What it’s Like Being a Queer Person with No Emergency Contact

There are apps now for people who live alone. You check in once a day, and if you don’t, the app alerts someone you’ve listed. I keep meaning to download one.

I crate my dog every night. It’s part of our routine. She feels safe in there, and I sleep better knowing she’s secure. But lately I’ve started to wonder if it’s the right thing to do. If something happened to me in my sleep, she’d be trapped. No way to get out. No way to get help. I keep thinking about that. Whether it’s safer to let her sleep free, just in case. Whether it’s cruel to keep her locked in when I live alone and no one would know right away if something went wrong.

I’m a queer femme in her 40s with no emergency contact. No spouse. No partner. No parents I trust. No best friend who checks in. If something serious happened to me, I don’t know who would come.

This is not the part of the queer success story people like to hear. They love the glow-up, the clever caption, the viral moment. They like the idea of having known me back when. But after years of surviving an abusive immigrant household, working multiple jobs just to afford rent, and building something from nothing, most of the people I thought were close to me have distanced themselves.

Some people couldn’t stomach the sight of me rising without a rope. They watched me climb out of survival, out of food stamps, homes with no heat, and hand-me-down everything, and instead of reaching out, they recoiled. My success unsettled something in them. It wasn’t just jealousy; it was a kind of grief, the quiet, aching kind that creeps in when someone else’s progress forces you to reckon with your own stillness. I became a reminder of everything they said they wanted to do but didn’t. I became living proof that it was possible, and that was too heavy for some to bear.

There are people who used to dismiss me, who thought of me as soft or unstable, as someone to humor but not to admire. They called me too sensitive, too much, too reactive. They said it with a smile, sometimes even with affection, but always from a place of disbelief that I could ever pull myself out. They have gone quiet now. I don’t think it’s because I became someone else but because I didn’t break the way they expected me to. I stayed soft, but I became sharp. I kept writing. I kept going. And that was the thing they couldn’t forgive.

I have had people disappear over something as small as a press pass to a music festival.

“You mean to tell me that you get in for FREE to all these things?!”—My friend from the Junior League. She never spoke to me again after I told her that. 

She stopped responding the moment I told her that I no longer have to pay for my own entry. As if the wristband somehow erased our shared history. As if my access meant her exclusion, despite her going every year anyway because she could actually afford to. Rich kids are not used to being the ones who don’t get the best perks. They have spent their lives being ushered in through side doors, handed back-stage passes, and treated as default VIPs.

When someone like me shows up, tattooed, queer, a little rough around the edges, but somehow still manages to access something they thought was only for them, they crash out. They unravel. My presence rewrites their understanding of who gets to belong, and that disruption is unbearable to them. Some treated me like a temporary elevator, hoping I would lift them into some brighter version of their lives. They hovered just close enough to stay in the photos, to get tagged, to be seen. But never close enough to carry any of the weight with me. Never close enough to witness what it cost me to build a life like this.

No one calls just to ask how I’m doing. Not really. They see the curated version of my life and assume everything is fine. They don’t ask how many deadlines I’ve met through a migraine, or how many nights I’ve spent staring at the ceiling, wondering what would happen if my body gave out while no one was looking. They don’t ask at all.

I don’t get invited to the slow things. The quiet things. No one reaches out just to watch a movie, take a walk, or grab groceries. I am not the person they think of when the plan is low-key and unremarkable. Or I’m invited along with five, eight, 10 other people, because I’ve somehow become responsible for setting the tone. I’m the “cool” friend, the “influencer” friend, the “famous” friend. I’m rarely just the sweet, thoughtful person they know named Rose. When I do get the invitation, there is almost always something attached. A plus-one. A favor. A shortcut. I cringe whenever I hear: “Can I pick your brain?” The ask is louder than the hello. And when I say no, or when I set a boundary, the silence returns just as quickly.

I do not want to sound bitter, but I have learned how to recognize when I am being objectified and treated like a resource instead of a person. I know what it is to be loved for what I offer, not for who I am. I know what it is to be tolerated just long enough to remain useful.

What I want is simple but rare. I want someone to knock on my door with coffee and no agenda. I want to be chosen for the joy I bring to a room, for the way I laugh when I finally feel safe, for the stories I tell when no one is recording. I want to be invited not because of where I can get us in, but because of who I am when we are just sitting on the floor, eating takeout, and talking about nothing. Nobody wants nothing from me; everyone wants everything from me.

And because of that, sometimes I feel like I am nothing at all.

At the end of the day, if that kind of friendship no longer exists, then I want to stop pretending it might. I want to stop waiting to be chosen by people who never truly saw me in the first place. But when you start choosing yourself, you stop being manageable to people who only knew how to love you when you were asking for less. Suddenly, you’re too much. Too clear. Too unwilling to shrink. And that clarity threatens the comfort they’ve built on your silence.

I came from nothing. Not the kind of nothing that gets romanticized, but the kind that teaches you how to stay invisible and quiet to survive. My parents are from the Silent Generation. They had me late. My mother, whom I suspect is affected by fetal alcohol syndrome, never developed the skills to navigate the world around her.

In Asian households, you never, ever dishonor your mother. And in my family, the silent truth about my grandmother’s drinking and smoking, and the hard life it created for my mother and at least one of my uncles, hangs in the air like smoke that no one will name. It is the elephant in the room no one in my family will acknowledge or admit, and it has been allowed to sit there for decades at my lifelong expense. Nobody will admit anything is wrong with her, and nobody will tell her to get help. Even if it means no relationship with me. Even if the stress of it all is slowly killing me.

