queer not as being about who you’re having sex with–that can be a dimension of it–but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live. – bell hooks

I am a person who often finds themself in the in-between spaces. From my multi-racial heritage to my status as chronically ill yet visibly abled, to trying to honor my value in an economic system that is inherently unjust. I find myself trying to reconcile my identity in a world that asks for us to settle into the tidy boxes we have been provided. This need for classification and bifurcation stems to parts of our internal and therapeutic experience, in illness/wellness, regressing/growing, suffering/healing, symptom/treatment. Often, what is lost in these dichotomies, is us; multifaceted, complex, dynamic, emergent. Many of us know what it is like to fight to survive outside of a limiting structure that was never meant to serve us, to tend to our wounds or care for our well-being. As someone who has often straddled the space between identities and roles, between suffering and healing, I consider how we can create new notions of what it means to feel whole, to flourish, to live generatively, to expand far beyond the limits of a box that was always too small to hold all that we are.