There is a kind of anxiety that does not go away when you come out. It is not the loud kind. It is the quiet, settled kind, the kind that has stopped announcing itself.
A few weeks ago, getting the home ready for the cleaner, I noticed that I had turned over the books on the coffee table. The ones, that is, with LGBTQ+ covers. I had not decided to do this. It happened the way one tucks a chair under a table: less an act than a tidying. The cleaner is a perfectly nice person who has never said anything about anything. There was no reason. What struck me, looking at the books, was not that I had done it but how completely it had been done. No flicker of resistance, no second thought. It was simply how I lived in my home.
Being out is not a single movement
We talk a great deal about being out and rather less about what being out actually involves. As though coming out were a single movement, completed once, after which one is on the other side. People who have been out for years know it isn’t like that. The closet, if it ever was a single thing, is more like a habit of the hand. One has stopped using it without quite stopping using it.
When I noticed the books, what I wanted to know was what kind of safety I had been providing for myself, and for whom. By adulthood, one has often been hiding from so many imagined audiences that the audience has become a feature of the room. The vigilance is operating without needing an actual person there. It runs on the memory of every actual person who has ever needed it.
This is the version of anxiety I am interested in. Not the anxious moment but the anxious shape. The slow, low, habitual managing of the self that has stopped feeling like vigilance because it has become a way of having a life. It is what therapists sometimes call minority stress, though that term, while accurate, makes it sound more measurable than it usually is. In my experience of working with LGBTQ+ clients in therapy, it more often feels like tiredness, or low mood, or a vague sense that life is heavier than it looks like it should be.
The mistake people make, I think, is to believe that the anxiety is a remnant of the past. As though it were a piece of weather that has not yet cleared. The clients I see who carry this kind of anxiety often arrive a little ashamed of it, suspecting themselves of being unwilling to move on, or worse, of being ungrateful. They are out. Their families are fine. Their work is fine. The world has, by their own account, treated them well. So what, exactly, are they still doing?
What they are doing, often, is running a system that learned its job some time ago and has not been told to stop. Vigilance is a skill, and the body that learned it learned it well. It also has nothing to compare its current job to. It just keeps doing what it’s always done. So the rearrangement before the colleague comes round, and the way one’s hand slips out of one’s partner’s hand when a particular kind of group walks past, and the small adjustments to how one describes one’s weekend on a Monday morning, all happen below the line of conscious decision. They happen the way the books got turned over.
I sometimes wonder whether the more interesting question is not how to switch the system off, but what to make of the fact that one’s life has been, for years, organised around an audience that may or may not still be there. Acceptance from those one is closest to does not, it turns out, address this. The audience is older and wider than that. It includes the look in the supermarket, the joke at the family lunch, the news. The body is reading specifics, in real time, and it has been doing so for a long time. It is not interested in being persuaded otherwise.
The grief underneath the anxiety
There is, underneath this kind of anxiety, often a kind of grief that nobody talks about. Grief for the ease other people had. Grief for the years one spent watching oneself instead of just being. Grief, especially, for the version of oneself that never had to become this skilled at noticing. People rarely arrive in therapy naming this directly. It comes up sideways, in the things they say almost as throwaways. I sometimes wonder what I’d be like if I’d had less to manage. I look at younger people now and I can’t decide if I’m pleased for them or sad for me. Both, usually. It tends to be both.
This is not, I think, an anxiety that gets better through reassurance. The clients I have worked with who have made any progress with it have done so by taking it more seriously, not less. By treating it as something that means something rather than something to be talked out of.
What helps, slowly
What helps, slowly, is being prepared to take this anxiety seriously instead of arguing with it. The argument doesn’t work. It mostly produces another layer of self-reproach, in which one is now both anxious and ashamed of being anxious. It might be more useful to consider that the anxiety has, by this point, the status of a long companion. It has come a long way with you. It has done more for your safety than you have generally given it credit for. The question is not how to dismiss it but how to give it a different role.
The body is the bit that doesn’t catch up by being talked to. It catches up, if it does, by being given different evidence. Time among people who don’t require translation. Rooms in which the self that has been on duty can sit down. Movement, breath, rest. LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy with a therapist who understands queer life, who does not require demonstration of having got over anything. Someone who knows that being out is a beginning, not a destination, and who can sit with the slower work that follows.
The books, in the end, did not need to be turned over. But the version of me that turned them over was not lying, exactly, about the world. The world has not, in fact, become uniformly safe for the people who would have read those books. The vigilance was right, once, in some places, and remains right in others. What had happened was that the vigilance had stopped distinguishing. It was operating in the kitchen of my own home, where it was no longer needed, with the same efficiency it once used in places where it kept me out of trouble.
I don’t know that this kind of anxiety can ever be fully resolved. I am not sure it is meant to be. But I suspect it can be moved, slowly, from the unconscious into the noticed. From the automatic to the intentional. From a feature of the room into a thought one can have, and then choose what to do with.
That, perhaps, is what is on offer. Not the absence of anxiety but a different relation to it. One in which the books, sometimes, get turned back over before the cleaner arrives.
I work with LGBTQ+ and queer clients in individual therapy, online and in person from my practices in London and Hitchin. If something here has resonated, you’re welcome to book a free 20-minute discovery call through my website.