Dear Care and Feeding,

I’m 14 years old, and my parents just found out I’m gay. My mom was listening at my door when I was Zooming with my boyfriend. She heard me tell him that I love him. So now I’m trapped with my parents who are telling me that being gay is disgusting and an insult to a god I don’t even believe in. I knew coming out to them would be hard, but I didn’t expect to be trapped with them after it happened. I feel like you guys give good, levelheaded advice, and honestly I wish you were my parents instead. Do you have any advice on getting through the next couple of months without me going crazy?

—Trapped

Dear Trapped,

I’m sorry this didn’t go as you’d planned. Under normal circumstances I would urge you to connect with any adult you love and trust—an aunt or uncle, a teacher or minister, a neighbor or friend—but these are not normal circumstances, and none of those people are available to you immediately. I think the safest thing at the moment would be to negotiate some kind of peace with your parents; you are indeed trapped with them for the time being.

It is not impossible that, despite what they’re saying now, your parents will someday be fiercely supportive of who you are. I really hope you get there! But I don’t want you to think about that at the moment. It is your parents’ job to love you unconditionally. It is not your job to argue for your own worth.

I hope your folks are still doing some of their job—feeding you, caring for you—and if they are, I hope you can remember that those things are also an expression of their love. (They could be doing more! But maybe this is all they can do right now.) As long as you are safe at home, I think you should try to just endure this moment.

If you feel unsafe—like they talk about asking you to leave your home or threaten you physically—that is another matter. That would be an emergency, and if that comes up, you should reach out to one of the adults you trust or, if that’s not an option, to an organization for young people like you.

But maybe you just feel bad and frustrated—you are who you are, your parents do not respect that. As terrible as that certainly is, I’m worried only about you surviving this weird period of quarantine. I don’t think you should lie or pretend to be anything you’re not.

If your parents bring up the subject of your being gay, try to change it. If they tell you it is disgusting, tell them that is cruel, and you don’t want to discuss being gay in these terms. None of this is how this should work, and I wish I had better advice, but I just want you to get through this moment. I want you to wait to have the hard conversations with your folks until you have some support from other people in your life.

To that end, I think you should preserve your connections to those other people—not just video chatting your boyfriend, but emailing and calling other friends, so you can remind yourself that while you’re stuck at home with Mom and Dad, there are still a lot of people out in the world whom you’re connected to. Throw yourself into your schoolwork, stay connected to your social network, be strong, be safe, and know that a lot of people out there (me included!) want you to be well. Please email me again if you need to talk.