Consider the simple, human need for recognition: the willingness to acknowledge another person’s inner world as valid, and their preferences and orientations as worthy of existing. This should not be hard. It is no more difficult than recognizing that the moon and the stars exist. Recognition does not require total agreement or unconditional approval — only the basic respect of allowing another mind to be itself.

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

I do not wish to judge their inner lives; their worldview is as valid as mine — just not valid when imposed upon me. But whenever I have tried to share my perspective, whether through conversation, writing, or moments of vulnerable honesty, it has been dismissed outright. I’ve been told my worldview is a “psychological illness,” that it is “abnormal.” And even when they acknowledge that I truly think this way, their response is simply, “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 world with theirs. I cannot do that without crumbling. It would feel like 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 for one human being to recognize another’s inner world without dismissing it? I have tried for years to make myself understood, and it has never worked with my parents. Others — kind, perceptive people — have seen me. Yet even this they reject: “Those people are just being nice.” As if genuine understanding is impossible, as if my inner world must be an illusion simply because it is invisible to them.

I am not part of the LGBTQ community, but I understand something of their experience. Many LGBTQ people are told that 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.

And yet the poignant part is the love that persists despite the lack of understanding. It makes me think there are actually three kinds of love: love for strangers — the basic compassion of shared humanity; love between people who care for one another but cannot fathom each other’s inner worlds; and love between those who care and also truly see and appreciate each other’s inner lives.