You guys, I really don’t even know how to begin this post. I guess I’ll start by saying that this is mostly geared towards the people in my life who I’ve known for several years, although I’m sure my new friends can appreciate my sentiments on the matter as well. Oftentimes, I write about small things that happen to me, or that I’m a part of…silly little tidbits about my day or about something funny in the media. I tend, though, to shy away from topics of a very personal nature.  There’s the occasional rant or moment of reflection, but for the most part I try to keep the content of this website light and humorous. I figure everyone has enough negativity in their own lives and everyday stresses… I can’t imagine anyone wanting to spend their spare time reading about mine. But tonight, sitting here forming this post in my mind as I type, I know that I’m veering off my usual direction. And even still, I feel compelled to write it. So here goes.

This upcoming February will mark three years since I first met my Christopher. We began dating soon after and, since then, we have discussed many times how greatly I’ve changed. Not in the way that everyone changes year by year, but more specifically how one changes between the ages of 20 and 23. As much as I didn’t like to admit it, in those days I was practically a child. When you turn 18 and graduate high school, you think you’ve become the person that you will be for the rest of your life. But the truth is, you aren’t ready. You haven’t matured. At 18 I might have been swiping credit cards and drinking everything in sight, but I had absolutely no idea who I was as a person. Due to my family background, I’ve always felt that I was forced to grow up much too soon…but as independent as I thought I was at the time, I was still in a stage of emotional infancy. Chris and I had more fights in the first three months of our relationship than we’ve had since then combined. He recognized a potential in me, but I’m sure he sometimes felt that it wasn’t worth the trouble seeing me through my early adulthood. I thought I had all the answers, but I knew nothing at all.

Chris is out of town on business this weekend, and I suppose that is what sparked this entire thought process. He’s in Wilmington, a city he doesn’t visit often, and when he does we always joke about our very first conversations. We met online, as many of the gays do, and I will never forget the first time I tried to make a move on him. We’d been doing a little MySpace messaging back and forth for a few days and he’d mentioned to me that he would be working in Wilmington for the weekend. I casually responded that I, too, might find myself in Wilmington for the weekend and that we should get together. His response? “Have a safe trip.” Yep. Major burn. You see, Chris was seeing someone at the time, and although my fast ass couldn’t be bothered with monogamy at that age, it means a lot to me now to know that he wouldn’t entertain my advances not even for a second. Thinking about that conversation reminds me of the person I used to be, and just how much has changed since then.

Tonight I caught the notion to log into my MySpace account for the first time in God knows when, and read a few of those old sin-mails. Or sinning males, in my particular situation. I delved deep with no particular date or conversation in mind, and the very first message I read immediately made me cringe. It was to my dear friend Kandice, and for the sake of my future children I don’t think I can, in good conscience, find the strength to copy on this website the filth that I found therein. My horror doesn’t stem so much from my stories of sexual escapades or drunken hazes, but from the point of view that I found myself narrating from. It is obvious that I was a lost little boy who truly believed that my own happiness would lie in the next sip of alcohol or romp in the sack. For the first time in my life, I felt wanted. I truly believed that I was making a difference in someone else’s world. For the next 45 minutes, at least. I was seldom alone, but I was always lonely.

I look back now and I am ashamed. Not ashamed that I made some immature decisions involving love and friends, because that is what life is all about. We can only learn from our own mistakes. But I am ashamed that there I was, in all my naivety and recklessness, having the audacity to presume that I knew all there was to know about life.

After the initial shock of reading through that conversation, I mustered up the strength to read another. This time even more humiliating. I found an angry message I’d sent to my friend Dylan with whom I was, apparently, having a heated debate with. As it turns out I was in the “Okay-Now-I-Admit-I’m-Going-To-Sleep-With-Boys-But-I-Still-Think-It’s-Going-To-Send-Me-To-Hell” phase. Guys, I am mortified. I was such a nut-job (no pun intended). Somehow or other, Dylan and I had gotten onto the topic of Nature Vs. Nurture and I, as an openly-identifying gay male, truly believed that being gay was a choice and that I was going to be punished for it in the same manner as any other sin. We all know that my being gay was no more a choice than Britney Spears and her father’s conservatorship, and I know now that my decisions were based solely on what I had been fed for years from a pulpit, without even a hint of internal examination or conscience personal struggle. I believed just what I had been told and it scares the hell out of me, quite literally, that I almost grew up to be that person those narrow-minded hypocrites wanted me to become. What’s more, I’d completely lashed out at Dylan for trying to ever-so-gently make me ask myself the questions that needed to be asked. He was so kind and understanding, yet I did what is common for us purebred Bible-Belt “Christians”…I clung to the ideals of a preacher and condemned my friend for merely suggesting I might ever believe otherwise. I remember having similar conversations with other people, too, and I suppose as a gay man I could still be grasping on that argument today if I hadn’t have had the support and patience of people like Dylan. Or Chris, or Kandice, or Kelly, or Avon. Or anybody else with half a brain. I’m so angry with the idea of organized religion and those who feel the need to cast judgment on all those around them deciding what is right and what is wrong. What big shoes they must have to fill, what huge burdens they must bear…the saints that they are.

Between me and you, Internet, I simply did not have the strength to go on reading more after that. I was two for two, finding myself to be a self-absorbed, self-righteous, self-deprecating ass in 100% of the messages I stumbled upon. Part of me wants to delete them, and choose to look forward to a wiser future. A bigger part of me, though, the nester…is grateful for the embarrassing moments in my past that remind me to feel appreciative of my present.