What God Designed

Being a gay Mormon is a strange mix. I am the one that when people talk about me they say, "Oh he is? Well, isn't that sad" or "I thought he would have done better." Well, something along those lines. I don't mean to request for pity at my lot in life. I am just adding another entry in an effort to learn how to come "home" even if that home means building a new one.

I have known since I was about twelve that I was gay but it wasn't until I was fourteen and sixteen that I came under the believe that I was somehow this ugly, abominable creation of God. I had no thought in me until the age of fourteen that there could be anything wrong with how I felt towards other guys. After all, I had feelings for both guys and girls. I just had crushes on guys a hundred times more then on girls.

When I came under the false belief that I was some abomination, life become dark and gloomy. To avoid darkening this post anymore then necessary I will summarize my activities. I engaged in self-hatred that took the form of low-level suicidal thoughts and active self-mutilation along with a generic attitude of self-loathing. When I look back upon those years, I am saddened that I had ever thought that hatred could change anything. I allowed religion, psychology, and political opinion to become twisted by my own fears and anxieties which those aspects in turn amplified my fears and anxieties to an unhealthy level. The tears of despair were innumerable and the feelings of pain over my attractions were truly unnecessary. So much wasted energy was spent in an attempt to "fix" or "cure" what God had never designed to be removed from its proper place: the soul.

I realized during my senior year of high school how terribly wrong I was. That single realization undid years of pain and self-hatred. It would take, though, another couple of years to fully undo the damage I had managed to do in my views.

Now here I am, realizing that more of my previously held views from high school concerning the nature of my soul were wrong. I have damaged and perhaps even retarded my ability to grow and improve. The sense of loss and bitterness over such a realization is inexpressible. I find that I am nearly at the point of square one and I realize now, more then ever, that I am wrong again on how things really are in life.

Anger, sorrow, bitterness, despair, hope, joy, loss, confusion, exhaustion, and curiosity somehow have managed to merge together despite their clear and obvious differences. I use to think that any issues I had with my attractions had been laid to rest months ago. I was happy and content with being gay. But after a conversation with the psychiatrist, I am left to wonder if I have been attempting to look the other way as I continued to twist and warp the very fabric of my soul in unhealthy and damaging ways.

Perhaps, ultimately, the only way I will ever anchor my soul is to reexamine just how I am handling things especially on this subject and to let things go and to embrace other things. The vagueness of the previous sentence should be revealing to the feeling of loss over how to even begin in this. I just wish I knew the path to proceed down, but I'm afraid that there is no path already made for me to walk down.