Member
I'm posting here because I've tried most everything else and have never seemed to find comfort. I feel I am an anomaly in every part of my being.
Nearly my entire life has been an exercise in suffering it feels. Good moments are fleeting at best, and then replaced by a blackness no one seems to be able to understand.
My mother destroyed our family (and my trust) when I was 12 years old, and for over a decade I've only stumbled further and further into misery and depression. We were a good Christian family, and just when we'd built our farm and settled in, everything fell to pieces. I asked God why, but all I heard was silence.
We lost all our animals, and eventually the farm as well. Everything changed.
In the years following, I learned that I was not attracted to girls the way other guys were in my age group. They ridiculed me relentlessly, insisting I was gay, but I wasn't attracted to boys either. Instead I was attracted to abstract ideas, fascinated with the distortion and manipulation of a body more than the body itself. I cannot explain this. I didn't choose it, nor did I intentionally try to further this fascination/fetishism, it's just who I am. This inevitably drew divides between myself and the people around me. Church became a place of judgement and persecution. The same people I saw in Sunday school, were the ones who would torment me in school the day after. My early childhood 'best friend' among them.
Once, in the midst of my teenage years I gathered the courage to try and express to my Father what I was experiencing. I brought him outside alone, and stated my plight, but it was as if he became deaf on the spot. He brushed it off and went back inside. Never again would I bring up the subject to anyone of my family.
I joined the Marine Corps as soon as I graduated high school intending to forget my old life and everything associated with it. Sexuality wouldn't matter in the military (at the time it wasn't legal to say anything but the traditional 'straight' regardless). I graduated honor platoon in bootcamp, only to be discharged OTH (other than honorably) under uncommon circumstances when I confessed to our Platoon Sergeant my suicidal intent moments before we set foot on the range. I had recreated my life with the goal of being the most exemplary Marine I could be, wanting only to make something of myself and show God that I could be strong. I gave everything. It ended in nothing but shame and dishonor, as though I had finally regained my heart just to have it torn out again. I asked God why, and again I felt alone, left to examine myself for reasons why I had failed to live up to what he wanted me to be.
For seven years now, I've drifted from place to place, school to school, vocational ventures and self-employment alike. I've done all kinds of things, from flying planes, to learning to blacksmith, to teaching myself how to paint on a semi-professional level and play instruments to match. I do everything, but none of it brings me any happiness. It only becomes a sour reminder of the growing abyss where my heart once sat.
My most recent career pursuit has been to attempt to make money selling my art online, and to some degree I was able to scratch by. This art is not what I want to be known for, though, and I know it can't be God's plan for me because though it isn't sexual in nature in a traditional sense, it feeds into a community of people like me who do not have sexual urges in the traditional sense. Non-sexual objects and concepts become sexually charged, and what appears innocent and neutral to regular people takes on a whole new meaning to those who appreciate it in that strange way. There are no real studies on these things that I have managed to find, and what little data there is is only speculative at best and comes from those who also experience it.
I lost my fiance the day after Valentine's Day this year. She left me abruptly, saying that she couldn't be with someone who was so emotionally numb. She had pushed for engagement, and marriage, but I wanted to slow things down. For how long, though? We'd been together for two years, but hadn't dated until the second. I felt I needed time to emotionally heal and be receptive, to learn how to open myself to love someone, but I don't think it is in me to do so. I'd never even so much as dated anyone before her, had no interests in relationships because to me there were neither sexual implications nor the need to be close to anyone. I couldn't trust it, not because I didn't want to, but because I am unable. I am broken to the point that I cannot trust anyone.
God is the only one that hears me, but despite my efforts, I cannot find my way. Everything I do falls apart, and leaves me more broken and lost than before. I don't enjoy anything anymore, I can't. I pray and look, searching for some new, unexplored path that might be the one I'm supposed to follow, but I can't stop finding things wrong with myself, things keeping me from God.
I drink, I smoke, I (until recently) self-pleasure, because every time I try to reach out to someone, I am met with the crushing reality that I may as well be speaking in tongues to them. Sometimes I won't sleep for days, sometimes I cannot bring myself to step out of bed. I am exhausted as a whole.
People are so quick to judge and condemn that I have never managed to even fully express what I need to say to them, despite many of them being apparent Christians, so this is my attempt.
Sometimes I feel my problems are small when I read about people like Job, but what if none of Job's problems had been externally visible?
