A lot to be proud of I’m proud of you.
I know you don’t necessarily need to hear that from me. But I wanted to tell you, just the same.
My beat around here has long been love and relationships, and I want you to know:
I’m proud of you and the hard work you have done when it comes to love and relationships, something that the world around us is making even harder than it already is.
I’m proud of you for loving your true self and for showing up as your true self.
I’m proud of you for loving others in the ways they are showing up, the ways that are authentic for them.
I’m proud of you for getting up and getting out and loving hard and showing the haters what they’re missing when they waste their time worrying about who and how other people love.
I’m proud of you for supporting the businesses and politicians who support us and our families.
And — more than anything — I’m proud to call you my community.
Now, it’s time to make ourselves proud. As we celebrate all of the strides we’ve made, I am always going to take time to think about the work ahead to protect and further those strides.
We have to vote. We have to support the candidates who support us. We have to travel to the places that love and support us to show we recognize their love and support.
We have to spend our hard-earned dollars in the places that love us and starve out the rest. We have to be out and proud as much as we feel comfortable. Our strength is in our visibility and presence.
I am grateful for those who came before us and fought the good fight, and I want to be sure that their work was not for naught. It is vital that we remember that despite how difficult things are now, we have come an incredibly long way since the fight for equality and respect began.
I am proud to be an out lesbian mom.
I am proud to be an out lesbian wife.
I am proud to be an out lesbian Jew.
I consider my very existence part of advocacy. I now live in a small lake community that is home to many conservatives. But I feel safe and loved there because I led with my homemade chocolate chip cookies and followed with who I love, and it’s hard to hate people whose cookies you love.
Actually, the saying is, “It’s hard to hate the people whose stories you know.” But it’s almost the same thing. People know I’m the nice girl who brings in people’s trash cans and bakes cookies and stops to pet everyone’s dog.
Pride Month always leaves me very contemplative. I am so proud of what we’ve done. I am so sad about where we are.
I am so torn about how corporate Pride has become — grateful for the funding, sad about the “stick a rainbow on it” approach.
Here’s what I know: As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in his sermon called Loving Your Enemies, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
This is the challenge I am giving myself. I am trying to love the hate out of people. I am doing my best to lead with love. I am asking myself to give people the benefit of the doubt. I am working hard to remember that I don’t know anything about most people’s inner lives.
I am focusing on being my best self and managing my own expectations and reactions and attachments — all of which I, and only I, have control of.
We should always be proud of who we are and who we love and how we show up. I am so grateful to be married to someone who feels the same way and who has committed much of her life to serving our community and raising much-needed funds and to always showing up. (I know couples where the two are not equally out and open, and the disparity can be a challenge.)
June is just a chance to shine a little light on that. So let your light shine this month. And, if you can, allow it to shine on someone else who could use a little spark.
There is no better time to stand together, for each other, and with only one thing in mind: Love is love is love is love … .