“In order to get happy, I had to get cringe.”

In order to get happy, I had to get cringe.

For years, it lurked in the shadows of my psyche, haunting me. I lived in fear of it overtaking me. I defined my life in opposition to it, as if it were truly a dangerous enemy. My phobia started in 2018, in West Philadelphia, a mecca for queer and trans people with lefty politics. It was there that I first encountered…“the Soup Queer.”

There, in that little hamlet at the edge of the city, it seemed everyone had a penchant for thrifted clothes and natural (read: ineffective) deodorant. Every meal was collectively prepped. And each chef-du-jour had to accommodate such a plethora of dietary restrictions (vegetarian, vegan, gluten free, childhood-trauma-induced-ARFID) that the resultant concoctions might have more accurately been called “hot waters with a hint of root vegetable.”

I was friends with many of these people. I even dated one for a time. But I also shuddered at the thought of being grouped with them. Even though I’d recently come out as nonbinary and felt proud in my burgeoning queerness, there was a side of queer culture that terrified me — it was so earnest. So…cringe.

The Soup Queers would talk deeply about their emotions, their identities, their places in the world. They would tell each other they loved each other even if they were just roommates. They would cry. About everything. Relationships, the violence of our political system, the outcome of Eagles games.

At certain points, it felt as if they were purposefully recreating the memes I’d seen online about people with names like Sock. There were multiple conversations during my Philly years that hewed scarily close to the “my roommate is invalidating my neurodivergent identity by asking me to do the dishes” trope.

For years, these too-on-the-nose moments helped me feel righteous in my insistence I was not like these people. I justified my fear of becoming Sock-esque by telling myself and others that Soup Queer culture was navel-gazey — that focusing so intently on everyone’s emotions produced a feedback loop of self-pity and drama, which discouraged participants from doing the important work of life: helping others, making good art, having fun.

But I suspected there was something darker about my distaste for soups and the queers who cooked them: they scared me because they revealed desires I’d long buried, or had been encouraged to bury by a homophobic and transphobic society — the desire to be exactly who I wanted to be without apology; the desire to be unreadable to mainstream culture and not care about it; the desire to live in non-traditional formations — befriending and sleeping with and being close with whomever I wanted; the desire to, in short, be weird.

Sure, there were legitimate reasons to be skeptical of the people some have deemed tenderqueers. That navel-gazing attitude is real. There is a strain of queerness (and, really, a type of person regardless of sexuality and gender) who centers their own emotional experience to the exclusion of nearly everything else. I remember telling a Philadelphia Soup Queer friend that I was planning on going away with some other friends for the weekend. He cried over his feelings of rejection for not having been invited, and suggested we talk for several hours about the feelings of abandonment my trip had triggered in him, even if he acknowledged that those feelings weren’t my fault.

But those near-satirical moments became cover for my deeper motivations for keeping this culture at arms length: I was scared of who I might become if I allowed myself to fully follow my gut instincts.

Because that’s the thing about fear: it can signal what we most desire. As the psychologist Carl Jung wrote: “The symptom [of fear or anxiety] is…an indirect expression of unrecognized desires which, when conscious, come into violent conflict with our moral convictions.”

That’s what was happening to me: these people, so unencumbered by the judgement of others, so free in their sharing of emotions and lives, made me realize how much more I could ask of my own life.

The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden once wrote that some of his patients ​​were disturbed even by the pleasure of “the sensation of the soft warmth of the sun on their skin — because it stirs the pain of recognition of how much of their life has been unlived.”

It’s not that I desired to make milquetoast soup, it’s that these people were the soft warmth of the sun, making me realize how much of my life I’d left unlived. To acknowledge what scared me about them would be to acknowledge what scared me about myself: my queerness, my vulnerability, my deep desire for closer relationships and community, my fear that searching for these things would cut me off from other parts of my life — nuclear family, a steady job.

✦

It’s no longer 2018. I no longer live in Philadelphia. I’m back in New York City, where I grew up, where I learned to be a person with a thickened skin and a semi-cynical outlook on earnest emotion. And yet…I have softened.

I live in a house with three close friends. We are planning on co-parenting a dog. I have an extended community that I have several times referred to aloud (albeit with a bit of a choke at the back of my throat) as my “chosen family.”

I got here through years of therapy, but also through years of practice — allowing myself to follow my gut instinct without worrying about what other people might think of the outward results. As it turns out, feeling deeply seen and supported by those you do care about makes you less susceptible to giving a fuck whether the rest of the world thinks you’re weird, or too queer, or, yes, cringe.

✦

A few weeks ago, one of the friends I live with had a bad cold. I walked to the grocery store, bought chicken, lemongrass, ginger and garlic, and spent three hours, without realizing what I was doing, making soup for him.

He texted a picture of the soup to another friend, one of many in our extended family of queers. And that friend texted me: you are the Soup Queer now!

At first, I was shocked. How could I have become what I’d spent years professing to hate? But then again, maybe I wasn’t exactly that: I took what I wanted from the culture I once felt scared to participate in, learned from it, and integrated it into a life that works for me. I cry a lot more now. I have deep and strange relationships with friends and lovers. I talk through my interpersonal dynamics and emotions. But I also, crucially, make much better soup.

Did P.E.’s essay make you hungry for some “hot water with a hint of root vegetable”? If so, you might also enjoy some hot ham water. Dietary restrictions permitting, of course.

If P.E.’s essay made you crave something more substantial, the Prism team is partial to Ghanaian Groundnut Soup, featuring the most delectable peanut buttery tang ever to cross your tastebuds.

But wait. That dish looks kinda more stewy than soupy. What’s the difference, anyway? For that matter, what even is soup??? Internet philosophers love to debate this question, with some even positing that the ocean itself could be considered a soup. Keep digging, and you’ll wind up back at the very first soup — the primordial one. What we want to know: who — or what — was the Primordial Soup Queer?! Now there’s some food — okay, soup — for thought…

Hope your Sunday is sweet and savory.