Coming out is painful? Good.

Coming out shouldn’t be easy. Don’t trivialize it on behalf of tolerance or blind love.

With gracious and loving intentions, progressive society seeks to make coming out a painless transition–with the best of intentions. But the day coming out to your family and friends elicits the emotional equivalencs as telling them you read Game of Thrones, is the day you arrest the nearly extinct practice of deep introspection from LGBTQA-Z people.

In an era of transient amusements, banal busyness, and numbing mental stimulations, coming out shares more with the pre-Industrial Revolution practices of slow, introspective thought than most 21st century Americans are ever to experience in a people-are-the-products world.

This is because coming out is less about the epochal event itself than the anticedent civil war—a war within self so bloody, so painful, that the victor is undisputed and the surrender total. An identity is forged through conflict, and that kind of identity cannot be easily changed. No usurper can arise to overthrow it. It is as close to certainty of self as one is like to get in this life.

By making coming out unnecessary, young (and older) adults are robbed of this truly defining event in their life. It is one thing that all gay men and women share universally—like being a veteran after a shared national war or having your first child. It forever alters your identity and evolves how you project yourself into the world.

So don’t get rid of coming out. By all means, let it awkward and difficult. No one benefits from pampering and ease. Give people the opportunity to forge authentic, meaningful identities in an era fraught with vapid self-delusion.