As a newly minted young adult who is moving into my own place and finding my way, I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently thinking about the concept of “home”. In retrospect, I’ve realized this isn’t a foreign concept for my thoughts to drift towards — in fact it seems to be a rather common thread over my years, a longing to feel secure in the communities that I choose, which the ones that I call family, within my own skin. To be free, authentic, unguarded.
My attempt at expressing my process below is disjointed, but perhaps that is for the best, as I’ve yet to find the language to articulate the range of emotion I’m experiencing currently. I hope that you’ll extend a special grace over my attempt to communicate my relational needs in this season.
When marriage equality was passed by the Supreme Court this summer, my heart was filled with joy for the millions of people who would be free to love and build lives with the ones they chose. My countenance however could not betray this joy. I went home, and my parents kept rehashing how terrible the day was. How immoral. How scary it would be that a generation of children will think that same-sex unions were okay, that queer people were normal. My mother rocked back and forth saying she couldn’t stand the thought. My father lamented all the people who would now feel okay to come out the closet as a result of the ruling. The only words of praise that came from their lips were for my brother. They were proud that he recognized queerness as wrong. They were relieved that it was confusing to him - that he didn’t understand how the couples on screen went against Adam and Eve. And me? I wanted to tell them, not inherently because I wanted to convince them, but because I needed to push past the disconnection that hiding and shame fosters into intimacy…but I didn’t. I made a cowardly choice influenced by fear and didn’t fight for these relationships I valued. Instead, I recoiled. I measured my every action, and waited just long enough to not be suspicious before excusing myself. Repeating over and over "Smile." Just 😬 keep 😬 fake 😬 smiling. It'll be over soon.
That day, I did not choose authenticity. That day I felt fraudulent.
I’m done making that choice. I’ve spent so much of my life performing, pretending, in hopes that I would find acceptance and love. That’s what I thought I knew of home — that if I pretended to fit a certain expected mold, there would be a place for me. This was the summer I learned the difference between a home and a dwelling place. A home is where you are safe…it’s a place of refuge and sanctuary. A dwelling place is space to lay your head. I’ve made my home inside myself and dwelled in many places. Now I understand that home, and the love that community thrives in is not conditional on our level of authenticity regarding who we are even if there are boundaries regarding our behavior to protect all that relationships choose to cultivate. Home should be constant. Home should be certain. Home should never be a place of underlying fear or its purpose and function to foster love is intrinsically compromised. Living with such an inherent fear and mistrust of this house has fostered an appetite for dissatisfaction in me. I’ve found myself unwilling or unable to place all of my heart and my effort in anything here at BA because of this fear that if anyone were to truly see me, they’d choose distance, not relationship. As a result, I’ve not given but a few that choice at all and have made the choice to distance myself for them with the rationale that separation can’t hurt if I’m the one who controls it. I was wrong. I’ve been seriously hurting. All I’ve left to hold on to is that God loves us. And I pray that trusting in that Love will be enough.
I have grown inwardly for far too long. One of my favorite poets once said, all the colors we are inside have yet to be known existed. I believe her. I believe it's time for me to grow in the light of day, trusting where I’m planted and I can only do that by putting down roots. I need to know how safe it is to put down roots here. I need to know if I can trust this place to choose to grow in. I feel called to intentional authenticity in community this year, and I don't feel I can do that while constantly wondering if I'm hiding well enough - it feels counter-intuitive to being intentional about being known.
I suppose I need to know that there’s space at the table for me where I am, finding who I am, while of course choosing to honor the position of the house regarding moral conduct. To be clear — I do not identify as heterosexual. If I had to identify to the extent that my vocabulary would offer, it would be as a grey-ace homoflexible bisexual. I’ve chosen to continue honoring the beliefs and boundaries of this house and not to actively engage those feelings even though I personally have no convictions against them. I can manage what I do, but I cannot control who I am. I’m not asking for my leaders to affirm how I identify, but to acknowledge that there’s space for me to exist. I am hoping that this will create an invitation to enter into a new kind of conversation. No one has to change what they believe, rather I see this as an opportunity to seek meaningful relationships amidst difficult disagreements. I choose to call our class, our church and community family, and hasn’t the table long been a place where families who fear they might be torn apart can choose ways to stay together instead?
In sharing this, I'm choosing authenticity in relationship over any favor and position I've garnered with this community. This has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I’d choose to be a friend and frequent visitor of BA with amity in my heart before I allow myself to turn into a son with enmity towards this house that I’ve come to love based on pre-conceived ideas regarding how I’d be received if I was completely laid bare here. To parallel, just as I’ve learned much here and have had my entire life changed by the past few years, I remain committed to the values my parents instilled in me: to serve, be honest, love God and put up a fight for what I want. Unfortunately, I felt I had to leave the people I loved to finally be myself. I hope to learn from my mistakes. I wish that to not be the case here.
