We Come From Survivors: Queer Strength and Resilience

More Than Trauma. We are Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

It is Mental Health Awareness Week, and I want to say something clearly to Queer people: we are not broken people trying to repair ourselves into worthiness. Yes, many of us carry trauma. We know rejection, shame, violence, bullying, fear, isolation, and grief. Some of us grew up hiding ourselves just to survive. Others are still doing that now. But if the only stories we ever tell about LGBTQ+ people are stories of suffering, we begin to believe suffering is all we are.

And that simply is not true.

Queer people are some of the strongest, most creative, and resilient people in human history. Not because oppression is noble, but because despite everything that has been done to us, we still create, love, organise, dream, and survive. We still build communities. We still hold one another through loss. We still imagine futures that many people tried to convince us we did not deserve.

Mental health is not only about understanding wounds. It is also about reconnecting to strengths. Too often therapy, media, and even activism focus so heavily on trauma that we forget to ask another question: what has helped Queer people survive all this time?

The Tree of Life and Queer History

In narrative therapy there is an exercise called the Tree of Life. It helps people understand themselves beyond trauma. The roots represent where we come from, our histories, cultures, and communities. The trunk represents our strengths and values. The branches are our hopes and dreams. The leaves are the people who matter to us, and the fruits are the gifts passed down by others. Then there are the storms: the hardships, oppression, discrimination, and losses we face.

Queer existence is a Tree of Life.

The problem is many of us were disconnected from our roots. Most LGBTQ+ people are not raised by Queer families with generations of stories being passed down. Instead, many of us grow up hearing silence about people like us, or worse, hearing only stories of shame, sin, danger, or pathology. We are taught about ourselves through arguments on television, political debates, hate crimes, sermons preaching hell fire or statistics about poor mental health.

Imagine growing up only hearing your people spoken about as problems to solve. Of course shame grows there.

But when we reconnect to our roots, something powerful happens psychologically. We stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals with something wrong with us and start recognising ourselves as part of a long history of people who survived unimaginable storms.

Our Roots Run Deep

We are older than oppression.

We are Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, buried together in ancient Egypt in ways many historians interpret as a same-sex couple. We are Sappho and the beauty and longing in her poetry. We are the Hijra communities of South Asia who historically held respected spiritual and protective roles before colonial powers criminalised and erased gender diversity.

We are also the sacred healers and guides in many Indigenous cultures across the Americas before colonialism imposed rigid ideas about gender and sexuality. We are Rumi and Shams Tabrizi. We are the poetry of Sheikh Abdullah al-Shabrawi writing lovingly of his beloved Ibrahim. We are the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military unit of male lovers who believed love strengthened courage in battle. We are the passion of the cut sleeve of ancient China.

This matters because Queer people are often made to feel like we appeared suddenly in modern history, as though we are something new, controversial, or unnatural. But our roots stretch across centuries, cultures, religions, and continents. We have always existed. We have always created beauty. We have always found ways to love one another despite systems trying to erase, hide or distort our stories.

Strength During the Storms

The storms in our Tree of Life are real. We cannot romanticise suffering. Queer people have survived criminalisation, imprisonment, violence, forced medicalisation, rejection, and death. Yet even in those storms, we continued to find each other.

During the Holocaust, Gay men identified with pink triangles in concentration camps were dehumanised, brutalised, and murdered. Yet even within those horrific conditions there are stories of solidarity, care, and survival. The pink triangle, once used to shame and identify Queer people for persecution, was later reclaimed by LGBTQ+ activists as a symbol of resistance and remembrance. That transformation itself tells us something about Queer resilience. We have always found ways to turn shame into survival.

We saw this again during the AIDS epidemic. Governments ignored Queer communities while thousands died. Families abandoned their own children. The media mocked and blamed us. Yet Queer people became carers, activists, medics, fundraisers, artists, and advocates for one another. They sat beside hospital beds so people would not die alone. They fought for research funding and treatment access. They built chosen families when biological families rejected them.

That is not weakness. That is extraordinary love under catastrophic conditions. Then came the Stonewall riots. Queer people, especially trans women, drag queens, sex workers, and Queer people of colour, fought back against police brutality and constant harassment. We are Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who refused to quietly accept violence and invisibility. The rights many LGBTQ+ people experience today were not handed over kindly. People fought for them.

Queer Resilience Exists Today

This resilience is not only historical. It exists now.

Queer Palestinians continue to organise, build community, and survive under brutal occupation and violence that makes any form of activism dangerous. Within the wider context of the genocide in Gaza, Queer Palestinians still exist, still love, we saw messages of love still come out of Gaza even as the bombs fell and continue to fall. And still they create spaces for one another. Oppression often tries to isolate people from their history and community because isolation weakens resistance. But Queer people continue finding each other even in the harshest conditions.

That same resilience exists in everyday life too. It exists in the teenager coming out despite fear. It exists in the trans person choosing authenticity in a hostile world. It exists in the couple holding hands in public despite anxiety about safety. It exists in every Queer person who continues to build a life despite being told they should not exist. It exists when that Queer person says no, I will go on that 100th date despite the 99 before being God awful. It exists when you experience that instant connection when you find your tribe.

And it exists in joy.

We are Sam Smith. We are Tom Daley with Gold, Silver and Bronze Olympic medals. We are Marc Jacobs and Chritian Dior. We are Pose telling stories of trans brilliance, ballroom culture, and chosen family, and of course my fave part of the series, Angel and Papi's wedding (sob)! Ok I know that was fiction but still. We get to dream! Dreaming allows us to get Zack Polanski, in the UK! Not in the Netherlands or Spain, but in post Brexit, Britain where conversion therapy is still a thing!

We are the brave human rights activists around the world, Josephine, Gilbert and Benon from Uganda, to Mehrub Awaz Awan in Pakistan, Hasan Kilani and Joris Lechne in the UK, Blaire Imani in the US and countless more.

Queer people do not just survive history. We shape culture, art, politics, fashion, music, sport, activism, and community TODAY.

Remembering Who We Are

The Tree of Life reminds us that storms are not the entirety of the tree. The roots still exist beneath them. The trunk still stands firm. The branches still grow toward something hopeful.

So this Mental Health Awareness Week, I want Queer people to reconnect with our roots and our strengths. We are not just trauma responses wrapped in human skin. We are the descendants of survivors, creators, rebels, healers, artists, lovers, and visionaries. We are people who kept going when the world tried repeatedly to silence us.

And one day, somebody else will look back at us as part of their roots too.

That means the way we love each other matters. The way we protect each other matters.

The way we continue and show up matters.

Because we are not simply surviving history.

We are making it!