In the families I studied, the ones who healed were not the ones who avoided the tension. They were the ones who walked straight into it.

That finding stopped me in my tracks the first time I saw it in my data. And then it stopped me again. Because it went against everything we assume about how healing works.

We assume that peace comes from resolution. That families move toward acceptance when the hard conversations stop happening. That the goal is to get past the tension and into calmer water.

My research says something different. It says the tension is the doorway.

What I was studying

My dissertation examined what happens when Christian parents of LGBTQ+ children engage in Single-Session Solution-Focused Narrative Therapy. One session. One conversation structured around their own goals, their own values, their own definition of what they most hoped for their family.

I was not trying to change their theology. I was not trying to convince them of anything. I was asking them to tell me what they wanted most, and then helping them find the version of their own faith that could get them there.

What I found was this: the parents who showed the greatest increases in supportive behaviors were not the ones who had resolved their theological tension. They were the ones who had engaged it most directly.

That is the meaning-making paradox. Engaging the tension facilitates transformation. Avoiding it impedes it.

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Why this matters right now

This week the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that conversion therapy is constitutionally protected speech. Last month AG Paxton classified Texas counselors as health care providers under SB 14, putting our licenses at risk for providing affirming care.

The legal architecture being built in this state is designed to tell families and clinicians: avoid the tension. Do not engage it. Let the law decide for you.

My research says that is exactly the wrong prescription for healing.

The families who showed up to that one session and said “I don’t know how to hold my faith and my child at the same time” — those families moved. Not because I resolved their tension. Because I invited them to sit inside it long enough to find their own way through.

That is what is being threatened. Not just affirming care. The entire premise that sitting with complexity produces healing.

What this means for you

If you are a parent navigating your child’s identity alongside your faith, I want you to know: the fact that it is complicated does not mean you are failing. The tension is not evidence of a problem. It is evidence that you love your child enough to stay in the room.

If you are a clinician trying to figure out what to do in the current climate, I want you to know: the research is clear. Evidence-based affirming care works because it does not ask people to choose. It holds both/and. That is not a political position. That is the clinical finding.

If you are a young person whose family is still figuring it out, I want you to know: the families who stayed in the conversation, even when it was hard, even when it was slow, even when the theology was still unresolved, those were the families who showed up. Process is not the same as rejection.

What I am doing this week

This week I am presenting this research at the Texas Association for Marriage and Family Therapy conference. On Saturday April 11 I will stand in that room and say what my data showed: that the meaning-making paradox is real, that engaging tension directly facilitates transformation, that the both/and is not a compromise. It is the clinical intervention.

I will also carry with me everything that happened this week. The ruling. The opinion. The kids in rural North Texas who are watching to see whether the adults in their lives will stay in the room.

The answer is yes. We are staying.

Con Cariño,

Dōctora JoAngeli Zertuche-Kasper, PhD, LPC

Executive Board Chair, Grayson County Pride

Mi gente,

You did it.

Maybe it was the degree. The title. The thing no one in your family had ever done before.

Maybe it was a conversation you finally had. A truth you finally told. A door you walked through, knowing you couldn’t go back.

Maybe you came out. Maybe your child came out. Maybe you lost what you thought was your dream job, and even though that door closing was a mercy, you still feel bereft.

Maybe you buried someone, and now you’re standing in a life that looks nothing like the one you planned.

Whatever it was, you crossed something to get here.

So why do you still feel like a guest in your own life?

I thought it would go away.

The imposter feeling. The sense that I’m “in the room” but not “of the room.” The tiny voice that whispers: they’re going to figure out you don’t really belong here.

I thought the diploma would silence it. The title would fix it. The accomplishment would finally, finally make me feel like I’d arrived.

It didn’t.

Why It Still Feels This Way

Here’s what I’ve learned:

The feeling doesn’t go away because the feeling was never about qualifications. It was about crossing, nepantla, the liminal space.

When you come from somewhere unexpected, the foreigner from a foreign land, you carry that somewhere with you. It’s in your accent, your references, your instincts. The hesitation before you speak. The over-preparing. The waiting to be found out.

When you’ve survived something that changed the shape of your life, you carry that too. It’s in the way you flinch at good news. The way you wait for the other shoe. The way you sit at a table full of people who seem to belong and wonder when they’ll notice you don’t.

That’s not weakness. That’s the weight of crossing.

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My grandfather and my uncles swam the Rio Grande with nothing but hope and a pair of wet clothes.

When I defended my dissertation, I thought about them, mi familia. I thought about how far the river had carried us, from that crossing to this room, from survival to scholarship, from silence to voice.

And I realized: I will always carry the river with me. I will always feel the distance between where I came from and where I am.

That’s not imposter syndrome. That’s generational legacy.

I See It Every Day

I see it in the people I work with, too.

The mother who held her faith and her child at the same time and lost half her church in the process. She “made it” to acceptance, and now she sits in a pew that feels emptier than before, or she sits alone, in isolation, wondering if building a faith community again is worth the effort...

The queer person who finally came out and thought freedom would feel like relief. Some days it does. Some days it feels like grief for the version of themselves their family loved more easily and society accepted.

The young woman who lost her mother and inherited a life she never asked for. She’s “made it” to the other side of loss, and no one tells you the other side has its own kind of loneliness.

They all crossed something. And they all still feel like sojourners.

Foreign until they choose to belong. That is the invitation.

Here’s what I want you to know:

You can miss where you came from and love where you are. You can honor your past and build something new. You can be proud of how far you’ve come and still ache for what it cost you.

Life is not an either/or. It’s learning the both/and of acceptance.

Belonging is not something they give you. It’s not a feeling that arrives with the diploma or the job offer or the coming out or the funeral. It’s not something you earn by finally “fitting in.”

Belonging is something you claim.

You don’t need permission to be here.

You don’t need to wait until you “feel” like you belong.

You don’t need to erase where you came from to deserve where you are.

You made it. You’re here. That’s not luck. That’s not a mistake. That’s you.

Sit at the table. Take up space. And when the voice whispers that you don’t belong, whisper back:

I crossed rivers to get here. I belong anywhere I stand.

What This Means for You

That voice that says you don’t belong? It’s not telling you the truth. It’s telling you a story about where you came from, and it’s confusing origin with worth.

Here’s the both/and: you can carry everything you’ve crossed, every river, every loss, every door you walked through shaking, and still claim your seat at the table. The crossing doesn’t disqualify you. It’s what qualifies you.

For the first-gen dreamer: you are not behind. You are building the road while you walk it. The people who had maps didn’t build anything. You did.

For the parent who chose love and lost community: you didn’t lose your faith. You outgrew a room that couldn’t hold all of you. The grief is real. So is the courage.

For the one standing on the other side of loss: you are not a visitor in your own life. You are the one who survived it. That life is yours now. You’re allowed to live in it.

You crossed something to get here.

You did not cross it to stand at the door.

You belong here.

Let me be the first to welcome you.

Con cariño,

Dōctora JoAngeli

I never felt like God left the building.

That is the part people do not expect when they hear my story. They expect a crisis of faith, a moment where the theology cracked, and I had to choose between my tradition and my child. That is not what happened. What happened was quieter than that, and harder, and more beautiful than I have words for even now.

Before I Could Say Anything

My child came out to me. And in that moment, before I had time to think, before I had time to consult anyone or construct a response, they asked me two questions.

Do you still love me?

Does God still love me?

I said yes. To both. Immediately. Not because I had done the theological work ahead of time. Not because I had read the right books or attended the right workshops. But because something in me knew it, the way you know things that live deeper than language, that the answer could only ever be yes. That God does not make mistakes. That this child, my child, was exactly who they were always meant to be.

My only prayer in that moment was something like: I am trusting You in this.

And I meant it. I still mean it.

What I Did Not Anticipate…

What I did not anticipate was what came after.

I did not lose my faith. But I lost something. The landscape of my spiritual life shifted in ways I am still learning to navigate. Churches that once felt like home began to feel like places I had to calculate before entering. The community I had known, the one built on shared worship and shared belonging, became a place I had to move through carefully, checking and balancing, protecting myself and my family with every step.

I became, in the language that came to me later, a foreigner in a foreign land.

Not because God changed. God did not change. But the institutions built in God’s name had not made room for my child, or for me, or for the families I would come to sit with in my practice and serve through Grayson County Pride. And once you see that, you cannot unsee it.

What the Families Taught Me

I understand something about isolation now that I did not understand before.

