There is a specific kind of grief that comes with a show ending. Not the grief of cancellation, that’s different. A cancellation you can usually see coming. This is unexpected, which makes it more intense.

Schitt’s Creek. Sex & the City. Insecure. Will & Grace.

Each of them knew, on some level, that the people watching needed something the plot wasn’t explicitly delivering. What made those worlds hard to leave wasn’t just the characters, though the characters felt like people we knew. It was the unacknowledged education happening underneath the entertainment. Week after week, something was being taught about how to move through the world, how to love and recover, how to survive. And you were learning it without realizing you’d enrolled. When those shows ended, something closed that you hadn’t known you were depending on.

The series finale of Hacks airs this week. Five seasons, a planned conclusion. What it teaches is that a generational divide doesn’t have to be a wall. It can be a mirror.

Deborah, who has survived decades of an industry that dismissed and diminished her, and Ava who has barely survived herself, end up in each other’s orbit long enough to start mattering to each other. Not cleanly. Not without damage. But genuinely. The show is, at its core, about two people from different generations who need what the other has and are too proud, too guarded, and too afraid to admit it without a fight first.

I hear a version of this in my therapy office regularly. It’s usually millennial clients talking about their boomer parents, or their older bosses, with a particular exhaustion already baked in. And unfortunately, the remedy the millennial landed on, the way they’ve made peace with the stress associated with being on the receiving end of a boomer’s rigidity to their influence, is “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

I can’t stand this phrase. For one, it normalizes the deeply inaccurate assumption that change becomes impossible with age, when what’s actually happening is an avoidant behavioral pattern rooted in fear of evolving. That’s not aging. That’s a coping style. It also locates the problem in the older person’s years rather than their choices. It assigns the younger party the role of instructor and the older party the role of reluctant subject before anyone has said a word to each other. And lastly, it refers to a person as a dog which is tacky and gross.

What this phrase doesn’t account for is what happens when the older person has something the younger one needs. And what happens when the younger person has something the older one has been quietly starving for.

We assume teaching flows downward through time. Elder to younger. Experience to inexperience. The older person deposits wisdom and the younger person receives it. That assumption is baked into how we talk about mentorship. It’s also, clinically, part of what makes intergenerational relationships so delicate. When one person is always the teacher and the other is always the student, the relationship never becomes a relationship. It stays a transaction.

Deborah has craft, survival instincts, and the particular scar tissue that comes from forty years in a business that tried to eat her alive. She knows how to hold a room, how to outlast a bad review, how to keep going when that’s the only option left. What she doesn’t have is fluency in the world as it currently is. Not because she’s incapable. Because success is an excellent reason to stop growing. Then Ava showed up.

Ava has cultural fluency, nerve, and the clarity that comes from someone who hasn’t yet learned to be careful. She also has a queer lens, and that’s not a small thing to bring to Deborah’s world. Not just her sexuality, but the way queerness shapes how she reads power, performance, authenticity, and survival. Queer people develop a particular fluency in navigating worlds not built for them. Deborah has been doing a version of that her entire career as a woman in comedy. She just never had the language for it, or anyone in her life who could name it back to her until Ava. What Ava doesn’t have is the long view. The knowledge that you can survive the thing you’re convinced is going to end you. That’s not something you can read about. Someone has to show you.

Neither of them would use the word teaching to describe what they do to each other. That’s the point. Some of the most significant learning experiences are rarely comfortable, and never announced.

The research has been making this argument longer than Hacks has been on air. What the literature on intergenerational relationships consistently finds is that when the dynamics work, the learning moves in both directions. When the relationship is genuinely bidirectional, both parties show improved wellbeing, reduced loneliness, and greater sense of purpose. When it stays hierarchical, the benefits flatten out for everyone involved (Martins et al., 2023; Zhang, Xi & Weiss, 2023).

There is also the matter of generativity. Erik Erikson’s term for the drive, usually hitting in midlife and beyond, to contribute something meaningful to the next generation. To matter past yourself. Research links it directly to lower depression and stronger mental health outcomes in older adults (So, Fiori, Rauer & Marini, 2022). Deborah Vance’s entire arc is, clinically, a generativity crisis. A sustained fight against stagnation. Ava isn’t incidental to that fight. She’s the condition of its possibility. You cannot be generative in the abstract. You need someone to be generative toward.

The “old dog” narrative we’ve been encouraged to use closes off exactly the dynamic the data shows is good for everyone involved.

