"It’s become a yearly tradition for us at The Open Minds Project to have an end of year check in. The ‘holiday season’ is supposed to be a time when people have more time and are able to see people who are important to them."

"At it’s core, it’s about treating yourself with the kindness, care and love that you would you give to someone who was dependent on you to help them live well and thrive."

"Sometimes the meaning of words become lost. Love is a big part of our lives, something we crave and search for, but when is the last time you sat down to think about what the word ‘love’ actually means?"

"Do you have a faith and is it something that you were born into, or was it something that came into your life as an adult? If you’re not religious, how do you feel about the rituals and practices of those people who do practice a faith? "

"You can think about your identities as being objects that you keep inside a house. This house has a few different rooms and only you get to choose who can enter which room. There are rooms that you would be happy to show strangers or people that don’t know you well, and there are rooms where you keep your most precious things, which can include the parts of your identity which mean the most to you. "

"Have you ever heard of the identity onion before? Well if you think of your identity like an onion with an outside and an inside, then if we cut this onion in half, what would we see. What identities would be easy for us to see on the outside, and which identities to you keep much more hidden at the core of your onion?"

"Are you Punjabi British? Are you Asian British? Are you British at all? Are you Punjabi but can’t speak Punjabi? Identity is a complicated thing and no matter how many times we talk about it in our groups, the conversation always brings up new ideas or new ways of thinking about the same things."

"It’s not always helpful to think about ‘good and bad’ types of people, as we all have good and bad qualities in our nature. Sometimes it’s the people that we’re around that bring out these good and bad qualities, and at May’s Open Minds Online group we started our conversation by thinking about what toxic or negative relationships have looked like for us."

Is it important for you to see people that look like you or think/feel the same way as you do? Let us put it a different way – do you remember the first time you saw another LGBTQIA+ person who had the same skin colour or heritage as you and how did this make you feel?

We started our March group with a discussion about the importance of family in our lives and the differences between the families that we were born into and the ones we have created for ourselves through our connections with friends and partners. In many Punjabi and South Asian cultures, the word family can also be knotted together with ideas about duty, responsibility and reputation and non-heterosexual families are still a taboo topic.

Who are you and how do you know who you are? What is your hxstory and how has your life journey so far shaped your identity? This month, we decided to try and answer some of these questions by asking the group to bring along a photo from their past that had importance for them.

Being LGBTQ+ doesn’t automatically mean that we have had hard childhoods or problems with being close to others, but it probably increases the chances of us being shamed in situations where we showed our authentic selves to people who didn’t want to accept or celebrate our honesty.