The Ghost of Who I Used to Be

An "old friend" paid me a visit today. Not the kind that knocks on your door or sends a text, this friend has no physical form. He is an emotion. A feeling. He has been showing up, uninvited, for most of my life, though thankfully his visits have grown less frequent the older I get and the further I travel from the pain of my past. Some would call him depression. Some would call him fear. Some would call him nostalgia. I don't know what to call him. Abandonment? No, it's more than that. Loneliness? No, it's broader than that. Maybe he is all of those things wrapped together. What I do know is that he used to come around constantly. It has only been in recent years that I've felt any real relief from this feeling.

What summoned him this time was running into people I hadn't seen in a very long time. People who knew me before I came out, back when I was still locked inside the walls of church and religion, still performing a version of myself that I could never fully inhabit. That encounter wasn't just awkward. It was a collision between two separate timelines of my life, and the impact shook something loose in me.

To understand why, you'd have to know where I came from.

In February of 1988, at the age of 12, my family and I began attending a Pentecostal church in East Tennessee. We had only lived here a few short years, and before that, our home was a place filled with fighting and raised voices that sliced through too many evenings to count. My mother was a deeply unhappy woman.

Then came the church, and everything changed.

We didn't just attend. We were committed at a level that consumed us completely. Sunday was church. Monday nights were prayer meetings. Wednesday nights were church again. Thursday nights were youth group. Every revival, every special service, every church outing, my family was there. My father drove the church van. He sat on the church council for many years. And I developed a fierce, almost consuming admiration for our pastor that went far beyond respect. To disappoint him was one of my deepest fears. It was a devotion that bordered on the cult-like, though I didn't have that word for it then. He was a good man, I want to be clear about that, but I had placed him on a throne no human being could ever deserve. Below him, I had arranged a kind of inner circle of church members I idolized, people I measured myself against constantly. It was an unattainable standard, and I chased it every day.

My sexuality had no place in that world. It never even had a chair at the table. And many would say that I should have just resisted the temptation and continued to live as a straight man. Pascal's Wager: Living a life of devotion and emptiness here on earth is nothing compared to the eternal damnation that I would endure if I chose not to live like that. There's a fundamental flaw in this argument. The wager only works if you already know which god is holding the ledger. And no one truly does.

I was very young when I first understood that something about me was different. And that was the last thing I wanted. I didn't want to stand out. I didn't want anything that would draw the wrong kind of attention.

I remember the feelings that would come over me around certain boys in my class. This was long before church ever entered our lives. Third grade, maybe. There were a few popular boys I longed to be near, and I told myself it was just wanting their friendship. I was wrong, though I wouldn't fully understand that for years.

The first time I felt it with real clarity, I was nine or ten years old. A friend of mine and my twin brother's stayed the night with us. We spent the day outside on an empty lot beside our trailer where the landowner had broken ground for a new home. The bare dirt had turned to clay mud, and we'd built a little world out of it. We stacked cinder blocks, molded creatures and objects out of the clay with our hands, working side by side for hours. I noticed the feeling immediately. Being close to this boy felt different from anything I'd experienced with my classmates at school. It was stronger. More certain. Something I didn't have words for yet. For the first time, I understood it wasn't just friendship I was feeling. And it terrified me.

I couldn't tell my mother. I couldn't tell my father. My brothers would have made fun of me. There was no one to tell. So, I pushed it down. Packed it away. Learned to carry it in silence.

It was a skill I would practice and master for decades.

That friend went home when the weekend ended, and I remember an overwhelming sadness descending over me. A depression, which wasn't a word I knew at ten years old, but I felt its weight clearly enough. That sadness became a familiar presence. Almost a resident inside me. Through my preteen years, those feelings only grew stronger and more insistent, pressing against me like a clamp I couldn't pry loose, filling me with a fear so heavy I thought some days I might buckle under it. Suicide crossed my mind more than once. The only thing that held me back was the fear that religion had already begun to plant in me and alongside it, the crushing belief that I was broken in a way that could never be fixed.

My devotion to the church, to what I believed was a genuine love for Christ, became the architecture of my oppression. When I finally accepted that I was gay, I turned every spiritual tool I had against myself. Days and weeks of fasting. Hours of prayer. Relentless Bible study. I begged. I wept. I pleaded with God to take it away from me, not just the attraction, but the loneliness and the emptiness and the constant feeling that something fundamentally inside me was out of place. There was never any relief. Never any freedom.

And so, I built a performance.

Like so many other gay kids, I monitored my voice, my walk, my gestures. Every preference, every instinct, every small pleasure all filtered through the question of whether it would give me away. If I wanted a pink shirt, I left it on the rack. If a musical moved me, I pretended it didn't exist. If I felt emotion rising in me outside of worship, I shut it down because emotion wasn't masculine, and I couldn't afford not to be masculine. I constructed a version of myself that the world around me could accept, and I lived inside that construction every single day. It was an exhausting existence.

That is the life those people knew me from. That version of me. The one I built to survive.

And seeing those people again, after all these years, after everything I had finally dismantled and walked away from, brought that old friend rushing back through the door. Not because they were cruel. They weren't. They were warm, genuinely kind, and showed no judgment that I could see. But the encounter didn't need cruelty to hit the way it did. It only needed to exist. Two timelines, pressing against each other. The ghost of who I used to be, standing in the same space as the man I finally became.

Yes, that "old friend" of depression still shows up sometimes. I don't think he'll ever fully stop. But he stays shorter these days, and I've stopped offering him a seat.