Deborah and Ava are not just two difficult people who found each other in Las Vegas. They are a product of a country that has been struggling with connecting across generational lines for decades.

We are generationally divided in ways that go well beyond whether a thumbs up emoji is a threat or who should have won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2025 (The answer is Demi Moore!). Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found significant variances across generations in how Americans conceptualize institutional trust, government, and legitimacy, differences that persisted regardless of party affiliation (Mason & Warren, 2026). We don’t just disagree on policy. We disagree about what the word progress means. About whether the institutions that were supposed to protect us ever actually did.

What’s striking about Hacks is that it lives inside that divide without trying to resolve it. Deborah and Ava don’t reach a political consensus. The show is smart enough to know that’s not the point. What it argues instead is quieter and more challenging: that sustained contact across differences is valuable not because it produces agreement, but because it produces something in each person that they couldn’t have produced alone.

The divide isn’t the problem. The distance is.

Hacks ends the way it lived. On its own terms, with intention, before anyone could take it from them. That’s rarer than it should be.

What it leaves behind is an argument that doesn’t require a television show to be true. That the generational divide we keep treating as a permanent condition is, at least in part, a proximity problem. That the rigidity we mistake for aging is usually fear. Deborah Vance was not a lost cause. Neither was Ava Daniels. They were two people who stayed in the room long enough to find out.

The show is over. The argument it made isn’t. Who’s the dog now?

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A fallacy is a false belief. One that arrives with such authority and is repeated with such casual confidence. They come early, settle in, and get passed down without context. Lather, rinse, repeat. They function less like advice and more like inheritance. The first rule of fight club is that you don’t talk about it. We have graduated from that. We talk about these things constantly, openly, and with great enthusiasm. We just never talk about what they actually require.

These requirements should not be specialized knowledge. This information was never withheld because it was too complex. It was simply never offered. We can’t blame the generations that passed them down. The same thing happened to them. It keeps needing to be said and I am happy to repeat it loudly. This is the first fallacy.

“You need to get married.”

My license is in marriage and family therapy. Relationships are not a minor concern in my work, they are the work. As queen Esther Perel has said, “the quality of your life runs parallel to the quality of your relationships.” I believe marriage matters, that partnership matters, that the people we choose and who choose us back matter. The desire arrived fully formed. The preparation never did. This is not a cynical essay about marriage. It is an argument that something this important deserves better preparation than what we are given.

The marriage projection has always had a preferred audience. It arrives early with a smile and a promise. Then it returns later with a different energy entirely, a slow finger wag from a culture that has no memory of never teaching you how. Single at thirty. Divorced. Struggling to stay. The finger was always ready. The roadmap was never offered. Everyone outside that preferred audience received a version that never quite fit. The finger wagged anyway.

For women the projection carries a specific weight. It isn’t just that marriage is expected. It’s that being chosen is framed as confirmation. Of desirability, of worth, of having done something right. Calogero (2013) extended objectification theory to show how self-worth becomes contingent on external validation and selection. Being chosen in partnership stops feeling like a relational choice and starts feeling like a verdict. Sassler & Miller (2017) traced how the cultural apparatus around romance is disproportionately directed at women, making marriage tangled up in identity in ways it simply isn’t for men. The message underneath is that a woman’s worth is measured by who has chosen her. Nobody taught her that worth was never the variable being evaluated.

For men, the projection assigns competence where intimacy is required. The script of provider, pursuer, and “the one who doesn’t need too much.” This isn’t just a set of expectations, it’s a relational education in the wrong direction. Levant & Richmond (2016) identified normative male alexithymia, this $10 word means the difficulty men have identifying and expressing emotion is culturally produced, not biologically inevitable, as a direct consequence of masculine socialization. Kimmel (2013) traced how that same socialization actively produces emotional unavailability as a feature rather than a flaw. By the time a man enters a partnership he has often spent years practicing not needing anything as a virtue. Then someone asks him how he feels…

Cultural background shapes how loudly the projection lands and how much it costs to resist. For some, the expectation is ambient. For others, it is the condition of belonging to a family, a community, a faith. The weight is not distributed equally and the consequences of non-compliance are not either.

