An Open Letter to the Queer Kids who are Being Raised in Christian Families.
I’ve been where you are. You’re experiencing attractions you can’t explain, feelings nothing in your past have prepared you for. And you’re terrified. You would be so ashamed if anyone in your life found out, so you soak yourself in shame, you deny that these feelings are real. And maybe you’ve overcompensated, trying to show the people you love that you’d never be like those people, the people everyone is …
An Open Letter to the Queer Kids who are Being Raised in Christian Families. Read More »
Some Thoughts on Jesus
Today is Easter Sunday, and Easter has always been a special holiday for me, because it commemorates a cycle of renewal and rebirth. I no longer consider myself a Christian, but the resurrection is the part of the story of Jesus that makes the rest of it matter. If I still believe in anything – which some days I do, and some days I don’t—it’s in the person of …
To My Younger Self
I heard the now Grammy-winning Brothers Osborne song, Younger Me, today and really listened to it for the first time. And it kind of got me in my feelings a little, thinking about my relationship with my younger self. I was so angry with him for the longest time. I thought he had ruined our life, that he’d been a coward. And yeah, there were sometimes he could have been …
The Bucket List
I am not at the point in my life where I have begun thinking about its ending. Maybe I just have some weird subconscious idea that I am immortal? But I have been thinking about things I’d like to do while I’m still young and healthy enough to enjoy them. Is this a bucket list? You could call it that. I don’t love that term, but it’s the term we …
Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin
Yesterday, someone I know hit me with a ‘love the sinner, hate the sin,’ and my initial reaction was like ‘Wow! Fuck you too!’ I didn’t say this, of course. I didn’t react at all. The person meant well, I think, but that is just such a classic microaggression, and it’s not hard to understand why I have such a visceral negative reaction to it. I think it’s …
My Writing Rituals
I belong to Apex writers and am part of the Accelerators group, led by Forrest Wolverton. In Accelerators, Forrest uses brain research to help us unlock our writing and career goals (It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist). Last week, we were talking about the rituals we all use to get us in ‘the zone’ for writing, and it made me think about how we all do that, …