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.

I have been in a lot of queer spaces. Some of them changed my life. Some of them left me feeling more alone than when I walked in. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about what makes the difference.

We spend a lot of time in queer spaces talking about romantic relationships. Who we love, how we love, what healthy love looks like when the world has spent so long telling us our love doesn't count. And that conversation matters.