In my dissertation research, a study on how single-session therapy can shift Christian parents toward acceptance of their LGBTQ+ children, I sat with families who were carrying exactly this weight. Parents who loved their children fiercely and completely, and who were also terrified of what their communities would say. Parents who were doing the impossible math of faith and family, trying to find a version of love that didn’t cost them everything.

What I found, over and over again, was that the shift did not require them to abandon their faith. It required them to go deeper into it. To find the part that had always known what love actually asks of us.

That is the gift and the burden of this work. It asks the same thing of me that it asked of them.

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Why Grayson County Pride Exists

I feel the weight of this work intensely. I will not pretend otherwise.

There are days when the legal landscape of Texas makes it feel like the walls are closing in. When a ruling comes down on a day that was supposed to celebrate visibility, and I have to sit with that. When I wonder what it costs the kids in our community to watch the news and calculate whether they are safe.

But I think about that prayer, I am trusting You in this, and I think about what trust actually requires. It does not require certainty. It does not require the absence of fear. It requires showing up anyway.

Grayson County Pride exists because showing up anyway is not optional. In rural North Texas and Southern Oklahoma, we are sometimes the only affirming presence in a young person’s life. The only place where they do not have to calculate. The only room where the answer to am I loved? is yes, immediately, without conditions.

That is not a program. That is not a strategic initiative. That is a covenant.

What Community Care Actually Looks Like

Community care, as I have come to understand it, is what happens when people who have been made foreigners find each other and build something anyway.

(Two of my friends illustrating “community” all the time, every day. I’m so grateful for them both.)

It looks like a parent texting another parent at midnight after a school board meeting. It looks like a therapist staying on the phone a little longer. It looks like a grandmother who learns a new pronoun because love asks it of her. It looks like an organization in Sherman, Texas, that was built on the belief that rural LGBTQ+ youth deserve to be seen, not despite the complications, but through them.

It looks like me, trusting God in every moment of this. Still.

I will not stop. Ever.

Not because I am fearless. Not because the work is easy or the losses are small. But because my child asked me two questions, and I answered them. And that answer committed me to something larger than myself.

If you are doing this work and you are tired, I see you. If you are a parent learning a new language of love, I see you. If you are a young person wondering whether the room you are about to walk into is safe, I want you to know: we are building those rooms as fast as we can. And we are not going anywhere.

Con Cariño,

Dōctora JoAngeli Zertuche-Kasper, PhD, LPC

Executive Board Chair, Grayson County Pride Sherman, Texas

Photo: Dolores Huerta Foundation, via Facebook.

Dolores Huerta carried a secret for over fifty years to protect the farmworker movement.

She hid pregnancies. She wore ponchos. She stayed silent about what happened to her because the cause was bigger than her pain.

I keep thinking about that sentence: the cause was bigger than her pain.

The Question No One Asks

How many women have been told that? How many movements have asked the women inside them to shrink, to stay quiet, to be devoted, gentle, in the background, so the work could continue?

Two Women, Two Responses

Yolanda Lopez saw it in the 1970s. The Chicano movement was supposed to be her liberation, but it had its own ideas about what Chicanas should look like. She picked up a paintbrush and refused.

Dolores Huerta saw it too. She chose a different path. She stayed. She carried it. And now, at 95, she is finally speaking.

Both responses are valid. Neither woman should have had to choose.

The Both/And at Its Most Painful

This is not an either/or. You can honor the farmworker movement and name the harm done inside it. You can hold gratitude for what was built and grief for what it cost the women who built it. You can love the cause and refuse to let it silence you.

That’s the both/and at its most painful.

(My mother carried her own weight as well.)

I Know This Weight

I know this weight.

Not the same weight. But the shape of it.

I grew up learning that certain things stay inside the house. That love meant carrying quietly. That the people who endured without speaking were the strong ones.

It took me years to understand that silence isn’t strength. Silence is survival. And survival is not the same as living.

When I became a therapist, I started sitting across from women who carried the same shape. The mother who stayed in a marriage that was breaking her because the church said divorce was worse. The woman who smiled through holidays because her family didn’t believe what happened to her. The queer person who hid for decades because the cost of being seen was too high.

They all believed the same lie: that their pain was smaller than what they were protecting.

It never was.

I See You

If you’re carrying something to protect a movement, a family, a church, a marriage, I see you. Your pain was never smaller than the cause. It never will be.

What This Means for You

You don’t have to carry it alone. And you don’t have to choose between honoring what you love and naming what hurt you. That’s not betrayal. That’s the both/and of healing.

If you’re beginning to put something down that you’ve been carrying for a long time, go slowly. Silence held you together for a reason. You don’t have to tear it open all at once.

Start with one person. One conversation. One locked drawer where your truth can exist without being edited.

And if what you’re carrying involves abuse or assault, please know: there are people trained to walk with you. You don’t have to do this alone.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (call or text) thehotline.org

RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network): 1-800-656-4673 rainn.org

Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741

The Trevor Project (LGBTQ+ youth): 1-866-488-7386 thetrevorproject.org

You are not smaller than what happened to you. You never were.

Con cariño, Doctora JoAngeli

Yolanda Lopez, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1978. Image via Smarthistory."

In 1978, a Chicana artist named Yolanda Lopez painted herself as the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Not kneeling. Not passive. Not waiting to be adored.

Running. In sneakers. Holding her own cape like a finish line she had just crossed.

The art world was not prepared for her. The Chicano movement, which was supposed to be her liberation, had its own ideas about what Chicanas should look like: devoted, gentle, in the background. Lopez picked up a paintbrush and painted what she knew she was: rebel, runner, fully alive.

She put herself in the frame.

I think about her a lot lately.

The Rooms That Weren’t Built for Me

I spent years making myself smaller in rooms that weren’t built for me. I was born in 1964, when women were still fighting for the right to take up space outside the home. Going to college as a first-generation student was already going against the grain. Going as the granddaughter of a man who swam the Rio Grande was something else entirely. I carried two kinds of not belonging: the kind that comes with being a woman in rooms designed by men, and the kind that comes with being a Chicana in rooms that never expected you to walk through the door.

Nepantla Turned into Art

Yolanda Lopez didn’t ask permission. She didn’t wait to be invited into the sacred image. She walked in wearing sneakers and said: I am also this.

That is nepantla turned into art. The borderland not as a place of waiting but as a place of making.

“Because I feel living, breathing women also deserve the respect and love lavished on Guadalupe,” Lopez said, “I have chosen to transform this image.”

Her most famous series placed herself, her mother, and her grandmother into the image of the Virgin. Her mother, a garment worker, seated and sewing. Her grandmother, an elder, holding a snake and a cloak with the quiet authority of someone who has earned the right to hold sacred things.

Ordinary women. Sacred frame. Both/and.

Art historian Charlene Villaseñor Black described Lopez’s work as part of a new “mestiza consciousness,” a multiethnic understanding of identity that crossed borders the way Chicano Spanish crosses languages. Lopez wasn’t just painting herself. She was rewriting what sacred looked like.

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The Holy and the Human

She was not saying the Virgin wasn’t holy. She was saying her mother Margaret was holy too. The woman who clocked in before dawn and bent over a sewing machine until her back ached and her fingers went numb. The woman who never sat in a pew and thought of herself as sacred, who never looked in a mirror and saw someone worthy of a frame. Lopez saw her. And she painted her there anyway, seated in the Virgin’s robes, needle in hand, doing the only kind of prayer she had ever known: keeping her family alive.

Ordinary women. Sacred frame. Both/and.

Both/And

Lopez refused to choose between the holy and the human. She held both.

I wrote a dissertation about what happens when families are forced to choose between their faith and their children. My research found that the families who could hold both, who could say my faith AND my child, not my faith OR my child, those were the families who stayed together.

Yolanda Lopez painted that both/and forty years before I had words for it.

Telling your own story is an act of resistance.

Not because the world is waiting to silence you, though sometimes it is. But because the act of saying I was here, I mattered, my mother mattered, my grandmother mattered, that act refuses the erasure that happens quietly, over generations, when people like us are kept out of the frame.

Making the Frame Bigger

I am building something now. Not because the world asked for it, but because I needed it and it didn’t exist.

A place where the first-generation Latina sitting in a seminar full of people who had maps doesn’t have to pretend she has one too. Where the Christian mother who just found out her child is gay can hold her Bible in one hand and her kid in the other and someone says “you don’t have to choose.” Where the queer kid in a rural town can see a Pride flag on Main Street and know they’re not alone. Where the young clinician who looks like me can open a journal and finally see her own face in the research.

