My Past Few Years


I wrote this in August 2004 as an email to a friend of mine that I hadn't talked with in years. I figured that since I hadn't ever taken the time to write down my story, that I should probably save it. I'll slowly update and add more detail as time goes by. Feel free to skim through.

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Back in high school, my life was a mess, too. I guess it always will be since we're human, but you know what I mean. It wasn't a mess because of drugs or sex or anything like that; just tons and tons of lies and deception.

I graduated from high school and went off to UT. I had three awesome suitemates - one you might remember, Ryan Meadows. Anyway, UT was great. My one roommate, Aaron, and I became best friends instantly and had this amazing relationship. We were both studying to go into the ministry, so we would share spiritual study and inspiration and stuff all the time. We had some kind of youth or Christian organization to go to every night. We went to church together. We started being small group leaders. We shared a lot, and it was the closest relationship I've ever had in my life.

Once we started to look inside, we began sharing things about ourselves - things we wanted to change, things we weren't proud of, things we hid or lied about. Aaron told me that he had become addicted to pornography. Now, for him, this was a major deal, and we worked on it a lot. I told him that I had been hiding from everyone that I was gay.

I guess I didn't really "hide" it so well. I always thought that I had, but come to find out that most of my friends had known since middle school. I found that awefully ironic, because I wasn't even sure of it for myself until late in high school.

So, Aaron and I talked about it a lot. I told him how I had secret boyfriends in high school and went out with lots of girls just to keep up my image. I thought for a while that if I tried hard enough I could force myself to be attracted to women, but it didn't exactly work out that way. Aaron helped me get up the courage to talk with my parents about it. I went home the weekend after my 19th birthday and told them that I was gay. They were totally shocked and all of the stereotypical reactions. They of course said that they still loved me and that everything was going to be fine. It was rough, but not nearly as rough as I was expecting. I told them that I had been afraid to tell them because I thought they might kick me out or pull my college money, and of course they said they would never do anything like that. That was in October, 2001.

I went back to UT for the rest of the semester and did a lot of "soul searching." I was still trying to figure out a lot of things about myself; what it meant to be a gay Christian; how God loved me unconditionally; what this meant for me going into the ministry. I came back home for Christmas and all hell broke loose.

My parents told me on Christmas eve that they weren't paying for another semester of school. They claimed it was because of grades, but I did fine in all but one of my classes. They also said that if I wanted to come back and live at home then I had to be straight. I tried to explain to them that as much as I wanted it to be a choice for me, I couldn't choose who I was attracted to. They claimed that I wasn't being kicked out, but rather I was "choosing to leave by choosing my lifestyle"; I called it being kicked out. Semantics, I guess.

So for about a month, I lived out of my car. I stayed at friends' houses for a few nights at a time. I looked at different places to move. I figured that if I was going to leave Tennessee, then now was the time to do it. I priced apartments in Florida, Atlanta, lots of different places. Over that winter break was the last Daystar college retreat that I got to attend. I wasn't really doing so hot then, but I didn't really want to discuss it with anyone else. I figured that if my parent had rejected me - the one group of people who were supposed to love me and be there for me - then how could I risk being rejected by all of my friends at Daystar?

I don't really even know how it came about, but somehow I ended up living with my dad and my step-mom. My relationship with my dad has never really been on good terms, so going from seeing him two or three times a year to living in his house was quite a transition for me. The last thing I was going to do was come out to them. They're about ten times as close-minded as my mom and step-dad, so I knew that I would be kicked out of there for sure.

Besides that, it turned out that I didn't have to tell them at all because my aunt and uncle found out and decided that it was their responsibility to tell the rest of the family. We never talked about it; we were all kind of just living in denial.

In March of that year (2002) after I had been living there for about two, I took a road trip down to Atlanta. I was planning on staying there for a few days and heading back through Knoxville on my way back home so that I could visit some friends from UT. While I was in Atlanta, I totalled my Prelude. It totally wasn't my fault at all, but somehow I got a ticket anyway. Whatever.

At this point, I was in the process of bawling my eyes out because my only real possession was now completely demolished, and along with it, a new $1000 sound-system, an $800 clutch I had installed less than three days prior, about $700 of rock climbing gear, it was all gone. As I was sitting on the side of the road, my friend Sarah from UT called me to ask what time I thought I would be getting in to Knoxville. I had to explain to her that I didn't think I would be getting there anytime soon because I had wrecked my car, so she said that she would drive down and pick me up.

I had already explained to Sarah everything that was going on with my parents, so she was cool with that. We spent the night in Atlanta at one of my other uncle's house, and the next morning we headed back to Knoxville. Along the way, she proceeds to tell me that she is pregnant.

So, my life just keeps getting better and better at this point. The father of her child is an absolute jerk. Besides the fact that he was an alcoholic, he was also very abusive, both verbally and physically. She didn't want this guy to be the father of her child, so we decided to get married and raise the child together.

I came back to Nashville a few days later and started making plans for the baby. It obviously wasn't an ideal situation, but the kid needed a Dad, and she really couldn't do it on her own. Anyway, after a couple of months, she stopped calling me. I started to get worried, and then I freaked out. I had no idea what had happened to her. I left her voicemails, emails, IM's, everything to no avail.

Sarah finally called me a couple weeks later and told me that she wasn't actually pregnant. It was a "false alarm." I don't really know that much about pregnancy and all that, so I really don't know what that means physiologically, but I knew that it meant the wedding was off.

I ended up getting an apartment in Franklin across the street from the YMCA so that I could walk to work since I had totalled my car. I got a roommate and then about a year and a half later I finally bought a car. My roommate, Andrea, and I went our separate ways for a year; she moved in with a crazy boyfriend, and I lived with my Grandma. I saved up my money, paid off my debts, and bought a house in Spring Hill. Andrea finally broke up with her boyfriend and moved back in with me in my new house.

So that's pretty much where I am right now. I started a new job about six months ago and love it. I miss the Y since I'm only there a couple hours a week now, but everything has turned out alright. I'm just trying to enjoy what God has blessed me with and deepen my relationship with Him right now. After all of that drama, things have started to fall into place.

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