How hopeless it is, to feel such a horrible brokenness without the shattered bones to show it.
Nearly my entire life has been an exercise in suffering it feels. Good moments are fleeting at best, and then replaced by a blackness no one seems to be able to understand.
My mother destroyed our family (and my trust) when I was 12 years old, and for over a decade I've only stumbled further and further into misery and depression. We were a good Christian family, and just when we'd built our farm and settled in, everything fell to pieces. I asked God why, but all I heard was silence.
We lost all our animals, and eventually the farm as well. Everything changed.
In the years following, I learned that I was not attracted to girls the way other guys were in my age group. They ridiculed me relentlessly, insisting I was gay, but I wasn't attracted to boys either. Instead I was attracted to abstract ideas, fascinated with the distortion and manipulation of a body more than the body itself. I cannot explain this. I didn't choose it, nor did I intentionally try to further this fascination/fetishism, it's just who I am. This inevitably drew divides between myself and the people around me. Church became a place of judgement and persecution. The same people I saw in Sunday school, were the ones who would torment me in school the day after. My early childhood 'best friend' among them.
Once, in the midst of my teenage years I gathered the courage to try and express to my Father what I was experiencing. I brought him outside alone, and stated my plight, but it was as if he became deaf on the spot. He brushed it off and went back inside. Never again would I bring up the subject to anyone of my family.
I joined the Marine Corps as soon as I graduated high school intending to forget my old life and everything associated with it. Sexuality wouldn't matter in the military (at the time it wasn't legal to say anything but the traditional 'straight' regardless). I graduated honor platoon in bootcamp, only to be discharged OTH (other than honorably) under uncommon circumstances when I confessed to our Platoon Sergeant my suicidal intent moments before we set foot on the range. I had recreated my life with the goal of being the most exemplary Marine I could be, wanting only to make something of myself and show God that I could be strong. I gave everything. It ended in nothing but shame and dishonor, as though I had finally regained my heart just to have it torn out again. I asked God why, and again I felt alone, left to examine myself for reasons why I had failed to live up to what he wanted me to be.
For seven years now, I've drifted from place to place, school to school, vocational ventures and self-employment alike. I've done all kinds of things, from flying planes, to learning to blacksmith, to teaching myself how to paint on a semi-professional level and play instruments to match. I do everything, but none of it brings me any happiness. It only becomes a sour reminder of the growing abyss where my heart once sat.
My most recent career pursuit has been to attempt to make money selling my art online, and to some degree I was able to scratch by. This art is not what I want to be known for, though, and I know it can't be God's plan for me because though it isn't sexual in nature in a traditional sense, it feeds into a community of people like me who do not have sexual urges in the traditional sense. Non-sexual objects and concepts become sexually charged, and what appears innocent and neutral to regular people takes on a whole new meaning to those who appreciate it in that strange way. There are no real studies on these things that I have managed to find, and what little data there is is only speculative at best and comes from those who also experience it.
I lost my fiance the day after Valentine's Day this year. She left me abruptly, saying that she couldn't be with someone who was so emotionally numb. She had pushed for engagement, and marriage, but I wanted to slow things down. For how long, though? We'd been together for two years, but hadn't dated until the second. I felt I needed time to emotionally heal and be receptive, to learn how to open myself to love someone, but I don't think it is in me to do so. I'd never even so much as dated anyone before her, had no interests in relationships because to me there were neither sexual implications nor the need to be close to anyone. I couldn't trust it, not because I didn't want to, but because I am unable. I am broken to the point that I cannot trust anyone.
God is the only one that hears me, but despite my efforts, I cannot find my way. Everything I do falls apart, and leaves me more broken and lost than before. I don't enjoy anything anymore, I can't. I pray and look, searching for some new, unexplored path that might be the one I'm supposed to follow, but I can't stop finding things wrong with myself, things keeping me from God.
I drink, I smoke, I (until recently) self-pleasure, because every time I try to reach out to someone, I am met with the crushing reality that I may as well be speaking in tongues to them. Sometimes I won't sleep for days, sometimes I cannot bring myself to step out of bed. I am exhausted as a whole.
People are so quick to judge and condemn that I have never managed to even fully express what I need to say to them, despite many of them being apparent Christians, so this is my attempt.
Sometimes I feel my problems are small when I read about people like Job, but what if none of Job's problems had been externally visible?
How hopeless it is, to feel such a horrible brokenness without the shattered bones to show it.
