The Christian Right abuses gay children. It absolutely does. It instills in them, from the time that they are very small, guilt for committing an adult sin. The Christian Right makes gay children walk around feeling bad about the sins they’re going to commit as adults while they’re still children. Straight children are applauded on figuring out who they are, while gay children are told to repress, repress, repress. Sexual thoughts are relentless when you’re a teen, so basically, the Christian Right takes each of those beautiful, natural moments of young desire and turns them into a tattoo gun that constantly inks the word “sinner” right across a child’s soul.

The thing is, I grew up as a Methodist preacher’s kid in Northeast Texas. When I was 12, we moved to Houston. The culture shock was great, but it had nothing to do with my father’s ministry. It wasn’t his churches that weren’t welcoming. It was the other churches around me that created monsters that I had to live with at school.

The Christian Right abuses gay children by teaching straight children that gay children are bad. While you think you’re just teaching them what God believes, your little fuckers are stuffing children into lockers or bullying them on the internet. The Christian Right hides behind an amazing amount of hypocrisy, because they will not directly accept accountability for creating the idea that gay people are lesser than and therefore okay to blatantly use and abuse.

But the main point I’m making here is that you’re asking children to take on responsibility for sins they will commit, and are then afraid to commit them, because your sin structure needs some cleaning up and you refuse to do it. Myths are explained by science and culture evolves. Something else becomes a myth because this one’s done.

But how do you get someone who believes the world was created in six days to comprehend the vastness of the universe? It is mind-boggling to even try. So I don’t.

I just remind them that every day their gay sons and daughters live in their houses, they die a little bit inside. I also remind them that it is super-weird to over-focus on one of your kid’s sex lives because it’s going to be different than your others. My parents didn’t do this to me, but I saw a lot of friends go through a lot of unspeakable brutality due to this very thing.

I got used to hearing stories about fathers and sons raping their lesbian daughters/sisters, trying to get her to change. While sexual abuse does happen to boys, I didn’t have very many male friends who were willing to talk about it. One in four American women is sexually molested; I think women have a more tacit approval to discuss these things. I got my statistic from The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2001. I am sure that it is much, much higher by now.

So in addition to being nervous about having lesbian sex with her loving partner in the future, there are baby lesbians being raped by their brothers and fathers right now.

The Christian Right abuses gay children. I cannot say it enough.

The thing is, no matter how you have been abused, it changes you. Just because you cannot see physical scars does not mean that they do not exist. My scar is that my comfort zone is about thisbig. When I was a kid, I had a friend who was A LOT older confide some things in me that should never have been confided from adult to kid. I am not sure that my friend would have even cared if I’d told anyone, but it didn’t matter. There was no one to tell. Everyone who saw the relationship knew it was off, and many people tried to dissuade me.

That version of “off” created so many trust issues in me that I don’t know where to begin. I don’t have friends. Not really. I have Dana and a few people that are close to me. The rest are either Fanagans or acquaintances. Of the people that are close to me, only one or two at a time get private time with me. It is not that I don’t care; it is that I do not have the emotional stamina to handle more than that. It’s not me trying to control a situation so much as it is me trying to control the possible number of things that could go wrong in said outing.

Nothing’s going to go wrong. I’m just nervous. There’s no reason to be nervous.

When I was younger, I would say that I was sick because I was. My mind would play these horrible tricks on me where I wasn’t being invited because I was fun to be with, jolly, etc. I was being invited to be the scapegoat and the court jester. Not wanting to play either one of those roles forced me more into my shell, so I just decided to stop going out. We weren’t making much money, anyway, so it made more sense. I felt anxious about getting out socially, so naturally, we’ll just bring the party to us.

And then I host parties and in about the middle, I’m done. I start acting like the classic second child who thinks her imaginary friend won’t play with her.

There has got to be a way to handle all of this social anxiety, but I know that I can’t do it with medication alone. It’s not a chemical imbalance. It’s an old tape that says, “you can’t trust anyone but me.” If the abuser is good enough, and mine was, he or she will make that tape speak louder than any relationship in your life.

Your mom.
Your dad.
Your sister.

I was so little, and my relationship with my abuser was such that it obliterated all of the other three.

As an adult, this manifests itself with me trying to go through life only trusting my abuser, because that’s what abusers do. They make you think that there is no other opinion that is right except for theirs… to the point that you will defend what they say against the Bible and the dictionary.

And that’s where I am now. I am so much better than I was when I began this journey, but changing my mental relationship with my abuser is what I now know is my life’s work. I don’t like that my emotional response system is so temperamental that I can’t trust it. I don’t like the things in my own mind that I can’t seem to change, because the thought is so deep-seeded.

Because as I get older, this mild distrust of everyone is descending into “maybe we should stay home.” That way, I don’t have to meet any new people, and I can stay in my own little bubble of fear. It’s worth changing. It’s worth letting a little light in. I just have to find the magic words that will fill me with sunshine, and make my mind’s eye blink because it’s so bright.

Dear Leslie,

I live in a small 2 bedroom house with hardwood floors. I have my bedroom as well as an animal room for my chinchillas, 3 resident dogs (a pitbull, a pit-lab x, and a deaf and blind blue heeler). I also have 1-3 foster dogs of varying breeds living with me at any given time as I run/work with a dog rescue. Giving up having the dogs around is well beyond out of the question as rescuing is a part of me. No matter how much I sweep, mop and clean, 30 seconds after I’m done it looks as though I haven’t cleaned in weeks. Beyond the hair/ dust on the floor I’m concerned about allergens that are certainly floating around in the air. I’m thinking of maybe starting to see this guy who so far is awesome but has pretty severe allergies- though I don’t know how allergic he is to dogs. How can I keep my house clean enough that I can feel comfortable to invite him over to hang out with out worrying that he’ll go into anaphylactic shock?