My father is a lifelong, MAGA conservative who believes he owns me. My parents stubbornly use my dead name on every form. They refuse to respect my identity. They have told me, point blank, that they don’t care how I feel. For the past decade, they have insisted, demanded at times, that I give up my rent-controlled apartment and my career and move back in with them to be their full-time caregiver. They see my autonomy as a betrayal. And as two ambitious yet uneducated people, they resented my intelligence most of all, along with the opportunities it brought. It has always felt like they were trying to even the playing field by throwing as many obstacles in my way as they could. Nobody knows what it’s like to have your parents be your first opposition, your first bully, your first heartbreak. The first thing you ever had to grieve, despite them still being alive.

I don’t trust them to make decisions about my health, my life, or my future. If something happened to me, they would dismantle the life I’ve worked for in order for me to return to my childhood home and be completely trapped in servitude to them. Like some twisted replay, a distorted redo of the childhood they desperately want to relive, but with more control this time. Not out of grief, but out of entitlement. In their eyes, that’s what I was born for. That was the whole reason they had me so late in life: to take care of them. I was never supposed to have any other goal, wish, or desire beyond the ongoing service of their comfort and needs.

So I keep my distance. And I live alone.

And I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the most expensive regions in the country, where the loudest voices in community care are often the most insulated from any real consequence. The so-called activists and advocates who flood social spaces with mutual aid slogans and inclusive language are, more often than not, rich kids cosplaying struggle. They grew up with safety nets, trust funds, property in their family names. When faced with someone like me, someone actually endangered, marginalized, low-income, and isolated, their performance crumbles. My existence reveals the gaps in their politics. My needs are too real, too inconvenient, too close to the truth. I am a threat to the fantasy they have built around themselves, and they do not know how to process that.

And, conversely, when you arrive in high society not by nepotism, not by your dad’s friend or your mom’s sorority sister, but by pure talent and merit, they too look at you like you’ve broken some unspoken rule. I have been invited to galas, awards shows, special dinners, nominated for work I built with my own hands. Not because anyone owed me a favor, but because I earned it through character, through consistency, through shaking one hand at a time.

They hate that.

They pelt you with questions, sizing you up. They stalk your social media and watch every story, waiting to find some hole in your origin story, some thread to pull that will unravel your legitimacy. They don’t want to believe I belong. They want to prove I’m poor, and that being poor is a life-long anointment and should have disqualified me from being seen. People like me aren’t supposed to have a legacy. We’re only meant to be mined for parts. They pluck swagger and personality off me like petals from a perennially blooming flower, lifting pieces of my charisma and passing them off as their own. They mimic my voice, my cadence, my ideas, trying to convince the world they were born with what I had to carve out. My existence is something they want to wear like fashion, but never stand beside when it matters.

Every once in a while, I go to the World AIDS Day memorial in Golden Gate Park. I’ve gone several times over the past decade, when I’ve been able to make it. The morning is always cold and quiet. Names are read out loud. Stories are told. The ones that stay with me most are the caretakers. Friends who stepped in when families disappeared. Lovers who stayed beside hospital beds. Strangers who showed up and stayed. People who chose to be there when no one else would.

That gives me some hope. That kind of queer love and loyalty once existed. Maybe it still does, somewhere.

Still, I can’t ignore what would happen if I died now. The people who haven’t answered my texts in weeks would post old photos. They’d talk about how talented I was, how promising. They would be running full-speed to break down my apartment door in order fight each other over who gets all my best designer clothes, shoes, purses, and my cherished vinyl records. But they wouldn’t know where I kept my writing. They wouldn’t archive my work. They wouldn’t dig through the notebooks stacked near my desk, full of poems and song lyrics and fragments I never got to submit because I was too busy surviving to pursue having anything published.

That’s what I think about when I clean my apartment. That there is no one who would know what mattered. That my dog would be waiting at the crate door. That I would be gone and the world would keep moving and no one would know where to look for what I left behind.

I’m a femme with no emergency contact. No safety net. No one to check the time of my last heartbeat. I’m still learning how to hold the weight of that reality without letting it crush me. I am still discovering what it means to build a life out of my own will alone, a life with no scaffolding and no soft landing, with no soft place to fall. I am existentially alone. There is no one to bear witness to my life, no one to say I was here and mattered. I am still here, rooted in a kind of resilience that doesn’t always feel brave, but is nonetheless real.

One of the hardest truths I’ve come to accept is that no one resents you more than someone who secretly aches for what you naturally are. Even if they’re friends and family. Especially if they’re friends and family. The closer they are, the more it burns when your light touches something they’ve buried in themselves. It’s a heavy kind of peace, knowing you have to be your own witness. There’s no one to carry the memory of who you were in case you vanish. There’s no one who knows what you’ve survived except the version of you that keeps surviving. Some days that feels like strength. Other days it feels like erasure.

And tonight, like every night, I will set the alarm, lock the door, and tuck my dog in. She does not know my fears, only that I return. She waits for me in the morning with quiet faith, not knowing how much that faith holds me together. Even if there is no one to call, she is still here. And for now, that is enough.

All photos in this article courtesy of Rose Eden.