Most of us learn to split ourselves long before we ever learn to love ourselves. For filmmaker, writer, and soft-skills trainer Chris McNeany, those splits widened through grief, caregiving, and the quiet pressure to be “put together.” But in this episode of Embracing All of Me, Chris reveals how losing the people he loved most, and discovering the pieces of himself he’d long ignored, brought him closer to wholeness than he’d imagined possible.
Years before his films reached millions, Chris was a caregiver to his grandmother through pancreatic cancer and later to his mother through glioblastoma. He describes those months as raw, unfiltered, and strangely clarifying. When someone is dying, the masks fall off. His traditionally Catholic mother became startlingly honest, shedding beliefs that had once shaped her identity, including her early discomfort with Chris’s queerness. Watching her soften toward his husband, seeing the love between them override old doctrine, became one of grief’s unexpected gifts.
Caregiving also forced Chris to confront his own humanity: his exhaustion, his tenderness, and the truth that grief isn’t something you get over. It waits for you in hospital hallways, in white-walled apartments, in the sudden scent that reminds you of a life you lost.
LGBTQ adults are significantly more likely to become caregivers, often carrying emotional and logistical burdens in silence. For Chris, that silence became a catalyst: Life is short. So why not build the life you want now?
That question led him back to entrepreneurship, to storytelling, and to exploring the parts of desire he’d once judged in himself. His viral short film More Than He Knows offered a tender, joyful portrayal of bisexuality, devoid of tropes, shame, or tragedy. His new feature, The Foot Longing, digs even deeper into identity, fetish, grief, and the ways shame keeps us from intimacy. Not to shock, but to humanize.
Chris’s journey is a reminder that embracing all of ourselves, our losses, our longings, our contradictions, isn’t indulgent. It’s liberating. And it’s often the doorway to the connection we’ve been craving all along.
Listen to the full episode for a real conversation about identity, caregiving, kink, queerness, and the courage it takes to live a life big enough for all of your desires.