"Queer as Faith"
by Nathan Gunter

Queer as Faith is Nathan Gunter's unconventional, thought-provoking, and sometimes raw column about struggling to live authentically in the real world.

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This edition:
All the People We Have Been

I moved last year, and in the process I had to pack a box with all the journals I have been keeping over the years. I started them when I was thirteen; now I am twenty-six, and when I read them, I cringe.

I cringe because I see myself in the writing, and yet the person is almost unrecognizable to me. He is naive and desperate for people to like him, but afraid to admit - even to himself - that he has doubts.

Such is the life of a teenager. In the ensuing years something happened: I grew up. It is never easy; we have to give up addictions and unhealthy relationships that mire us down, and this process is agonizing. Everything that I have ever let go of bears the marks of me trying to hold on as tightly as possible. I read my old stuff and inhale sharply through my teeth. This is the person that I was, and he is still there.

I had a couple good reminders of this recently.

I have friends who dutifully call twice a month, send emails and even, for God's sake, send letters on actual paper. I am not remotely wired this way; I think it is a little aggressive. So I keep an online journal so the people I love who happen to be far away do not have to worry that I have died in some freak accident.

By a strange coincidence I found a similar site kept by someone I once knew. I once had a habit of clinging to people I thought were cool in the hopes that some of this cred would rub off on me, and this was one such person. You might say I was a huge poseur. The friendship was one of those that regularly makes you feel disregarded and worthless. This was no more my friend's fault than mine, but as I grew I found this friendship - and all its attendant issues and letdowns - disappointing and unnecessary. The two of us soon grew out of it like an old skin, and moved on, and there has been little contact since.

And yet when I found this person's online presence I was momentarily excited. I read every post, every sidebar, every comment. I began to remember what it had been like, and that old desperation welled up in me. It was like the person I had been years ago sat up inside and began to look around with his scared eyes, like an animal's. It was like finding buried treasure that had been contaminated with radiation.

I started to notice things, like awful descriptions that matched me or my writing. This person, whom I had not seen in almost a decade, was trashing me online. No names were used, but the intent was clear.

I seethed. I was so angry I went to bed shivering with rage. My fury became like a plant; I watered it and tended to it. I moved it into the sunlight. I told everyone I knew how she had trashed me, and then I trashed her. It felt absolutely wonderful. I was getting high off of it. I almost started smoking again.

The whole thing became a tower of Babel. I kept building it, and it kept getting knocked down, but I would not be deterred. I had been wronged, and I wanted some vengeance.

Friends got sick of hearing me talk about it. I noticed people's eyes get glassy when I mentioned the fiasco. This made my entire being sit up and roar.

Finally my boyfriend, Brian, looked me in the eye sternly and reminded me that I do not live in the opinions of others. He said that this person was as insecure and afraid as I am, and that we are no longer in each other's lives.

I got that I am insane, and that was Step One. Step Two was to pray, which I did. I prayed for the courage and grace to let go. Sometimes, I even feel like that might be happening.

I remembered what I believe: that there is, in fact, enough love, talent and prose to go around, and that we can have as much as we like. I remembered that I did not go to high school with The Lover of My Soul.

And so, last fall I moved into a new house with Brian. I moved everything out of my mother's house, but the room I had there lay messy, like an archeological site. I shuddered to think about myself dying in a freak bus accident; it would stay like that for all eternity. Visitors would stand at the door, afraid to go in, as something would have rotted in my mini-fridge. My mother would tell them, "It's how he left it."

A week before Christmas my mom called.

"Can you get all your stuff out of that room? I'd like to redecorate it."

So much for sentimentality. I have no real attachment to that room; I am 26 and I will never live there again. I went the next day to get started.

I started with the closet. I made two piles in the floor: keep and trash.

The keep pile quickly began to flourish, as I am a pack rat, and my instinct is to keep everything. Who knows when I might need a program from Key Club Convention 1997, say, or a headless action figure? But an interesting thing happened; I began to throw things into the trash pile that I thought I never would.

I found a dried-up white rose wrapped in decorative paper. I remember the rose, that I was given it, but I suddenly had no idea by whom. I found my crayon box from kindergarten; you know, those plastic boxes they made you buy to hold everything. I tossed it into the trash pile. I found projects from high school, photographs of friends with whom I have lost contact, notes from high school classes. I threw away all evidence of certain fashion trends, mostly from the mid-90's.

There were things I kept as well. A small rug knitted by my great-grandmother. A small cedar box I kept secrets in as a boy.

I loaded everything in black garbage bags, and, needing the whole experience to pass as quickly as ripping off a Band-Aid, drove - appropriately - to my high school, around the corner. There are big dumpsters there, and it was Christmas break. I played Mary Chapin-Carpenter and David Wilcox on the way; good friends who talks me through things.

Mary Chapin has a great lyric, and I put it on repeat: "There's no such thing as no regrets, and baby that's all right."

I pulled up behind the cafeteria and began unloading bags into the dumpsters. I kept thinking about regret. There are so many things I have been and done and thought that I regret, and it made me sad to think of them. I put regrets in the "keep" pile, with resentments, insecurities, and sadness. I toss out encouragement, compliments and praises, as I am convinced they could not be genuine. It seems that someone once told me that I shouldn't like myself too much, and in deference to that person, whomever he or she was, I don't.

Yet I have spent the past eight years walking with Jesus, who has this pesky habit of teaching me that my resentments hurt only me, and that I am allowed to like myself and trust in the faith I have been given. I carry all of these people inside of me, all of the people that I have been, and this is okay, because I carry the Holy Spirit too.

The whole affair turned into an odd celebration. There, behind the cafeteria of my high school, throwing away half of the posessions I had ever amassed, a kind of tribal joy overtook me. I will always be who I was in junior high, in high school, in college, in the hard times when I was drinking too much. But there is also me now: older, more mature, calmer, and - I hope - kinder.

I was glad to have had a chance to look my regret in the eyes and, if not to dismiss it, to acknowledge that we wouldn't be seeing as much of each other from now on.

Our growth never stops, and yet we always have these anchors, these people that we have been, inside us. Our old wounds will always cause us to limp a little. This is okay; these old people are Us, and they are loved.

I drove away from the high school and back to my new house. Brian and I were having people over that night for a party, and within hours the house was filled with the smells of baking cookies, the sounds of conversations, and friends smiling at each other, bundled against the cold.