What 'Andor' taught me about burnout and belonging
I didn't plan to watch Andor. It came into my life through the voices of my clients: healers, organizers, artists, and advocates. Many of them identify as queer and/or trans, and many carry a deep, embodied grief shaped by the worlds they move through.In therapy sessions, they spoke of Andors honesty, its resonance, and a strange kind of comfort. As a trauma therapist, I'm familiar with the emotional terrain beneath activism: the grief no one sees, the fractured loyalties, the quiet fatigue of those who've made a life of resistance. But what I hadn't expected was how deeply Andor would speak to my own experience.There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from living at the intersection of queerness and justice work. A slow erosion of rest, safety, and belonging is repeatedly traded for urgency, survival, and the hope that change is still possible. I recognized not just my clients storiesand minein characters from the show. the heartbreak of choosing principle over comfort, and the loneliness of holding nuance in a polarized world. The stubborn hope that draws so many of us (especially queer and trans folks) back to the work, even when it costs more than we can name.Activism has long been both a compass and a container for me. It helped me make sense of violence, gave shape to my longing, and offered a place to pour my heartbreak. But it has also come at a cost. I've known what it means to lose family to a cause, to be 'out' in movements that prized radical politics but erased queer lives. I've felt both hyper-visible and invisible in activist spaces: too queer, too tender, too much, even with privileges as buffers. The belonging I needed was often sacrificed for 'the work.' Over time, like many, I became untethered from the very communities I was trying to protect.Like many shaped by struggle, I built an identity around survival and resistance. Sometimes out of deep conviction; sometimes because there was nowhere else to belong. Watching Andor, I recognized the subtle wear of displacement, the ache of exile, and the way resistance can both shape and shatter one's sense of self. In Cassian's journey from a hunted child to a revolutionary, I saw my elements of ruptured relationships, tension between visibility and safety, and the slow birth of political clarity etched by grief but sharpened by love.Grief shows up in many forms in activist spaces. For some, it comes through the irreparable loss of lives stolen by state violence, colonialism, and systemic neglect. These losses are profound and ongoing, shaping not only personal grief but collective memory and movement. But grief also emerges in less visible ways. Many activists, myself included, experience a quieter, more complex loss: the grief of no longer belonging to the communities that raised us. And as we come into deeper alignment with our values, identities, or truths, we often find ourselves distanced from familiar spaces we once called home.That, too, is a kind of exile.Andor captures this layered reality through Cassian's journey. His evolution isn't just about fighting an oppressive regime. It's also about letting go of the people and places that once defined him. His story reflects a truth many activists know well: that liberation often involves grieving not only what is taken from us, but what we choose to leave behind to become who we need to be.I saw, too, the burnout that comes from being everyone's anchor, the guilt that shadows rest, and the fractures movements carry when trauma goes unspoken. I recognized the pain of choosing integrity over proximity to loved ones and the isolation of living in between. These are the private costs of public commitment. Andor, with its refusal to romanticize revolution, offers a language for these complexities. A narrative that meets our grief without flinching and reminds us that even in exile, we are not alone.Were living in a moment when LGBTQ+ communities across the U.S. are being targeted with increasing violence and repression. Queer and trans youth are criminalized, families are under siege, and many are forced to make impossible choices about where and how to live. And still, we organize. We build mutual aid networks, march in the streets, and hold each other through grief. We find joy anyway. And so many of us do this while carrying legacies of displacement, surveillance, and systemic harm.Andor doesn't pretend that liberation is clean or unified. It shows us what real resistance looks like: messy, relational, deeply human. Vel and Cinta's love is strained by ideological urgency; Mon Mothma's quiet desperation clashing with Luthen's calculated ruthlessness; Saw Gerrera's militancy resisting Nemik's tender idealism. These characters bring with them trauma, difference, and friction. They hurt each other. They misunderstand. And yet, again and again, they stay.Movements fail when we mistake unity for sameness. Real solidarity is born not from perfection, but from showing up with our contradictions, woundedness, and refusal to give up on each other. That kind of solidarity is hard-won, especially for queer people whose lives have so often been made conditional, and whose safety is never guaranteed. We know what it means to be betrayed by our communities, erased from their narratives, or used as political pawns.And yet, we stay.We stay because we believe in something bigger. Even after heartbreak, we still long to be part of something that might save us, not just from the Empire outside, but from the empire inside. Andor reminds us that the revolution isn't just about fighting fascism. It's about refusing to replicate it; to build movements that don't sacrifice care in the name of strategy.There is no perfect revolution. Only the difficult, necessary work of showing up through rupture, choosing each other again and again. We build real change not by discarding the messy parts but by learning to hold them. With compassion, rigor, and the kind of collective hope that says: we don't leave each other behind. Queer communities have always known how to survive and how to dream. We carry the blueprints for relational resilience. We know how to hold pain and beauty in the same breath. In a world that tells us we are disposable, Andor reminds us: we are not.Our love, grief, and resistance are sacred. They are a strategy to endure. And how to win.Perspectives is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ and Allied community. Visit pride.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on any of our stories. Email us at voices@equalpride.com. Views expressed in Perspectives stories are those of the guest writers, columnists and editors, and do not directly represent the views of PRIDE.com or our parent company, equalpride.
