Chosen Family: The People Who Taught Me What Love Could Look Like

By Nat Hagee

The first time I realized family could feel different, there was no dramatic speech and no movie-moment music playing in the background. I was simply around people who talked to each other. 

That sounds almost ridiculous when I say it now. Talking to each other should not have felt revolutionary. But to me, it did. 

I grew up in a family where appearances mattered. From the outside, we looked loving, religious, successful, and close. There were holidays, church, vacations, laughter, and all the things people point to when they decide a family must be happy. Inside the house, there were also secrets. There were things you did not say, things you did not question, and feelings you learned to swallow because keeping the family together seemed more important than telling the truth. 

I loved my family. That is one of the hardest parts for people to understand when they hear pieces of my story. Love and harm can exist in the same house. Good memories do not erase bad ones, and bad memories do not magically delete every good moment. Human beings are messy like that. 

As a kid and teenager, I did not have language for any of it. I only knew that I was angry, confused, and constantly trying to figure out how to survive whatever emotion was hitting me next. I also knew I was different in ways I could not fully explain. I was attracted to women, but I had grown up in an environment where that part of me felt like something I was supposed to hide, fix, or pray away. 

Then I started meeting people who lived differently. 

One of those people was Kelly. Our relationship was young, complicated, and sometimes chaotic because we were young, complicated, and sometimes chaotic. But what changed me most was not just being with her. It was being around her family. 

They talked. 

They disagreed. They got irritated. They laughed. They told each other the truth. And somehow, after all of that, they still belonged to each other. 

I remember watching Kelly and her sisters with their mother and thinking, Wait, you can just say what you feel? 

In my world, honesty often felt dangerous. I was used to measuring my words before they left my mouth. I was used to wondering what could be said, what had to stay hidden, and what might happen if the wrong truth came out at the wrong time. At Kelly's house, people could be blunt without the entire family falling apart. 

That was new to me. 

They did not treat me like some awkward extra person hanging around because I was Kelly's girlfriend. They made room for me. They included me. They corrected me when I was wrong, and trust me, I got corrected. There was no shortage of strong opinions in that family. But even when someone was hard on me, it did not feel like I was about to be thrown away. 

For the first time, I started learning that disagreement did not have to mean abandonment. 

That lesson followed me everywhere. 

Through my friends, I met Yo, who became another huge part of my life. Yo was not gentle with advice. She was more the kind of person who would look at you and basically say, 'Get your shit together. You can do better than this.'

And annoyingly, she was usually right. 

She pushed me when I did not know how to push myself. She wanted me to become independent. She wanted me to stop settling for chaos just because chaos felt familiar. She expected more from me during periods when I did not expect much from myself at all. 

That is another thing I had to learn about love: sometimes love is not someone agreeing with everything you do. Sometimes love is somebody refusing to let you disappear into your own worst decisions. 

Then there were the queer spaces. 

The first time I walked into a gay or lesbian bar, I felt like I had stepped onto another planet. I saw women kissing women. I saw men holding men. I saw people dancing, laughing, flirting, existing. 

And nobody was angry. 

Nobody was staring. 

Nobody was telling them they were disgusting, sinful, broken, or wrong. 

It was just another night to everyone else in the room. 

To me, it was fucking magical. 

I had spent so much time believing that loving a woman had to come with fear attached to it that seeing people love openly almost short-circuited my brain. I kept looking around like someone was going to burst through the door and announce that all of us were in trouble. 

Nobody did. 

Instead, people kept dancing. 

I was still a teenager, and I was so desperate to get back into those spaces that I somehow ended up with a fake ID that accidentally made me look like I was in my mid-thirties. Apparently math was not my strongest criminal skill. Anyone who looked at that thing and believed it deserved an award for optimism. 

But what mattered was not the bar itself. What mattered was what I found there. 

I found people who did not ask me to explain why I was attracted to women. I found people who had already survived the shame I was still trying to crawl out from under. I found friends who could look at parts of me I had been taught to hide and act like those parts were completely ordinary. 

That changed me. 

Those friendships became a kind of chosen family. I spent time at friends' houses. I joined their families for meals and barbecues. I watched movies on couches. I laughed until my stomach hurt. I had people I could call when things were bad. I had people who knew pieces of the real me, not just the version of me I thought I was supposed to perform. 

None of that looked dramatic from the outside. It was ordinary life. 

That was exactly why it mattered. 

Ordinary safety can feel extraordinary when you have spent years waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

I did not have the word nonbinary for myself back then. I did not yet have the language I would eventually use to understand my gender. I only knew that I never fit neatly into the boxes people kept handing me. I hated being told how I was supposed to look, dress, act, love, or exist. For a long time, I assumed that meant there was something wrong with me. 

Being around queer people slowly taught me a different possibility: maybe the problem was not that I failed to fit the box. Maybe the box was too small. 

That idea took years to fully sink in. 

Finding community did not instantly heal me. I still made terrible decisions. I still carried trauma into relationships. I still used humor to cover pain and sometimes used chaos to avoid sitting alone with myself. There were periods when I hurt people, periods when I let people hurt me, and periods when I did not know the difference between being loved and simply being wanted. 

But chosen family gave me a reference point. 

I had seen people disagree without destroying each other. I had seen people be queer without apologizing. I had seen friends show up without demanding that I pretend everything was fine. I had experienced what it felt like to be welcomed instead of managed. 

Once you experience that kind of safety, even briefly, some part of you starts remembering it exists. 

That mattered later when I began doing the much harder work of looking at my life honestly. It mattered when I had to separate love from fear, loyalty from silence, faith from control, and family from biology. It mattered when I finally started asking myself who I was when I was not trying to become whatever everyone else needed me to be. 

And it matters now as I tell my story publicly. 

My memoir, Surviving Hagee, is about abuse, silence, survival, and the complicated reality of loving people who also caused pain. But it is also about the people who helped me learn there were other ways to live. The story would be incomplete if I only wrote about the people who hurt me and ignored the people who helped me rebuild. 

Survival is not only about escaping the worst thing that happened to you. 

Sometimes survival looks like sitting at somebody else's kitchen table and realizing nobody is afraid to speak. 

Sometimes it looks like a friend calling you on your bullshit because they believe you can do better. 

Sometimes it looks like walking into a queer space and seeing two people hold hands without shame. 

Sometimes it looks like learning a new word for yourself years after you first realized the old ones never fit. 

And sometimes it looks like finally understanding that family is not automatically created by blood, a last name, or a shared history. 

Family is created through safety. 

Through honesty. 

Through showing up. 

Through being able to tell the truth and still be loved when the truth is inconvenient. 

I used to think family was something you were assigned and then expected to protect at any cost. I do not believe that anymore. 

The people who changed my life taught me something much better: family can also be the people you choose - and the people who keep choosing you back. 

---

Nat Hagee (they/them) is a Texas-based nonbinary author whose memoir, Surviving Hagee, explores family secrets, abuse, survival, queer identity, chosen family, and healing. Nat writes in a direct, conversational voice about surviving what was hidden and learning to build a life beyond it.

Follow Nat on Instagram: @surviving_hageenat and TikTok: @.survivinghagee

Surviving Hagee is available to buy here