What Happens When You Stop Abandoning Yourself | For Parents of LGBTQ Teens

In today's episode, you'll finally understand why the exhaustion you feel has less to do with who you are and more to do with how long you've been pretending. Welcome to More Human, More Kind, the podcast for parents of LGBTQ+ kids and anyone trying to stay human in a world that keeps hardening. I'm Heather Hester, and here we talk about fear, belonging, boundaries, courage, love, and what it means to protect what matters without losing yourself in the process. Your child doesn't just need a parent who's informed, they need a parent who is grounded and strong. Let's take a breath and let's begin. Welcome to More Human, More Kind. I'm Heather Hester. The Friday Reset is your space to pause, breathe, reflect, and begin again. These episodes are not about becoming perfect. They're about becoming more honest, more grounded, more connected to yourself and to each other. Because transformation rarely happens through one gigantic moment. More often, it happens through tiny shifts, Quiet choices. Small acts of courage repeated over time. This is the butterfly effect. After my conversation this week with Steph Vachon, I have not been able to stop thinking about one sentence he said: "I spent so much of my life surviving that I wasn't fully living." And I think so many people know exactly what that feels like. Not just LGBTQ+ people, not just people who experienced bullying or rejection. People who learned very early that being fully themselves felt unsafe. People who became experts at reading rooms instead of listening to themselves. People who learned to shapeshift in order to belong. People who became so good at surviving that they lost connection to who they actually are. And survival is adaptive, it protects us, but eventually survival can become a cage. You hear it in the way people talk about themselves: I just don't know who I am anymore. I feel disconnected. I don't even really know what I enjoy. I've spent my whole life trying to make everyone else around me comfortable. That is not weakness. That is often what happens when someone spends years abandoning themselves in order to stay accepted. And one of the most beautiful things Steph shared was this idea that returning to the ice felt like coming home to himself. Not becoming someone new, coming back to someone true. And I think that matters deeply because healing is not always about becoming. Sometimes healing is remembering. Remembering those parts of yourself you buried to survive: the creative parts, the softness, the joy and honesty. Your voice, the child inside you who existed before shame arrived. I think many of us carry invisible grief for the versions of ourselves we abandoned in order to belong. The sensitive kid who became emotionally armored. The queer child who learned silence was safer. The person who stopped creating because they were mocked. The parent who disappeared inside of their caregiving. The adult who became performative instead of present. And after enough years, the performance starts feeling normal. You stop asking, what feels true for me? And you start asking, what version of me feels safest? That's survival. But it's not freedom. And this is why representation matters, why affirming spaces matter, and why visibility matters. Sometimes seeing another person fully alive gives us permission to imagine that maybe we are allowed to exist fully too. So here is your tiny action for this week. Reconnect with one small thing that once made you feel like yourself. Not something that's productive or impressive or useful to anyone else. Just you. Maybe it's music. Maybe it's skating for you too. Maybe it's writing or painting or dancing. Maybe it's resting without feeling guilty about it. Maybe it's wearing something that just feels like you, or laughing loudly, or speaking your truth. Just one thing, even 5 minutes counts. The goal is not transformation overnight. The goal is remembrance. Your word of the week is Reclamation. Not reinvention or perfection. Reclamation. Taking back the parts of yourself that you were taught to hide: your joy, your voice, your softness perhaps, or your truth. Reclamation says, "I do not need permission to come home to myself." Your micro rebellion for this week is to notice one moment where you instinctively shrink yourself and make a different choice. Maybe you stop apologizing unnecessarily. Maybe you say what you really think. Maybe you correct the pronoun. Or maybe you wear the thing you normally talk yourself out of wearing. Perhaps you rest instead of perform. Or maybe you let yourself take up space without explaining why. Tiny moments matter because every time you choose authenticity over performance, you create a ripple, not just for yourself, for everyone around you. Quietly wondering if they are allowed to do the same. So your one line to steal this week is this: I am allowed to become more myself, not less. Or it could even be: Survival protected me, but authenticity brings me back to life. I think one of the quietest heartbreaks of being human is how many people spend years believing that they are the problem instead of realizing that they adapted to environments that just could not hold their fullness. And I think one of the bravest things a person can do is to decide, I would like to meet myself again. I want to get to know who I really am, not the performed self or the filtered self, or even the survival self, that real self, the real person underneath all of the noise. So today I want to leave you with a few questions to ponder. When do you feel most like yourself? What parts of you tend to disappear around certain people? What did you once love before shame got involved? What would change if authenticity stopped feeling selfish? And what if becoming more yourself is actually the point? Take your time. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who may need the reminder that they do not have to earn the right to be themselves. And if you are looking for deeper conversations, reflections, practical tools, and gentle support around belonging, identity, parenting, boundaries, advocacy, and just staying human in this very complicated world, come join me over on Substack. The link is in the show notes. Remember that new episodes of More Human, More Kind release every Tuesday and Friday. Until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and remember, sometimes the smallest act of authenticity can change everything.