None of this is a personal failing. It is a preparation failing. What the projection skips is the part that matters. What you should know about yourself before choosing a partner. What healthy attachment looks like and feels like in practice. What your own relational patterns are and where they come from. In my practice I work using attachment-based theories, which means we explore the wounds, often unexamined, often old, that make intimacy, dating, and relationships harder than they should be. Those wounds don’t announce themselves. They show up in who you choose, how you attach, and what you do when someone gets close enough to matter. The projection assumes that desire is enough. It has nothing to say about our readiness.

The cultural footnote to the marriage projection is the divorce rate. Cited frequently, examined rarely. We know the number. We do not ask what produces it. This is not an indictment of the people who married without the tools. It is an indictment of a culture that never offered them. I co-authored a publication in graduate school that found that a considerable number of emerging adults beginning the process of mate selection endorse unrealistic relationship beliefs and myths, and that those beliefs directly shape whether they seek any preparation at all (Reed-Fitzke et al., 2019). We are encouraged to take Advanced Calculus in high school but God forbid we take a class on how to feel an emotion, or how to succeed in the one thing we are told we need. The divorce rate is not a cautionary tale about marriage. It is a cautionary tale about preparation.

Queer people, or anyone outside the binary, are not exempt from the projection. It arrives anyway, from family, from culture, from the ambient assumption that partnership looks one specific way. It just rarely fits. That misalignment creates space to question the destination itself. To ask what you actually want rather than assume you already know. To choose toward something rather than default into it. But fluidity of a path is not the same as relational competency. Having more directions available is not the same as knowing which one leads somewhere worth going. Even Dorothy needed directions.

I officiated my brother’s wedding in 2022. Like my favorite pop divas, I had a microphone and a choice about what to do with it. I didn’t talk about destiny or how they found their other half. I referenced four things. The architecture of a durable partnership that my brother and his now husband actually meet. Not projection. Context.

1. Twinship. The experience of being fundamentally understood, felt in your sameness, recognized rather than merely seen. In partnership, this is the quality of feeling that your inner world is not foreign to the person you are with. That you do not have to change yourself to be known.

2. Mirroring. Being seen as you are, not as someone needs you to be. Wolf (1988) described mirroring as the response that confirms your child self’s sense of worth and vitality. Many people spend their lives in relationships that skip this entirely and wonder why they feel alone.

3. Handling. The capacity to hold each other, to remain present and regulated in the face of the other’s intensity, need, or distress. Not to fix. Not to flee. The question is not whether your partner makes you happy. It is whether they can handle you. Whether you can handle them.

4. A respectful no. The ability to set limits, recognize your own edges, disappoint each other, and remain fully present through it. In relationships where the no is not safe, the yes means nothing. The respectful no is what makes the yes worth anything.

These are not a checklist. They are not a compatibility quiz. They are an orientation toward what you are actually building when you build a life with another person.

All of this operates under an assumption worth naming. Marriage is not mandatory. Lives can be fully lived, deeply connected, and genuinely fulfilled outside of marital status. The reason that feels difficult to believe is not personal failure. It is the culture. The same apparatus that projects the necessity of marriage also makes its absence feel like incompleteness. That’s a different essay.

I cannot hand you a map. No one can. But I can point to a few things worth knowing before you decide where you’re going. The culture that handed us this fallacy is the same one that made us feel like something was wrong for struggling inside it. I received the same inheritance and felt the same cost.

The finger was always pointed at the wrong person. Consider this a redirect.

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A lot happened in 1973. Technology was forever changed with the creation of the first cell phone. Audiences were terrified with The Exorcist hitting theaters and smizing expert and ice cream mogul Tyra Banks was born.

Legislatively, 1973 brought Roe v. Wade into law; a landmark recognition that bodily autonomy is a right worth protecting, even if the decades that followed would prove how hard that protection is to hold. It was not the only decision that year that changed how institutions saw people.

I learned in graduate school that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), in 1973. That was the lesson. One action. One year. And as a feminine presenting, Britney Spears loving, Gay with a capitol G. man, a little more context to that lesson would have been nice.

What school neglected to teach me were the years it took and the people who fought to make it happen. There is something particular about training for, and then building a career inside a profession that once pathologized people like you. It sharpens your attention to what gets taught and what gets left out. And of course, that experience is not unique to me.

Barbara Gittings and Frank Kameny had spent years pressing the APA from the outside, showing up at conferences, organizing, demanding that the institution examine its own evidence rather than their assumptions. They were not asking politely. They were making it impossible to ignore.

