Sad (part 1)

Every now and then (probably like all other bloggers) I like to cruise the "blogosphere." (oh man, did I actually use that word?) Now it is true that there is a huge amount of crap out there and getting through this landscape is rather like wading through the sewers. But that's o.k. I don't mind wading through human waste from time to time - it sort of humbles a person. Plus, every now and then you stumble upon a blog worth reading. Now one of the things about just meandering through this space is that you come upon writings you were never really meant to see. That seems a strange statement to make - doesn't it? I mean after all, isn't the whole point of blogging to make your thoughts available to....well to everyone? I'm not sure that this is entirely true, and even if it is, I certainly don't think everyone who writes a blog understands that fact, so there are definitely people out there writing blogs that they never imagined YOU would read. And if the knew YOU were going to be reading it, they might not write it at all. And so this process of randomly moving from blog to blog sometimes allows you to become a vouyeur. In your vouyeurism, you can find all kinds of stuff: funny stuff, profound stuff, political rantings, mundane commentary on popular culture, moving personal experiences, titilating personal fantasies and so on! I think I've covered a few of those things in my own blog.

And so it was yesterday that I was peeping into the windows of random bloggers souls when I stumbled upon Adam's blog. Now my first name is Adam also, so I figured I would read on. It was heartbreaking. It reminded me so much of some of the most gut-wrenching experiences I went through myself years ago that at times it actually made me cry. It turns out that Adam (I'm not sure that Adam is his real first name anymore) is a Christian man struggling with the fact that he is gay. His postings almost without fail, alternate between pessimistic expressions of self-loathing and condemnation when he finds himself "giving in" to his "sinfulness" and optimistic expressions of spiritual hope when he finds himself (for a day or two) able to repress his feelings and deny his sexuality.

Now I understand exactly what "Adam" is going through. I went through it from the ages of about 8 to 23. Oh, I've known I was gay (read "different" in my earliest years, I don't think I really knew a word for it until I was about 10 or 11) for as long as I can remember. I mean even at 4 and 5 I was curious about men and about their private parts. Yeah, I was a pretty precocious kid - my sexual awakening came early. But I was being raised as one of Jehovah's Witnesses. That is to say, I was being raised in a fundamentalist christian home. Homosexuality was unacceptable and condemned as an abomonation. I was taught that it was unnatural and that God hated homosexuals. I learned to hate myself and to drive everything inward. I grew up suffering from severe depression. During my teens and early 20's I engaged in seriously self-destructive behaviors. I'm not just talking about the traditional things like abusing drugs (I certainly did that), I'm also talking about taking razors to my body and cutting myself (and letting others do that to me as well). I thought about suicide all the time (fortunately at the core of my being, I'm just not the suicidal type - I'm too much of a survivor). I suffered from insomnia and chronic sickness. All in all, I was miserable.

Based on his postings, it is clear that Adam is miserable too. And he honestly doesn't know why he is miserable. He grew up being taught the samethings as me. If you just genuinely confess your sins to God and repent of them, He will help you. And so I would, in the most sincere and abject manner, open my heart and soul to God, and confess and repent. And guess what? God did not heal me. He did not change me. He did not make me whole or make me "normal." And I couldn't understand why. What had I done? What was so wrong with me? Clearly God was rejecting me. Adam has expressed all those thoughts and feelings in his blog and I cried reading them. I've always been a rather empathic person, and seeing all those familiar thoughts, feelings and experiences in print in a blog just made my heart go out to this complete stranger.

To be continued...