I am battling my own ghost.  How do you fight yourself?  You know all your best moves.  You know how she’ll react to any given situation.  And when you emerge the victor, have you actually won?  Because you just trashed yourself.

My ghost is beating me right now.  My 18-year-old son and I went on a walk last night.  He leaves for college in two days and I wanted his opinion on how to handle a situation with his 12-year-old sister.  We’re not communicating well and I can’t figure out how to fix it.  With four kids in total, I needed help.

“It sounds familiar, Mom,” he said.  “I think she’s at the point where I was just a few years ago.  I didn’t know how to communicate with you in a straightforward way.  I felt like I had to strategize and plan so that I wouldn’t get in trouble.  I think she hasn’t learned she doesn’t have to do that anymore.”

4...

Our mission here at the Pride and Joy Foundation is to increase self-awareness in LGBTQ families and the allies that love them. A key component of self-awareness is learning how to let go of other people's opinions and trust your intuition. So we bring you UnHook, a course to learn how to let go of judgment and learn to trust yourself.

Did you know that I'm a fly fisher? You can listen to how that happened in my TEDx Talk some other time. Fly fishing has taught me a lot about life and how to navigate it, when to stay on the shore, and when to wade in deep, how to focus and let everything else go, and most importantly, how to get off the hook.

Fish are caught when they mistake my fly for their food. We, as humans, are caught when we mistake opinions for important facts. That's how you and I get hooked. Now, a smart fish can shake their head just the right way, and pop, off they go, unhooked and free.

Smart humans, like you and I, can do the same thing. We can use...

Schools are the second important space for children (the first being home) which affects their overall growth and it plays a vital role in directing their mental development. It is important to look into how these schools work in nurturing and mentoring a healthy and socially responsible group of youth.

As Canada is a country that has a law and society that accepts the LGBTQ community, Canadian schools are also required to be inclusive in nature with regard to gender diversity and sexuality. With the law enforced and several efforts taken to make sure everything is perfectly executed, do all of the schools in Canada follow the provincial law and the right curriculum when it comes to LGBTQ? 

Unfortunately, the answer is NO.

There are a lot of issues in schools that need to be addressed. The root cause of most of the problems is lack of awareness. Some of the visible problems are discrimination against LGBTQ kids from other students as well as teachers, bullying, discrimination...

It Was Time For Him to Go

I’m coming off a high. I just fired someone, and it was one of the crowning achievements of my adult life.  I made sure to make a scene of it too by gathering everyone into the conference room, laying out a long list of offenses, and walking him out of the room and building to never return. It was awesome!

Nine months earlier I came out to my wife of 13 years...  I married her with the best of intentions, desiring to do all that was expected of me as a man in the Mormon Church.  From the time I was a child I wanted nothing more than to please my God by doing the things I was taught to do; including choosing the right, following the prophet, abstaining from coffee, tea, and alcohol, serving a mission, and marrying in the temple.  From there it was a simple matter of re-populating the earth and enduring until the end.  If I kept my end of the promises made at baptism and in the temple I would be rewarded with eternal life which...

                                         CHOOSING TO BE GOOD PARENTS

As someone has said, parenting is the easiest thing in the world to have an opinion about, but the hardest thing in the world to actually do.

In India, parenting is something everybody around you involved in; the grandparents, uncles, aunts, neighbours and the list goes on. This is because there is an unofficial fundamental right to peep into how others are raising their children and make comments and suggestions and also teach them religious and ‘traditional values’ if they get a chance. 

Yes, it is stupid, but unfortunately true. Joint families still exist in India, hesitating to break into nuclear ones. This makes it more common to have a lot of people getting involved in the process of raising a child. Even if the family is a nuclear one, the grandparents never step back from their...

As a lot of you know, I am a pretty open-minded individual. I would go as far as saying that I am probably one of the more socially progressive people in most of the local groups I volunteer with, my small circle of local friends, my lifelong friends from childhood, and even my immediate family. I mean, one of my favorite shows on TV right now is "We're Here". It's a series on HBO about three drag queens traveling around to small, conservative communities with hopes of opening the minds and hearts of the folks who live there, to be more accepting of people within their communities, who feel like they don't belong. It has ALL the feels and the best cast! I'm also an empath, I'm learning how to be a better ally, and I always pull for the people who feel like they don't really fit in. Mainly, because I know that feeling all too well.

I have very short hair, I have broad shoulders, not much to speak up for hips, I wear a t-shirt or hoodie every day and I rarely go without...

It takes insight and intelligence to know our ‘self’. Not everyone dares to discover it and embrace their real whole self. Because it takes immense strength too.

 As a straight ally, I have tried to know the puzzle and pain one has to go through in the process of finding one’s ‘self’. It is quite a baffling state of existence where you don’t identify with the terms society has attributed to you. Because for the majority of the society, sexuality is something to be attributed to a person based on the biological or physical appearance they can interpret. For them, everything is either black or white, no greys in between.

Coming out for LGBTQ people would have been an easier process if their society would start to understand that sexuality never exists in binary. It’s a spectrum of different shades.

I have friends who ended up in forced marriages against their will and got...

We are so excited that Chelsea Chapman is joining our team, alongside Gopika Kalarikkal and Gabrielle Ackerman.  She will creating digital content for us, specifically designing teaser trailers for our "Conversations that Create Change" series.  I'll let her introduce herself to you.

Hey all, Chelsea here.   Uber stoked to join the Pride and Joy family!!

I am a marketing student (the second bachelor’s for me— I know I’m crazy for going back to college ).  Before this, I taught elementary school for 6 years.  Loved it, but felt the call to change.  As much as change terrifies me (hello anxiety),  I am a firm believer in following your gut-or at least trying to.  I love board games and card games.  My family is currently playing Dungeons and Dragons, like the paper and pencil kind (Family time growing up was DnD or some other type of game).  I was born...

One of the most beautiful things about the Pride and Joy Foundation is that it is “striving to build self-awareness within and safety for LGBTQ+ families and their allies.”  Let’s take a second to talk about how important allies are (hint: so freakin’ important!) to the LGBTQ+ community.  Let’s think about it this way - even if every member of a marginalized community banded together to fight for their cause, they would still be up against a majority, making change near impossible.  For any marginalized community, having strong ally support is integral in the fight for equality because allies allow for the community to show up in numbers and to prove that their cause isn’t only their own. 

But what does it mean to truly be an ally?  Queer sex educator and trauma specialist Jimanekia discussed in an Instagram video post her position on allies.  Though her post specifically references non-Black allyship within the Black...

Editor's Note:   On September 22, 2017, Sarah Hegazi attended a concert for Mashrou' Leila whose lead singer, Hamed Sinno, is openly gay. She was arrested along with a group of others for waving a rainbow flag in support of LGBT rights. Her arrest coincided with Egypt's zero-tolerance crackdown response to end public support for LGBT rights in the country.  She recalled being jailed, beaten, and abused by inmates. 

Sarah (Zarah) was granted asylum in Canada but lived with the PTSD from her experience.  

“To my siblings,

I tried to survive and I failed, forgive me.

To my friends,

The experience was cruel and I’m too weak

to resist it, forgive me.

To the world,

You were awfully cruel, but I forgive.”

This is the last note left behind by Zarah Hijazi, an Egyptian LGBTQ rights activist who committed suicide last week in Canada. She was raped and tortured in the prison by the US-backed Sisi government for her...