I'm gay. And couldn't come up with a better title.

Disclaimer: within this letter, I make references to church, ministries and religion. I do not make any of these references by name. This letter is not intended to speak ill of anyone, to blame anyone or to be used as evidence against any particular people or organizations. I have had the great experience of being a part of many organizations and churches that provided love, support, friendship and community during so many times in my life. I am not anti-God or anti-church. In fact, I was in church on Sunday and loved being there. This is my experience. That is all it is intended for.

Hello my friends. Some of you, I have known for as long as I can remember and some of you have only recently come into my life. I have always considered myself to be so fortunate that despite the many times my family and myself have moved or transferred or started over, I still have people around the world who care deeply for me.

The last 5 years have been a lot. I don’t even know if there are words for the amount of heartache and change and joy and growth that I have experienced since I graduated college. I have let go of dreams and embraced all new ones. I have changed plans, made course corrections, had crushes and thought I was in love a few times, picked up habits and broken them. I have gained and lost friends. I have forgiven and I have held grudges. I have changed my mind, switched sides, flipped loyalties, and outgrown my old opinions. I don’t see this as a betrayal to myself but rather an effort to continually grow, learn and embrace. Changing, admitting you’re wrong and grieving your mistakes is not about denying yourself or who you were, but rather allowing the full you, the real you to continue to thrive and to always break through to the surface.

That is what I have done. I have faced every change and every trauma and every heartbreak. I haven’t done it all perfectly. I can’t say that I haven’t left casualties in the wake of my grief. I can’t say that I never grew angry and that hatred never became my motivation because it did. I have been angry and I have been hurt and I have been truthful and I have been miserable and I have been wrong and above all, I have been myself. I have always, always been the most honest version of myself that I could. For that I am proud.

Many people have watched this journey. I somehow manage to be a private person who tells everyone everything. I usually face every change with a season of withdrawal and reflection before once again emerging fully confident in the person I am, unashamed of all the words I have to say. I know I’m probably getting it wrong most of the time but I would rather be wrong. I would rather get it all wrong and make messes that need to be cleaned up than live in a tidy world of being afraid of making a mistake. My mistakes have been many and my sorrows considerable but the overwhelming confidence I feel is undeniable.

Here I am at a new season of change. One that has been coming for a very, very long time and one for which I am relieved is finally here. I have spent my entire life, childhood and adulthood believing in the traditional Christian values as they have been taught to me. I have had so many beautiful experiences in the name of that faith and in the pursuit of that life. I have also faced significant rejection and heartache as I have stumbled through my twenties, desperately trying to understand what being a kind, loving, open, changeable, truthful, normal, vulnerable, strong human means.

Along with many of the commonly taught principles of the Christian faith, I for a long time have believed that homosexuality and same sex attraction were sins. They were struggles some were plighted with, all were susceptible to but everyone could overcome. This is something I now know so emphatically in my heart to be false.  I cannot express my sorrow for all of the ways I unknowingly and blindly contributed to the repression, rejection and suffering of so many people.

I had always, always been sensitive to the suffering of people around the world. Hunger, war, disease, lack of education and access in Third World countries would drive me to tears as a child. It was not until I went to college and began studying social work that my eyes became opened to the systematic, built-in injustices that we have created in my own country and the ways that my religion has contributed to those things, no matter what the intentions were. In was then that my heart towards the LGBTQ community began to grow and I just barely started looking at things I was being taught. However, like most things that poke at the foundation we have built our identity on, this was far too painful to truly examine. If the church could be so obviously wrong about this. If I could have been so, so plainly wrong about this, what else, what other “truths” that I had spent my whole life clinging to could also be so, so wrong. It was realty too painful to examine with any amount of truth so shoved the questions deep inside myself until it became a wound of betrayal, festering in its desperate attempt for air.

Like all festering wounds, this could not be ignored. So I would reexamine this. I would dress it up and present it in a new way that allowed me to love people the way I desperately wanted to without feeling like I was betraying what I had been raised to believe. I twisted it so I could feel justified holding onto my idea of being a Christian because that was something I simply did not know how to let go of. I twisted myself and my thoughts and my desires and my ideas into a shape that would fit the Christian size hole that barred the entrance to the community and family and identity I had always known. That hole never used to feel small or confining. When I was a child, I passed through that hole with ease. Like walking into the church building on a Sunday morning, the doors were wide open to me but as I grew, the hole became smaller and more defined and more confined until I had contort myself into an unrecognizable shape in order to fit through. Like a messed up game of Alice in Wonderland where the fate of your very immortal soul in this life and the next was all dependent on how well you could make yourself fit.

Not everyone seemed to be struggling with this ever shrinking hole of acceptance. In fact, for some people it felt as if the older they got and the more time went on, the wider the hole became, the more accepted their shapes were. This religion made room for their growth and their gain. I watched with envy as the friends I knew continued to walk through the doors and cried myself to sleep as I began to realize what worked for them would never, ever work for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to fit and didn’t want to follow the rules and didn’t want to be everything I was “supposed” to be. I wanted to do all of those things. I tried for years to be all of those things. But something inside of me simply could no longer fold itself up into something that it wasn’t. The cost of making myself into a convenient package for others was losing parts of myself. Fitting into the ideas of my religion I had always believed was like standing in front a tiny church looking in at the half-maimed people inside. “It’s okay,” they said, “You don’t need both arms. Just chop off a limb or two and you will fit in just fine.” How sad that no one ever told them they could make a bigger door.

