In November of 2007, I read an article in preparation for the foundational feminist writer Mary Daly coming to speak at Hood College. The essay was about the importance of naming one’s experiences in order to eventually overcome them. I didn’t quite understand what she meant by “overcome,” but it was compelling enough to get me to go to Wal Mart that night and buy a $3 faux-leather journal and write some thoughts on what I just read.

And then I kept writing.

On Sunday, October 25, 2015, I wrote a five-page treatise after returning home from my older brother’s camping-trip bachelor party. It started with the sentence “I think I’m something completely different from Chris.”

It was the first reference I made to an experience I had not known how to name for eight years.

The crisis of my wedding wouldn’t come for another two years, and that would unfold between two shocking revelations.

The year leading up to my wedding was the stark, but polite and “completely innocent”, unmasking of the singular truth of the community I was born into — I was nothing more to anyone than the faggot son, brother (he’s trying), grandson, nephew, cousin, employee, classmate, roommate, friend and best friend.

The months after were an even harder epiphany, and it devastated, emotionally debilitated, me, especially for the past six weeks — realizing that after 11 years, I was the only one who was just learning what everyone else knew all along. This was news to no one.

I fought it so hard. I fought it, because I knew that once I accepted it, my entire life until then would ultimately make sense to me in a way I never wanted it to.

Every person in my life had made up their minds about me from the first moment I came out of the closet, and they have gaslighted me into believing I was to blame ever since.

Every single one of them.

I wasted so much time. I was never going to change anyone’s mind, no matter how much I believed I might, and I finally understand that that’s not my fault.

My best friends freed me from a vicious and brutalizing cycle; gave me a safe ground beneath my feet for the first time; helped me finish deliberating my way into my consciousness; and got me to a place where I could finally find peace.

That’s the gratitude I honored this Thanksgiving.

#happythanksgiving