A fear of not being believed

What fears have you overcome and how?

Before I came out, as either ace spectrum or nonbinary, my biggest fear wasn’t rejection, but of not being believed.

I’d known I was some form of queer since my teens. But my parents separating because my mum fell in love with another woman, made it a lot harder for me to come out. I’d already experienced not being believed for things related to pain and fatigue, which would, as an adult, be revealed to have a very real cause. So not being believed because I was a teenager, in a broken home, with a queer parent, wasn’t an unreasonable fear to have.

I lived, for a long time, not feeling like a real person because I was forcing myself to appear cis and straight to the world, when I knew it wasn’t true. I felt like I was constantly chasing happiness, and never feeling truly happy.

It took the pandemic, and the realisation that I needed more… Deserved more… Deserved to feel real. Deserved to experience actual happiness. To give me the courage to come out.