Out to Some, Not to Others: The Quiet Exhaustion of Being LGBTQ in Different Spaces
- Stella Ong
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
You know the feeling in the lift up to a family dinner, when you are already running through what can come up tonight and what cannot. Who might ask about your weekend, and which version you might give them. Or even, whether the person you spent your weekend with is going to be a name at the table, or a 'friend', or left out of it entirely. By the time you sit down, you have done a full shift of work in your mind and the meal hasn't started yet.
Living Out to Some People and Not Others
If that lands somewhere uncomfortable, you're not being dramatic and you're not unusual. For a lot of LGBTQ+ people in Singapore, life gets sorted into different mental compartments: Your closest friends might know you completely, but your colleagues might get a version that is carefully edited.
The family reunion table gets another version that keeps certain doors shut, so that the dinner stays easy for everyone. You move between these versions so often that it stops registering as effort, which is exactly why the mental cost of being LGBTQ in different spaces is easy to miss.
A Separate Self for Each Compartment
This switching is so habitual that most people stop seeing it as something they do. It starts to feel less like a choice and more like the weather, just the conditions you operate in. But each move asks something of you.
You track what you have said to whom, you keep the stories straight so that nothing from one room spills into another. Done once or twice, it is still manageable. When done across years and across most of the people in your life, it accumulates into something heavier than any single evening would suggest.
There is a framework underneath this that researchers have spent decades on: the minority stress model describes how living as a sexual or gender minority exposes a person to a steady, low-level strain that their straight peers simply don't carry, much of it ordinary and not always intended by anyone in particular (Cyrus, 2017). One piece of that research speaks directly to the room-switching we are talking about.
The Part That Quietly Drains You
A study on Chinese LGB adults looked at what happens when someone is preoccupied with how others might judge or reject them for their sexuality. As you'd expect, that worry was linked to lower life satisfaction. What the researchers found underneath it is the useful bit: the worry didn't damage well-being directly so much as it pushed people toward concealment, the active and ongoing hiding of who they are, and it was the concealing that did the quiet harm (Hu et al., 2013).
Concealment isn't a single decision made once, but it is the constant monitoring of how you speak and carry yourself, the rephrasing of a partner into a roommate, the editing out of an entire weekend so that no thread can be pulled. Drawing on the idea that self-control runs on a limited supply of mental energy, the authors describe how people who hold themselves under that kind of watch end up genuinely depleted and exhausted (Hu et al., 2013).
Why It Often Hurts Most Around Family
This study also found something that will resonate with anyone whose family is the room that stays closed. When they looked separately at concealment from friends, from acquaintances, and from family, the cost to well-being pointed most clearly to family relationship, which they connected to how central family is within many Asian cultures (Hu et al., 2013).
It is worth saying plainly that concealment is often a sensible response to a real situation people face. In one study of young gay men, hiding was understood as a strategy for staying safe in an unwelcoming environment, and several described feeling caught between being fully themselves with their families and keeping those relationships intact at all (Joyce et al., 2025).
When the cost of being seen is high, managing what you reveal is social navigation. The trouble is that when the navigating never stops, you stop seeing it, so the tiredness gets read as a personal failing instead of the result of carrying several selves at once.
Where Support Can Help, at Your Own Pace
This is often where therapy or counselling becomes useful, and not in the way people sometimes fear. The work in therapy isn't just about being marched toward coming out, or being told which rooms you ought to open. A good therapeutic space is one where, perhaps for the first time, no version of you needs to be managed at all.
From there, the questions become yours to ask at your own pace. Which of these doors are closed because they genuinely need to be, and which have simply stayed shut out of an old habit of bracing for the worst. Where your tiredness is actually coming from. The aim of therapy isn't to hand you a decision, but to give you room to feel the full weight that you have been carrying for so long.
If any of this feels familiar, you are welcome to reach out. We are located on the East side of Singapore, and it's meant to be a safe space without the gear-switching, where you can be all of yourself without first checking the mental compartments.
Appointments can be scheduled on weekends or weekday evenings to fit around work and life, and there is no expectation that you arrive having figured anything out. You can come to therapy as you are, which may be the rarest thing on offer.
And lastly, Happy Pride Month! 🏳️🌈
Stella Ong is a clinical member and registered counsellor with the Singapore Association for Counselling, registration number (C0940). Click here for more information on Stella Ong.
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References
Cyrus, K. (2017). Multiple minorities as multiply marginalized: Applying the minority stress theory to LGBTQ people of color. Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, 21(3), 194–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/19359705.2017.1320739
Hu, X., Wang, Y., & Wu, C. (2013). Acceptance concern and life satisfaction for Chinese LGBs: The mediating role of self-concealment. Social Indicators Research, 114(2), 687–701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-012-0168-8
Joyce, E., Pratt, D., & Lea, J. (2025). "Where is my place?" A qualitative study of gay men's experiences of social support, relationships and community in relation to psychological wellbeing and distress. Journal of Homosexuality, 72(5), 841–867. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2024.2354408