I am putting myself in the frame. And I am making the frame bigger.

Yolanda Lopez died in 2021, but the frame she built is still open. She spent her whole life painting women like her into spaces that had never made room for them. She didn’t wait for an invitation. She made one.

This essay is for her. And for every woman who ever picked up a paintbrush, a pen, a diploma, a microphone, or her own voice and said: I am also this.

What This Means for You

Lopez’s paintings are windows. She looked at a wall that said “the sacred looks like this” and refused. She believed all women were sacred: the runner, the seamstress, the elder. The frame was never too small for them. It had just been held by the wrong hands.

In my work, I talk about windows instead of walls. Walls are the binaries: sacred or ordinary, faith or family, belong or don’t. Walls tell you to pick a side. Windows let you see through to something else, a world where both things are true at the same time.

You can do the same thing. Not with a paintbrush. With your presence.

For the woman holding her faith and her child: you are not choosing between two loves. You are holding both, and the both/and is not a compromise. It is the most sacred thing you can do. Your family doesn’t need you to have answers. They need you to stay in the frame.

For the first-gen dreamer who feels like she’s pretending: you are not pretending. You are pioneering. The fact that no one in your family did this before you doesn’t mean you don’t belong here. It means you’re the first one in the frame. That matters.

For anyone who has been edited, translated, or made smaller: you don’t need permission to take up space. You don’t need someone to paint you into the picture. You can pick up whatever is in your hands and put yourself there.

What frame have you been kept out of? What would it look like to put yourself in it?

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

Sources & Further Reading:

Charlene Villaseñor Black, “Sacred Cults, Subversive Icons,” in Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity, edited by D. Letticia Galindo and María Dolores Gonzales (University of Arizona Press, 1999).

Karen Mary Davalos, Yolanda M. López (UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Press, 2008).

Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, “Artist Provocateur: An Interview with Yolanda López,” CrossRoad, no. 31 (May 1993).

Betty LaDuke, “Yolanda López: Breaking Chicana Stereotypes,” in Women Artists: Multi-Cultural Visions (Red Sea Press, 1992).

Guisela M. Latorre, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (University of Texas Press, 2008).

Tey Marianna Nunn, “Remembering Artist and Activist Yolanda M. López,” Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum (2021).

I was a student at an all-girls Catholic high school, sitting in a classroom after the other girls had already filed out. The nun had just given us our assignment for the year: a journal. We would write in it regularly, she said. It was part of the coursework.

I waited until the room was empty. Then I walked to her desk, my heart thudding in my chest, so loud I was sure the teacher could hear it, and asked a question that sounded simple but carried everything I couldn’t say out loud.

“Can I write about anything?”

She looked at me. Not past me. Not through me. At me. Straight in my eyes.

She said the journal was mine. That I could write about anything. And then she said something I will never forget: if I didn’t want to take it home, I could leave it with her. She would keep it in her desk. Locked.

She didn’t ask me why. She didn’t need to.

In that moment, she gave me three things no one had ever offered me before: permission, privacy, and presence. She created a space where my story could exist before I even had the language to tell it. A locked drawer in a teacher’s desk became the first place in the world where I could be myself without being edited.

And I wrote. For the first time in my life, I wrote freely.

The Art of Disappearing

For most of my life, I moved through the world trying not to make or take up too much space.

Too Latina for some rooms. Too queer-adjacent for others. Too old. Too loud. Too much. Too everything.

I learned to shrink. To code-switch. To read the room and become whatever would make people comfortable, and keep me safe. I learned to translate myself into whatever language the room required, and I got so good at it that people forgot I was translating. I forgot I was translating.

Visibility felt dangerous. If they really saw me, they might reject me, or they might hurt me.

So I stayed invisible. On purpose.

Maybe you know this feeling. Maybe you’re doing it right now, performing a version of yourself that feels safe enough to survive the room you’re in. Scanning. Calculating. Holding your breath.

What I Was Missing

When the Sister saw me, really saw me, I realized what I had been missing.

Not approval. Not permission.

Witness. Validation. Recognition.

Someone who could say: I see what you’re carrying. I see who you are. And you belong here.

That’s what cracked everything open.

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Witnessing in Practice

I think about this a lot when I work with people.

A woman came into my office, and she’s been performing too. She’s been the “good Christian mom” who has it together, who knows the right answers, who holds the family line. And then her child came out, and the ground shifted, and now she’s carrying something she doesn’t know how to name or who she can talk to or with.

Or the queer person who’s come to my office because of anxiety. As they learn to trust that I won’t out them, that I won’t judge them, they finally exhale.

The mom, she doesn’t need me to fix her. She doesn’t need a lecture, a scripture, or a five-step plan.

They both need someone to see them. To say: I see you in this impossible situation. I see you trying to hold your faith and your child at the same time. I see you trying to stay in a state that doesn’t want you. I see you, and you’re not failing. You’re staying.

That’s the moment everything shifts, when someone witnesses you in the space between, and doesn’t ask you to leave it.

I think about the younger ones, too.

The first-gen student who just sat through a seminar where everyone seemed to speak a language she was never taught. The 20-something scrolling Instagram, watching people her age build things that look effortless, and wondering why everything she does feels like it’s crap.

She doesn’t need another motivational quote. She needs a person, a tía, a mentor, someone who looks at her and says: Slow down, mija. I see you. You’re not faking it. You’re pioneering it. You just don’t know it yet.

Being seen doesn’t fix everything. It doesn’t erase the years of invisibility. It doesn’t undo the harm.

But it cracks something open. It lets light in. It makes you think: Maybe I don’t have to hide anymore.

And once you’ve been seen, truly seen, you can’t unsee yourself.

I see you

That’s what I try to do now.

For every client who walks into my office carrying shame they didn’t earn. For every trauma survivor who thought they were the only one. For every parent standing in the parking lot, wondering if they have to choose. For every student who thinks they’re too old, too late, too much. For every scared kid at a Pride event who doesn’t know if they’re allowed to exist. For every first-gen dreamer building the bridge while they walk it.

I see you.

I say it out loud. Because no one said it to me for a very long time. And when they finally did, it changed everything.

What this means for you:

What the Sister gave me in that classroom has a name. In therapy, we call it witnessing -the act of seeing someone fully, without trying to fix them, without judgment, without rushing them to a conclusion.

Witnessing isn’t agreement. It isn’t advice. It’s presence.

And here’s what most people don’t realize: witnessing is a both/and practice. It means holding two things at once. I see your pain, and I see your strength. I see where you are, and I see who you’re becoming. It refuses the either/or of “you’re broken” or “you’re fine.” It says: you’re both. And that’s okay.

You don’t need a license to witness someone. You can do it today:

For the parent: The next time your child tells you something that scares you, before you respond, pause. Look at them. Let them see that you see them. You don’t have to have the right words. Your presence is the message. The both/and of witnessing says: I don’t fully understand yet, and I’m not going anywhere.

For the first-gen dreamer: The next time you’re in a room where you feel like a fraud, look around. There might be someone else scanning the room the same way you are. See them. A nod. A “you too?” That’s witnessing. That’s how invisible people find each other.

For anyone who’s been hiding: Let one person see you today. Not the performance. Not the credentials. You. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be as quiet as telling someone, “This is hard for me.” That’s the door opening.

You were never meant to be invisible. And the first person who needs to see you, fully, without judgment, without the mask, might be you.

So if no one has said it to you today, if you’re still performing, still translating, still scanning the room for danger, let me be the one:

I see you. You belong here. You don’t have to hide anymore.

Stay in the room, mi gente. Someone is always watching for you.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

There’s a particular kind of invisibility that comes with living in rural Texas.

No Pride centers. No gay bars. No coffee shops with safe space stickers in the window. No critical mass of people who look like you, love like you, live like you.

There’s just… silence. And churches…lots of churches. And the assumption that everyone is the same…SHOULD be the same.

If you live in a place like mine, you already know this. You’ve felt it in your body. The way you scan every room before you walk in. The way you hold your breath in the grocery store line when someone says something inappropriate to your culture. The way you’ve learned to read danger the way other people read weather.

On Disappearing

In a city, you might be unseen in a crowd. Anonymous. Easy to overlook.

