Pride and Practice

This is an excerpt of a post published on freedbodyworks.com. You can read the full post here.

I came to yoga through my queerness, and into all that I know of my truest, queerest, proudest self through yoga. I really mean that–the commingled practice of living as a queer yogi has helped me grow in the fiercest, most rewarding of ways.

Hear me out: I was raised by a Christian family in suburban Wisconsin, where I attended a moderately affluent public school, went to church a minimum of once a week, and was raised with love by two perfectly flawed individuals, who, like every single one of us, hold certain deep-seeded beliefs and have many experiential blind spots. In short, I grew up in comfort without reason or encouragement to question those circumstances. When I think about my upbringing in retrospect, the description that comes to mind is “kind complacency.”

I very clearly remember a moment in 5th grade when I stopped in my tracks and had a fleeting crises around my identity as a “good kid.” It didn’t last long, but more moments like this came to pass, and these flickering moments of introspective awareness and questioning now strike me as the beginnings of my then-burgeoning queer identity. When they eventually culminated in my first intimate experience with another woman, the flickering stopped–suddenly I had a reason to question everything, and this time the identity crisis was anything but fleeting.

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