I am going to take a moment here to say something that needs to be said. This overwhelming feeling of not being able to fit was not the result of things other people had said to me. I was never verbally rejected or told that I did not belong. In fact a lot of people have probably been confused on why I pulled back so much, which is why I am here, writing this letter. I have been very, very, very loved and I am very, very, very grateful.

I have spent the last twelve months standing on the outside of that door, that hole, looking in. Confused at why I don’t fit anymore. Desperate in my attempt to figure out what is so wrong with me. “Why isn’t this working anymore?”, was the desperate scream inside my head. Begging the void to answer me. The thing is, I am not angry. I have not been bitter. I have been so very sad. And then it happened, the true break. When I was faced with the decision to choose a side and I did. What caused this final break? A friend of mine was told he could not be on church leadership because he was gay.

He is gay and he loves Jesus. He is gay and is single. He is gay and he has been doing everything he can to stay within the rules so he can fit in the hole; so he can get through the door.  And because of who he was, he was told that he could not participate. That he could not offer his praises and his songs and his service and his sacrifice to the Lord. I was leading a ministry that I had started at the time that was connected to a church and because of this, my friend never asked if he could participate because he assumed my answer would be the same, “No, we don’t have a space for your kind”. When I found this out, I was distraught and heart broken. I wept. I wept for many days.

I kept my struggles to myself and did not share them with very many. To stand up for the victimized sometimes means to become a victim yourself and I was too afraid to face the rejection of being pro LGBTQ and pro God and pro church. So for a while I said nothing and all of these feelings and thoughts and hurts and doubts stirred inside as I wrestled with what kind of human I wanted to be. The kind who would say nothing or the kind who would say everything.

I stepped down from church leadership a few months ago. It was devastating for a time but has healed itself slowly. I was so saddened by my need to leave but resolute in the conviction that I could not be a part of something that didn’t make room for everyone. And I mean everyone. At first I kept quiet about my reasons for stepping down and stepping away. I would share half-truths about the reasons I left. Partly because I was afraid of the rejection I would face and partly because I didn’t know what to do with the painful looks back on the faces of those who loved me but didn’t know how to love my ideas. I am not very good at staying silent so of course the real reasons and my anger and my frustrations have been making their way to the surface as I have been sorting through the voices crowding my own head about what is and is not a sin and what sin even means and who God actually is and what it actually means to be loved by Him.

So I pulled away, as I normally do. I stopped going to church. Not because I didn’t want to go or because I didn’t want to believe but because I was so tired of feeling like shit all of the time. Because I just wanted to be happy and not have to worry about not fitting or what I was standing for or against and because I was just so tired.

In the months since I stopped going to church, I have discovered a lot of things. First of all, I love sleeping in on Sunday mornings. Seriously glorious. Secondly, I discovered a whole group of people who are amazing and who want to talk about real things like sex and fears and that shit that happens in the world. And I really like these people. And lastly, I have finally, finally let myself say out loud and admit to what I have always known. I am gay.

After months of therapy and tears and panicking feelings of trying to figure out why going on dates left me feeling petrified and why I could never stomach the idea of intimacy with a man or why after spending my whole life within a system I couldn’t fit anymore, I realized that I had been miserably trying to force myself to do something that I couldn’t do; that I would never be able to do. And the relief of this revelation is indescribable.

I am gay and I’m so freaking ecstatic. For the first time in I don’t know how long, a future with someone actually seems possible. Love actually seems possible. Marriage actually seems possible. I had long resigned myself to single life because the sick feeling in my stomach I got whenever I tried to date a man was such an anguishing feeling, I simply couldn’t do it anymore.

I’m gay and I’ve never been prouder of myself. The day I came out, I wept with such joy and such freedom. I felt God in my tears. I felt God in my freedom. I felt God in the sweet, sweet redeeming feeling that there was nothing wrong with me. That I didn’t need to fit into anymore holes or anymore doors or anymore more systems or religions or churches or groups that need me to shut down a part of who I am to appease their best interpretation of what “goodness” looks like.

For those of you who are shocked or saddened by this news, I wish I could tell you I was sorry. But I am not. I’m not sorry. I can tell you that my wish for you is that whatever you choose to believe, you believe so with your eyes wide open, conscious to the consequences. My wish for you is that you might feel the depth of my love and gratitude for you on the part you have played in my journey so far. My wish for you is that wherever you are reading this, you find comfort and joy in knowing that you are not responsible for me or the choices I have made.

I don’t owe you an explanation. I don’t owe anyone explanation. I don’t owe you my story and I have no plans on giving you those details. I am not interested in giving you the gory details of “how I know” or “when I found out” because quite frankly, that is none of your damn business. So I don’t offer this letter as an explanation but rather an invitation. An invitation for you to explore all of the reasons within your heart that you believe the things you believe.

I am gay. And I am so happy and so proud and so relieved.