In a small town, you’re unseen because you’re not supposed to exist. The community has already decided who belongs, and if you don’t fit, you learn to disappear. You learn to pass. You learn to keep quiet about who you love, what you believe, what you need.

You become invisible on purpose, because visibility isn’t safe.

I know this because I lived it. In church, I folded. In white spaces, I folded. In the red county I still live in, I folded. Then my child came out, and I spent three years folding in a church that was never going to hold us.

I wish I never had.

I stopped disappearing. Not because I found courage. Because I finally stopped asking rooms that were never going to hold us to make space.

If You’re the Parent Reading This

Maybe your child just came out. Maybe it was three weeks ago, and you haven’t told anyone. Not your husband. Not your sister. Not your pastor. You’re carrying it alone because you don’t have a single person in your life you trust to hold it with you.

You’re not asking anyone to fix your child. You’re just trying to breathe.

I know, because I sit across from you on Tuesday afternoons. You found me through a Google search at midnight, the only affirming therapist within an hour’s drive.

If that’s you right now, you can reach out. But even if you’re not ready for that yet, keep reading. This essay is for you too.

And I want you to know: you’re not alone. You just can’t see the others yet.

The kids sitting in church pews hearing that they’re an abomination, scrolling social media and seeing Pride parades in places that feel like another planet, thinking maybe I’m the only one? They’re not the only ones. They just can’t see each other yet.

And neither can you.

On Building the Room

That’s why we built Grayson County Pride. Not because it was safe. Not because anyone asked for it. Not because the community was ready. Because in a place like this, visibility doesn’t just happen. You have to create it yourself.

Every time we hold a Pride event, we prepare for the possibilities of protest. That’s the cost of visibility in a place like this. But existing and being visible is an act of rebellion. It’s also living and not hiding. It’s the opportunity for this community to be seen, valued, heard, and loved. We aren’t going to take that away from them because of the possibility of hate.

And they show up. Kids wearing their colors for the first time in public. Some of them shaking. Some of them crying. All of them seen. And their parents are there too. Some standing behind their kids. Some standing a few feet away, close enough to show up, not quite ready to hold the flag. But they’re in the room.

People ask me why I stay in rural Texas. Why I don’t move somewhere with more resources, more allies, more rainbow crosswalks.

I’m not queer. I’m a Christian mom whose child came out. I’m an ally who decided that loving my kid and loving my faith didn’t have to be an either/or. And I stay because the families here need to see someone like them holding the door open. Not someone from the outside. Someone from the next pew over.

Because in rural Texas, they have us, or they have nothing.

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What This Means for You

Rural invisibility isn’t just about geography. It’s about who gets to be seen and who has to hide. It’s the assumption that LGBTQ+ people only exist in cities, that we’re an urban phenomenon, not a human one.

We exist everywhere. We always have. And so do the people who love us.

Invisibility is an either/or trap. It tells you: be visible and be unsafe, or be invisible and survive. Pick one.

The both/and says there’s a third option. You can build visibility, slowly, carefully, on your own terms.

Here’s what I knew before the data confirmed it: the parents who sit in the discomfort, who let themselves not know the answers, who stay in the conversation even when it hurts, those are the ones who grow the most. The tension wasn’t the obstacle. It was the doorway.

That might look like a mom joining a private Facebook group for parents of LGBTQ+ kids. It might look like a therapist quietly adding “affirming” to her website in a town where that word still raises eyebrows. It might look like you, reading this essay right now and thinking, someone sees me.

Coming out is your choice. Not your church’s. Not your employer’s. Not your neighbor’s. No one has the right to demand that information from you. This isn’t a political statement. This is about safety.

You can show up at a Pride event and still not owe your coworker a conversation. You can trust your closest friends with your whole story and give your mail carrier nothing but a wave. You can hold your child at home and hold your boundaries everywhere else.

Your visibility belongs to you. No one else gets to set the terms.

Visibility isn’t a single brave moment. It’s a practice. And every small act of showing up, for yourself, for your child, for your community, makes the room a little bigger for the person behind you.

Listen…

If you’re reading this from a small town, if you’ve learned to disappear, to pass, to keep quiet, I want you to know:

You’re not the only one.

You never were.

And if you’re the parent, the tía, the friend who doesn’t know what to say yet, you don’t have to have the words.

You just have to stay in the room.

The room is small in a place like this. But it’s real. And every time one of us shows up, it gets a little bigger.

Stay visible if you can.

Stay safe if you can’t.

And know that someone out here is holding the door open for the day when you won’t have to choose.

Before You Go

If this essay found you and you’re the parent wondering who you can trust, or the one who thinks they’re the only one in their town, message me. You don’t have to carry your story alone. Just say hello.

And if you’re in North Texas and looking for community, Grayson County Pride is here. Reach out at info@graysoncountypride.org. You don’t have to show up to an event to belong. You just have to reach out.

Or: if you know someone carrying this quietly, in a small town, in a church pew, in a parking lot, send this to them. You don’t have to say anything. The essay says it for you. Sometimes visibility starts with one person saying: I thought of you.

Con Cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

Dear younger me,

(There’s a song by Mercy Me entitled that…)

It’s your first day. You’re sitting in the parking lot, and you’re not sure you can do this.

You’re fifty-six years old. You’ve done this before, but you were so much younger. And now, you’re about to do something no one in your family has ever done. You’re about to walk into a doctoral classroom where everyone will probably be younger than you. Some of them might even be younger than your children.

You’re wondering if you made a mistake.

Slow down, mija. Like I said, we’ve done this before. Let me walk with you and remind you…

You belong here.

Not despite your age. Not despite the fact that you learned that speaking Spanish was unacceptable at kindergarten or first grade, and you were forced to learn a language that wasn’t as beautiful as yours. Not despite the winding path, the years in clinical practice instead of the classroom, or the family that doesn’t have words for what you’re about to do.

But, because of it.

You are walking into a room that was not built for you. That’s not a reason to leave. That’s the reason you matter in it.

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There are things you won’t know today.

You won’t know that you should have already read most of the first book or that you’ll be expected to read many books quickly and absorb the material and then synthesize it in a way that makes sense (what’s synthesize mean anyway?) You won’t know that you’re supposed to engage and take part in discussions in a way that makes you the center of attention when you’ve been taught not to be seen or be less so you don’t bring notice to yourself. You won’t know that when the professor says “any questions?” the answer is yes…even if it feels like it’s stupid (there are no dumb questions in grad school EVER).

You won’t know the names they drop or the theories they reference. You’ll smile and nod and scramble to research ALL of it with long hours in the library and late nights studying online with your community (which you will find along the way). You’ll code-switch so well they’ll forget you’re translating.

That’s okay. You’ve been translating your whole life. Between languages. Between worlds. Between who your family needs you to be and who this room is asking you to become.

There’s a word for that place you’re standing in, and one day you’ll learn it and it will change everything. But for now, just know: the in-between is not a sign you’re lost. It’s where the transformation takes place.

There are things you won’t know for years.

That your life experience, the decades of clinical work, the people you’ve sat with; the LGBTQ+ teen who wants to die because they believe they’re a mistake or the family who believes they have to choose between faith and their queer child, the woman rebuilding herself after trauma while raising kids alone, the father who doesn’t understand that he’s picked a toxic partner because that’s all he’s ever known…that’s not background noise. That’s the research. That’s the data no textbook holds.

That one day you’ll discover something counterintuitive in that very data: that the tension is not the enemy. That leaning into the hardest conversations, the ones about faith and identity and impossible choices, is exactly what opens the door. Not despite the struggle. Through it.

You don’t know this yet, sitting in this parking lot. But the discomfort you feel right now? It’s the same mechanism. The same doorway. You are already doing the work, you’ll spend four (oops, I said 5 in the recording!) years learning to name.

That being a mother, a counselor, a Latina who clawed her way into rooms that locked from the inside, that’s not a disadvantage. That’s the reason your dissertation will matter. That’s the reason a mother will sit across from you one day and trust you with the worst moment of her life, and you’ll be able to look her in the eye and say: you don’t have to choose. And she’ll believe you. Because you lived it first.

“All knowledge is there for the taking, waiting on a shelf. But it must be found.”

Here’s the thing about first days.

They’re hard. They’re supposed to be. Knowledge is available for everyone, but it can't be summoned effortlessly. It has to be found. It has to be hard won. Everyone is pretending they know what they’re doing. Not everyone will seek what needs to be found.