Signed,
Ahhhh-choo

First of all, if you’re coming to me for cleaning advice, you must really be desperate. The best thing that you can do is just clean when you can. If your guy can’t fit into that, then maybe he’s not worth putting the effort into when it comes into the long-term. People will be able to look at your life, dogs and all, and realize that there is no taking you away from it. It is a 24/7 operation. If anyone wants to take you away from the dogs because it makes your house messy, that’s the time to stand up and say, “thanks for playing.”

If your guy truly is allergic, that’s his problem. I suggest an antihistamine every day, because you can’t use Zyrtec/Claritin/Allegra for spot treatment. It takes about six weeks for the histamine blockers to get to maximum efficacy.

Yes, my stepmom is a doctor. Yes, I really do talk like that.

Love,

The AntiLeslie

My relationship with my apartment is changing, mostly due to an influx of energy from feeling good all the time. I know I rant and rave on my web site, but because I get my anger out here, I’m free the rest of the time to feel fantastic. If you are confused about how this happens, just think of Leslie and The AntiLeslie as two separate people who only need one number in your cell phone. Just like Jackson Pollack, I don’t just pitch my art. I wind up. I get fired up. So it’s not just an essay coming at you, it’s RRRRRAAAGGGGHHHHH! I FEEL X ABOUT X!!!! Then, you meet me in real life, and you wonder where that lady went. She’s been replaced by a Rainbow Brite doll.

In the past, my real underlying emotions were hidden, so I constantly felt bad about myself. I’d separated myself into two distinct personalities; I had one for school and home, and one for being with parishioners. It was the only way I could make it through the day, because I was so shy and introverted. Summer camp was a nightmare unless my mom was there (it was Choir Camp). She’d let me into her cabin to give me a break. I was too afraid to ask strangers.

Working on those kinds of issues has made me a better person; I think I deserve more, so I put more into me. Today, I cleaned my office and baked chocolate chip cookies. Dana is going to freak when she comes home because I’ve hidden her DVDs and VHSs. Notice that she doesn’t use any of them because we have streaming media, but there they are, hanging out and taking up space.

Not anymore. Know that if I do not post tomorrow, come over and make sure I’m okay. 😉

I put all of Dana’s media into her footlocker (that way, they’re easily portable if she decides to get rid of them). If I had enough boxes, I’d do the same with her books. We read our Kindles incessantly, and the number of books we own to the number of books we get out and read is ridiculous. Of course I’m okay with keeping sentimental things, but at the same time, we are ADD and the dust gets ridiculous because we constantly forget that dust is sitting in the books and someone should clean them.

Our apartment needs serious work, and I mean that on the management level, not that the apartment is dirty. I am sure that they want us to move out; we sent them a registered letter of complaint and prayer for relief…. still, no response. Therefore, I think I just want to start doing some of the stuff myself. It’s just too dangerous to step on carpet tacks on a daily basis. If you think the management doesn’t want to fix the water damage in our ceiling, it is nothing compared to the contempt they have for us because we asked them to replace our carpet. It’s become a safety issue, and I think we’re being iced out. They’re “losing money” on us because Dana’s lived in that apartment for over 13 years. The rent hasn’t risen but about $150 since she moved in.

All the units in our complex are being remodeled as people move out, and then the management is charging them quite a bit more because the apartment is so much nicer. How dare we continue to live in a spot where we’re getting a great deal! It’s the only reason we can afford to live in our neighborhood. I live two miles from downtown. There’s nowhere around here that will match what we pay.

So, we’re pretty much here for good… unless moving to Washington really will save us lots of money. We need to run the numbers before we even consider it. Let’s table that discussion.

Back to where I live now.

You only get as much out of a relationship as you put into it. I found that I wasn’t putting enough energy into my living space, so I started. Cleaning is fun again, when it wasn’t for a very long time. I was so wrapped up in my depression that I couldn’t hack it. I stopped taking care of myself, to the point of not bathing. I hadn’t even been good enough to deserve those things.

And that’s how depression works, at least for me. I shame myself into thinking that I don’t deserve family, friends, a clean house, a clean body. Those are luxuries for people who do things, who accomplish things… and here I am, just me. I was born eight weeks early, I have a palsy in my brain, I have lateral isotropia/strabismus, and from the minute I was born, nobody thought I’d do anything. It was doubtful that I’d even walk. As a result, it is a learned behavior in me that constantly says, “I’m too little/not strong enough/can’t take it.” It is a running tape in my head, because I just don’t act like other people act. I don’t get it. I feel the constant struggle of a “day late and a dollar short.” I don’t move in the world the way other people do, and I finally have some acceptance of it. People aren’t sure what to do with me. I got tired of not knowing what to do with me.

I’m sure it evokes some sort of pity in other people, but at the same time, that’s not what I’m trying to get across here.

My mother helped me learn to walk; now I have to learn to fly.

For me, the first step is making my apartment beautiful.

Earlier today, I wrote a letter to a 13-year-old lesbian in love with a 13-year-old straight girl. It shook me into the reality of being a gay teenager, and these memories just started pouring out.

———————

The first time I really crossed a line with a straight friend, I was about ten years old. I was at a slumber party, and I grabbed her hand while she was sleeping. Of course I got caught. Are you kidding me? It was a nightmare. I learned then that if I wanted to hold another girl’s hand, I just needed to keep it to myself. In northeast Texas, in the ’80s, there wasn’t a lot of “no, thank you.”

From then on, I thought I was a total freak of nature. Two and a half years later, the idea was reinforced to me when I met another lesbian for the first time. It got real, fast. I learned that you could lose your job just for loving women. I learned that gay people were thought of as pedophiles (though this is changing- it was 1990 at the time). I learned that being married to a woman was just as complicated and wonderful as being married to a man.

But even then, you couldn’t say anything. Back then, you had to play the pronoun game. The pronoun game is something that all gay people use when people are asking them about their lives and they don’t want to reveal that they’re gay via conversation. Every same-sex pronoun is changed to opposite; eventually, you’ll slip up one too many times, and by the time you tell everyone you’re gay, you won’t get the reaction you’ve been expecting.

They already knew. They saw you hiding it and just didn’t say anything until you were ready to have the conversation.

