Monster
“What if I, what if I trip?
What if I, what if I fall?
Then am I the monster?
What if I, what if I sin?
What if I, what if I break?
Then am I the monster?”
It can be hard not to believe in monsters. All my life I’ve been tempted to believe in monsters. Anxiety, depression, people, circumstances, and even God at times have all seemed like monsters to me.
I’ve never wanted to believe God was a monster. I’ve fought against that temptation more than any other when it comes to monsters in my life. But the God I believed in for way too much of my life was a God who seemed like a monster to me. A God who set up impossible rules for me to live by and couldn’t wait for me to trip … fall … sin … break so he could label me monster and condemn me to hell eternally for making him mad. I no longer believe in that God. But I did for a very long time.
Anxiety and depression have certainly been monsters in my life all too often. Anxiety has mostly been a little monster lurking in the background, threatening to bury me under out-of-control emotions; to keep me from connecting with others. Depression has also lurked in the background most of my life, but it has also grab me by the throat on more than one occasion and threatened to destroy me.
The worst experience with depression was more than 25 years ago now when I experienced an 18-month period of my life when nearly every waking moment I battled against thoughts in my head that said everyone and everything would be better off if I just stopped existing. Day after day I thought constantly about ways I might end my life. A year and a half is a very long time to live convinced that the world would be better without you. So depression has definitely been a monster in my life at times.
People and circumstances have also given me reason to believe in monsters. Circumstances like growing up knowing I was attracted to boys instead of girls. People because they often rejected me either because they knew (or suspected) that I was gay or because they simply didn’t care enough to know me at all.
But mostly, I’ve believed I was the monster. For much of my life I believed that being attracted to other men made me a monster. It made me different. It meant I was alone in the world I found myself in, because that world seemed only able to utter the word gay with contempt. When you’re an introverted, lonely teenage boy wrestling with feelings that you know you can never admit to or talk with anyone about, the feeling of isolation is a monster. A huge monster that I cannot adequately describe with words. A lump rises in my throat every time I think of that boy.
I believed being gay was a judgment from God. That He made me gay because He hated me. Gallons of tears and caverns of despair marked my life year after year as I begged God to take the attractions away or at least tell me why He hated me so much. Not knowing why was the worst kind of monster. If hell was inevitable, shouldn’t God at least tell me why?
I grew up in a time when many evangelical Christian leaders were celebrating AIDs as God’s judgment on people they deemed worthless and deserving of only death and hell. Do you know what it feels like to believe that the God you want to love and the church you want so desperately to belong to have only one message for you: “Go to hell! The quicker the better!” That’s how I perceived the church, growing up with my secret. That’s where I thought everyone, including God, would want me to go if they knew my secret.
People will argue that not all of the church was like that. That’s true. I’m just telling you what my perception was at the time. The public messages from these church leaders was all I was hearing about gay people and those messages said I was a monster. So, I tried to bury myself deeper and deeper in my dark closet because, after all, that’s where monsters are supposed to live.
Even now, when most of the people reading this will not be surprised by my confession of same-sex attraction, I have a hard time talking about it without a tickling at the back of my mind that says you really are just a monster after all. There are people who wish I would retreat to my dark closet, people who believe I really am a monster and who would rather I be hidden away from their view. But there are so many others who love me for who I am and that gives me hope to keep pursing the light of honesty instead of letting the darkness of hiding rule my life.
I’ll be writing more about what it’s like to grow up living in a closet with a dark secret and about the God I’ve come to know and believe in over the coming weeks. For now, I just want to say that I write openly about my life because I can’t bear the thought of returning to the darkness and aloneness I experienced for so many years. I still experience the temptation to believe I’m just a monster who doesn’t deserve anything better, but I’m choosing to fight against that. Writing is one way I fight.
It’s hard. I hate being misunderstood and writing openly about my feelings is certain to generate plenty of misunderstanding. My hope is that you will give me grace and the benefit of any doubt you may have about my position or motives. It’s easier to stay silent, but I’m afraid silence will lead me to believe in monsters again; to return to the belief that I’m a monster myself. I can’t do that. I can’t be a monster ever again.