healing

  • I Did My Best

    I Did My Best

    These are thoughts from the quiet moments in the morning, from a night that was too long. Sometimes the quiet in the early morning gets loud enough that I finally let myself say it. Not out of frustration. Not as a defense. Just because it is true. I did my best. I was a very…

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  • The Emotional Pandemic

    The Emotional Pandemic

    This morning I sat down to write and worked on a few things. The grammar was right and the punctuation was right. The sentences did exactly what they were supposed to do, and that was the problem. None of it felt like me. It felt like I was behaving on the page, keeping things in…

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  • Trying to Stay Human

    Trying to Stay Human

    I do not know. I just feel like a lot of people are carrying more than they let on right now. You can hear it when you talk to them. Even when they say they are fine, there is something underneath it. For me, taking care of myself has stopped being a big idea. It…

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  • A Season for Ghosts

    A Season for Ghosts

    I often think of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when I think about ghosts this time of year. December has always felt like the most haunted month to me. Not because it is frightening, but because it brings the past closer. Dickens understood that. He tapped into something deeply human when he wrapped a ghost story…

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  • Walking With My Father

    Walking With My Father

    I had a dream last night that stayed with me long after I opened my eyes. It felt real in that quiet way some dreams do. In the dream I was walking with my dad at Christmastime. We were at Northwest Plaza in St. Louis, going to see Santa, and I was maybe four years…

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  • The Chosen

    My relationship with God is not a complicated one. I live on very even ground with Him. We have an understanding, a quiet agreement that I am who He made me to be. Sometimes I believe that being gay has actually made me one of His chosen. Think about it. You come into this world…

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  • To be a gay father raising three children in the nineties was to live in quiet. Only the closest people to me knew the truth, because protecting my children mattered more than my own openness. I came out at twenty-nine, but even then it was carefully measured, told only to those who needed to know.…

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  • I Am Not the Secret

    I am not the secret,though they tried to make me one—hiding truth behind closed doors,feeding silence instead of love,teaching bitterness as inheritance.I was the boy they blamed,the brother they resented,the son who stood in the shadows of lies. I am not the sin,though they laid it on my shoulders.I am not the weight of their…

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  • I have died before. Thirty-eight seconds on an operating table. I cannot tell you exactly what happened in those brief moments of death, but I can tell you what I felt and why it has stayed with me ever since. Those thirty-eight seconds stripped my life down to its bare truth. They showed me that…

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  • The Morning After Me

    Lately, I’ve been feeling the weight of time. It’s hitting me that I’ve lived more years than I probably have left, and no matter how I try to shake it, the truth stays. One day, I won’t be here. And that day is coming faster than I ever imagined. One morning, people who love me…

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