24. The joy of queerness

Arden eating ice cream.

Dear Team Joy,

I met Arden through work, but it wasn’t until we both left corporate that our friendship bloomed. We had a formative conversation about queerness and by the end of the call I was asking her to try to capture some of the hard earned wisdom she shared with me, in a Team Joy post. She graciously agreed. I genuinely could not be prouder to press publish on this piece, and to share the gift of Arden’s writing with you. 💚

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“What is queerness?” Isabel suggested this question as a jumping-off point when asking me to write for Team Joy. It’s a big question for a short newsletter, but in the spirit of Isabel’s vision for this community, I will offer some of how queerness brings me closer to her three north stars: integrity, joy, and freedom.

Queerness is my magic portal into a more beautiful life – it is the pair of glasses I wear to view the world with more richness, complexity, and nuance.

Yet none of the lessons I’ve learned from queerness are inherently queer. This week, I invite you to consider how you can make your life a little queerer, regardless of your identities.

✨ Integrity.

I am a queer woman who is in love with a cis man. This can be confusing. Early in my relationship, I would interrogate my sexuality as if it were a complex math problem I could solve with enough perseverance and intellect. I created arbitrary tests: If I feel this way about my partner in this moment, then it certainly means I’m bi; if I don’t, I must be lesbian. In addition to inducing anxiety, these assessments always led me to the same impossible conclusion: I am most often drawn to women, and I adore my partner. The love and desire I feel for him just doesn’t fit into the categories offered to me.

My favorite definition of integrity is “the state of being whole and undivided.” My queerness teaches me that to be whole and undivided does not require being consistent or neatly packaged. Instead, I am most whole when I hold my complexity without apology, when I stare straight into the mess and say, this can all be true at the same time. My integrity is the courage to trust the relationship I have, not the one I expected; my integrity allows me to hold my partnership sacred without justification. My queerness is a gentle invitation to ask, what else could be true today? The answer, it turns out, is my capacity to hold many different types of love.

🤩 Joy.

As much as I celebrate my queerness, I hold homophobia in my heart. I can’t help it. That seed was planted without my consent, and it will take time to pull out the weeds. I sometimes feel shame when I desire women, and there are people I’m afraid to share my identity with. Narratives around pride and “coming out” make me feel I can’t claim my queerness until I am less ashamed. But my joy cannot wait. Joy is my right, not something I must earn.

Finding joy in queerness guides me towards joy in other tricky areas – for example, in my body. Like so many women, my body and I have serious healing to do together. I treat my body like something to be controlled, shrunk, manipulated. But just as I’m sick of my homophobia, I’m tired of hating my body, and I don’t have time to wait for body positivity, radical self-love, or any other impossible spiritual transformation. None of these triumphs are arriving in my near future. Queerness teaches me I can feel the sun on my skin, the gleeful exhaustion after a long trail run, or the childlike pleasure of an ice cream cone – and I can still struggle with my body image. Sometimes on the same day. Sometimes at the same time. My queerness shows me how to experience joy without condition.

🦋 Freedom.

Like many of you, I am a recovering management consultant. I treated my body like a shipping container for my brain, and it showed: I was a twisted, anxious mess, I had chronic insomnia, and an old back injury flared regularly. I convinced myself these symptoms were unrelated to the 70-hour work weeks I was muscling through, ignoring my body’s blaring signals that something wasn’t right.

I came out more visibly at work around the same time I became a manager, motivated by a commitment to build teams where everyone could be themselves. But my queer self at work felt sanitized. I wanted to reconnect with queerness not as a social identifier or the reason I ticked my company’s D&I box, but as my own deeply personal experience of desire.

Exploring queerness from this lens led to a revelation: I was profoundly disconnected from what I wanted, and as a result, my decisions were heavily influenced by external pressures. I hardly knew what I liked to eat for breakfast, let alone the intricacies of my sexuality. Getting closer to my queerness became a conduit for learning about desire in every area of my life, intimate and otherwise. I started asking questions of my body, in addition to my mind: Instead of writing it off as anxiety, what was the tension in my chest trying to tell me? Instead of defaulting to the gym, what type of movement would feel best today? Instead of relying on my company to define success, what work made me feel connected and present?

The answers sometimes surprised me. I realized I desperately needed spaciousness and sleep and I wanted more time to call my beloved grandma. I discovered I love scalp massages and that cooking makes me feel connected to the earth. I noticed how expressive I become when I mentor colleagues, my typically stoic face transforming. It was my queerness that told me to leave consulting, go to grad school, and spend a summer in Kenya – expansive decisions that revealed new desires in turn. Queerness releases me from other people’s expectations while holding me accountable to my truths. Learning to honor my desires feels like freedom.

My queerness is a gift not because one type of love is better than another, but because it helps me see my own limitlessness. In that way, my experience with queerness is universal.

Isabel and I want to know: How you can make your life a little queerer? What experiences, identifiers, or perspectives bring you closer to your integrity, joy, and freedom? Send us a note with your thoughts – we’d love to hear from you. If you want to reach out directly, my email is arden.kreeger@gmail.com.