The Weight We Carry

In Europe, winter has a particular honesty.

It doesn’t ask who you are or what you pretend to be. It simply arrives—gray, slow, unapologetic—and expects you to survive it. I learned this one January morning in Berlin, watching my breath fog the air like a confession I wasn’t ready to say aloud.

I’ve always been a big man. Broad shoulders, thick arms, a belly that announced itself before I did. In queer spaces, that made me visible and invisible at the same time—desired in theory, overlooked in practice. Too soft for some, too heavy for others. Too much.

The Bears community was supposed to be different. That’s what the flyers said. That’s what the profiles promised. Celebration of size. Celebration of age. Celebration of softness.

But celebration, I learned, is a complicated word.

At my first Bears meet-up, held in a dim bar near the Spree, I stood by the wall pretending to enjoy my drink. Around me were men laughing loudly, touching shoulders easily, moving with the confidence of people who had already made peace with their bodies—or at least learned how to weaponize them.

I smiled when spoken to. I nodded when laughed at. I did everything right.

Still, I felt like an outsider wearing the right costume.

Europe teaches you to live among strangers. On trains, in cafés, in rented apartments with thin walls—you learn to coexist quietly. But loneliness here has texture. It presses against you on platforms at dusk, follows you home through cobbled streets, sits beside you when you eat alone.

That night, walking back under yellow streetlights, I realized something uncomfortable: I wasn’t afraid of being rejected anymore. I was afraid of being seen.

Because being seen meant being measured—not just by my weight, but by my softness, my age, my silence.

Months later, in Lisbon, I met André.

He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t sculpted. He had a beard flecked with gray and the kind of smile that arrived late but stayed long. We met not at a bar, but at a bakery—two Bears reaching for the same loaf of bread like it was a shared destiny.

We talked about nothing important at first. Weather. Cities. The way Europe makes you feel old and young at the same time. Only later did the real things slip out—how he once loved a man who wanted him thinner, quieter, less visible. How I spent years shrinking myself emotionally because my body already took up enough space.

We didn’t fix each other. That’s a myth people sell when they’re afraid of slow love.

Instead, we learned how to sit with our weight—physical and emotional—without apology.

In the Bears community, people often talk about pride. But pride doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it shows up as ordering dessert without guilt. Sometimes it’s letting someone touch your stomach without flinching. Sometimes it’s standing shirtless in bad lighting and refusing to disappear.

Europe, with its long histories and patient streets, taught me that bodies change—but dignity doesn’t have to.

Being a Bear isn’t about size alone. It’s about endurance. About warmth. About carrying others when the world gets cold.

I still have days when mirrors feel hostile. Days when I wonder if I’m enough even in spaces built for men like me. But now, when winter comes, I don’t fight it. I put on a coat that fits. I walk slower. I let myself take up room.

And somewhere between Berlin’s gray mornings and Lisbon’s golden afternoons, I finally understood:

The weight I carry isn’t something to lose.

It’s something I survived.