Living Authentically While Finding Yourself: Pride, Adoption, and Belonging

There is a question underlying much of the work we do in this practice. Sometimes it sounds like anxiety, or grief, or a feeling that something is off that the person can't quite name. But when we slow down enough to listen for it, it's usually there:

Is there a place where all of me fits?

June is Pride Month, and it's also the month I want to write about that question directly. Certainly Pride Month is not the only time it's relevant, but because the visibility and energy of this month creates an opening to say some things that are true all year long, and that I think deserve to be said plainly.

If you are an Adoptee. If you are LGBTQIA2S+. If you are both, and navigating what it means to hold those identities in the same body, at the same time, in spaces that weren't always built with you in mind — this post is for you.

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What Pride Month Is and Isn't

Pride Month means different things to different people. For some people, June is a season of celebration that brings parades, community, the joy of being with others who share your identity; and for others, it's a month of reflection and grief, a time to remember those who were lost to violence, illness, and systemic neglect, and to reckon with how much work remains. And for others still, it is a complicated month — one where the pressure to be visible, festive, and out can feel like one more thing that doesn't quite fit.

All of those experiences are real. Pride Month is not a monolith, and neither is the LGBTQIA2S+ community it honors. It encompasses queer and trans people across every racial background, every socioeconomic circumstance, every age, ability, and family structure. It includes people who are loudly out and people who are quietly figuring it out. It includes people for whom Two-Spirit identity is a specific, sacred term rooted in Indigenous tradition. It includes young people who are still finding words for their experiences, and people in their sixties and seventies who came out late in life and are only now learning what it means to live more fully as themselves.

Pride doesn't ask you to be further along than you are. It simply asks you to be here.

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What Adoptee Identity Carries That Doesn't Always Get Named

Adoption is another thing that means many things. There are Adoptees who feel unambiguously loved and well-placed. There are Adoptees who carry grief and loss alongside love, grief for a first family, a culture, a language, a version of themselves they never got to know. And other Adoptees who have spent decades being told that the "right" feelings about their adoption are positive ones, and who have quietly wondered why something still aches.

The truth is that adoption, for many people, involves real loss, loss that is often invisible or minimized in public conversation. Loss of biological connection, cultural heritage (especially for Transnational Transracial Adoptees), and the loss of a self that might have been. These losses don't negate the love in an adoptive family, rather they coexist with it, and they deserve to be witnessed.

For Adoptees, identity work often begins early, before there's even language for it. Questions about who you are, where you come from, and where you belong can feel urgent in a way that's hard to articulate to people who haven't experienced it. And for Transracial Adoptees especially, those questions have a visible dimension: your face tells a story that may not match the family around you, and the world will remind you of that in ways both subtle and overt, for your entire life.

Identity isn't something you arrive at. It's something you return to, again and again, at different stages of life — and each time, you understand it a little differently.

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When the Questions Are Layered

For LGBTQIA2S+ Adoptees, the question of belonging doesn't arrive in a single form. It arrives in layers.

There is the question of belonging in an adoptive family, a family that loves you, and may or may not share your racial or cultural background, and may or may not have the framework to fully understand your queer or trans identity when it emerges. There is the question of belonging in LGBTQIA2S+ spaces, which are often predominantly White or which carry their own cultural assumptions about what queer identity looks like. There is the question of belonging in a birth community or culture, one that may not have been part of your upbringing at all, or that carries its own specific relationship to LGBTQIA2S+ identity.

And underneath all of it, there is sometimes a quieter question:

Is there any space where I don't have to leave part of myself at the door?

We will note this: that question is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is the natural result of navigating genuinely complex terrain, and it can happen when a person carries more than one identity that has historically been excluded or marginalized, and when that person may find spaces created for each community — it doesn't always make room for the full picture.

A note on Two-Spirit identity: Two-Spirit (2S) is a term used by some Indigenous North American folx to describe a person who fulfills a traditional third-gender or other gender-variant role. It is a culturally specific term, rooted in Indigenous traditions, and is not synonymous with being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans in the Western sense. If you hold a Two-Spirit identity, or are exploring what that means for you, we approach that work with cultural humility and deep respect for the specificity of that experience.

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On Living Authentically Without Performance

Living authentically has become a cliché. It can sound like a fact, like something you either are or aren't, or like a destination, such as a threshold you cross once and forever stay. In our experience, both personally and clinically, it doesn't usually work that way.

Living authentically is more like a daily practice than a permanent state. It is the ongoing work of noticing where you've been shrinking yourself, and asking whether you want to. It is learning which parts of you have been shaped by what felt safe, rather than what felt true. It is the slow, sometimes difficult process of bringing the version of yourself you are in private into the spaces you share with other people, and discovering, over time, which of those spaces can hold you.

For Adoptees, there is often an early apprenticeship in reading the room: What feelings are welcome? What questions are allowed? What parts of your story are better not to bring up? That attunement can be a genuine strength, often making Adoptees remarkably perceptive and relationally skilled. And it can also make it very hard to locate your own experience underneath all the adapting.

For LGBTQIA2S+ folx, there is often a similar kind of code-switching, learning which spaces are safe to be out in, calibrating how much of yourself to share and with whom by carrying the energy cost of that calculation for years, sometimes decades. When those two experiences overlap, the weight can be significant, and often goes unacknowledged, because there's no single community that holds the whole picture.

Authenticity isn't about performing your identity for other people. It's about knowing yourself well enough to stop performing for yourself.

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A Few Things Worth Saying Out Loud This June

You don't have to be certain about your identity to deserve support. Identity work is allowed to be in process.

You don't have to choose between your identities to be worthy of care. Your adoption story and your queer identity and your racial or cultural background all belong in the room at the same time.

You don't have to be visibly out, or celebratory, or further along than you are. Wherever you are, this is exactly where therapy can meet you.

And you don't have to have it all figured out before you reach out. In our experience, that's usually not what brings people to therapy — what brings people is the sense that something important is happening underneath the surface, and they don't want to keep carrying it alone.

If that's where you are, I'm glad you're here. Whenever you're ready.

Rooted in healing, growing together.