I don’t have any one example but I always love it when meet someone new and to be able to talk with them openly, where I don’t have to be careful to “hide my power level”, and I can just be balls gonads to the wall radical in all things without necessarily needing to attach any concepts to it.

Just being able to draw upon the well of knowledge and experience about matters of queerness and gender and sexuality and stuff like toxic masculinity in an open discussion without a filter, where I don’t have to hedge my words or to defend/litigate these concepts is liberating as fuck.

Meeting those people where you can just drop your guard and speak like that is so affirming to me that it’s like crack. I could speak for hours on end about these things with people who I’ve just met, so long as they happen to be on the level.

And maybe the most affirming thing for me is to have people who know how to do comradely criticisms - when I slip up, when my use of words is not appropriate, when one of my (many) blindspots or areas of ignorance emerge and they call me out on it and invite me to learn and develop in a mutually respectful way, that’s the shit. It means that I can trust them to encourage me to do better and that they are also open for me to do the same with them. It takes a lot of pressure off me as an individual.