5 Incredible Creatives On Feeling Pride In Who They Are

“There’s nothing like a private act of kindness to make you feel proud of yourself on a day-to-day level, but I’ve learnt it’s those difficult, long-term projects that really bolster one’s sense of self. I suffered from what I would call ‘fake pride’ in my early twenties – the grandiosity that actually comes from feeling bad about yourself. You tell yourself you’re better than other people precisely because you feel inferior. I’ll never forget how I felt when I knew my book was finished. I’d rewritten and edited it so many times, but there was one night when I just knew: it’s done. I’m a perfectionist, so it will never really be ‘done’ for me. But I’d been writing it for seven years, and there just came a point where I knew it was enough. A story I could live with. And I cried. It was the first time in my life that I felt I’d done something undeniably good, just having finished it. If you grow up in a house where you don’t feel loved, where nothing you do is good enough, being told that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re a freak, a pervert, mentally ill, that you are less than other people, and you hear that message at home, at school, and you see other people like you being treated like that in the media, how are you not going to be affected by it? How are you not going to have low self-esteem as an adult? And the book has acted as the antidote to that. It’s like, fuck you, I wrote a book! And a good one, too. If you want to feel good about yourself, do something that deserves respect and makes you feel proud.”

Paris Lees is the author of What It Feels Like For A Girl

“Honestly, I don’t really have a pivotal moment in my journey to feeling pride. When I realized I liked girls, I sat my mother down and told her, “Mom, I think I’m a lesbian.” And she said, “You might be bisexual.” She reminded me how I had crushes on people growing up regardless of gender. After that, we went to the GLAAD website and looked up the definition of bisexuality, and it really suited me. My mom helped me realize I can love who I am and love whoever I love, and I think that knowledge in itself is important. So many of us in the LGBTQ+ community are taught that we must have a big dramatic coming-out moment or a life-changing experience of self-understanding, and sometimes that’s just not the case. Although, yes, I did come out publicly on Fox News (by accident), and that definitely shaped some of my journey. More than that very public, very dramatic experience, I am grateful to have been taught to love and accept myself growing up. I hope that anyone reading this doesn’t feel they have to have a big moment. It can be a series of small boring moments. As long as you love, honor and respect the person you are.”

Blair Imani is the author of Read This to Get Smarter and creator of #SmarterInSeconds

“It’s difficult to think about pride without thinking about coming out, which is something I feel I never really did. I never made an announcement to my parents; I just brought a girl home, and a while later, married her and had a baby. My coming out, and its attendant pride, has been a gradual unfurling into selfhood. But I do know that there are moments when I look up at my wife and son, at our home and work and the world we’ve built around us, and feel a surge of astonishment that this is our life, that we’re able to live it like this. In those moments, it feels easier to correct the woman in the park who refers to my wife as our son’s ‘auntie’, or the doctor who seems to think one of us is the other’s mother. Because with pride comes joy in articulating who we are. We are so lucky to have what we have, and to have found each other in this place at this time, and all of a sudden I want to tell everyone about it.”

Nell Stevens is the author of Briefly, A Delicious Life, out this month

“I don’t remember a pivotal moment when I came into myself. I wish I remembered. I wish that I could give myself a narrative arc like I do my characters in the novels I write. But my coming out process was more internal than external. It took a series of failed attempts at relationships with women, who I either met on campus or online; it took being found out by my mother, who overheard me on the telephone sobbing to my ex-girlfriend, who was about to break up with me; it took being ostracized by my parents until I ‘changed’; it meant not getting to go back home to Jamaica for five years to my childhood home. What it took for me to love and accept myself was time. It wasn’t until I embraced the parts of myself that would’ve otherwise been deemed ‘queer’ – being woman and Black and immigrant – that I began to take pride in my sexuality, too.”

Nicole Dennis-Benn is the author of Here Comes The Sun and Patsy

“It sounds silly, but I first felt proud of my sexuality in 2005. Sara and I had released our fourth album, So Jealous, and were getting radio play for the first time ever. We experienced so much homophobia, so much sexism and marginalization of our band over the years that it was profound to finally be accepted in the mainstream. It felt like a change. We started selling albums and seeing more people at our shows. And we started selling T-shirts. A lot of them. The most popular ones had our faces on them – and, as visibly gay women, this meant a lot. To look out at a sea of strangers proudly wearing us on their bodies was meaningful; every shirt we sold felt like another person saying, ‘I support you, I love you for who you are, I’m proud to be a fan.’ And it made me so proud to think that those people would be signaling that same message to other queer people when they wore that shirt out. Representation matters, even if it’s just a band T-shirt.”

Tegan and Sara’s LGBTQ+ foundation works to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ women and girls. Their new single, Fucking Up What Matters, is out now.