It always bothered me that I knew I was gay when I was a child, and yet, there are still people in my life that would call me a sinner; I am. I know I am. But not about this. They attribute characteristics in me to a global conspiracy instead of looking at their memories of me and deciding, “hey… wait a second… she’s been gay the whole time.” When I came out as a lesbian, I did not grow three heads or anything. I was just a normal kid.

I don’t think very many people saw that. I wasn’t born late enough to get the benefit of gay marriage being so out and forefront in people’s minds. When I came out, it would never have occurred to me to ask if I could get married, because I was a sinner and I knew it.

I carried a lot of weight on my shoulders due to the time in which I was born. Being a lesbian was akin to trying to find the Underground Railroad. Someone that knew a path to bring you to safety. I had that person; many of my friends did not. In those days, some of my gay friends were homeless, kicked out for no reason except loving people of the same sex rather than opposite.

It feels like I have an amazing amount of emotional scars from my childhood, and as I work through them, I realize the miracle that the generation after me is going to be.

I was shunned and isolated, but let us all hope that from this day forward, we all have the ability to be inclusive. I can’t imagine what a difference it would have made in my life if being gay just felt like a part of life instead of a sin equated with adultery.

As a child, I believed that I was caught. I was going to have to live on the outside of society, peering in, for the entirety of my life. Now the pendulum has shifted; the things I believed would get me killed are now perfectly normal and I’m still reacting like my 13-year-old self. I would like to think that I react in the same way that those in the Depression horded pennies for years afterward. At the same time, though, I don’t want to feel old. I don’t want to feel like people are going to react to me the same way they did when homosexuality was generally thought to be some sort of disease. Some claimed you could even cure it!

Until now, I’ve lived in a pretty small comfort zone. I get wild, crazy, loud, etc. when I’m with my friends at parties and such, but it takes a lot of self-confidence to feel comfortable. Most of the time, I’m just a tender, quiet geek who’d rather type to her readers than try to gather the energy to go out.

As one part of a lesbian couple, “out there” has always felt a little bit intimidating. Now I know that it started in my teenage self, and even though I need to keep working on what I need to do, I can give myself a break.

I come by my flaws honestly.

If you hear nothing else in this essay, hear this: help the gay children around you to just be kids. Stop discrimination when you can, and model for your straight children that being gay is no different than being straight. It’s the modeling part that’s hard. Say it all you want, but your actions have to line up.

Otherwise, gay children will continue to be afraid of the world around them… because it’s scary to feel that you are a mistake.

I have a youth pastor friend who asked me for something I’d written about baby lesbians who hit on straight girls, and invariably get their hearts broken. He had a baby lesbian in his youth group flirt with one of the straight girls, and the straight girl says something to the effect of, “maybe we could date on a trial basis.” I do not think that the straight girl was actually interested. I think that she wanted to put off that inevitable moment of rejection when the person who loves you doesn’t love you back. I told my youth pastor friend that I would write a personal response back to her, and post it here.

Dear Amy,*

Ohhhh, honey. Let me tell you the sad truth about straight women. They can’t change their wiring any more than you can. It does happen that love can transcend gender, but it doesn’t happen very often… especially not in middle school. In middle school, you’re still trying to figure yourself out. Telling people that you’re gay or bisexual is scary, even if everybody is really cool with it. You’ll breathe a sigh of relief when it’s finished, but nothing tops the butterflies before you have to say those words now. I still get them, and I’m 35.

I was like you when I was your age. I had crushes on all kinds of women, both gay and straight. Here’s what I have the benefit of knowing now that I didn’t know then: it hurts to be rejected no matter which gender you love.

Either way, you’re going to have to nurse your pride, eat a lot of ice cream, and throw yourself into your homework and activities. Staying busy will help keep your mind off things.

I know that 13-year-old love is so tender and real. I’m sorry that it’s not likely your friend wants to date you. I’m sorry that she wasn’t brave in the moment and said so, because you got your hopes up, and that hurts worse than anything else.

You will feel like complete and total crap for a few days, so treat yourself well. Get plenty of sleep, treat yourself to soda and junk food, take lots of bubble baths, and read good books.

If you have to run into your crush at school, you might want to tell her that she hurt your feelings, but that you know she was embarrassed and you forgive her. It isn’t right to be mad at someone just because you can’t be their girlfriend. If she is as good a friend to you after you tell her this as she was before, then you should know that she is a friend worth keeping. You’ll listen to sad music on this very topic (see every song ever written). Eventually, the crush will go away, and you’ll be back to playing XBOX in no time (or whatever it is that your people do).

Eventually, you will realize that a relationship finds you, instead of the other way around.

Chin up, Amy. It gets better.

Love,

TheAuntieLeslie

Here is what I have learned about pot since Washington, the state literally 20 minutes north of my front door, has now legalized small amounts. My friends that live in states where it’s still illegal are starting to ask the questions that other states have already answered. I’m not talking about people that were potheads to begin with. If you want street drugs, you’ll find where to get them. I’m talking about people that you’d never expect would ask you those questions in a million years.

I’m still in the stage where it’s embarrassing to talk about pot, even though I live in a place where it’s generally considered no big deal. I was raised in the South, and I have very strict definitions of what I’d consider polite conversation. Of course, when I check in with myself and realize that what people are saying is, “why is pot a big deal? Should I try it?” Before, I thought of those people asking questions as invading my privacy. Now pot is on the Today show, the nightly news, etc. I just have to get my shit together and adjust… society is already doing it for me.

In Oregon, we have what is called Medical Marijuana. I didn’t really understand the concept. To me, no doctor in the world should ever have to write a prescription for Train Wreck. There hasn’t been a whole lot to change my mind, because there are so few ailments that to me, really qualify pot as treatment. Most of the time, I think it is prescribed as “treatment.”

What started to change my mind about using pot as treatment came from this web site. I’d never thought of using cannabis balm or cream for spot treatment of injuries or relief from arthritis. I realized that I was quite uneducated and I began to read. Interestingly enough, the reason I was reading was because of an arthritis patient in her 60s who saw it on television, and just wondered if it worked.