Another key figure was Dr. John Fryer, who presented at the 1972 APA National Conference disguised in a mask and a distorted voice modulator, identifying himself as Dr. H. Anonymous. He hid himself because being identified would have cost him everything. He may have looked like Michael Myers with bedhead, but he played a profound role in what came next.

What stopped the APA in their tracks, what made their position impossible to defend, was Ronald Gold. In 1973, Gold stood before the assembled psychiatrists and delivered an instruction. Not a research presentation. A direct instruction.

“Stop it. You’re making me sick.”

There was a precision to those words that is easy to miss. The APA classified homosexuality as the sickness. Gold flipped it. What was making people sick was not who they were, it was the diagnosis itself, the treatments it authorized, and the discrimination it allowed. He handed the pathology back to the institution that had invented it.

What made that possible was not courage alone. It was years of organized pressure, and the fact that the research had never supported the diagnosis. The APA had power. The activists had evidence. Evidence won.

Before 1973, that diagnosis was not simply a classification. It was a permission slip. For aversion therapy, which used electric shock or chemically induced nausea to associate same-sex attraction with physical suffering (Drescher, 2015). Queer people were at risk of institutionalization, losing their employment, custody, and basic civil protections. None of it was supported by research. What existed was bias, and the institutional authority to enforce it.

Normal has always been a category with consequences. Who gets to define it matters. Who gets left out of it pays.

It is also worth naming that the documentary Cured gets honest about the activists who led this campaign, who were mostly white, educated, and cisgender (with the exception of queen Magora Kennedy). The protection they won was real and uneven. The same DSM edition that removed homosexuality introduced the first diagnostic category for gender nonconformity. The ledger is complicated, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of erasure.

1973 was a milestone. It was not a finish line.

That milestone left more questions. Not the one Gold had answered, but the ones that followed from it. If the framework queer people built through survival, resistance, and refusal has that kind of diagnostic precision, if it could dismantle an institution’s certainty about what was sick and what wasn’t, what else could it do? Who else could it help?

Queer theory, outside of its academic register, is a critique of the category ‘normal.’ It asks what that category costs, who it serves, and what it conceals. Built through decades of refusing a diagnosis that was never supported by evidence, through forging identity and community under conditions designed to prevent both, it has something to offer anyone sitting across from a therapist, regardless of the identities they hold.

It asks what a person has organized their life around in order to qualify as acceptable. It helps locate the problem in the conditions rather than automatically in the person, which is precisely what the activists were demanding the APA do in 1973, and precisely what research supported then and still supports now (Hatzenbuehler, 2009). Anyone who has ever felt the weight of a category that was never built with them in mind is not outside this framework (Meyer, 2003).

I work inside a profession that got this badly wrong within living memory. The confidence to practice openly, to build something like Friend of Dorothy Therapy Network, to write any of this down, that confidence has a lineage. It was built by people who had considerably less cover than I do. By clinicians who wore masks to conferences. By activists who showed up anyway. That is not a reason for guilt. It is a reason for honesty about what was borrowed and who paid for it.

That lineage is also why research is not incidental to this practice. It is a core value. Friend of Dorothy Therapy Network operates a research lab oriented toward the same question the activists were asking in 1973, not whether queer people deserve to be well, but what the evidence actually says about how people get there.

This practice is built in the name of the queer people who sat across from a clinician armed with a diagnosis that was never supported by evidence and who were treated in ways they never should have been. For me, practicing inside that same profession is not a simple thing. There is complexity in feeling gratitude and disappointment regarding your profession’s history. I have made peace with that.

Gold’s instruction was aimed at an institution causing harm with no evidence to justify it. He won because the research was on his side.

Friend of Dorothy Therapy Network offers its own version of that instruction, aimed at the assumption that what queer people built through survival could only ever be of benefit to them. The framework has something to offer everyone. The research supports that too.

Friend of Dorothy Therapy Network is devoted to continuing that work.

Stop it. This can help you feel better.

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Anytime I meet someone for the first time I tell them I’m from Minnesota. It sounds basic, but where you’re from is not just geography, it’s culture. And being a white boy from Minnesota, until graduate school I thought my culture was passive aggression and potato salad so we’ve come a long way.

Like any culture, there are parts you carry forward and parts to unlearn.

When people hear Minnesota, they usually say the same thing: Minnesota nice. And it’s real. It looks like warmth and helpfulness. People hold doors for you. Strangers have helped me dig my car out of the snow before class. The community knows how to show up.

But underneath that warmth is structure.

