February 29, 2024

Hello again! Like the vast majority of all new year's resolutions, this one did not stick around very long. My therapist has convinced me to try again “at least at the end of every month.” So here we are at the end of February. Not much has changed from last month. I still live in a tent in my grandmother's backyard. I haven’t gotten a raise yet, but I wasn’t expecting one, so that’s okay. I have developed a toothache, most likely from all the junk food I have to eat from the gas station. I won’t be able to get it fixed because my parent's insurance doesn’t cover dental.

I’m grateful to my parents for allowing me to stay on their insurance. I’ve struggled a lot trying to understand their version of love. I grew up going to church every Sunday, like almost every kid I grew up with. As a kid, a lot of values taught to us were easy to understand. Don’t lie, cheat, steal, or kill anyone. All boiled down into one word, sin. As you grow older in the church, you learn that sin is a little more complicated than you remember as a kid. Sex gets introduced and there’s a whole slew of new sins. And as I grew, I started to feel uncomfortable. It’s a bit hard to explain. I started to constantly feel like I’d been locked in the wrong house and couldn’t get out. As my body changed, when I would look in the mirror, it was like I was looking at a complete stranger. And I grew to hate my body. When I tried to explain this feeling to my mother once, she told me that “God made me perfect just the way I was” and that I should “repent so that he might wash away my sin.” So, before I went to bed that night, I did just that. And when I woke up the next day, that feeling was still there.

It wasn’t until late into my teens that I remembered a Christmas play I had participated in at church. I didn’t go to a very big church, and most of the folks that attended church there were older. And in a small town like the one I live in, only a few of their kids had stuck around to attend the church with them. So, there weren’t too many children attending the church. There were only two girls in the entire Sunday school, and both of them were too young to have a major role in the play. The boys argued over who got to be Joseph and who had to be Mary. The Sunday school teacher ended up choosing someone to be Mary and the someone he chose was me. When we got up on stage to do our performance, and all of us were in costume, I remembered all the old farts in the church thinking it was hilarious when I came out in my Mother Mary costume. And despite their laughter at what, to them, was a bit of innocent fun. I felt correct for once. Even though I knew none of them saw me as Mary, I felt comfortable. All that to say, when I made that connection, I knew I was a girl. And at 18, when I came out openly, my parents kicked me out of their house. Luckily my grandma was begrudgingly there to let me live in her backyard because “she can’t willingly let sin enter her home.” 

That was a very long-winded way to circle back to my struggle with understanding my parents' version of love. At this point it feels like they’re willing to love me, as long as they don’t have to be around me. And it hurts to think about it sometimes, but I’m very lucky to have found a good friend. 

That’s all I’ve got for the night. I’ll be sure to tell you about my friend next time.

See you next month. Thanks for listening, friend.

-Hope