Happy Pride 🌈 A letter on love, coming home, and the sacred many-ness of who we are…

Happy Pride, Beloved Ones …

Pride is not just a month of celebration, it is lifetimes of a reclamation ! 

A returning. And for many of us, it is an ongoing act of courage to simply be ourselves in a world that hasn't always made room to be just simply human.

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Across so many indigenous cultures throughout time, loving in these ways, same-sex love, two-spirit identity, the fullness of the gender spectrum  was not only accepted but held as sacred. Seen as a gift of spirit. A sign of wholeness. Long before shame was layered onto something so natural, entire communities honored what we are still, in many places, fighting to reclaim. That suppression of love, of body, of truth is a recurring theme so many of us carry. 

And Pride, to me, is the slow and beautiful unraveling of all of it.

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In Turkish culture, there is a long and complicated history with queerness. 

Trans women — known as travesti — have held a visible, even beloved place in entertainment, music, and nightlife for generations. They are icons, they are celebrated, and their courage to live openly in a deeply patriarchal society deserves profound honoring. And yet, even within that visibility, queer women remained invisible. Female same-sex love was simply not part of the conversation — not celebrated, not acknowledged, not named. It was treated as perversion, or more often, as something that didn't exist at all. As if a woman's desire outside of a man was simply impossible to imagine. The travesti community blazed a trail with tremendous sacrifice and beauty ( which to be celebrated hugely ) and still, so many of us were left in the dark, finding our own way home without a map.

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My own journey of being proud has been one of coming home from a long exile of shame, guilt, and confusion.

I was born knowing that love felt just as natural with women (girls) as it did with men (boys). When I was seven years old, I was playing with a neighbor girl I loved dearly. We were curious, innocent, discovering  the way children are. When my mother found us together, it became my first heartbreak. Her response was frightening , abusive and final: we were never to speak again or see each other and that I should be punished in self shame.

From that day, I learned that this part of me was something to hide.

For many years, I kept this carefully tucked away from my culture, my family, and for a long time, from myself.

I tried to be the good girl. To make my father , baba proud. To find a husband, build a conventional life. And there were beautiful relationships with men too truly. But there was also a deep untruth I was living. The shame settled into my body. It found its way through addiction, through confusion, through years of not fully knowing who I was allowed to be.

It has taken me years of serious inner work, ceremony, community, and a lot of grace with my now beloved girlfriend / partner to make deeply peace with this. 

To stop carrying it as something broken and start receiving it as something whole to celebrate. 

I am so grateful to live here in Northern California, held by a community where I am not just accepted but genuinely celebrated for the fullness of who I am, who we are with my beloved partner.

I know how rare and precious that is.

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This Pride month, may you know yourself as sacred. May every step you've taken toward your own truth be honored , the brave ones, the stumbling ones, the quiet ones no one else saw. You are not too much. You are not broken. You are, and have always been, exactly what love looks like when it refuses to shrink. I hold you in my heart, in my practice, and in every circle I have the privilege of gathering. 

Thank you for being here. Thank you for being you.

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There are beautiful events happening this month to celebrate and come together and I just want you to know: there is so much to be proud of. In your love, your becoming, your courage to keep showing up as yourself.

Happy Pride. From the deepest place in my heart.

With love,

Tutku & Temple of Integration