No one really talks about queer burnout. This season, I leaned in and sat with that feeling for a while, unpacking how the constant performance many of us have been doing our entire lives can become incredibly heavy. When I was younger, I thought Pride was supposed to feel loud and vibrant. I imagined adulthood as this glamorous arrival point where authenticity would eventually become effortless, especially once I moved somewhere like New York, where freedom feels like the default mode when you CRANK IT in these streets. In many ways, it has been. But the older I get, particularly as a queer creative working in industries obsessed with image, culture, and identity, the more Pride has started to feel quieter, heavier, and infinitely more honest than I ever expected.
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I think an important part of that burnout also comes from the fact that queer people are constantly living under public scrutiny. So often, it feels like we’re not just representing ourselves, but an entire community. There’s an almost unspoken expectation to be exemplary — successful, emotionally balanced, socially conscious — because we know that individual mistakes can easily be used to reinforce collective prejudices. The weight of constantly having to educate, justify our existence, or prove that we deserve respect can make authenticity far more exhausting than it appears from the outside. Maybe that’s why, over time, Pride stops being only about celebration and also becomes a space for resistance, vulnerability, and honesty about the emotional cost of living under that persistent gaze.
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