Thrive is a space where I write honestly about navigating life with full presence — the joy, the grief, the beauty, and the fury. It’s about refusing to shrink, refusing to be silenced, and insisting on a life that is rich and real even when the world is doing its level best to make that hard. Especially then.
I came home from the most beautiful trip of my life.
The kind where the light hits the water just right, where you eat something so good it makes you laugh out loud, where you find yourself standing somewhere and thinking — this is it. This is what it’s all for. I came home full of it. Luminous with it, really.
And then I opened my phone.
On March 31 — Transgender Day of Visibility, of all days — the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Chiles v. Salazar. Eight to one. Eight justices, including liberals Kagan and Sotomayor, agreed that conversion therapy bans — laws that bar mental health therapists from practicing a version of talk therapy that seeks to change a teenager’s sexual orientation or gender identity — could well be struck down across some two dozen states, and set a precedent that invites the same abuse with no accountability. They dressed it up in First Amendment language, called it about “free speech,” and handed a victory to a “therapist” represented by an organization that, let’s be clear, has long supported the criminalization of homosexuality.
Let me be plain about what conversion therapy is. It is not a difference of opinion. It is not a lifestyle choice for therapists. LGBTQ+ youth who undergo conversion therapy are more than twice as likely to report having attempted suicide compared to those who did not. Every major medical organization — the AMA, the APA, the American Academy of Pediatrics — has condemned it. This is not a debate in medicine. It is settled. And the Court just told predators with licenses that the Constitution protects their right to harm children.
I am devastated. I am furious. And I am exhausted in a way that feels older than my bones.
Then there is the broader climate we are living inside — the daily chaos, the cruelty-as-policy, the assault on every protection this community has spent decades building. A demonically possessed Resident Clump threatening genocide just because he wants to: this is insanity on a global scale. I will not pretend otherwise. The rage I carry about the direction of this country is real, it is righteous, and it is not going away.
But.
Here is what I keep coming back to, the thing I won’t surrender:
I stood somewhere extraordinary recently:
- At the top of a waterfall in the El Yunque Rainforest (the only rainforest in the United States) that I had just hiked with my bestie Allen
- In the beauty of downtown Charleston, SC
- Among hundreds of other revelers on a cruise ship dancing our asses off, all in red (some white and black accents) on “Scarlet Night”
- In the Theater District of NYC witnessing a Broadway-worthy drag show — maybe the best drag show I have ever seen
- At the top of Rockefeller Center, looking out over the whole of NYC and her boroughs
And beside — or laying in the arms of — the only human being I know loves me unconditionally 100%. His eyes are the most beautiful home I have ever lived in. Loving him is an indescribable joy.
I was present for beauty that did not ask permission to exist. I laughed until my stomach hurt. I connected with people I love in ways that felt like genuine, life-giving grace. The world did not grant me that joy. The world — this world, the one currently trying to legislate queer children out of safety — did not manufacture those moments. I found them. We found them together.
And they are mine.
That is the thing about joy — it is not naïve. It is not the same as pretending everything is fine — or keeping on performing a version of yourself others invented and called God’s will. It does not require you to look away from injustice. In fact, I think the deepest, most defiant kind of joy lives right next to the grief. It says: I see all of this, and I am still here, and I am still capable of this.
The Court wants to make us smaller. The current political moment wants us exhausted into silence. There is real and ongoing harm being done to real children in real rooms, Sunday Schools, and youth pastor’s offices, and we must fight it with everything we have — through advocacy, through votes, through showing up for LGBTQ+ youth in our communities, through refusing to let these rulings become invisible in polite conversation.
AND — and this is the “and” I am insisting on — I am keeping my vacation and our memories. I am keeping every sunset, every meal, every moment I stood somewhere and felt whole. They do not get that. They never did.
Thriving is not the absence of fury. It is the refusal to let them have your joy on top of everything else.
I’m not done fighting. And I’m not done living beautifully either.
If you want to take action: look up PFLAG, the Trevor Project, and your state legislators on conversion therapy protections. The fight isn’t over — it just moved to the lower courts, and it needs our voices.
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