The difference is, they’ve been taught to pretend. You haven’t. You think your uncertainty is showing, but what’s showing is your honesty. And honesty is what makes a good therapist. It’s also what makes a good scholar and an excellent advocate.

So walk in.

Find a seat. Open your notebook. Listen more than you speak, at first. Ask questions when you don’t understand, even when no one else is asking. Especially then.

There will be days you want to quit. Days the imposter in your head is louder than the professor at the front of the room. Days you come home and try to explain what you’re learning and watch the people you love most look at you like you’re speaking another language.

Stay in the room.

The both/and is harder. It takes longer. It asks you to hold the woman you were and the woman you’re becoming in the same two hands. But it’s the only path that lets you keep all of who you are.

One day, someone will ask you, “What are your best hopes?” and you’ll realize that question isn’t just a clinical technique. It’s how you’ve been living your whole life, swimming toward something you couldn’t yet see, trusting the water to hold you, refusing to go back to shore.

Four years from now, after going to school all year long (no summer breaks or summer vacations for four long years), you’ll stand in front of a committee and defend your dissertation. You’ll become Doctora. You’ll have written something that helps families hold their faith and their children at the same time, something that proves the impossible thing: that joy exists in the places you were told joy couldn’t survive.

And then you’ll do what you’ve always done. You’ll hold the door open for the next one. The young woman sitting in her own parking lot right now, wondering if she’s enough. The baby queen about to make her first walk. The first-gen student with no one to call when she doesn’t understand the rules.

You’ll look at them the way someone once looked at you, not with answers, but with presence, and you’ll say: I see you. I know this ground. Come, let me walk with you.

But that starts today. It starts with getting out of the car.

You’re not too old. You’re not too late.

You didn’t start late, mija. You started ready.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli (The woman you’re becoming).

There’s a word for where you live.

Not the city on your driver’s license. Not your job title. Not the room you just walked into.

The space in between. The liminal space.

The Nahuatl word is nepantla. Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa used it to describe the liminal space of transition, the in-between place where you’re no longer who you were but not yet who you’re becoming.

And if you’re reading this, I think you might be living in it right now.

On Being Seen

I first heard the word at the 2024 TAMFT conference. Priscilla Dominguez, Alisia Tirado-Hernandez, and Dr. Joanna Mendez-Pounds presented “Self of Therapist Using a Chicana Feminist Lens,” moderated by Dr. Rebecca Lucero-Jones. They talked about nepantla, the in-between, and what it means to be a Chicana therapist navigating systems that weren’t designed for us.

For the first time in my academic career, I felt seen. Not just tolerated. Recognized. There was a place for me within my cultural community and my academic community at the same time. Someone had given a name to the space I’d been living in my entire life.

That presentation changed something in me. It told me the space between wasn’t a failure to arrive. It was the crossing itself.

My grandfather knew nepantla, even if he never had a word for it.

When he swam the Rio Grande, there was a moment when he was neither Mexican nor American. Neither home nor arrived. Just a body in the water, suspended between two shores.

He didn’t wait until he understood the other side to keep going. He just kept swimming.

On Staying in the Room

First-generation students live in nepantla too.

We walk into classrooms that weren't built for us, carrying families who can't follow. We learn new languages: sometimes English as a second language, an academic language, a professional language, and the unspoken language of belonging that we can't fully translate back home.

We become bridges. And bridges don’t belong to either side. They exist in the middle.

If you’re the first-gen student reading this, the one who sits in seminars wondering when they’ll figure out you don’t belong, I want you to hear something. That discomfort you feel? That’s not evidence that you’re in the wrong room. That’s the feeling of nepantla. You’re in between worlds. And you’re building the bridge as you walk it.

You’re not faking it. You’re crossing.

I remember the first time I came home after starting my doctoral program.

My children were off pursuing their own degrees. I tried to explain to my husband what I was studying: qualitative research, narrative therapy, mixed methods, epistemology. His eyes glazed over. Not from disinterest. From distance. I was speaking a language he didn’t have the vocabulary to ask about.

And I realized: I was in nepantla. I had crossed far enough that I couldn’t fully go back. But I hadn’t arrived anywhere that felt like home either.

Maybe you know that particular loneliness. The holiday table where no one asks about your work because they don’t have the words for it. The meeting where everyone seemed to know the unwritten rules, and you were still trying to figure out who wrote them. The moment you realize you’ve outgrown a room that raised you, and the grief of that.

You’re not ungrateful. You’re in the middle. Both things are true.

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On Becoming

Anzaldúa didn’t see nepantla as a problem to solve. She saw it as a place of transformation.

In nepantla, you have the opportunity to become something new. You can’t stay who you were; the old world won’t hold you anymore. And you can’t simply adopt the new world’s identity; it wasn’t made for you.

But you get to choose. You get to choose the both/and, and you get to decide your timeline. It’s the process that matters, not the destination.

So you create a third thing. A both/and. A self that holds contradictions without breaking.

Nepantla is where new consciousness is born. It’s where the either/or dies and the both/and begins.

Working it Through

I think about my clients who are caught between faith and family. They’re in nepantla too.

The mother who held her child while they sobbed, terrified that mom would choose the church over them. She can’t go back to the simple certainty she had before that conversation. But she hasn’t arrived at a new understanding yet. She’s standing on shifting ground, and everyone on both sides says she has to pick.

Her church says: choose your faith.

Her fear says: choose your comfort.

Her child’s eyes beg: choose me.

And she’s standing there, thinking she has to let go of one to hold the other.

She doesn’t. But she doesn’t have the language for this yet.

Or the woman who is clawing her way back into her own life after trauma. She’s a full-time student. A single mom. A person trying to rebuild herself in a world that didn’t pause while she fell apart. She’s not standing between two shores. She’s standing in the middle of three rooms at once, and every one of them needs her whole self.

My job, as a therapist, as a researcher, as a scholar · advocate, and as someone who has lived in this space my whole life, is to stand in it with them. To look in their eyes. To see them. And say: I know this ground. You don't have to choose. The both/and is survivable. And you're closer to solid ground than you think.

Listen…

Here is what I’ve learned from a lifetime of living in the in-between:

Nepantla is not a place you pass through on the way to somewhere better. For people like us, first-gen, both/and, code-switching, border-crossing, bridge-building people, nepantla is where we live. It’s where we’ve always lived.

And it is not a deficit.

The in-between is where transformation happens. It’s where my grandfather became someone new. It’s where I became Doctora. It’s where my clients discover they can hold their faith and their child in the same two hands. It’s where a woman rebuilds herself as a survivor and a student and a mother, all at once, without letting go of any of it.

The space in between is not empty. It’s full of us.

The Practice

Nepantla isn’t just a theory. It’s a practice. And it starts with refusing the either/or - the binary.

Every time someone tells you to pick a side, you’re being asked to leave the room before you’ve finished becoming who you are.

You don’t have to.

The discomfort is not the problem. The discomfort is staying. Tolerating the vague, the unknowable.

Stay in the room. The both/and takes longer. It asks more of you. And it’s the only path that lets you keep all of who you are.

You are not stuck between two worlds, or three, or however many you’re holding at once. You are becoming who you were meant to be. And that person, the one who holds contradictions without breaking, is the most powerful version of you.

So if you’re in the middle right now. If you’re the student who doesn’t feel like she belongs in the room. The parent who can’t go back to who she was before. The survivor rebuilding everything at once. The dreamer who is building something no one in her family has ever seen.

Stay, mi gente. You’re not lost. You’re finding you.

And you are not alone.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

My oldest child and I at school.

Dear first-gen who’s faking it,

I see you.

You learned the rules no one taught you. You figured out which fork to use, which words to say in meetings, which version of yourself gets to show up in which room. You code-switch so well that people forgot you’re translating.

And some days you’re so good at it, you almost forget too.

Almost.

Your body remembers…

But then there’s that moment. The one where someone mentions a childhood vacation (what’s a vacation?) to Europe, or a family tradition at their alma mater, or the trust fund that made graduate school possible. And your body remembers.

You didn’t have those things. You had a grandfather who crossed a river. A mother who worked doubles. Maybe access to student loans, maybe not. You did have a family that loved you fiercely but couldn’t help you navigate a world they’d never been invited into.

So you built the map yourself. Step by step. Room by room. And every time you walked through a new door, part of you was scanning: Do I belong here? Will they find out? How do I blend better?

I know this because I lived it.

I know this because I lived it.

I walked into my first doctoral classroom at 56 years old. I was one of the oldest people in the room. The brownest. The most likely to have a kid texting me about dinner while I was trying to understand epistemology (true story).

