This is such an excellent prompt, I look forward to reading many perspectives on it. So many of us grew up feeling profoundly alienated because of our closeted queerness, often being strangers even to ourselves...so we place a lot of weight onto the promise of a queer community to soothe our wounds and help us to finally feel the connection and ease we assume everybody else already feels. And yet it seems to be human nature to always experience a distance, even from those we love, and building the bridges across that distance is even harder when you have years of queer trauma.

I'd like to sit down and pen something about this, but I think it's still half-baked for me yet... I've recently reached the point of shrugging off that in certain queer spaces, I will always feel out of place. So what if the young guys at the club utterly cannot relate to me? I'm a 36 year old who is "divorced", of course we are different! So what if most of the kinksters at the "women, trans and nonbinary" leather social make the wrong assumptions about my identity or what i'm into? That's most people in society, why would I think they'd be above that mistake?

I've always found my best friends on the margins, rolling their eyes and making snide comments at the proceedings, or else having panic attacks in the bathroom. The haters and neurotics are my people, and even if i were to put together a convention of only people like that...I'd still feel out of place. There's a weird freedom to accepting that the community of my fantasies does not exist, and that loneliness will always be my companion, but then dusting myself off and trying anyway. It makes me feel a whole lot more grateful for the true friends I do have, and for the moments of understanding I can find.

Often, it's reading words from someone who has also been there that helps me to feel more seen, more than actually standing in the crowd. That's a very common Autistic thing too, I think. Closeness doesn't always mean feeling comforted in person... sometimes it's a reaching through the darkness with our art. I find it's especially difficult for me to connect in an immediate, face-to-face way when it comes to more negative emotions such as grief or a trauma trigger. But a good book or a personal story someone has written about feeling alone, bereft, shaken to their core? That soothes me like nothing else can. And writing is still the best way to seek witness for what I'm feeling that I have found.