It’s Pride Month, and on my walk this morning a memory came rushing back to me. One of those memories that has been living in your body for years, waiting for the right season to say, “Hey, we need to talk about this.”
I was thinking about my personal connection to members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and one person in particular came to mind. Someone I knew during my time in the Army. Someone who was part of a friend group that became more than a friend group….we became family.
That happens sometimes in the military. You end up in a particular place, during a particular assignment, with people you didn’t grow up with and probably wouldn’t have met any other way. But through shared meals, long conversations, ridiculous inside jokes, stressful days, late nights, and the kind of bonding that happens when everybody is away from home and trying to figure life out, you become each other’s people.
There was one friend in that group who we suspected may have been part of the LGBTQIA+ community, but nobody pressured them. We didn’t demand a declaration. Nobody sat them down under a bright interrogation lamp like, “Anything you wanna tell the class?” We loved them. That was the point. Nothing they said (or chose not to say) was going to change the love. And then one day this friend handed me VHS tapes of a TV show.
Yeah VHS….please respect the era.
They told me I needed to watch it. I wasn’t familiar with the show at the time, but it was popular, and they were serious about me seeing it. So I took the tapes and watched the episodes, the show centered LGBTQ characters.
And after I watched it, I remember thinking, “Wait a minute…did this person just come out to me through a show? Did they just hand me a stack of tapes and say what they needed to say without actually saying it?”
And all these years later, it has become something of a running joke in our friend group.
They picked me, and the older I get the more sacred that feels.
Because now through the work I do with Confidence Coaching for Her, I spend a lot of time talking about truth, safety and the courage it takes to be fully seen. About the ways women, especially, are conditioned to hide parts of themselves in order to be accepted, protected, loved, or left alone.
The work of this brand has always been about helping people release shame, reclaim their truth, and restore their power, because so many of us have been buried underneath conditioning, fear, silence, and inherited beliefs. And when I think about that friend handing me those tapes, I realize that on some level, they believed their truth would be safe with me.
Me.
Young, roguish me.
Army me.
Still-figuring-my-own-self-out me.
Me, with all my questions, my growing pains, my unhealed places, my own identity still unfolding in ways I didn’t yet understand. I don’t know that I would’ve called myself “safe” back then….I know for sure I didn’t have the language for it.
I was young and trying to understand my own life, my own beliefs, my own womanhood, my own place in the world. But somehow, somebody saw something in me that made them feel like they could offer me a piece of themselves. They trusted me with the tender truth of themselves.
It is not a little thing to be chosen as a witness to someone’s truth, especially in a world that has made truth-telling dangerous for far too many people.
Especially for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, who are still asked to defend their humanity, explain their existence, soften their joy, or make themselves more palatable so other people can remain comfortable.
And let me be clear: I’m not interested in a world where people have to earn the right to be safe.
I’m not interested in love that requires someone to disappear first.
I’m not interested in faith, politics, family systems, traditions, or social norms that demand someone abandon themselves to belong.
That’s not love. That’s control in church clothes, family clothes, policy clothes, or “I’m just concerned” clothes….and I’ve lived long enough to know the difference.
Part of the confidence growth journey is learning to stop outsourcing your truth to people who benefit from your silence. That is why self-discovery, self-trust, and self-expression are at the center of this work.
And Pride Month reminds me that self-expression isn’t a cute concept.
For many people, it is risk, grief, courage, safety planning, chosen family, and finding one person in the room who might be able to hold what others have mishandled.
And sometimes, it’s handing someone VHS tapes and hoping they understand. At the time I understood, but not fully. Definitely not with the awareness and language I have now. But I understood enough to know that my job wasn’t to pry or make it about me. My job was to keep loving them, being their friend.
I believe people deserve the dignity of their own timing. They deserve relationships where love isn’t held hostage by people who need a public announcement in order to practice private loyalty. They deserve spaces where they can be witnessed without being consumed.
As I remembered during my walk this morning I felt overwhelmed with gratitude.
I’m grateful that our friendship survived distance, time, adulthood, and all the life that happens between who we were then and who we are now. I’m grateful that, even before I had the words for this work, some part of me was already becoming the kind of person I now hope to be on purpose.
A safe place. Not perfect or performative or in name only. Just safe.
And in this season of my life, I want to be very clear about where I stand: with people being free to be whole, with the LGBTQIA+ community, with the sacredness of truth. I stand with people who are tired of performing versions of themselves that were built for someone else’s comfort.
And I hope, with everything in me, that I am still the kind of person someone can trust with their truth.
So maybe the reflection for all of us this Pride Month isn’t, “Do I support people?”, the deeper question is:
Do people feel safe being fully themselves with me? And if not yet, what would need to change?
If this stirred something in you, take a few minutes to journal on this question: Who has trusted me with their truth, and how did I hold it?
And if you are in a season of reclaiming your own truth, the Inner Strength Journal was created to help you hear yourself clearly, gently, and honestly.
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