Leather & Lace

I see some of my own story in Matt's. It's not the same exact story, obviously. I am a gay woman, for starters. But there were some things that resonated deeply. Like this quote: “hiding from yourself makes things all the more difficult to find. Nearly impossible. [...] Looking back, it's easy to see the truth. But when you are in an all-out war to be straight, you'll forage for any clue that points in that direction. [...] I spent years complicating what would've been easy to know. But I didn't have the tools to be honest with myself or others.”

And this:

“My walk out of evangelicalism happened over a very long decade. At first, it was like coming out of a coma. Then once I was awake, there was sifting to do—fear to let go of, educating myself, new friends to find, and ultimately, the breaking away. When your entire life is defined by something this powerful, it becomes an amputation with ghost pains that can last a lifetime. Standing at the precipice, something was calling me forward. But leaving the place where I had lived for so long—that I was entirely familiar with—was a terrifying leap. Because there are some leavings we cannot get back to. While walking out on them, we are also abandoning a part of ourselves. And there is something sad about that. Because nothing in our lives is exclusively one thing or the other. In each segment, there is good and bad. Love and loss. And inhabiting the new places we've never been demands that we find out who we are there, what we will become, and how we will live.”