For a long time, I wasn’t sure whether naming my religious past was an act of healing — or just another way of giving it power. When I wrote the details of my life into my bio on this website, I questioned whether I wanted to mention anything at all about the Fundamentalist Christian influences that shaped my early developmental years. Part of my growth has been reclaiming my agency — not giving it away by remaining trapped in an ongoing victim narrative.
And yet, silence can also be a kind of erasure.
I now try to speak from a place that feels truer to my lived experience: not rehearsing old grievances, but also not pretending the fire never burned. I want to be known for what I am for, not simply what I am against — while still acknowledging that what I moved through left marks that didn’t disappear just because I outgrew the theology.
Deconstruction without bypassing
I didn’t arrive where I am now through spiritual bypassing. This post is my nod to the long, uneven work of deconstruction and reconstruction — the work of becoming a person again after growing up in a fear-based religious system that emphasized a contractual relationship with God for the explicit purpose of avoiding an eternity of Eternal Conscious Torment.
The stakes were absolute. This world was not a place to enjoy too freely. Most people, I was taught, were “vessels of wrath fitted for destruction.” Vigilance was not optional; it was survival. Desire, pleasure, rest — these were dangerous territories, places where one misstep could cost everything.
When I came out of the closet at eighteen, I did not step into freedom. I stepped into years of internal war. By the time I was twenty-eight, I was still a virgin, still untouched romantically — not out of virtue, but out of terror. When I finally kissed my first boyfriend, when I had sex for the first time, the fear didn’t vanish. It sharpened. I would lie awake at night, my stomach twisted into knots, certain I had traded eternity for a moment of intimacy.
And yet, celibacy was not a viable life. I was lonely. I was desperate. I had tried to date women, and while I felt genuine respect and affection, there was no attraction — only the quiet devastation of knowing I was betraying both them and myself. Obedience meant self-annihilation. Honesty felt like damnation.
The turning point didn’t arrive with fireworks. It arrived as a question that wouldn’t let go: why did I feel overwhelming guilt for consensual same-sex love — which harms no one — while feeling comparatively little guilt for moments when I had lied, gossiped, betrayed trust, or failed to act with courage and compassion?
My values were misaligned.
I began to realize that my problem was not that I loved men. It was that I had been taught to prioritize purity over kindness, belief over behavior, certainty over integrity. I had learned how to be afraid — but not how to love radically, responsibly, or well. I was later told that we can be loving or we can be right, but we usually can’t be both. I had leaned into being right at the cost of being loving every. single. time. In a way, it makes sense – if you’re wrong, you could go to hell and that’s a pretty big risk – so being right or being loving turns into a life-or-death choice.
That realization did not heal me. It destabilized me. And that destabilization was necessary.
Making peace with uncertainty
I began life with confident, tightly held beliefs that functioned as both anchor and cage. Letting them go felt untethering. One of the harder truths to admit is that certainty has its comforts. There was something oddly reassuring about believing the universe was rigidly ordered, even if the cost was fear.
Now, I try — imperfectly — to make friends with impermanence and uncertainty. One of my guiding axioms is that strongly held beliefs can become the enemy of revelation and evolution. I no longer believe in an airtight systematic theology that answers all of life’s questions. I am learning to live with an empty cup — though some days my nervous system still reaches for the old scaffolding.
There are moments when mystery feels expansive and alive. There are other moments when it feels disorienting, even lonely. Both are true.
I now live in a world with fewer answers and more questions, and I no longer interpret that as failure. Still, I notice how quickly the old reflex returns: the urge to be right, to be good, to be exceptional — to earn my place in the cosmos through effort or insight or spiritual sophistication. The old story doesn’t vanish; it loosens, resurfaces, loosens again.
The slow work of becoming
I didn’t arrive here overnight, and I’m increasingly skeptical of narratives that suggest arrival is even the point. While I sometimes envy those who were allowed to grow without religious brainwashing, I can also see how the struggle shaped me — not as a badge of honor, but as a reality that required adaptation, resilience, and constant recalibration and introspection.
What I carry now was not self-manufactured. I did not pull myself up by my bootstraps. I was shaped by timing, relationships, access to books and ideas, moments of grace, and the slow unwinding of fear. I feel deeply grateful that I was born gay and that I live in a time where resources and language exist — if one is given enough curiosity and safety to reach for them.
And still, there are days when old toxic beliefs flicker back to life: the idea that love is conditional, that rest must be earned, that worth is proven through productivity or achievement. Healing, I’ve learned, is less like a finish line and more like an ongoing practice of noticing when I’ve drifted — and choosing, again, to return.
From fear to grace
I once believed, as Jonathan Edwards preached in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, that we balance on a knife’s edge — one misstep away from catastrophe.
Now, I suspect the knife’s edge was never there.
What has changed is not the disappearance of fear, but the widening of what I trust. I am learning — slowly — to believe that beneath our striving and self-surveillance is something astonishingly generous. That if we stumble, we do not fall into punishment, but into relationship. That grace is not a reward for correctness, but a condition of being alive. And that love and connection seep in precisely through the cracks of my imperfection.
Even this belief is held lightly. I no longer need it to be airtight. I only need it to be honest enough to keep me oriented toward love.
That is how I understand the phrase LOVE WINS — not as a tidy ending, but as a long arc that bends through confusion, resistance, relapse, and return. The drama lies not in whether we arrive, but in how many times we forget — and remember again.
Why I’m writing
I’m writing because I know I’m not alone. Because I suspect many of us carry a strange mix of peace and residue, freedom and flashbacks. I feel a particular call to connect with those who are leaving fear-based religious systems and trying to come home to their bodies, their desires, and their own moral intuition without replacing one rigid structure with another.
If this resonates, you’re not broken. You’re not late. And you’re not doing it wrong.
If you’d like to connect, I’d be glad to walk alongside you — imperfectly, honestly, and without pretending the road is neat.
This really resonated with me, and gave me some clear takeaways to incorporate into my own journey. Thank you for writing this, it’s so needed. It feels nice to know we’re not in it alone.
Thanks for reading and for commenting – it means a lot to hear that we are on this journey together and finding our healing path and learning from each other. I hope you continue to find your way toward wholeness