Your Shadow is Queer: Pride Offers Courageous Alignment

Pride is a Protest to Performance

For my queer siblings, living authentically is a protest against expected performance. This is the purpose of Pride. Coming out is not a one-time event, but an ongoing life of courageous alignment: to name what is real in a world that often prefers performing roles rather than soulful living. Pride was born from protest, from refusal to split body from soul, or from inherent wholeness and worth.

Pride is not only about embodying authentic sexuality or gender expression—it is about initiating throughout life into our deepest and purest expression. It’s about breaking inherited scripts, reclaiming our body, and refusing to shrink. Even if you don’t identify as queer, there are parts of you that have been hidden, shamed, or contorted in order to fit. This reflection on queerness and Pride is for all of us who are learning to live more honestly. Because our shadow isn’t just dark—it’s different, strange, and judged by our personal and collective ego.

The Shadow Resists the Script

“No matter how hard you fight the darkness, every light casts a shadow, and the closer you get to the light, the darker that shadow becomes.”

Pride can be mistaken as the final arrival point—where LGBT+ individuals and allys become loud and proud about some fixed label. But the soul doesn’t move in straight lines (only “Q”s lol). Queerness, in its deepest sense, never settles into a finished identity. It remains fluid, disruptive, alive, and curious. Pride is not simply a month long expression of arrival, or even of survival, though those elements certainly are core. Pride is a collective renewal of our soul’s requirement to unfold and initiate into our highest and most authentic and energetic humanity (Read my previous post: Fascism and the Collective Shadow)

Your shadow is queer–your softness, your firmness, your doubt, your certainty, your intensity, your ease, your longing, your satisfaction. Shadow doesn’t just contain wounds in need of healing–it holds powers in need of activation. Shadow contains your power to refuse or comply with unhealthy expectations, and incongruent expectations.

Queer Theory Meets the Inner Life

In queer theory, “queer” is less an identity than a posture—a way of living that defies inherited scripts. Queer theorist, Michael Warner describes it as “resistance to regimes of the normal.”

Pride is a celebration of LGBTQ+ vibrancy and radical existence. It is also a month long sacrament for everyone to ask:

• What have I had to suppress to belong?

• Who did I become in order to survive in my family, school, faith community, etc.?

• What might emerge if I stopped performing?

Performance and the Persona

Judith Butler, a core voice and pillar of queer theory, teaches that gender and identity are performative—not because they’re fake, but because they are repeated acts, sustained through social expectation and power. The same is true of the persona. When we confuse performance for authentic expression, the shadow grows. Coming into our truest and highest self is not a repeated performance of identify, but a transgressive journey into our expansive life.

The Risk of Normifying Queerness

This is why we must be cautious not to “normify” queerness itself. When queerness becomes marketable, palatable, or a fixed identity, it risks losing its transgressive and liberative power. Queerness will always be an affront to power and empire. However, it can become normalized and fixed in our psyche, and become the empire that assumes supremacy over anything “other” within. Whether you identify with the LGBTQ+ community or you’re an active ally, Pride isn’t simply a reaffirmation of identity, but a conscious protest welcoming and aligning with everything in us we’ve yet to value.

Your shadow is queer. It is is wildly complex, yet very simple to except by those who chose to break out of the many binaries available: masculine/feminine, good/bad, sacred/profane, normal/deviant. shadow work requires us to move beyond integration as correctness or accuracy, into integration as love, alignment, vitality. It requires us to heal our wounds, yes, but then honor, celebrate and take pride in the vitalizing wisdom shadow carries.

Pride Calls us to Psychic Liberation

Pride invites everyone to fully participate in the sacred work of becoming whole. Because queerness isn’t only about who you love. It’s about who you become as when you refuse to align with anything other than your highest and most authentic self. Your shadow is queer, and it protests any alignments you make rooted in basic survival rather than the life-vitality inherent in your soul.

Let’s Journey together into the depths of your Shadow

I supports clients through a blend of individual support and intentional communal engagement. Book a free 30-minute discovery call with me to learn more.