The silence said: too old, too late, you don’t belong here.

I stayed anyway.

You're not faking it.

And here’s what I want to tell you, from the other side of a dissertation defense, a PhD, and a whole lot of rooms that weren’t built for me:

You’re not faking it.

You’re building the bridge as you walk it. And that’s harder than walking a bridge someone else built for you. It’s harder, and it’s braver, and it’s the reason your people will have a bridge at all.

The imposter feeling isn’t evidence that you don’t belong. It’s evidence of how far you’ve come from where you started. Your nervous system is still catching up to what your courage already knows.

Slow down, mija…

So if you’re sitting in a meeting right now, translating yourself into a language that isn’t your first…

If you’re in a classroom surrounded by people who seem to know things you were never taught…

If you’re standing in a room that wasn’t built for you and wondering how long until they notice…

Slow down, mija. You’re not faking it. You’re blazing the trail for those who will follow you through it.

And someone who comes after you is going to walk through the door you held open and breathe a little easier because you were here first.

That’s not faking it.

That’s the work.

And if you’re the one who’s already walked through those doors, the mom, the tia, the mentor, the one who built the bridge…don’t forget: you were the first-gen who was faking it once too. You’re not faking it anymore. And someone is watching how you walk through rooms. They’re learning from you.

That’s not faking it either. That’s legacy.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

#PhDLatinxMomOnAMission

A couple of months ago, I defended my dissertation. The culmination of years of research exploring what happens when Christian parents sit down, even once, and engage in therapy designed to give them an opportunity to have the hard conversations about acceptance of their LGBTQ+ child. I studied it. I measured it. And what I found gave me chills.

And then I graduated. And the people who need that research most, the parents, the pastors, the families sitting in the tension, they don’t read scholarly journals.

Here’s the thing about academic writing…it speaks to a very specific room. A room full of people who already know what “solution focused narrative therapy” means, who read methodology sections for fun (maybe), who will cite you in their own work someday. That room matters. But it’s not the room where the parents are. It’s not the room where a mom in Denison, Texas is Googling “my kid just came out and I don’t know what to do.” It’s not the room where a pastor is quietly wondering if there’s a way to hold onto his faith and still love his child fully.

I came to Substack because I need a bridge between what I found and who needs to find it.

But it’s more than the research. It’s the fact that my entire life exists in spaces that aren’t supposed to coexist.

I am a marriage and family therapist who centers queer families. I am a person of faith who builds Pride organizations. I lead a nonprofit that serves rural communities most people forget about, and I do it at the intersection of identities that make people uncomfortable at dinner tables on every side of the political spectrum.

I live in the liminal space. The in-between. The place where faith and queerness aren’t opposites but are having a conversation most people don’t know how to listen to. Where clinical practice and community organizing bleed into each other because in small towns, they have to. Where being the state student president for TSAMFT and the executive chair of an LGBTQ+ resource nonprofit aren’t contradictions, they’re the same work wearing different clothes.

Instagram lets me show up in that space. But it doesn’t let me sit there. Substack does.

And then there’s this: rural queer life deserves to be told.

Pride Festival

Not interpreted through an urban lens. Not packaged as a tragedy. Not reduced to a red-state punchline. The stories that come through Grayson County Pride, the families reaching across generational and theological divides, the teenagers finding community for the first time in counties where the nearest affirming anything is an hour away, the quiet revolutions happening in living rooms and church parking lots across North Texas and Southern Oklahoma, those stories don’t get told because they don’t fit the narrative.

They’re not dramatic enough for the news. They’re too complicated for a caption. And they matter more than I can say.

Strategy meeting at Grayson Pride

This is what scholar-advocacy looks like. Not just publishing in journals, but showing up in parking lots, in Pride tents, in living rooms where the research actually matters. If you're a scholar sitting on findings that could change someone's life, don't let them live behind a paywall. Build the bridge. Your community is waiting for what you know.

So I’m here. To write about what I’ve learned, what I’m learning, and what these communities are teaching me every single day. To translate research into real life. To sit in the tension of the in-between. And to make sure these stories, our stories, have a place to live.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

I say that now like it’s nothing. Like it’s just a number. But for a long time, I didn’t say it at all.

When I started my doctoral program, I was fifty-six.

I was older than some of my professors. I was older than my chair. I sat in classrooms full of thirty-year-olds who had their whole careers ahead of them, and I thought: What am I doing here?

No one ever said I was too old. In fact, this program accepted me so thoroughly that it took me by surprise. The silence wasn’t coming from the room. It was coming from me. The “imposter syndrome” trying to rear its ugly head.

It’s that same voice that says too queer in a church pew. Too brown in a boardroom. Too much in a family that needs you to be less. Different rooms. Same voice. And it always says the same thing: You don’t belong here.

There’s a particular invisibility that comes with age.

People look past you. They assume you’re slowing down, not speeding up. They assume you’re there to audit, not to earn. They ask when you’re going to retire…not what you’re going to build.

I stopped waiting for permission to be seen.

But I’ll tell you what usually happens first. My body scans the classrooms, the students, and the professor on the first day of each semester. Am I safe here? Can I relax, or do I need to brace? And each time I make the decision… I’m staying.

Here’s what I know at sixty-one that I didn’t know at thirty:

I know that “too late” is a lie people tell to keep you from starting.

I know that experience isn’t a disadvantage; it’s depth.

I know that the rooms that weren’t built for me still have doors. And I know how to open them.

There is this idea, this narrative that at certain ages, certain behaviors are expected. Slow down. Step aside. Let the younger ones take over. But the reality is that life is full of twists and turns and opportunities if we just start looking for the possibilities, the chance to change the narrative.

I didn’t go back to school at fifty-six because it was the right time. I went because I finally stopped believing I had missed my chance.

There’s also a phrase I’ve heard too many times: “If only I had started sooner.”
As if the years behind us are wasted. As if the path we took was the wrong one. As if we arrive at this moment damaged by a detour.

I don’t believe that anymore.

Every year I lived before this one, every client I sit with, every family I help, every failure and recovery and quiet lesson, continues to make me the scholar I’ve become.

I didn’t start late. I started ready.

At sixty-one, I have less time ahead of me than behind me. That’s just math.
But I also have more clarity. More urgency. More willingness to do the thing that scares me, because I’ve learned that the alternative, the not doing it, is worse.

I am not winding down. I am just getting started.

If you’re reading this and wondering if it’s too late for you, it’s not.
Start now. Start messy. Start scared. Start sixty-one.
The only wrong time to begin is never.

And if you’re the younger one reading this, the one sitting in a room right now wondering if anyone sees you there, someone does. Someone sat with that voice, that story, that narrative before you and stayed so you’d have a place to stand.

You’re not too young. You’re not too new. You’re not faking it.

You’re already in the room. Stay.

The day I passed my comprehensive exams defense. I was the older person at that table. I was also the happiest.

Con cariño,
Doctora JoAngeli

Dear family who didn’t understand,

I’m not writing this to blame you.

I’m writing this because today is Valentine’s Day, and the world is talking about love. And I keep thinking about what love looks like when it doesn’t come with understanding.

Once upon a time, I held my child while they cried. They told me they were gay. They asked me, “Do you still love me? Does God?” This moment the ground shifted in my world.

Maybe you’ve had a similar moment. Maybe you held your child while they cried. Maybe they told you they were gay. Maybe they told you they expected you not to love them anymore. Maybe they told you they wanted to die. And the ground shifted.

Not because you stopped loving them. But because no one prepared you for this. No one sat you down in Sunday school and said: One day your child will tell you something that rewrites everything you thought you knew. And you’ll need to figure out how to love them in a language you were never taught.

Your pastor didn’t prepare you. The parenting books didn’t cover it. Your own parents couldn’t help you navigate a world they’d never been invited into.

So you froze. Or you said the wrong thing. Or you said nothing at all.

I understand that. I froze too. And I breathed and decided I could love God and my child too. Now, I’m sitting with parents in that exact moment.

Here’s what my research taught me…the thing that surprised everyone, except me (I knew it was possible to both/and):

The parents who felt the most tension between their faith and their child’s identity? They weren’t the ones who walked away. They were the ones who showed the greatest growth in supportive behavior.

Not the parents who avoided the hard conversation. Not the ones who picked a side and shut the door.

The ones who stayed in the room with it.

The tension wasn’t the obstacle. It was the doorway.

