We spent an entire series talking about toxic relationship patterns. About power and control, chosen family, money, sex, community, and what healthy actually looks and feels like. And underneath almost every single conversation was the same thing, whether we named it directly or not.

Shame.

We talk a lot in therapy about the stories we carry. About how the messages we absorbed early, about who we are, whether we belong, whether our futures are worth investing in, shape the decisions we make long after the people who handed us those messages are out of the room.

I have been sitting with this conversation for a while now. Because what Alex Garner brought into this week’s Episode of My Therapist is Out! was not just decades of advocacy experience or a sharp political analysis, though he brought both of those things. What he brought was the particular clarity that comes from a life fully inhabited.

Most of us spend years figuring out who we are. Coming out, naming our identities, finding language for the parts of ourselves that the dominant culture never had words for. But there is a whole other layer of work that does not always get the same attention: figuring out what we actually want.