Politeness isn’t personality. It’s social regulation. Cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand’s research shows that some regions are stricter about how people are supposed to act, while others are more relaxed. A stricter culture says there’s a right way to behave. A relaxed culture says do your thing. Minnesota leans strict.

That strictness has roots. Minnesota’s dominant settler culture was Scandinavian and German Lutheran. Communities that brought with them a specific inheritance: communal obligation, emotional restraint, and a deep ethic of not burdening others. Scandinavian culture has a concept for this. Janteloven, roughly translated, don’t think you’re better than anyone else (Sandemose, 2000). Minnesota nice didn’t emerge out of nowhere. Like the potatoes, it was imported, practiced across generations, and eventually became indistinguishable from personality (Gelfand, 2018).

Which means Minnesota nice isn’t random, it’s social monitoring. It’s learning early not to cause a scene. You are taught to soften disagreements, downplay yourself, and read the room before you speak. Growing up, conflict felt threatening. Hard truths were disruptive and discomfort felt like failure. I learned an uncomfortable amount of tolerance for what really bothered me.

And then I went to therapy school.

Therapy school didn’t undo Minnesota nice, it expanded it. Learning that avoiding discomfort is not the same as protecting connection. That kindness without honesty is not integrity. That silence can wound as much as harshness. Therapy school taught me to be respectfully honest because that’s the job. And that’s a harder skill.

Because yes, nice can limit you. Indirect communication drifts into passive aggression. Humility can shrink visibility. Conflict avoidance can silence truths. But those same traits grow from something else; respect. Respect for your neighbors, a shared space, and for the understanding that your actions can affect others. With the right balance, that isn’t a limitation. It’s attunement training.

Attunement: The ability to be aware and respond to another person’s emotional state with sensitivity (Gleiser, 2020). That training didn’t start in a classroom. It started at Christmas dinners with my extended family. And for many people, queer kids especially, it starts much earlier than that. Reading a room isn’t always for comfort. It’s also for safety.

The expansion of nice eventually forced a harder reflection: is being nice the same as being good?

My therapist recently referenced the Stephen Sondheim lyric nice is different than good. Nice keeps things comfortable and avoids disruption. Good hits different. Good tells the truth, reflects values, accepts accountability, and defends integrity. Not moral superiority, responsibility.

At its best, Minnesota holds both.

But let’s be clear. Politeness may guide how a Minnesotan moves, but it does not define what we tolerate. Disrespect gets named. Harm gets challenged. Injustice gets pushed back on. We are seeing that now more than ever in 2026. Communities across the Twin Cities have been showing up and standing between neighbors and their front doors in response to federal enforcement that continue to reach into people’s homes, workplaces, and daily lives causing chaos and compounding systemic trauma.

In moments that test a community, you see whether nice was surface-level or rooted in values. What I’ve seen in Minnesota is warmth paired with a backbone. When someone harms the community, that harm feels personal. Community protection runs deep and civic action is not optional, it’s wanted to be given.

Something else has become clear. While I was away learning how to expand nice into something more honest, Minnesota was doing the same. The culture that trained me young in attunement is now showing that attunement does not mean silence. That kindness does not mean passivity.

We both grew. And we’re still growing.

Minnesota shaped how I enter rooms. How I track impact. How I speak carefully and stand firmly.

Minnesota taught me to be nice. And we’ve been growing ever since. Potato salad and all.

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Women have been singing about this for decades. The man who left, the grief that predates him, the wreckage that somehow becomes the most honest work of her career. I eat it up every time.

Seeing Raye and Lily Allen in the same week did something to this understanding. These aren’t just messages of survival, they’re reckonings. Something being named that was previously only felt.

What makes a reckoning different from survival is that it reaches beyond the person having it. Survival is private, even when it’s performed. A reckoning asks something of the room. Both nights I watched a congregation form in real time. The wreckage described on stage becoming the thing that bonded the room together. What women have always known and what these two albums say plainly. The pain doesn’t just heal, it gets shared. And something in the sharing becomes its own kind of bond.

Many bonds we form are rarely the ones anyone plan. Joy creates connection. Pain creates attachment. We remember who was there when something broke. We forget, more quickly, who was there when everything was fine.

I tell clients often that vulnerability, the thing we are taught from a young age to avoid, is ironically the thing that bonds and brings people closer when tended to properly. Vulnerability is an intimate exposure of something personal, when being seen feels like a risk. Through an attachment lens, that risk can carry a specific fear. Not just that the other person won’t tend to what’s being shared, but that the exposure itself becomes the reason they leave (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2016).

