Something Borrowed

By Dr. Patty Gently on June 28, 2025

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patricia Gently supports gifted and twice-exceptional adults in their own autopsychotherapy through identity exploration, structured reflection, and alignment with inner values. A writer, educator, and 2e adult, Dr. Patty centers depth, integrity, and complexity in all aspects of her work.

Something Borrowed

There were rooms where everyone meant well, and no one noticed what the walls were made of.

Someone had named the space liberatory, so the risk was presumed to be gone, like naming a wolf “companion” made its teeth ceremonial.

The forms asked for data, not context.

Your name.

Your address.

Your category.

As if disclosure were not a boundary but a button.

Most people in the room looked like they were trying. Mid-aged white women, some with gentle rebellion braided into their neck scarves, and some with edgy looks, proclaiming their distance from the structure while still tracing that distance with borrowed language. The men, a step behind, quoted feminist theory like it was theirs to lend.

Queering was spoken like a ritual mispronounced, an invitation, not a memory of exile. It sounded smooth on tongues that had never bled for it. It was not fully understood that celebration belonged to those who had borne the bruise, not to those merely drawn to the glitter.

Somewhere in the quiet, a different kind of body measured the exits, felt the air harden at the back of the neck, and knew:

freedom is not a shared aesthetic.

Maybe the theory was clean. The bodies were not. There were gaps between what was said and what was survived.

What was missing wasn't language but pluralism, a willingness to stop making sense long enough to witness what sense costs to different people.

Some want more than inclusion. They want the room to stop rearranging itself as if the furniture were the problem.

They want a floor that doesn’t collapse when they speak in their real voice.

They want maps that mark where the blood dried and where the living kept going anyway.