Which brings me to my next cultural point about the Pacific Northwest. When I came here, it shocked the hell out of me that some of the grandmas and grandpas were bigger potheads than their grandchildren. Texas, where I was raised, never taught me that old people could use street drugs. But now it’s not a street drug. It’s a medicine.

My wild hair attitude and my Southern upbringing are fighting this one out. Part of me says that I canNOT talk about this. It’s just too weird, especially when the questioner is old enough to check into a retirement home. It reminds me of a story from when I was a teenager. My sister was watching TV in her room, and my dad stopped by to check in. He asked if he could sit down with her, and she said, “You don’t watch MTV WITH YOUR DA-aaaad.” Just as a teenager does not want their parents in the room while they’re watching Undressed (my particular favorite on MTV when I was a teen), I do not want to answer questions from old people about marijuana. It gives me that same feeling that every child gets when their parent says something to the effect of “now we’re going to talk about sex.”

When I get back into my body, though, what I hear is that “you are not a Texan anymore. You live in a different cultural mindset, and you don’t have to apologize for it.” My work on the subject of pot is to stop being afraid of talking about it- in the same way that I had to learn that in Portland, holding a woman’s hand on the street wasn’t going to get me served a huge helping of verbal and (frighteningly) physical abuse. Living in the South had me so trained to watch my back that I still treat Dana more as my friend than my wife when we’re out.

I have to consciously put myself out there to take her hand, and I do it. Just like I will learn not to react like a deer in headlights when an elderly person thinks that pot is the new Oil of Olay.

Dana tells me that I talked for two solid hours, and told me that I needed to write because I was talking like I was writing. I don’t know how much of it to believe, because as I’m sure that some of my readers can attest, Dana has an interesting relationship with the truth. I’m not calling her out on it, because I think that I do, too. It’s just that her version of truth is often more dramatic than the actual situation at hand. I’m sure people would say that about me, too. I’m probably just getting a taste of my own medicine.

When Dana told me this, it sent up a huge red flag. It could be a sign that my medication isn’t working, that something is physically wrong with me, or that it just seemed like two hours. It also felt as if she was saying to me, “I don’t want to listen to you, so go tell someone else.” That is the biggest hot button issue I have- when someone close to me says that I talk too much and to just, in a sense, go away. It’s not Dana’s fault. That hot button has been there since I was 13. She does have to deal with me when I’m scared and lonely, however.

As I have said before in this web site, I was keeping secrets for a friend that a teenager should never have had to keep. As I grew, the friend became more and more distant, and all of the sudden, I didn’t have a place to go with those secrets anymore.

I don’t mean to imply that what I learned was all that bad. In fact, if I had been an adult, there would be no problem whatsoever. I wasn’t, though, and I learned a lot of operant conditioning- “if you do this, X will happen.” X was whatever behavior in which I learned my part of the dance.

I was not trained to deal with being an adult at 13, but I did my best. I think I was pretty good at it, but it limited me socially. I was much older than my peers, emotionally and spiritually. I retreated into myself, and just wrote and wrote and wrote. Tackling a blank page was my therapy, and it went well. Because I have been a writer for a long time, I have consistently had a way to deal with my problems. Art comes from pain, and there’s a lot in me. Getting it out is my way of funneling anger into beauty.

Because of writing, I never felt alone. Even if I didn’t have my friend in the corporeal sense, she was in my head. She became a diary in which I could grow and develop from the inside out.

It was also a dark time in my life because I related more to a blank page than I did to live people. When I was a preacher’s kid, it was easy to put on the mask of separation. Ministers and their families have the same problems as everyone else, but lay people have a hard time believing it. Living in the fish bowl wasn’t that bad, actually, because no one ever knew the real me. The real me was in a notebook at the back of my closet.

The same friend, so amazing as a pen pal, predictably turned out to be much different than expected when the pages and pages of letters over the years turned into you and me, face to face. Because I was only myself in my letters, she knew everything there was to know about me, except my behavior.

It is a terrible conundrum, because for me, face-to-face had to somehow line up with reality, didn’t it? Phone calls weren’t nothing, were they? Here I am, all of about 19 years old, tortured with my friend’s secrets and now I couldn’t even talk to her about them, either. The balance of power was off to the point of insanity, and neither one of us could figure out why, until the scary truth found me in a pink and purple book called The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize It and How to Respond, by Patricia Evans. It gave me the coping mechanisms to see that I had unintentionally been manipulated because my friend needed someone to listen and I was completely harmless. The amount of emotion that she was pouring into me had some unintended consequences, and I grew up fast… both in thinking that by confiding in me, it created some sort of romantic notion that she wanted me to protect her like a husband… and that by confiding in me, she wanted me to protect her like a father. Passionate and companionate love swirled in me until I no longer recognized myself. I wanted to invert our relationship the way children of alcoholics start to raise their parents. The amazing thing is that I really thought I could do it. Every day, I’d walk past a sign in seventh grade homeroom that said, “hire a teenager while they still know everything.” I’d think to myself, “if you only knew…”

The passionate love ended when my friend got married, but the companionate love didn’t. I was hooked into the grip of thinking that my friend needed me to protect her, and because it was a learned behavior in childhood, it wasn’t anything to mess around with. It was so intrinsic to my personality that I am now rewiring almost a quarter century of memories so that I can learn to act appropriately.

By that, I mean that enablers are used to being caught in the grip of their abuser’s sunshine. She gave me so much love that my heart would flip when she walked into a room. It felt to me like the air changed, and I choose to believe that it did.

The problem is that with abusers, the sunshine doesn’t last. It is a ploy to get your attention so that they can use you for something. The dopamine in your brain gets used to the heightened sensation of emotional sunshine and then, usually without rhyme or reason, the abuser disappears… often without saying goodbye.

In my experience, which is vast, this is because abusers feel guilty about the way they’ve treated their enablers. If you have been abused in any way, there is only a small percent chance that you will ever receive the apology that you’ve been waiting for a very long time.

