Make Your Mama Proud, Be Real
“Once You Are Real You Can’t Become Unreal Again. It Lasts for Always.” —Skin Horse, The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams
My daughter sat curled up with a book in the living room, waiting for me to finish her twin sister’s bedtime routine. She was quieter than usual, the kind of quiet that signals an important conversation. I sat down close to her, eager to listen. I didn’t have to probe. She whispered with a slight stutter, chest concave, big blue eyes teary:
“Mom, no matter what I tell you, will you still love me?”
It was 2010—a time of increasing visibility for LGBTQ+ people in media and politics, as well as lingering discrimination, bullying, and erasure. Progress and prejudice marched on side by side.
She didn’t conform to stereotypes. She always had one close female buddy and would rather compete with boys than appease them.
She was crushed at her birthdays when girls want to dress up as sexy models in high heels, rehearsing to win the male gaze. At sixteen, she was an astute student, athlete, and circus performer; her classmates voted her “best candidate for president.” Why? Because she was fair and kind.
I’ve always enjoyed engaging with her bright mind. Her acceptance of her identity didn’t surprise me at all. I melted:
“I’m your mother. I already know this about you. I see you every day.”
“That wasn’t a celebration!”
I felt the ache beneath her words. I was reminded of the first time a girl kissed me in college. Rather than celebrating, I denied liking it.
“Mom, you already have to take care of Abby and Libby with their disabilities. I don’t want your life to be harder because of me.”
That stung.
I felt a rush of anger, not at her, but at a world that punishes difference and dictates that authenticity is dangerous. She learned that living out loud could cost you comfort, belonging, and safety. Not because she’d been bullied or rejected, but because she’d paid attention. She carried the historical weight of queerness—an awareness of exclusion, of coded silence. She knew what I knew: we’d never fit the mold.
“Oh no, no, honey. You get to be you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you.”
At the end of her verbal coming-out, she said,
“Mom, can we have a real celebration for my birthday?
I smiled,
“Yes!”
“I only want you, me, the twins, and Gretchen.”
What Neither of Us Knew—Pandora’s Box of Discovering Permission, Pleasure, and Power Opened
In April, I wrote a short essay in response to a prompt from
about my least favorite summer job. It wasn’t the kind of job you list on a résumé, but it catapulted a transformation. I was bartending at a shady club, where I met Lady Fay and her snake, Balbao—the night’s entertainment.I was in college, newly sober. Two of my brothers had taken refuge in my care. I felt desperate—we needed the cash. In my early life, a series of non-consensual sexual traumas ravaged my body, leaving fractures slick with shame—distortions that sank into my skin, hid as lies, and took years to shed. When the boss man told me I’d be the next act with Balboa, I made a quick exit and never turned back.
That night marked a fierce initiation into the slow, cyclical underground work of disentangling intimacy from pain, desire from danger, subject from object, pleasure from faking it. I threw myself into twelve-step rooms, intensified therapy, and dreamwork with Eunice. I enrolled in the Boston University School of Theology to study mysticism with feminist scholars. I found meaning in teaching yoga to women in prison. I was the keeper of their stories—stories that would make most people’s skin crawl. I curated them as testimony for my master’s thesis: The Abuse of Power: Learning What Love Is Not.
It was the 1980s—decades before #MeToo had a name. I wrote sacred dramas that called survivors forward. We invited those who had endured sexual abuse to write their names in our collective prayer book and receive resources for healing—alongside a cautionary note to men: mind your dick.
Sisterhood and Heartbreak
At the start of graduate school, I met a woman on a spiritual retreat. We became running partners, trading intimate stories as we jogged alongside the Charles River. She wasn’t a student, but we were fluent in each other’s language. We ran marathons—well, I ran one, she ran many.
One night at dinner, she told me she was in love with me and hoped I felt the same.
I remembered that first kiss but held fast to sexual renunciation—not from shame, but for sovereignty. Conditioned by a heteronormative world, I wasn’t ready or sure of what I wanted. That felt like an honest kind of love. Still, I broke her heart.
Sometimes saying no to one kind of love is what clears the space for another to emerge—one rooted not in fear, performance, or people-pleasing, but in choice, on your timeline, without apology.
Sacred Tobacco: Harm or Cure
Years later, I became intimate with the spirits of the plants. This completed my reclamation of what was taken—betrayed.
Through a long apprenticeship under the guidance of my maestro, Ernesto Garcia, I returned to myself as a woman whole unto herself with erotic power.
"The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings." —Audre Lorde
Sacred tobacco remains a powerful ally for protection, balance, and permission to feel everything. Stay tuned for an upcoming essay, Tobacco: Harm or Cure.
A Closing Reflection:
Pandora’s Box wasn’t full of demons. It was full of forgotten selves ready to uncoil.
Is it possible to be fluid about our identity at any age?
What if, instead of assuming we already know who we are, we stay curious—together—in our collective becoming?
Let’s Celebrate with Chappell Roan - Pink Pony Club (Official Music Video)
Dear Precious Reader, Your comments are always welcome! I hope you will join this conversation and check out a few friends on Substack who celebrate Wholeness and Pride every day:
With love,
Prajna O’Hara
Retreats and New Moon Circle, June 25th, are here. Join us!
“It happens all the time in heaven,
And some day
It will begin to happen
Again on earth -
That men and women who are married,
And men and men who are
Lovers,
And women and women
Who give each other
Light,
Often get down on their knees
And while so tenderly
Holding their lovers hand,
With tears in their eyes
Will sincerely speak, saying,
My dear,
How can I be more loving to you?
How can I be more kind?"—Hafiz
Loved this, Prajna. Hooray for you, and hooray for your daughter!
God, I wish this country would wise the fuck up. So many of us have no curiosity, no imagination, no understanding , not even of themselves. maybe especially of theselves. Oh well. They miss the deliciousness of a full life.
Prajna, your essay opened up a self-reflection and also a reckoning. I come to your words from a different terrain, yet there’s a shared undercurrent. My trauma bound me tight, forged a discipline so rigid it could’ve been mistaken for virtue. I stayed within the rules of every law, every norm, every line ever drawn—except the one I simply couldn’t suppress: being born, in that time and place, a lesbian.
That one truth refused to be silenced. It pulsed beneath the iron fist of everything else I’d tried to lock down. I couldn’t un-be it, and wouldn’t try. And so I lived with the tension—of survival by obedience, and life by honesty.
Your story—your daughter’s quiet question, your own awakenings, the heartbreaks, refusals, sacred reclaimings—it reminds me of what it costs to live close to the bone, and what it gives back when we do. The erotic as holy. The mother as witness. The self, returned.
Thank you for sharing this tapestry of memory and power.