My deepest friendships are with women. A result of choosing a form of intimacy that men in our culture are not exactly encouraged to seek. What I found there was recognition. Not sympathy, which keeps a careful distance, observes your pain from across the room, and offers something warm but separate. Recognition is when someone takes the thing you are holding and holds it with you. You’re not being witnessed, you’re being met.

And yet friendship is the relationship culture and research have most consistently underrated (Chopik, 2017). Attachment theory organizes itself around parent-child bonds and romantic partnership, leaving friendship largely in the margins. The relationships you have alongside the “real ones.”

The apologies some of us make when we admit our friendships sustain us more than romantic relationships are not a personal quirk. It’s a cultural instruction. We have been taught structurally and repeatedly that friendship is supplementary. A lesson queer communities have been quietly disproving for generations. For a lot of people, friendship is the most load-bearing structure in their lives. They just haven’t been given permission to say so.

Raye’s Click Clack Symphony isn’t a song about a man. He’s the context. But the grief within it goes somewhere older and deeper than he could have produced on his own, which is the point. What she’s excavating is the texture of a sadness that girlhood built. The years of performativity with an arched back and slowly diminishing a sense of self. This man didn’t create that structure. He just moved into it. And when he revealed himself, what collapsed wasn’t only the relationship. It was everything she’d organized herself around long before he arrived.

And when that kind of collapse happens, when the relationship falls away and takes the structure with it, what remains are the friends who were always there. The ones who knew the arched back version of you and loved you anyway. The ones who don’t need you to explain the wreckage because they watched it being built. That bond doesn’t form in the good years. It forms in the excavation. The bind that holds precisely because nobody planned it.

This is what I think about when people tell me their friendships feel more sustaining than their romantic relationships and then immediately feel shame for saying so, as if it’s a confession of failure. It isn’t. They’re getting their needs met by people who have seen the most honest versions of them. That’s not failure. That’s healthy attachment.

Lily Allen’s West End Girl has a different and arguably more unsettling architecture. The grief in it didn’t come from inside her own history the way Raye’s does. It arrived uninvited, delivered by her husband’s infidelity in the form of another woman’s existence. Her name was Madeline.

Lily didn’t just lose her marriage. She was handed, without consent, an intimacy with a stranger. She had to know Madeline now. Hold her in mind, reckon with her, maybe recognize something she would rather not. The other woman became relevant against her will.

This is the bind. A bond forged sideways, through a man’s failure, between two women who never chose each other. It is an intimacy nobody would ask for, let alone desire. And it produced what is arguably the most precise creative work of Lily’s career.

The bond between Lily and Madeline didn’t become friendship. It didn’t need to. What it became was a reckoning that couldn’t have existed without Madeline. The other woman was never the point of West End Girl and also entirely the point. This unwanted intimacy cracked something open that comfort never could have reached.

The audience at Radio City Music Hall knew this too, not necessarily because they’ve been cheated on, but because most people have had something arrive uninvited that broke them in a way nothing chosen ever did. The bond nobody wanted but turned out to be necessary. The one that outlasts the man who caused it.

Both concerts delivered an argument I didn’t make, just listened to. Two women on stage, on separate nights, turning some of the worst things that had happened to them into a mechanism by which a room full of strangers found each other in.

That’s not therapy. It’s not church. Though it borrows from both. It is something that happens when pain is brought inside a shared space and named out loud. Recognized by people who were not required to be there but came anyway. Pain is not the problem. Unwitnessed pain is.

What Raye and Lilly Allen both know, and what the rooms they filled confirmed, is that the bonds formed in wreckage are not consolation prizes. They are the thing itself. The friendships that survive the excavation. The intimacies that arrived uninvited. The recognition that forms between people who never would have found each other any other way. These are not the bonds anyone planned. They are the ones that hold.

Nobody asks for them. Turns out, most of us need them anyway. God, I love women.

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The first questions we ask someone are rarely about information. They’re about comfort. You’re scanning for safety while quietly hoping for connection.

Are you a friend of Dorothy? was a coded question used in the mid 20^th century by LGBTQ+ people to discreetly identify one another, at a time when authenticity could have cost you your job, your housing, or your safety. For those unfamiliar, Dorothy refers to Judy Garland, gay icon, accidental patron saint of survival. Beneath this curiosity lived the same hope for connection we all carry, even if some of us have to strategize more carefully than others.