If you get the apology that you’re looking for, there is a large chance that your abuser has not grown with you, and will not hesitate to step all over you if you are determined to believe that all relationships go through a few troubles and this time will be different.

In my case, “this time will be different” came around several times, and each time, I fell for it hook, line, & sinker. Each time, the sunshine lasted until I started to emote. I couldn’t talk about my feelings and my e-mails became “emotional bombs.” What used to be keeping all my friend’s secrets became “let me dump all my crap on you and mysteriously disappear when you need me for anything at any time.”

I was silly to go back for seconds, and disastrous to myself when I thought it was okay to try thirds.

My friend agreed to meet with me, and I told her that I was not in a good emotional place. Please don’t let me down again.

A few days later, still in the same emotional place I was in when I said, “please don’t let me down again,” I got an e-mail saying we were beyond reconciliation. It was just one more “thanks for being my friend since you were a teenager, now let me spit venom in your eye.”

My problem is that I was willing to wait until I got verbal venom before I was willing to admit that my friend wasn’t.

The revelation in my mind was that I never intended to treat myself so badly. For so many years, I waited for a moment that was never to come, and that future lived with me for a long time until it collapsed under its own dead weight.

I tell this story to bring it back around to Dana, and how I’m so sensitive to the way we talk to each other (about certain things, anyway). When she says things like, “you talked for two solid hours,” I only have one response- “why didn’t you stop me? Why did you just let me keep talking instead of telling me to shut up?” If people are passive aggressive, they rob one of a chance to correct their behavior and the other of compassion and forgiveness when they learn the other side of the story. They just get more and more resentful.

I get verbal diarrhea trying to start conversations with people who are totally absorbed in their screens. I want someone to interact with; every once in a while, I’ll try to think of another cool thing to say that will grab someone’s attention because I feel like no one is listening to me… another direct hit from my abuser. I try to start conversations because it seems nicer than “you’ve been on your phone for an hour playing Candy Crush Saga. I’m really sorry to bother you while you totally check out.” In response, people get more and more involved with their screens because you’re trying to get them to interact. It is a Catch-22, and I am often thought of as high-maintenance because I think human interaction is important for me to maintain the personality I have in public. Equally as important as the one I have online.

Now that I’m writing and people know that I have an outlet, they’d rather just read what’s happening on my blog.

And again, no one knows the real me.

It’s a good thing I do.

Actor Cory Montieth’s death hit me hard, because he was only a few years younger than me. It’s this 30’s thing. We all get to our thirties and we all start to deal with the issues that didn’t get resolved in childhood/adolescence. For Cory, it was alcohol addiction. For us, it’s X. X takes many forms, whether it’s neglect, stress, hunger, abuse… the list goes on and on. Your thirties are when you start to realize that you are indeed not bulletproof, and something will get you. Your addict friends are finding this out more quickly than you are, because as a progressive disease, your addict friends are starting to care whether they make it out of said addiction alive. Because like Cory, they struggle with the handcuffs and the ring- the seduction of a perfect glass of whiskey and not caring about consequences such as killing others or even themselves. Logically, they know they can die. Emotionally, who gives a fuck? It’s just one drink.

I have been dealing with abuse of my own- carrying secrets that no one should have to carry as a child. No ability to tell anyone that I was carrying said secrets. No validation whether I was doing the right or the wrong thing. No ability to stop protecting the people who were abusing me because the pattern had been set up before I knew what patterns were. I was young and impressionable; now, I am not. It is my job to go back and unpack these years, and learn to protect myself as opposed to everyone else. It’s something I know logically, but emotionally? No one has ever been able to tell their hearts what to do. You might have a shot with your brain, but you are never going to win with your heart.

The answer to this is meditation. The cognitive dissonance that you are experiencing is deafening. You cannot do anything else but turn this one mind worm in your head over and over, as if it is on a spit. To quiet your mind, you must quiet your body.

Quieting your body might require talking to it- a soothing voice to ease your muscles into alignment. When you are seated comfortably, you have opened yourself to the entirety of your thoughts. You can see them like a universe filled with stars. You close your eyes, and they rotate, rushing toward you. You only have to pick one as they float by.

The one you pick is your starting line. Concentrate on that one memory until you have grasped the meaning of it… until you have grokked the entirety surrounding it. Still your mind into a “people mover” of thoughts. Concentrate on one thing until you are ready to put it away.

I learned this from realizing that I had to get through almost 25 years of memories, and I could not take them in all at once. It was too close, too damaging to try and live in the past, present, and future at the same time. To me, that is the single reason that you cannot look directly at the face of God. For me, the analogy that works the best is from the British TV show, Doctor Who. The Master goes insane when he is a little boy from looking directly at the time vortex. The past, the present, and the future combined to create a scene so full of terror that The Master is changed forever.

In a sense, I think that this is what we do to ourselves when we keep those insecurities and fears from getting a proper release. You know what you didn’t get in childhood. You know how to give yourself those things, instead of asking for them from others. It’s just that you won’t find them until you give yourself a chance to think.

How much time per day do you spend thinking about yourself? How much do you dream about where you want to go? How much time do you spend raging about things that are unfair, unjust, anger-inducing? Meditation can take all of that. I call the source God, you can call the source whatever it is that you want. But as I have said before, God is willing to act as your personal punching bag so that you can work out what ever it is that you need to work out so that you’re mad at God instead of the people around you. Let go of all the fear, all the anxiety, all the everything. Just scream it at God if you need to. Because at the end, you will feel more spent than you ever have in your life, and the greatest peace. You know why? Because you sat there and talked to someone who doesn’t have a horse in the race. God doesn’t care if you’re a sinner or not. God doesn’t care if you’re an angel or not. God is the big, immovable force that provides resistance when we need someone to use and abuse.

You know why? Because we all have that potential as humans, and better to get out our anger against God than to raise up against ourselves, our families, our friends. Because God is big enough to take it, while the humans around us aren’t. When you take out your frustration on God, you release yourself from the strain of having terrible relationships because you’re directing your anger at your friends instead of the deity that cannot be offended.

