One of the most uncomfortable things I have had to learn is that not seeing someone is not the same thing as opposing them. For much of my life, there were people whose experiences, struggles, and gifts sat outside my field of vision. I was not hostile toward them, nor was I intentionally excluding them. I just wasn’t paying attention. At the time, I would have described that as acceptance. Looking back, I see it was often something much closer to indifference.

When I first began engaging questions of gender and sexuality as a queer person myself, I thought I was learning about queer people. What I was actually discovering was how much of the world I had been missing. I began noticing assumptions I had never questioned, stories I had accepted as complete, and people who were absent from conversations I thought I understood. The more I listened, the more I realized that invisibility is not always created by hostility. Sometimes it is created by the simple fact that nobody thinks to ask who is missing.

That is one of the gifts Pride has given me. Again and again, it introduces me to people whose lives challenged the limits of my imagination, whose experiences could not be reduced to a single identity or issue, and whose stories expose the gaps in my own understanding. Each encounter requires more than tolerance. It requires attention. It requires me to see people I had previously overlooked and to recognize what that failure of attention had cost.

That process is far from over. There are still people I do not see clearly enough, stories I have not heard, and assumptions I have yet to confront. If Pride has taught me anything, it is that belonging begins with paying attention. It begins with noticing who is missing, whose voices are absent, and whose experiences are treated as an afterthought. Sometimes the most important thing we can learn is not a new answer. The work of belonging begins with paying attention, and attention begins with the humility to ask who we have not yet learned to see.