This makes me think of my uncle David, an openly gay man in New York City at the height of this era, and the legacy he and the community paved for queer people to show up as openly as we do today. But that history was not evenly distributed. The visibility that built the foundation I and many other people stand on cost Black and Brown queer people, trans women of color specifically, the most. The confidence I have to name my lens openly in 2026 was not arrived at equally. I carry it as something borrowed and my intention is to pass it forward in my work, in my writing, and in every person I sit across from who is still deciding whether they’re allowed to take up space.

That reflex didn’t disappear. Many of us know what it feels like to scan a room before we speak. One of the simplest definitions of privilege is being able to walk into a room without thinking about it. What began as a survival strategy for marginalized communities remains a subtle social reflex many still practice today.

Early in my career, I was given guidance that echoed the coded history. Except this time, instead of subtlety leading to community, it was neutrality dressed up as professionalism. ‘Your identities don’t have anything to do with the kind of therapy you conduct.’ Be beige. And if you know me at all, you already know how that went. I found it nearly impossible to keep quiet about the part of myself I found most useful.

You may be doing something similar right now. When you encounter a new writer, you scan. You read their bio, assess for tone, and decide whether this way of thinking feels steady enough to follow. Credentials help. Training matters. But we don’t stay for degrees alone. We stay because something in the person’s worldview feels coherent and trustworthy. Studies on perceived responsiveness show that when people feel understood, trust deepens and engagement follows (Reis & Gable, 2015). The same principle applies here.

So let me be transparent about how I think.

There’s more to someone than what we see on the surface. The anxiety, the distance, the people pleasing, the rage, none of it arrived randomly. Behavior that looks like dysfunction from the outside is usually adaptation from the inside. It arrived because at some point, it worked. Part of my job as a therapist, and the orientation I bring to everything I write, is to find that logic and follow it back to the source to see change and/or expansion in thought.

It is never as useful to explore what is wrong with someone as it is to explore what happened to that someone (Perry & Winfrey, 2021), and what they built from it. I look for the story beneath the symptom. The relationship between what we feel privately and what we have been taught, collectively, to expect from ourselves and each other.

And I apply that everywhere. To the therapy room, yes. But also, to the relationships we normalize, the politics we absorb, the cultures we consume without questioning, and the roles we perform without even realizing. This blog will move through all of them. Sometimes we’ll be in a clinical frame. Sometimes we’ll be analyzing the cultural impact of a Beyonce album. The thread is the same. Context. Systems. The space between who we are and who we were told to be.

This mindset has a name, many names actually. I promise this is the only part that sounds like a CV.

Narrative theory keeps me attentive to the stories we inherit and repeat. Attachment and experiential models keep me focused on emotion, regulation, and connection. Systemic thinking keeps me focused on the relational context. Feminist and minority stress scholarship reminds me that distress exists within systems of power and intersectional research reinforces that identities do not operate in isolation.

Research anchors all of it. It’s how I separate instinct from insight, though both have their place. But the framework that organizes all of this for me is queer theory.

Not as an identity, as a method.

I know some of you pause there. You might assume this only applies if you identify as LGBTQ+. That reaction makes sense. Our culture often reduces queerness to identity categories. But in academic and clinical contexts, queer theory functions as a critical lens. It challenges norms, examines how binaries get constructed, and asks who benefits from defining “normal” (Ahmed, 2017, Jagose, 2015). It is the same questions I ask in a therapy space, just more broadly. Who decided this was the right way to feel? The right way to live? The right way to be?

A queer influence benefits everyone.

Most of us, at some point, have felt boxed in by expectations we didn’t choose. Chronic exposure to that kind of rigid expectation predicts higher rates of anxiety, depression, and substance use (Hatzenbuehler & Pachankis, 2016; Wong et al., 2017). A lens trained to notice and question those constraints doesn’t only serve LGBTQ+ clients and readers. It sharpens the work for anyone whose life doesn’t fit into the projected expectation.

‘Are you a friend of Dorothy’ had to be coded. It protected authenticity in hostile conditions. And although in 2026, leading with your genuine self can still lead to danger, I am choosing to name the lens openly. To make explicit what once was implied. To honor the history without reenacting the discretion.

‘Friend of Dorothy’ was never only about identity. It was about whether connection was possible.

If it is, we continue.

If it isn’t, we part ways.

Either way, the code is no longer necessary.