When God says that there is nothing you can do to separate yourself from God’s love, it’s all in there. All the crap you give other people that you can’t get away with when you’re alone. All the anger you wish you could scream. All the tears you wish would fall. God will take them all.

Let God be the punching bag, instead of making your family stand in. Your anger is yours, not theirs. They deserve your love, and you deserve theirs. But you will not believe it until your anger is out of your body and you are capable of taking it in. So much love is lost because we just can’t believe it’s there.

Trust me.

It.

Is.

The original article was written in 2005, by a group I belonged to then called “RevGalBlogPals.” I wasn’t a minister, just a velveteen one, and they let me join anyway. The questions are so good, I want to try and answer them every few years.

Am I content with who I am becoming?

Finally, blessedly, yes. I have been trying to help myself for years, but it wasn’t until I met my current pastor that I felt safe enough to be able to let my guard down and just let her take care of me in the way that my pastor should have been doing all along. Because my dad was a pastor when I was little, I am a terrible parishioner… in exactly the same way that a doctor is a terrible patient. Every pastor who’s parented a child will smile when they read this. It is true. Learning to see what other people see in their pastors when they haven’t grown up in the church has been so freeing.

Do my family and friends recognize the authenticity of my Christian spirituality?

I hope so. I think everyone is surprised at the way I approach it, though. I don’t modify my fucking language, I dress however the hell I want, and I don’t care if you like my hair or not. People think that I am an immature Christian because they see my image and not my voice. My image is not for you. It’s for scared teenagers who need someone who looks like they do, talks the way they do, and spends their time in the world looking like an acceptable person to befriend even though they know I’m over 30. Senior pastors, I am THAT youth pastor. You know the one. The one that brings more teens into your church than you know what to do with but at the same time, cannot get me to behave when the bishop comes. Yup, that’s me. Deal.

At the same time, I have been to the mountaintop in terms of sin and have walked away every time because I know for sure that my God is stronger than my temptation for wrongdoing. God is that voice in my head that tells me not to be an asshole. God hears my anger when God tells me that I’m doing something wrong and I don’t want to be told that I’m doing something wrong I want to do what I want to do and you’re not going to stop me goddamnit I’m going to do what I want… God is capable of taking your rage. God is capable of taking your furious justifications for wrongdoing and calmly listens until you are finished. All the way until you are finished. God is the moment that dawns on you when you realize what you’ve really been fighting. God already knows you feel bad, and isn’t adding punishment to what you will already give yourself. God is that one consciousness that sees all the evil in you and just waits for you to figure out on your own which kind of person you choose to be.

Is my prayer life improving?

Everything that I’ve felt my entire life is starting to deepen. If I prayed in my childhood, now I’m praying more, because I feel the same urges I always have, it’s just that now it’s weighted with more meaning. When I concentrate on praying, I have no idea how much time goes by. I am so focused on God seeing everything that it takes me a while to get it all ready. I hem and haw and think and look off into space until a memory catches, and when the dam breaks, God is there to just receive. God receives whatever I feel about the memory that broke me open. Sometimes it’s joy, and sometimes it’s pain. God is a safe space because God has heard me use very colorful language on a number of topics. So, yes. The best thing that has ever happened to me is that I’m not afraid of God anymore. God doesn’t give a fuck whether I say fuck or not. God doesn’t care if I’m gay or not. In fact, I’m pretty sure God has never even noticed. Actually, the one thing God has ever said to me about sexuality is that I was right for being afraid of Angelina Jolie.

Have I maintained a genuine awe of God?

Awe doesn’t even begin to cover it. You only get as much out of a relationship as you put into it, and I learned that lesson indelibly seeing the movie Shadowlands. The movie is about C.S. “Jack” Lewis, a revered theologian and children’s book author. There is one scene that brings me to tears every time, and here it is:

Harry: Christopher can scoff, Jack, but I know how hard you’ve been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.

C. S. Lewis: That’s not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God, it changes me.

I pray because God’s reaction is not my responsibility. I pray because God is big enough to take all my shit. God is big enough to let me be anxious and needy and self-serving and mean and snobby and generous and loving and gorgeous and human because I AM ALL OF IT AND SO IS GOD.

The awe is breathtaking.

Is my lifestyle distinctive?

I may need a few more parameters, but I think I know what you mean. I have no problem talking about my spirituality in public. I think Jesus was one of the best preachers and teachers in the entire history of the world, and I am not threatened by any theological doctrine in all of creation. My God is bigger than all of them combined and you still wouldn’t be able to see a fourth of it. My lifestyle is distinctive BECAUSE YOU CANNOT SAY THAT YOU KNOW GOD BETTER THAN I DO, BITCH! Because the truth is that no one knows God. But we try to anthropomorphize God, anyway. I’m tired of conservative Christians tell me that I’m an outcast, and not because I’m a lesbian. Because even if I was straight I couldn’t swallow their hypocrisy. It makes me feel crazy when I show up at a church and there are clearly imbalances of power between men and women and for people to tell me that I’m a hideous sinner because I don’t realize that women’s subservience is how it’s supposed to be. I’m sorry, what? Jesus was the Gloria Steinem of his day. Do you have any idea how many kinds of weird it was for Jesus to allow Mary of Bethany to sit with him and all the other men while he lectured? Do you know how many rabbinical laws were broken before dinner? Can you imagine having enough power to be able to walk into a room and say, “I’m not going to let you get away with your inequality bullshit as long as I’m here?” If Jesus walked on earth, there is no way he would recognize Christianity. And he for damn sure wouldn’t recognize the whitey with his name on it.

Is my “spiritual feeding” the right diet for me?

It is now. I think that everything I am has led me to this church, and I will not stray. The thing that sets Bridgeport apart is that it is the first church that gave me a chance. They listened to my first sermons, they taught me how to lead a crowd, they’re just there for everything I could need as someone who wants to preach without necessarily being a pastor. My congregation feeds me by being willing to hear me think out loud. I pray just as incessantly as Jack Lewis because I don’t feel a need to prepare for it. Praying is thinking and thinking is praying. I believe all religions have that in common.

