During 2020, two nonbinary drama therapists meet on Zoom to explore queer(ing) drama therapy. Each represents different intersectional identities, yet both envision a decolonized, queer methodology that transcends current limitations in drama therapy practice. Their resulting dual reflections are separated by a series of asterisks. The North American Drama Therapy Association defines drama therapy as the intentional use of drama and/or theatre processes to achieve therapeutic goals.1Through variations of methodologies like play, storytelling, role theory, projection, and witnessing, drama therapy creates several threads of possibilities across the spectrum of healing.(c, a 29-year-old queer Filipino cultural immigrant and drama therapist, in a session with my therapist): What does it mean to be normal right now, anyway? between everything going on—COVID, George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, my job—the stuff I usually do doesn't work anymore. Why does it feel like in the past year, after everything I've gone through and learned and grown from, I feel like I haven't moved at all? How am I supposed to help clients heal when I don't know if I'm healing at all?In 2019, I performed an autoethnographic piece for my master's project where I examined my identity as a Filipino immigrant with U.S. citizenship coming into terms with my queerness, my experience learning therapy in a predominantly white classroom, and the comparison between my access to privileges like studying abroad and the lack of access for domestic household workers—including my own nanny—to have opportunities to rise out of poverty. In this context, I used autoethnography and Emunah's self-revelatory performance,2 which is used to work through current issues an individual is facing, to examine and question the role of the dominant narrative alongside my own narrative as a queer, nonbinary Filipino therapist. I wrote about the metaphor of all these parts of myself coming to my dinner table and me serving each of these parts of myself a dish that symbolized the fullness of the experience. At the time, it felt like coming full circle—that my work through those issues was complete. I wrote in my final paper that I felt like I was able to integrate several aspects of my identity on different levels of engagement with the environment around me.Reflecting on this experience in 2021, I would not express similar sentiments. However, the utilization of drama therapy in that moment in 2019, as a nonbinary, queer therapist on the brink of several personal and professional transitions, became a gateway to understanding that my healing is not linear or binary. The culmination of my drama therapy education was merely the beginning of several moments of integration and disintegration as I learned more about myself in relation to my clients, many of whom identify as LGBTQ+ or POC youth. Between then and now, I pulled myself together, only to break down again into little pieces, and then pull myself back together into someone new. That process multiplied several times over the onset of COVID-19, the news about police brutality against Black communities and the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, the 2020 election, and many more personal moments I experienced as being isolated from family and friends while trying to support clients who had to experience remote learning from the comfort (or discomfort) of their own homes. Many times, I've returned to the metaphor of the dinner table in my mind. Who am I serving? What am I offering? Will “dinner” ever end?Communities can use drama therapy as a tool for continuous self-revelatory work in a world that is constantly dynamic and fluid by allowing opportunities to consciously reexamine the culture, the context, and the manner individuals exist within their individual systems and the collective systems around them. Not only is this an avenue for individual healing, but also for collective healing within broken systems that intend to oppress and silence members of marginalized communities. Although drama therapy can be powerful and heavy and moving, it also creates space for soothing, tenderness, and care that our world sometimes does not allow. My work with clients during this time has shifted, using drama therapy for creating safe spaces and developing self-soothing. My clients and I have traveled to the middle of the woods, traversed lands that we could only dream of, and morphed into beings that transcend the virtual space. Although the occasional talk therapy grounds us, drama therapy has allowed us to envision a future—not just outside the confines of COVID-19, but also outside the confines of systemic inequity and injustice. Especially when my clients are members of marginalized communities, they (and I) are often the targets of inequities in the medical system and are on the frontlines of community activism and change. The use of drama therapy in sessions provides that space of sitting in the ambiguities that our situations provide and transforming some of the ambiguity into empowerment, agency, and personal change.One of the many ways I have used drama therapy in my clinical work is the use of dramatic ritual, whether that's through our embodied or imaginative check-ins and check-outs or the continuous exploration of a client's experience by setting up a ritualized container in sessions. These rituals have given us a sense of structure and normalcy while trying to maintain a therapeutic relationship in an ambiguous world. For example, a client and I have used guided visualizations at the beginning of every session, using our senses to imagine the client's happy space (the container). By consistently visualizing this happy space at the beginning of session, the client then begins to associate the container with a sense of safety and imagination, allowing the client to explore more ambiguous topics in a dramatic, embodied sense during the rest of session. The practices have also given us the opportunity to exist in various points of our self-work. Drama therapy allows us to work on what's interesting and potent in the moment, and also allows us to return to our work once we have changed. This creates space for clients and community members to experience the fluidity of healing that sometimes traditional talk therapies struggle to offer. In experiencing that fluidity, the healing process becomes less about productivity and the ultimate destination of being “completely healed” and more about the cycles, ebbs, and flows of healing that may resonate more with clients from marginalized communities.