“Just Be Yourself” Can Feel Complicated as an LGBTQIA+ Person

“Own your space!”

“Don’t shrink to fit places you’ve outgrown”

“Be yourself; everyone else is taken”

Lovely sentiment, right? Inspiring, uplifting, empowering.

Except when you’ve grown up with the explicit or implicit message that you’re… different. That there’s something a little unusual about you. 

When something that is fundamental and personal to you and doesn’t hurt or concern anyone else gets exaggerated, caricaturised, even vilified.

Maybe your parents were unconditionally loving, but thought it was “a phase” or that it was best to “keep the peace” with other relatives. Or maybe they effectively shunned you.

Maybe at school you had good friends, but they used slurs - and tried to convince they didn’t mean you were like that. 

At work, people may act almost a bit too friendly - asking you questions you’re tired of answering in the name of making you feel welcome.

Or you simply witnessed the world become bit by bit more progressive (with lots to catch up on still), then suddenly start regressing again.

It may have come up in big ways, or “micro” ways, but it was always there. So, “being yourself” started feeling too personal, vulnerable, even unsafe pretty early on.

The very big, and very “small”, ways minority stress can affect LGBTQIA+ people

Living in a cishet world when you’re LGBTQIA+ can lead you to feel like you’re not enough, or like you’re too much. 

And this way of seeing yourself - as not enough, or as too much - in a world that perhaps feels unsafe or unfair, and with people that maybe seem untrustworthy - can be a recipe for low confidence, low self-esteem, self-consciousness.

So, understandably, you might try to do something about it - to bend yourself into someone who could be appreciated, or at least, accepted.

You want to prove yourself - so you start overcompensating. You get really good at stuff, you strive, you overwork, you become an overachiever. A bit of a perfectionist, maybe.

Alongside this, you don’t want to give people any more reasons to dislike you, or reject you - so you neglect your needs, keep your head down, loosen up your boundaries, and just become easy-going, bubbly, nice - maybe a bit of a people-pleaser.

And to help with all this, you also learn to monitor yourself and others - constantly - and mould yourself accordingly. To make sure you’re agreeable, acceptable. You shrink yourself, to make sure you don’t stand out. 

The really difficult part is that no amount of… all of this will make someone like you who’s already made up their mind. And along the way, you lose yourself.

When you can’t tell what’s actually you anymore

You’ve learned that putting on a mask helps keep you acceptable and maybe even liked, so it can be tricky to see the drawbacks of this.

Because it works. You manage to blend in. You get included. 

But you feel exhausted, burnt out, and it doesn’t make you feel any better about yourself. Maybe because it’s not the real you - and maybe because you’re not even sure who that is, what they care about, what they need, what they want.

Why it’s not as simple as just being yourself

People often prefer familiarity, even when it doesn’t feel good, over the uncertainty of change. 

“What if I say what I need, express my opinion, say no, stick to a boundary - and get rejected?”

That’s not an irrational fear. If you’ve spent a long time people-pleasing or adapting to not make a fuss, it makes sense that other people might react with confusion, discomfort, or even frustration when you start doing things differently.

And for LGBTQIA+ people, there can be an additional layer here - because in some contexts, being visible or more fully yourself hasn’t always felt entirely safe.

So this isn’t about suddenly forcing yourself to change overnight or put yourself in situations that don’t feel safe. It’s more about noticing the tension between how you’ve learned to keep yourself safe in social relationships, and what it might feel like to exist in them with a bit more of yourself present.

How to get there

This work can feel vulnerable, and sometimes a bit destabilising. So the most important thing is that you do it gradually, with a bit of self-compassion along the way.

You may start to notice the beliefs you’ve picked up about yourself, other people, and the world - and how these turn into rules for how you behave, often without even realising it. And how that shows up in both the big decisions you make, and the small ones that seem insignificant at the time.

It can also become clearer that a lot of this isn’t a series of conscious choices anymore - but patterns that have become automatic, habitual. Things you default to - which need to be noticed too.

There can also be something important in thinking about who you want to be as a person - the life you want to lead, what you want to stand for. And seeing how you can live in line with this in small ways, day by day - and what gets in the way.

And finally, you might learn to relate to your thoughts and feelings in new, more helpful, more gentle ways - so they don’t throw you around anymore, and things can feel a bit lighter.

If you’re exhausted from always playing a role but unsure how to break out of this…

You’re not alone in it.

A lot of people I work with in therapy describe something similar - that sense of constantly adjusting themselves around others, and feeling burnt out by it over time.

Therapy can be a space to start gently making sense of these patterns, and to explore what it might look like to relate to yourself in a slightly different way.

You can read more about how I work with LGBTQIA+ clients, and also with high-achievers - because fear of failure, pressure, and self-criticism often show up in overlapping ways here.

Hi, I’m Carina - an experienced, yet very human BABCP-accredited CBT therapist specialising in working with high-achievers with low self-esteem, high-functioning anxiety, or OCD, including autistic and ADHD folks, as well as LGBTQIA+ folks.

I use evidence-based approaches - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), but really from an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and mindfulness perspective - so if you’ve tried CBT before and haven’t really connected with it, I might be your person.

If you’re curious about what this could look like for you, I offer a free, no-pressure initial chat.