There is no real love without the simple, human requirement of recognition: the willingness to recognize another person’s inner world as valid and their preferences and orientations as worthy of existing. This should not be hard. This is just like recognizing that the moon and the stars exist. Recognition does not mean total agreement, nor unconditional approval — only the basic honoring of another mind’s right to be itself.

My parents do not seem to understand this. It is a strange and disorienting experience to receive “concern” from people who simultaneously insist that I must alter the core of who I am to fit their expectations. Their concern becomes something hollow when it demands the erasure of my identity.

I do not want to judge their inner lives; their worldview is as valid as mine, just not valid when imposed upon me. But whenever I have tried — in conversation, through writing, or in moments of raw honesty — to share my perspective, it has been dismissed outright. I’ve been told my worldview is a “psychological illness,” that it is “abnormal.” And when they do acknowledge that I genuinely think this way, they simply respond with something along the lines of “It’s not normal — change it to the worldview we suggest.”

But that is not a request about opinions or lifestyle. It is a demand that I replace my inner life with theirs. I cannot do that without crumbling. It would be a kind of psychic lobotomy — the removal of something essential just so I can appear “normal” to them.

I keep asking myself: is it really so difficult, in human nature, for one person to recognize another’s inner world without dismissing it? I have tried for years to make myself understood, and it simply never works with my parents. Other people — kind, perceptive people — have seen me. Yet even this they dismiss: “Those people are just being nice.” As if genuine understanding is impossible, as if my inner world must be an illusion because it is invisible to them.

Even when I tell them directly that their behavior is harming me, nothing changes. At that point, their “concern” begins to feel less like care and more like a kind of negligence — a harm disguised as love.

I am not part of the LGBTQ community, but I understand something of their experience. Many LGBTQ people are told their inner world is “fake,” “attention seeking,” or “pretending,” simply because others cannot imagine it. I recognize that structure of dismissal: the refusal to believe something is real because one cannot personally feel it. I see the same mechanism at work in the way my parents relate to me.