Some days my body feels like it has lived too many stories. Every muscle is a footnote to something I’m forced to remember. Expectations I couldn’t fulfill, names that never fit me, (I have a whole blog post on how my parents stole my name), the silence I learned to survive in.
I’m not the only one.
Jay* came out to their parents at seventeen and got the full we don’t know you anymore treatment. “They didn’t kick me out or threaten conversion therapy or any of that. They just stopped saying the word queer like that would make me not it. Silence was their eraser.”
“That was the moment I realized being queer comes with a mute button…”
Now, in their first year of college, Jay recently tried to write a personal essay about queerness for a writing class. “I wanted to say my truth out loud on the page.” But the silence from their parents kept the words from coming, cutting Jay off from feelings they needed to express. “That was the moment I realized being queer comes with a mute button,” they said. “And once you learn to hit it before anyone else does, it’s hard not to keep pressing it.”
The queer body is often a kind of archive that doesn’t get to choose what’s stored inside. Familial silence, like Jay experienced, teaches you that some truths shouldn’t be spoken (or written), so you keep entire parts of yourself off the page. Internalized shame takes over, and every sentence becomes a quick check. Too much. Too real. Too risky. Hyper-awareness takes it further, making the blank page feel like another danger zone, making it easier to say nothing at all than to risk something a reader might punish you for. All of it leads to a fragmentation of identity, especially for writers who risk separating the self they live from the self they write about.
This is how queer art is silenced. How it almost silenced me.
Imposter syndrome taught me to write small. For a long time, I didn’t feel queer enough to belong to my own story, so I hid inside the queer stories I wrote. Fiction made it easy to pretend none of it was about me. But writing pulled me toward my truth by letting me test pieces of myself on the page.
” I still worry that I’m getting my own experience wrong…”
It was hard, though. It still is. A queer body carries its own kind of fatigue, dysphoria, old hurts, the constant weariness of being mis-seen. Writing from that place isn’t always therapeutic. It’s a mess. It’s confusing. I still worry that I’m getting my own experience wrong, or flattening it, or writing something that feels untrue. Claiming myself on the page is messy and painful and frightening.
There is guilt in it, too. Queer writers are good at blaming ourselves when the words don’t come, as if not writing is a personal failure. Because our writing is often a way to reach others, failure can feel bigger than ourselves. It can feel cultural, like we’re letting down people who might have needed our story and that our struggles add to the silence and erasure we’re trying to escape.
What finally helped was lowering my bar to something manageable. I stopped trying to write the whole of my identity into one character or one story-arc and let myself move toward it in fragments. I’d find a single truth and put it in a sentence. Then expand it into a paragraph. I’d create a character who could support that truth in order to make myself feel seen, then make another character who could argue against it to give myself a tiny platform to speak from, often to an audience of one: myself.
“…queer writing rarely comes from ease…”
I began to surround myself with queer mirrors (especially within the writing community) instead of straight ones, people who understood the challenge. Being seen by them made it easier to see myself. And I started treating writing as a safe space where I could make mistakes, explore feelings I didn’t understand, get things wrong. And get things right.
What I know now is that queer writing rarely comes from ease. It comes from living hard things. There’s no mastery here, no finality of arrival. There’s only a steadfast continuation. A simple promise to myself that the blank page deserves my truth, even if I’m the only one who reads it.
Crooked Craftwork:
Begin by writing one sentence that holds a single emotional truth you can deal with today. Not the whole identity spiral, just one tiny piece. Hand it to a character you already have (or make one up) who can hold space for it. When you see how it sits with them, bring in another character to press on it, not to shatter it, but to mirror it. The point isn’t to fight your truth, but to give it room on the page so you see why it matters, and to build story tension that makes it stronger. Your story will deepen because your readers will connect to your experience.
Follow the smallest truth. It opens the biggest doors.