How My Mother’s Violence Shaped My Queerness
TW: This piece discusses childhood abuse, physical violence, emotional neglect, and parental trauma. Please take care while reading. Just a kid, somewhere along the way. This is not my usual content. I usually write about physics. It's been a while since I've posted on here, and I have many saved drafts written about black holes, nature, and gateways to other universes. But it's Pride Month, and something old has been surfacing again. Like background radiation, always there and impossible to ignore: Am I a lesbian because I never had a mother who loved me? A person born in a burning house believes the world is on fire. And for most of my life, I didn’t know any different. I came out at sixteen. I'm twenty-four now. I've known for a long time that I love women. That this is not a phase or a reaction or a wound pretending to be love. But lately, I've been wondering how much my queerness was shaped in the shadows of my mother's violence. Not created by it, bu...