You don’t have to understand everything today.

You don’t have to have the right theology sorted out. You don’t have to know what every word means or agree with every choice. You don’t have to have walked into a Pride parade or read the right books.

You just have to stay.

Because love was never about understanding first. Love is about choosing to remain in the room when everything in you wants to run. It’s about saying I don’t have the language yet, but I’m not leaving.

That’s the bravest thing a parent can do.

I witnessed a woman in a rural Oklahoma bar embody this last week. A brand new baby drag queen was making her first bow after performing (she was fabulous by the way), shy, maybe a little overwhelmed by the applause, rushing, ready to bolt. And a drag mom got up, walked alongside her, and whispered:

“Slow down, honey. They want you here. Don’t go running off leaving money on the table.”

The money on the table is the relationship. The years. The holidays. The phone calls. The chance to know your child…all of your child, in the fullness of who they are.

That’s what you leave behind when you run from the room.

So on this Valentine’s Day, I’m not writing about romantic love. I’m writing about the love that doesn’t require understanding to begin.

The kind that says: I’m still here. I’m still learning. I’m not going anywhere.

If you’re the family who didn’t understand — you’re not too late.

The room is still here. Your child is still here. And they don’t need you to be perfect.

They just need you to stay.

And if you’re the child reading this…the one who expected your mom not to pick you…I want you to hear something too:

Some of them are trying. Some of them are standing on shifting sands trying to find their footing. The silence doesn’t always mean rejection. Sometimes it means they’re terrified of saying the wrong thing.

Give them the room too, mi vida. Some of them will stay.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

#PhDLatinxMomOnAMission

Last week I wrote about Alex Gemini owning the stage at The Icehouse in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. About queer joy in a rural bar. About what happens when someone stops apologizing for who they are.

But there was another moment that night I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. A quieter one. The kind of moment you almost miss if you’re not paying attention.

It happened off to the side, just before a baby drag queen made her very first walk.

She was brand new. You could see everything on her face—the nerves, the adrenaline, the terror of being seen for the first time in a room full of strangers. The music was playing. The lights were on her. This was it.

And she started to rush.

Head down. Moving fast. The kind of speed that says: Let me get through this before they realize I don’t belong here.

That’s when a woman got up.

Not a stage manager. Not a director. A drag mom.

She had taken it upon herself to mother a whole group of queens—not just emotionally, but practically. Teaching them. Walking with them. Showing them how to hold a room. She’d been doing this work long before anyone called it mentorship.

She stepped alongside that baby queen, and she said:

“Slow down, honey.”

“You got to walk the room. Make eye contact. They want you here. They’re supporting you.”

And then she said the thing I can’t stop hearing:

“Don’t go running off leaving money on the table.”

I need you to sit with that for a second.

Slow down.

They want you here.

Don’t run from the thing that’s trying to love you…to accept you…to keep you in the room you belong in…

I’m a therapist. I’m a researcher. I spent years studying what happens when Christian parents try to hold onto both their faith and their LGBTQ+ children. I built a clinical intervention around it. I defended a dissertation on it. I sat across from parents who were terrified that loving their child meant losing their God.

And I’m telling you: what that drag mom did in a rural Oklahoma bar is the thing.

Not the theory. Not the clinical framework. Not the six-session protocol.

The thing.

She got up. She walked alongside someone in a room the world told them wasn’t theirs. And instead of watching from the audience, she got close enough to whisper the truth:

You belong here. Slow down. Let them love you.

My research found something that surprised everyone, including me.

The parents who experienced the most religious tension, the ones most torn between their faith and their child, showed the biggest increases in supportive behavior toward their LGBTQ+ kids. Not the parents who avoided the tension. Not the ones who picked a side and shut the other one down.

The ones who stayed in the room with it, who straddled the middle, the liminal space, the nepantla…

That’s the paradox. You don’t get to joy by going around the hard part. You get there by walking straight through the hard…slowly, eyes open, making contact with every person who showed up to support you.

Just like that baby queen had to learn to do.

Here’s what I saw in that Oklahoma bar, beyond the performance I wrote about last week:

I saw a dance floor full of people who had every reason to hide and chose joy instead. I saw regular people being introduced to drag for the first time, leaning in, not pulling away. I saw brave kings and queens being celebrated, not tolerated, not endured… celebrated.

And I saw a mom.

Not the kind the world expects. Not the one sitting stiffly in the back row with her arms crossed, trying to understand. This was a woman who had already crossed the river. She had already decided that love was bigger than the rules she’d been given. And now she was reaching back, walking slowly alongside someone who was still learning how to be seen.

If you’re reading this and you’re the parent still sitting in the car;

The one who loves your child but doesn’t know how to show up in their world;

The one who’s been told that supporting them means abandoning your faith;

The one who’s terrified of the room;

I need you to hear what that drag mom said:

Slow down, honey.

They want you here.

Don’t go running off leaving money on the table.

The money on the table is the relationship. The years. The holidays. The phone calls. The chance to know your child, really know them, in the fullness of who they are. That’s what you leave behind when you run from the room.

You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to understand drag. You don’t have to have all the language or all the answers.

You just have to stay. Walk slowly. Make eye contact. Let them see you’re there.

That’s what queer joy looks like in an Oklahoma bar.

It’s not just the queen on the stage.

It’s the mom who got up.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

Alex Gemini — drag queen, artist, and Grayson County Pride’s Drag Coordinator — took the stage at The Icehouse in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. A rural bar. A small town. The kind of place where you might not expect to find a drag performance, and exactly the kind of place where it matters most.

And Alex didn’t just perform. They owned that room.

There’s something that happens when you watch someone stop apologizing for who they are and just… become. The confidence, the artistry, the sheer presence- it was electric. This is what we talk about when we talk about queer joy in rural spaces. Not asking permission. Not shrinking. Just showing up fully and daring a room to keep up.

This is also why the work we do at Grayson County Pride matters. We’re not waiting for acceptance to arrive from somewhere else. We’re building it, in North Texas, in Southern Oklahoma, in small towns and dive bars and community centers. People like Alex are proof that visibility isn’t just a concept. It’s a person on a stage in Tishomingo on a Saturday night, and it’s beautiful.

I’m so proud to have Alex on our team. Watch this one. They’re just getting started.

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Stories of joy, resilience, and becoming, from small towns that don’t make the news.

Rio Grande at Matamoros. Image: Encyclopædia Britannica

To the ones who showed up,

To the ones who stood in line when it would have been easier to stay home,

To the ones who voted in Texas when everyone said it wouldn’t matter--

This letter is for you.

You were told your vote didn’t count here. That Texas was already decided. That the math would never work in your favor.

You showed up anyway.

Last week, January 31, 2026, Tarrant County, deep in the heart of red Texas, flipped blue for a Texas Senate seat in district 9. The first time since 1991.

That didn’t happen because of one candidate or one campaign. It happened because thousands of people decided that showing up mattered more than the odds.

I think about my family, who made the decision to immigrate here to a country that has repeatedly stated that they didn’t want our people here. People who work hard, become legal, but make a difficult choice to have a better life for their future families…so they crossed the river anyway.

That’s what you did.

You crossed anyway.

To my LGBTQ+ community: You showed up in a state that has spent years telling you that you don’t belong here, that your families aren’t real, that your existence is a problem to be legislated away.

You voted anyway, and you will continue to do so, because you are fighting for your lives.

To my Hispanic brethren: You showed up in a climate of fear…ICE raids, executive orders, a country trying to make you invisible and render you captive.

You showed up anyway.

To everyone who almost didn’t, who thought about staying home, who wondered if it was worth the risk, who nearly convinced themselves that one vote couldn’t matter:

You showed up anyway.

This is what the third way looks like.

Not hiding. Not recklessness. But showing up with wisdom…knowing the risks, weighing the costs, and deciding that visibility matters more than safety.

You didn’t wait for Texas to change before you acted. You changed Texas by acting.

There’s more work to do. One flipped county doesn’t undo decades of policy designed to keep us out. But it proves something:

When we show up, we shift what’s possible.

When we refuse to disappear, we make room for others to be seen.

When we cross the river, when we walk through the door, we prove that the impossible was never impossible at all.

Thank you for showing up.

Thank you for crossing anyway.

Thank you for being the proof.

Con cariño,

JoAngeli

View of Radcliffe Square, Oxford, UK

To the one who stands at the threshold,

The one who wonders if you’re allowed to enter,

The one who has walked into spaces that weren’t built for you and felt your own presence as an act of rebellion…

This letter is for you.