Is obedience in small matters built into my reflexes?

Yes, to the point where it has become detrimental to me and I’m trying to undo it. I can’t live this life anymore where people are content to walk all over me and just expect that their behavior is okay. Obedience is a blessing, but so is self-preservation.

Is there enough celebration in my life?

My celebration never ceases to amaze me. I love my friends, I love my family, and I love my wife. She is the cream in my coffee, and grieving her loss would be like trying to replace one of my legs, or Waffle House or something like that. Something that MATTERS.

Am I generous?

I am generous when I remember to live in the vision of bounty instead of scarcity. I cannot be generous when I feel afraid that I will not have enough. When I do have enough, I shower generosity on everything because I am so grateful for what has been given to me.

Do I have a quiet centre to my life?

My quiet center is my friend _______. There are two names that go here, and they both know who they are. One is local, one is not. One sees me all the time, one I’ve never met. But when we are online together, magic happens. We are able to talk about things that are absent in our daily lives but present in the arcs of our lives. It is a deep, abiding love that allows both of us to feel supported all the time and chastised when we need it. Because I want to know the truth, even when it’s bad.

Have I defined my unique ministry?

You’re looking at it right now. 😉

Amen.

I got nothin.’ No one has sent me anything. E-mail me and send me a question, or post it at the bottom. I can’t answer if you don’t question. It’s not as fun if I write the question. I already know what I think about those. 🙂

Drama has just been swirling around my house, but it’s all been of my own making. That’s what being Bipolar II gets me. The ability to create a play even when no one else knows it’s going on. I do not get wigged when other people do not play their parts. People think I do, but my annoyance has nothing to do with the fact that you don’t want to act what I wrote. Nine times out of ten, it’s because the part I wrote for you takes the high road, and people are much more, well, human than that.

I do not try to create drama so much as I learn to function in it. When I was really young, my mentor was an opera singer. When I was a teenager, I went to High School for Performing and Visual Arts. I am a writer who has had some success. There is no moment of my day when I am not able to emote clearly. I may not know exactly what I think, but if what you’re saying is the kind of thing that gets people worked up, it will work on me. In other words, I may not have the response you’re looking for, but I will definitely have a big reaction. I differentiate between the two because a reaction generally doesn’t have any thought behind it.

Incidentally, the difference between reaction and response is one of the joys of my getting older. I don’t have to react to the world, but I do have to respond. Sometimes it’s hard for me not to jump in right away. My mind works at 500 miles an hour. I have to be careful because I know I have a large capacity to hurt people. I’m excellent at being underhanded emotionally, and my life’s work is to heal the rift that made me think this was okay.

It’s hard to say it out loud, that “being underhanded emotionally.” it’s one of those things that’s true of everyone on earth, but it takes cojones to make something like that self-referential. But that’s the journey right now. I’m not throwing out any part of myself until I know what’s there. Here’s the thing about getting ready to be 40 (I will be 36 on Sept. 10, so it’s not that far…)- you just want to stop wading in bullshit.

No, wait.

I already know that I’m wading in bullshit, and that life is just like that. However, what I can control is the bullshit itself. Am I processing it correctly so that I’m not constantly dealing with old bullshit? When does the new bullshit arrive? Where do you put the old bullshit once it’s processed? Can you sell it on e-bay?

The bottom line is that I was emotionally abused from the day I turned 13. The reaction is that I’m going crazy. The response is that I’m writing it all out so that I can be crazy in my head, and still the calm and gorgeous person you know on the outside. The reaction is severe because I’ve been holding down my feelings about this abuse because everything was a secret. Everything.

Having that big a secret convinced me to keep other, bigger secrets so that all of the sudden, I was weighted down in ways that a 13-year-old just can’t process. Protecting my abuser from the people who had abused her became the play in my mind that I was acting. But my abuser needed no help. She had moved on from having power taken from her to taking mine away, instead.

My natural responses turned to dust as her siren song echoed farther and farther across the universe.

I think it’s particularly important for me to say categorically that I was abused by a woman, because so few people believe they are capable of it. Power and control is not the domain of men, because in this case, her only weapon was words. In fact, some of the most powerful words in the universe have to do with soft power. If you don’t know what I mean, think about the multitude of things you would do for your partner if she only looked at you that way.

When she looked at me that way, there is nothing that I wouldn’t have done for her. My 13-year-old determination allowed me to move mountains at that age, and I did. I achieved things I never thought possible in the names of love, courage, and empathy.

The disconnect is that it was only love for me. For her, I was a puppet. She had woven my strings into her fingers so that she could not put them down. I thought it was love, so I was content to let her pull them.

She manipulated me, and I manipulated her right back. With our age difference, though, I was outmatched. Being outwitted my whole life up until now has given me the determination to want to be alpha dog, and I see that change in myself, especially as I write for this web site. I believe that I am that person, that she is the one I would have been without having to live in someone else’s shadow. The challenge is to stay Type A. Type A is exhausting. How do you people do it?

I think my anger fuels me. It’s what gets me out of bed. I pump anger into my day, but not to reinforce negativity. To reinforce that I am taking all of this negative energy and pouring it into my own recovery so that what goes in as toxic comes out as inert. I want to be that person who can forgive as much as they love.

My path is to figure out how love always wins, instead of that still, small voice that says it’s ok to kill you if you cross me.

Your clever’s title.

Clever Title Goes Here, bitch.

Ohhh, here we go.

You’re going to regret making friends with me.

I’ve hated you for 35 years and that hasn’t gotten me anywhere. Liking you is a new thing I’m trying out. So far, it feels good. You’re a lot more awesome than I’ve ever given you credit for.

Leslie, that’s because I’m not really you. I’m the sub-you. I’m not your arrows, I’m your compass.

Look that that metaphysical shit going on. Where did you get so smart?

You’ve always been this smart.

Have I really?

Yes, for evil and for awesome.

That’s a new thing I’m trying out, too. Liking the bad parts of myself. Because disliking them wasn’t getting me very far, either.

