A friend of mine recently shared the following quote from poet Ocean Vuong:
“Being queer saved my life. Often we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation from me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me curious; it made me ask, ‘Is this enough for me?’”
In the last 5-6 years, my life has changed drastically. There have been points where I’ve looked back and wondered if 12-year-old me would like who I am today (usually my conclusion is a bit of yes, a bit of no). But I think Vuong is right that the changes to my life and worldview, despite distancing me from who I used to be, have saved me. What felt like seismic shifts and upsets actually cracked my world open rather than broke it down.
Saving my life didn’t start with queerness. It started with leaving Christianity and discarding a faith I used to wholeheartedly depend on. I call it my messy divorce with God.
I grew up in a non-denominational Christian family with parents who identified themselves as “Bible-believers” but didn’t attach too many other strings or identifiers to their exact ideology. I also grew up in a region, state, and country (SE MN) where church and religion and the barest bones of what could be recognized as the Christian church are near universal.
From this melting pot of influences and, you know, the general morass of societal pressure and dominant patriarchal ideology in the US, I grew up with a firm and unshakeable belief that I was going to burn in hell forever, screaming in a fiery dark void for years and years. Why?
Because no matter how hard I tried and prayed about it and cried about it, faith never brought me peace. I still wanted to do what I wanted to do. I still felt God’s rules were unfair. And eventually, after 22 years of trying, I quit.
Only it wasn’t as easy as quitting. You don’t wake up one day and decide to reject the basis of your entire worldview. Or, you do, but then have to practice and unlearn until you’ve built a new worldview.
I left Christianity by deciding I would just stop believing in God and the Bible and the whole salvation shebang. Coming to that decision took months of questioning and second guessing, culminating in a few intense days of deciding I was just done with it all. Actually leaving has taken years - and I’m not really finished. I certainly didn’t wake up one day yelling “Fuck you!” at God (although I’m happily there now). Instead, it was more like:
Sobbing in the shower for months because it’s the only place I let my doubts catch up to me with the paralyzing fear that maybe I’m wrong and God will punish me for my rebellion forever.
Excusing myself from friendly invitations to come to church or other faith-related functions because having to stand and fold my hands to pray makes me feel cold and afraid inside, like what if this time God decides to finally, finally talk back.
Fuming at those stupid GET-TRUTH billboards and their predatory fear mongering and then screaming at God for every hateful, hurtful thing that’s been done to me in that name until I have a headache.
Reminding myself that I’ve put in enough effort every time a Christian offers to pray for me to find my faith again, or encourages me to just seek out God again, or to otherwise keep trying. I’ve become a chorus of one telling myself that, sometimes, I actually am right and I actually did try really hard for a really long time to make it work and that there’s actually nothing wrong with concluding that faith does not work for me.
I had a lot of doubt. I have less now. Mainly because I’m happier now. There is no dark doom looming over me which I can never escape from no matter how hard I try to earn the favor and attention of an omnipresent, morally ambiguous being. I have, after four years, stopped believing in one.
I have, after four years, realized how much Christianity encouraged me to not trust myself, and worked to teach myself to believe myself for once.
I have stopped crying in the shower about hell.
I haven’t stopped flipping off those stupid GET-TRUTH billboards on the highway, but I don’t think stopping believing in a God means I have to stop rebelling against one. I still have a lot of anger, and I’m in no hurry to get rid of it.
Leaving faith took a lot of breaking. It demanded a lot of innovation. Now that I can’t outsource my moral compass to an external document or maxims of my favorite a religious figure/teacher/leader, my alternative routes are guided by questions that mainly go unanswered. I muddle through the best I can, making my own mistakes, asking “what is enough for me?” and answering that question myself or with the input of real people who I actually know care and have an equal stake in mutual wellbeing.
Queerness is sort of similar, sort of different in terms of how it broke and fixed my life.
I never had a big coming out moment. Queerness has come slowly, mainly through process of elimination, realizing the things I am not. For me it was a painful process that definitely felt like deprivation. Talking about it felt and feels private, like it’s not really anybody’s business what secret hurts I’ve been carrying and what I’ve learned from them about myself.
But considering Vuong’s words, queerness is still freeing - after I finished grieving things I thought I wanted and worked to have and be.
After the breakups stopped feeling like a personal sign of my undesirability, I realized I didn’t want to be desired. After my friend’s attention switched from me to her boyfriend-then-husband, I realized I didn’t want to be somebody’s #1 someone. After the sting of being the odd-one-out without stories of sexual escapades faded, I realized I didn’t want to have sexy escapades. After the FOMO of never being the person somebody picked became background noise, I realized I didn’t want to be picked.
What I wanted was to be able to dream my own future - without putting plans on hold or leaving them in limbo to await the input of a future partner.
What I wanted was to be a body that would never belong to anybody else but me.
What I wanted was a viable future that didn’t rely on hitting milestones of marriage, childbearing, childrearing, and caregiving that frankly filled me with panic if I dwelled on them too long.
What I wanted was to be happy with myself and let that be the end of it.
That’s where my queer journey has landed me. We’re on the third or fourth iteration of my queer self, moving on from the versions that turned out to be built more on what I thought a queer person should be like than how I actually am. I made alternative routes. I asked what was enough for me. I realized when I had done enough.
I generally trust poets to hit the nail on the head, and Vuong certainly does.
The things that felt most like they were going to shrink my world have in fact saved my life and made it bigger and better. Instead of depriving me, queerness and leaving the church moved me in directions that brought joy and opportunities I had been deprived of.
Basically, I’m never going back.