I’ve been thinking about doors lately. The ones we stand outside of, heart pounding, wondering if we’re allowed in. The ones we push open anyway, not because we’re certain we belong, but because staying outside isn’t living either.

Last week I wrote to the afraid; to my LGBTQ+ community, to my Hispanic brethren, to anyone being told right now that visibility itself is dangerous. I said there’s a third way: we can be safe AND visible. We can protect ourselves AND refuse to disappear.

But I realize now that essay was only half the story.

Because some of you aren’t afraid of being targeted. You’re afraid of something quieter. You’re afraid you don’t belong in the first place. Especially now, when US citizens are being scooped by ICE and our Voter Information is being stolen. You’re afraid that even if you walk through the door, someone will tap you on the shoulder and ask to see your invitation.

I know that fear. I’ve felt it in academic spaces that weren’t designed for first-generation students or for non-traditional students. I’ve felt it in professional rooms where I don’t match the majority, my background too working-class, my path too unconventional. I’ve felt it getting ready to re-enter the US after this last trip to Oxford.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Walking through the door is the proof.

You don’t need an invitation. You don’t need permission. You don’t need to wait until you feel ready, or qualified, or enough. The fact that you’re standing at the threshold means you’re already supposed to be there.

And you’re not walking alone.

Those that came before us, my relatives, those at Stonewall, the Suffragists, the Civil Rights movement, and every other quiet rebellion… came so that we could walk into spaces that merely make us uncomfortable. Every ancestor who moved through danger with wisdom, not just fear, they’re walking with you.

Wonderland exists for those brave enough to step through. Not the fearless. The brave. The ones whose knees shake and who enter anyway. Because courage is not the absence of fear, it’s what we do when we are afraid…

So if you’re standing at a door today, a job, a school, a relationship, a community, a dream that feels too big for someone like you, I need you to hear me:

You are not an imposter.

You are not a guest.

You are not borrowing space that belongs to someone else.

You belong in every room you enter.

You are not alone.

You are seen.

And you belong here.

Con cariño,

JoAngeli

Today I asked myself a really hard question.

I’m sitting in London, my last stop before flying home, having just left Oxford, a place that has come to feel like home, a place that sees me. And I’m about to fly back into a country I’m not sure sees me at all right now.

ICE raids. Executive orders targeting LGBTQ+ protections. A climate of fear so thick you can choke on it.

This is not abstract for me. I work with the LGBTQ+ community in rural North Texas. I run programming that asks people to be visible in places that already feel unsafe. In a few hours, I’ll board a plane and return to that work.

And I asked myself: How do I keep encouraging others to step into the light when the light itself…being seen…feels dangerous?

I don’t have an easy answer.

But I know this: the research I’ve done, the work I continue to do, shows an alternative to the binary we’re being handed. The one that says: hide or be targeted.

There is a third way.

The one that says we can be safe AND be visible. We can protect ourselves AND refuse to disappear.

When my grandfather and my uncles crossed the Rio Grande, they didn’t do it because it was safe.

They crossed because staying wasn’t living.

This isn’t a call for recklessness. It’s a recognition that I come from people who knew how to move through danger with wisdom, not just fear. They calculated. They planned. They protected each other. And they kept going.

I carry that in my blood.

The programming we’re building at Grayson County Pride exists because families need space to figure this out together, in the middle of hostile, frightening times.

We’re developing spaces for seniors in our LGBTQ+ community, because it’s time for them to have a place that’s safe, open, and hospitable. They survived one era of being hunted. They shouldn’t have to survive another alone.

We have the Grayson Glow Up for young adults 18-25, because they need to see that visibility doesn’t have to mean vulnerability.

We are building safe gathering spaces for entire families, of all ages, in all configurations, because belonging shouldn’t require bravery. But right now, it does.

And this is also a call to my other community. The one I was born into.

To my Hispanic brethren, citizens and undocumented alike:

You belong in this country.

Don’t give in to the fear.

I see you.

We belong.

I don’t know what the next months will bring. I don’t know if the light will feel safe again anytime soon.

But I know this: my grandfather didn’t cross that river so his granddaughter would hide.

And the elders who survived Stonewall and the AIDS crisis didn’t fight so the next generation would disappear.

We come from people who moved through danger with wisdom.

We can do this too.

To the afraid:

You are not alone.

You are seen.

And you belong here.

Con cariño,

JoAngeli

That’s the thing about being first-generation. It’s not that you’re not smart enough. It’s not that you can’t do the work.

It’s the not knowing what you don’t know.

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When I started my doctoral program, I didn’t know you were expected to read, actually consume, annotate, and understand 5-10 books per WEEK, that note-taking would be elevated to an art form, or that dissertation work would be so lonely. I didn’t know “revisions” meant months, not days. I didn’t know that I would be expected to present at conferences (several times throughout my doctoral journey), that there were unwritten rules about what to wear, who to talk to, and how to introduce yourself.

I didn’t know because no one in my family had ever done this. There was no one to call. No one to ask, “Is this normal? Am I doing this the right way?”

I just kept showing up, hoping I was not screwing everything up.

That’s the invisibility of being first-gen.

It’s not that you can’t do the work. It’s that you’re doing the work while also trying to figure out the rules no one taught you. Everyone else seems to know something you don’t. They move through spaces like they belong there, because someone in their family walked this path before them and left a map.

You’re drawing the map while you walk.

I remember sitting in a doctoral seminar, listening to classmates talk about their parents’ graduate school experiences. Their family friends who were professors or involved in higher education. Their summer internships at research labs, fellowships for post graduate work, the importance of being published.

I thought: My grandfather swam a river and then worked for Coca Cola. My mother was a homemaker until she and my father divorced. My father was in the Marines.

I didn’t say that out loud. I just nodded, like I understood what they were talking about.

Here’s what I’ve learned about invisibility: it doesn’t go away. You don’t suddenly become visible once you get the degree.

But you can make yourself visible to the people coming behind you.

You can say, "I didn’t know. Here’s what I figured out. Here’s the map I drew.

PS. This is my “husky” cat, Starr Dew, telling me to get to work. This was my real life while I was writing my dissertation…

That’s why I write. That’s why I talk about being 61, and first-gen, and Latina, and still figuring it out.

Because somewhere, there’s a woman sitting in a seminar, nodding like she understands, feeling like she’s the only one who doesn’t have a map.

She’s not the only one.

I didn’t have a map either. I made one. And now I’m leaving it here for her.

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If you’re first-gen anything—college, grad school, career, country—I see you. You’re not behind. You’re building the road while you walk it. That’s harder. And it counts.

#PhDLatinxMomOnAMission

Dear Dreamer,

Someone reminded me of something important this week.

I’ve been writing about the kids—the teenagers who walk into their first Pride event shaking, the young adults finding their people, the families learning to hold love and faith together.

And that matters. It does.

But I haven’t been writing about you.

You, who came out when there was no word for it—or when the only words were clinical, shameful, whispered.

You, who found each other in glances, in code, in the back corners of places that don’t exist anymore.

You, who lost jobs. Lost families. Lost decades to hiding.

You, who survived.

The kids at Pride? They’re there because of you.

Stonewall wasn’t led by teenagers. It was led by people who had had enough—people who had been surviving long before that night and kept surviving long after.

Every rainbow flag flying on Main Street in small-town Texas exists because someone, somewhere, refused to disappear.

That someone is you.

And yet.

I hear you when you say you’re still invisible. Still lonely. Still wondering where your people are.

In cities, there are LGBTQ+ senior centers, social groups, chosen family networks built over decades. In rural Texas? You might be the only one you know. Or the only one you think you know—because everyone’s still hiding.

That’s not okay.

I don’t have a perfect solution yet. But I have a promise:

I see you.

You are not forgotten.

You are not an afterthought.

The work of belonging isn’t just for the young. It’s for everyone who was ever told they didn’t belong—including those who’ve been waiting the longest.

You didn’t just pave the way.

You are the way.

And I’m going to do better at making sure you know that.

Con cariño,

Doctora JoAngeli

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If you’re in Grayson or the surrounding Counties and you’ve been waiting to be seen—or if you want to help us make sure no one gets left behind—we want to hear from you.

Reach out to Grayson County Pride: 📧 [info@graysoncountypride] 🌐 [ Grayson Pride Facebook Group ]

There’s room for you here.