My Queerness Changes How I Express Myself. Is that a Harmful Stereotype?
Does My Queerness Influence the Ways I Emotionally Express Myself?
It is more complicated than that.
I am adept at picking up others’ emotions. I have been called an empath. I am hyper-vigilant. Yes, I cry in private. I can get emotional watching a movie, but I dare not show it to others. I have perfected the art of emotional suppression, and on the occasions I get overwhelmed, I completely shut down. The shutdown can manifest itself in extreme lethargy, seizures and withdrawal from life. It is a behaviour I have adopted to protect myself.
My queerness influences the way I express myself, but not in the way some might expect. I am on constant alert for rejection. I police my and others’ emotions. I am so busy reviewing the emotional narrative that I withdraw into myself. I accept responsibility for things outside my control, because believing this is reality is too painful to contemplate despite my own experiences. I, therefore, exist in a state of denial of said experiences. I refer to myself in the second person, being an observer rather than the one subject to those experiences.
