Hello, my friends.
My hope is, in this space, to re-learn how to write. I’m only halfway exaggerating when I talk about having to learn how again, because as I mentioned when I first “launched” my artist website on my socials, I have been somewhat in hiding for the last couple of years.
In 2024, I came out as queer, and my former husband (still an excellent parenting partner and friend) and I came to the decision to end our 17-year marriage. Making these kinds of life choices when one has an extensive background in evangelicalism can lead to significant relational fallout, and this has certainly been the case for me.
Stan (my now-ex-husband) and my kids have continued to be an invaluable support system to me, with the addition of Kimberly, my fiancee, without whose care I don’t know where I’d be. A handful of friends, along with my church family, have remained supportive as well.
However - and I haven’t publicly shared this yet - my entire family and extended family of origin, with the exception of one cousin, have essentially cut me off.
I really don’t love talking about it because it feels… I don’t know… like it could be perceived as attention-seeking? And I didn’t say it to more than two or three close people for a long time because for the first year or two, I held some level of hope that a few of them would come around. But the truth is that it has been, and continues to be, an epic, gut-wrenching loss… and those words don’t remotely do it justice. The grief and sense of abandonment still sometimes take over and leave me in borderline panic attacks. Kim has spent many an evening holding me or listening (over the phone) while I cried.
The thing is, if you asked them, my family would almost certainly not agree that they’ve cut me off. They would tell you I made that choice for myself when I came out and Stan and we ended our marriage. I get it, though it isn’t my decisions that have effectively ended my relationships with them.
I used to think the way they do, used to interpret and apply certain Bible passages literally - the only way I was taught to approach them - with no thought for historical or cultural context or the reality of translation errors perpetuated over decades and centuries. I used to truly believe the best way to “love” someone was to virtually excommunicate them if I deemed they were “living in sexual immorality.”
It’s heartbreaking to me that I ever thought that way, heartbreaking that such a large sector of Christianity sees things that way, heartbreaking how many precious, vulnerable humans are rejected and abandoned by loved ones and entire support systems when they courageously decide to live more fully into the way they were made.
Eventually, I’ll share more here. I’ll tell you about my journey toward deciding to come out, tell you how all these life changes have drawn me deeper into God’s heart, how I’m learning to find my senses of identity and home in God when it’s hard to find them in concrete ways anyplace on Earth.
For now, though, I wanted to give you just a quick glimpse into my life of late. A glimpse into the grief and the gratitude that I continually hold in tension. I don’t know how often I’ll be able to write or what it’ll feel like to share myself vulnerably, publicly, again after so long. But my hope is that saying some of this “out loud” to you will serve as a stake in the ground; hopefully it’ll be another early step on a journey of re-learning how to show up in the world as my fullest, bravest, most alive self.
Thanks for being along for the ride - your presence means more to me than you know.
