I remember I’d had a lot of thoughts in my late teens and throughout my 20s that I “might be some kind of queer, IDK,” but 1) I had no idea what options there actually were to act on such thoughts, and 2) I’d been raised in a highly isolating and abusive situation by an extremely controlling religious parent, which left me with a lot of hangups about how I “should” live my life and who I “should” be. It was like I’d have thoughts, and sometimes even try to entertain them, but a little cop in my head would always be there with his beatstick to hammer those thoughts down and shove them down the appropriate memory holes.

First time I smoked weed (in my mid-twenties; incidentally, a few months after I’d first actually tried alcohol as well since I was trying to be less of a stick-in-the-mud and expand my horizons), it was like the weed told that cop to just go on break for a nice long while, and I could finally observe and accept my thoughts for what they were.

I wouldn’t smoke weed again for a few years, but the experience of my thoughts being that free stuck with me in the months to come. A year later, in the midst of a period of intense depression, I had resolved to seek out hormone therapy and begin my journey of gender transition. That’s not the only way in which I started embracing my true self (I realized a lot about my own values and what I want in life generally), but this thread is about realizations of queerness, so I’m focusing on that.

Weed didn’t give me the thoughts in the first place, but it helped me see how I could allow myself to have them, and to explore them, and that the world wouldn’t end if I did.