Healing Without Shame: Rethinking Recovery for Queer and Trans Communities
by Lali Mendoza, mental health counseling intern Lali Mendoza is a bilingual (Spanish/English) graduate student in SDSU's Community Based Block (CBB) Multicultural Community Counseling and Social Justice Education Program. They are 29 years old, queer, trans masculine, and a proud Mexican immigrant from Tijuana. He earned their BA from Harvard in Psychology with a minor in Latine Studies and has dedicated their career to supporting marginalized communities, especially trans and queer BIPOC individuals. Why I Turned to Weed in College I started smoking weed in college, right around the time I came out as queer and left home. It felt like survival—like the only thing that made the loneliness bearable. Academically, I was struggling, not because I wasn’t capable, but because I felt so unsupported. My school wasn’t built for someone like me, a first-gen, working-class, trans person of color navigating a system that wasn’t designed with my success in mind. Weed became my escape, ...