Do you think it will work?

Do you?

[…]

I’m going to a meeting tonight.

Is Tall. Mustache. Fishing Hat. going to be there?

No, that’s the other meeting. I’m trying a different one.

Why?

Because I just am. Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis and actually meeting chicks!

No you’re not.

Yeah, you’re right. I’m not.

This is depressing.

No, it’s not. You just realized the joy of being a married person. You don’t have to go anywhere or do anything and that’s more appealing than meeting chicks.

I’d like to think I’m more adventurous than that.

Why do you want pretty women around you all the time?

Why don’t you?

Because Dana might get mad.

You’ve MET Dana, right? Since when has she ever objected to having pretty women around her?

That is how we do that, isn’t it? We just share eye candy instead of being jealous. The advantage of that is that we each find some the other misses and we’re eternally grateful.

How is it that you can even do this together?

Because most of the time, we are two fifteen-year-old boys living in an apartment together. We are the type people that think Doctor Who could be a religion. We are such nerds that we are kind of like Bart and Milhouse in every episode of The Simpsons ever. If Bart and Milhouse ever realized that they were butt crazy about each other, it would resemble our marriage greatly.

Meaning?

Meaning I don’t give a shit who Dana thinks is gorgeous because I’ve got my own list (and most of them know who they are). Dana knows every thought I’ve ever had in my life, so as far as she’s concerned, she might as well let me have crushes ’cause she’s going to hear about it one way or another. I’m not threatening, I’m just annoyingly verbal.

One of these days, she’s just going to turn around and yell, “FINE! Just fuck her. Seriously. If that’s what it takes to get you to shut the hell up, FINE.”

It’s at this point that I realize that I am way too obnoxious for my own good and we go back to talking about television and housework. It’s not a bad deal. In fact, it helps us be married that we are not contractually obligated to like each other all the time. We have built-in escape pods that allow both of us to be ourselves, so that we don’t become LeslieAndDana. Crushes, as long as they’re inert, are fun as a shared experience. The trouble is when you realize that you are projecting too much energy into the crush and you haven’t paid as much attention as you want to your spouse. It’s your job to limit contact with the crush and bring your partner into the relationship, because the only way to keep a friendship with a crush is to talk about it with your partner frequently. Let your partner tell you if he/she thinks it’s getting out of hand. Once you stop seeing that as a threat and take it for what it is- a caring warning- you are well on your way to a much healthier relationship.

The thing is that you’ve got to be willing to take as much as you give. If you let your partner talk about their crushes and you shut down emotionally, then you are internalizing the frivolous fun of having a crush as a serious threat to your relationship and not the silliness that it is.

A Warning: If you’ve never done this before (because Dana and I have been best friends for almost a decade), limit yourselves to celebrities. Fucking amateurs will not walk into their houses and announce that Leslie said it’s ok to tell you I have a crush on our next door neighbor, who will live here just as long as we do and it will be absolutely that awkward until we move.

The flip side of the coin is that Dana and I have several people in common on our “Door List.”

The door list is people that we get to fuck, but they have to come to the house and knock on the door. For instance, I do not think that Kerry Washington knows where I live. But if she did, Dana would have to admit that Kerry went to extraordinary lengths to find me and that this is the chance of a lifetime that cannot be wasted.

See? There’s A LOT of fifteen-year-old boy in each of us.

It’s why we get along so well.

Wanting to fuck other people helps your marriage?

Why wouldn’t it? From what I’ve seen, what destroys marriages is that people have crushes that they don’t talk about so they fester and then it gets so big that they tell their crush and it could possibly turn into an affair in the time it takes for you to tell your spouse about it. So talk about it first. If you pretend that crushes don’t happen, then you are completely ignoring the spectrum that is sexuality and that most humans are wired to couple up with one person, but when they meet, it does not render either of them blind.

I use Facebook when I have short blurbs instead of full-length essays. Because of that, I write on Facebook a lot more than I do here. For some reason, I have a Twitter account. I don’t do Twitter. I can limit myself to a paragraph but a hundred and forty characters? Come on. I know that people say it makes you a better writer- to be able to say an idea in its most empirical form- but at the same time, it doesn’t really allow you to speak in depth and breadth that you might like. When I have good ideas, I like to write them down, but I don’t like how much text message-speak there is to express one analogy. I can only compromise my standards so much, and one of them is using letters as words. U dig?

And come on. The 140-character limit is complete bullshit because it has to include the link that backs up your great idea. Screw that. Facebook is my platform, and I hope I use it well. I want to educate people, I want to bring people together, and most of all, I want to emote.

I have been the type person that holds in feelings- sometimes, really painful ones- for years and years until they threaten to undo me. Because of that, the keyboard has become my last bastion of safety. A blank page is the closest thing I know to be a cure for the magnitude of ideas you want to present when you realize that you’ve been a walking zombie. You go years and years being afraid of other people’s reactions, and you hold on to your emotions more and more because the times you do let your guard down, people distance themselves and you can’t live without other people at all.

The message in this essay is that for me, bottling emotion could have driven me into a truly unstable mental place. My saving grace is that I caught it before it became necessary to be hospitalized, and that I had an outlet in this web site. I pour emotion into it because the more I do, the more people across the globe confirm that my ideas matter in a way that nothing else could even attempt. When I write my own stories, you believe they are true, when a lot of the time, the people that they are about do not. Their reaction is not my responsibility, either. My responsibility is to get the help I need so that life does not push me in the water and stand on my head.

The reality is that you always want to connect with people who don’t have a horse in the race. I don’t write about myself to hurt the people close to me. I write about myself because I’m the one that’s moving in the world and writing about it. I don’t write for your reaction. I want to know what Canada thinks. I want to know what Australia thinks. I could give a crap about Portland, Oregon because I’ve got Jesus on my side. You know why? Because if nothing good comes out of Nazareth, then nothing good comes out of Portland, either.

My writing is my art, just as Jesus’ message was his. He doesn’t give a crap what you think, either. He puts it out there, and you have the option to listen to it.

Just like me.