(Dana, a 33-year-old, white, neurodivergent, Appalachian, trans nonbinary drama therapist): I facilitated a virtual open mic night during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a part of the offerings of a community organization by and for queer disabled individuals in Central Texas. I struggled to find an accessible venue pre-COVID, and meeting over Zoom made the event possible. As queer, disabled, POC individuals shared poetry which processed intersectional struggles to survive and thrive (both before and during COVID-19), many affirmed the virtual space itself made their performance possible, whereas a public stage would have been/felt inaccessible. There is a strange and beautiful intimacy in meeting others in their living spaces during COVID-19, greeting pets, and increasing agency regarding how, when, and even if people want to be seen. Suddenly, visibility can be negotiated, rather than demanded or assumed as a necessary component of social connection.If queerness is “an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices,”3 life during COVID-19 has gotten much queerer for a lot of people. Health and wellness are often packaged as a cure to be found by purchasing products—do this detox, subscribe to this fitness program, take these supplements, and don't forget to meditate! Corporations are quick to preach “self-care,” but slow to make policies and procedures more accessible, equitable, and human. Health as a destination is much more difficult to achieve in an ongoing global pandemic, where asymptomatic cases were initially estimated as high as 30 percent.4 When there's so much we don't—and can't—know about how to protect ourselves and our communities, wellness becomes about a series of decisions and negotiations, rather than a definitive destination. But for many marginalized individuals, it has also always been this way.Health, wellness, and healing are a privilege, and not something everyone has access to. I started a virtual drama therapy private practice in the midst of the pandemic, and as an openly nonbinary drama therapist, the clients who have sought me out are almost exclusively nonbinary, or else exploring gender or sexuality. One client, new to therapy, expressed not having sought it previously out of the assumption of not being able to find a therapist who could meet them in the fullness of their identities. This hesitation mirrors my own history: I became a drama therapist due to my own frustrations with finding culturally competent mental health care and still struggle regarding this in my own healing work.I have an altar in my living room filled with candles wrapped with photographs of queer role models: Sylvia Rivera, Margaret Cho, Jonathan Van Ness, and even Carrie Fisher and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who get honorary status). Although these altar candles might seem sacrilegious, who says an individual must be granted sainthood by an official authority? I light the respective candle when I need to draw in some aspect of that individual's energy for support. Combining role theory in drama therapy with a spiritual self-care practice, embodying a queer lineage of community activists and change-makers, I feel held by their light even as I quarantine alone in my apartment. Can this be considered therapy? If it helps, does it matter?Many of my clients start to engage in creative projects between sessions. Often, any given session is predicated on what they created over the last week. This breaks down the presumed power dynamic of therapist as healer and client as healee, the arts becoming a vehicle through which individuals heal themselves. Scientific evidence is starting to illustrate what many marginalized individuals have long known: resilience “moves through the body . . . is neither built nor developed; it is taken in and expressed as part of a larger relationship with a family, a group, a community, or the world at large.”5 Healing is possible where a relationship exists; the relationship between therapist and client is only one possible relationship where healing occurs.One of the most healing moments I personally engaged in during the pandemic was at a virtual social for this same group of disabled queers. We began by engaging in a communal scream over Zoom, muting audio, but seeing the faces of fellow participants mirroring our own. Creative self-expression is an important aspect of trauma healing, as trauma is stored as emotions, somatic sensations, or images that cannot be easily put into words. Drama therapy resists the notion that one must create a cohesive narrative to heal trauma, opening space for individuals to discover or create their own unique healing rituals. For marginalized individuals continually experiencing trauma and violence at the hands of oppressive systems, there may never be a moment in time where all that traumatic energy is completely resolved. But building in a pressure valve, through community-centered strategies and rituals, creates pockets of healing, belonging, release, and joy along the way.Drama therapy posits that we are a constellation of the roles we enact, which means I am always already a work in progress. It also means I can intentionally build a relationship between aspects of myself and engage in a healing dialogue. I take a holistic approach to therapy, picking up whatever thread presents itself in a session, and trusting that whatever has the most energy today will tie back into the greater whole, possibly in a way that is not currently evident. Clients who feel frustrated with the U.S. health-care system's focus on “solutions-focused brief therapy” find solace in this process—where therapy is a journey of self-discovery, and we are creating the map of the territory together. For many queer individuals, “the constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment.”6 When the future isn't guaranteed, it can be hard to imagine what we are propelling ourselves toward. And although many rush to vaccinate so society can “get back to normal,” their wish ignores the lived experience of those who don't have a “normal” to get back to.Perhaps out of sheer habit, many social interactions still begin with, “How are you?” I've started joking that I refuse to answer, as the obvious answer is that none of us are okay. Drama therapy leaves room for such a question to be answered with movement, vocalization, or gesture—possibly even the aforementioned screaming! I have shifted from the pressure to perform the role of Health or Normalcy, instead striving to stay in tune with bodily sensations encouraging me to pause, rest, or ask for help. I've gotten accustomed to being simultaneously okay and very much not okay in any given moment. By engaging the body, drama therapy creates room to be present with whatever is here in the moment and removes pressure to condense those lived experiences into a verbal narrative. This allows therapy to manifest Halberstam's “queer time and space,” resisting the pressure white supremacy culture places on mental health services to return individuals to a state of productivity and functioning under late capitalism. We don't have to DO anything. We can just BE. Together.