The Doe's editorial team takes a look back at the year and shares its favorite narratives.

The Doe - Best of 2021

Best of 2021

I often used to feel guilty about needing to heal from traumatic experiences in my childhood because some of my basic human needs, like food and shelter, were stable. Years of therapy taught me how to extract myself from family members with toxic behaviors and create enough space to look at what happened to me like an archaeologist at a dig site. Ah yes, this PTSD relic is from a time when my father sexually abused me. This one here is from when I started writing daily letters to my mother to confirm whether she loved me. Indeed, I have discovered many types of this artifact, indicating prolonged emotional abuse from my mother. Therapy helps me curate my artifacts in an internal museum and piece together a story of my childhood with mentally unwell parents that my adult brain can understand. It applies a logical and psychologically informed framework to my deepest wounded material at the bargain rate of $200/hour and keeps me alive. 

After a decade of meticulous curation, the grand opening of my internal museum was held in 2019 when my niece was born and air finally met my vocal cords in the ears of a social services intake person, and eventually a detective, with my sincerest hope of keeping my niece safe from my father. I sat alone at a conference table at work one afternoon in July when a detective told me over the phone that I could pursue my case in court, but that without external evidence or anyone to corroborate my experiences, it would be a lot of wasted energy, time and money. In his words, I could hear the training he received about what to say to people like me. As our short conversation wore on, his heart and tone broke for me in between his sturdy template of sentences, and I am forever grateful that a human was on the other side of that phone call. 

So there I was, living in the depths of what it means when the truth sets you free, with my tidy museum and logical framework carrying me forward. A trusted friend recommended an introductory workshop on shamanism to me as a means for spiritual healing and understanding human relationships to the natural and spirit worlds. Shamanism is a spiritual practice that can be found cross-culturally as far back as human records of time. This workshop led to me entering a three-year shamanic practitioner training, which utilizes a heal-the-healer method wherein we learn how to facilitate healing for others by practicing shamanic healing methods with the other learners in the program and on ourselves. This circle provides the stability and wellness needed to visit the parts of my life where stability and safety were absent and work toward healing them. I am a fierce protector of my spirit, and this program offers the safety I need to learn and heal in two key ways: learning how to achieve a trance state with drumming and rattling (rather than psychedelic drugs), and having a core foundation of personal sovereignty. 

As one example, in my circle of 60 learning shamanic practitioners, there are as many faiths and cosmologies as there are practitioners, and we coexist and honor one another’s experience of spirit because they are all vastly different and true at the same time. While we learn how to facilitate shamanic healing techniques with the help of our trusted spirits (also referred to as helping spirits), the cosmological explanations of the universe and why/how it functions are purposefully left up to each individual practitioner, in living practice of our sovereignties. 

This program provides a curriculum of healing techniques that has served as a map through my internal museum for me to use to explore all of the ways in which my spirit has been wounded and work with trusted spirits and shamanic practitioners to compassionately acknowledge what has happened to me and heal. The following are a few examples of my experiences with shamanic healing specifically related to my experiences of childhood sexual abuse. This narrative speaks to my personal experience and only represents a small fraction of shamanic healing techniques and possibilities.

With the guidance of a highly skilled and fully trained shamanic practitioner and a few of my helping spirits, I recently entered into a trance state as the sovereign adult that I am now and visited one of my most traumatic memory artifacts with my father. The adult me was vibrant and full of my own self-knowledge and personal power. In the shamanic journey to this memory, I took my child self’s hand and she understood that she is safe with me now and we left the memory together. Visiting this memory as my highest self allowed a transformation of the memory to occur wherein the focus became my connection to my child self and her connection and focus on adult me, rather than the trauma that was occurring. It is a vastly different experience when compared to thinking about this memory in a non-shamanic state or talking about this memory in therapy. And when I think of this memory now, my association is with bringing my child self to safety and her trust in me, whereas before, I could never see or feel anything beyond what my father had done to me. 

The shamanic healing technique mentioned here is called transmutation, wherein a memory of an experience is transformed from one state (highly traumatic) to another state (filled with spiritual light). This is something that I would not have thought possible without experiencing it myself at my own pace. This is the kind of memory artifact in my museum that was so traumatic that visiting this while using a psychedelic drug to achieve the same healing end could have been too much for me to handle. Utilizing drumming to achieve a shamanic trance state allows me to leave a journey at any time and return to it later, thus enabling me to be sovereign in relation to my own healing pace. I have also learned the value of working with a team of spirits who are always with me, as well as with another shamanic practitioner when working on complex inquiries. 

I recently asked a trusted spirit how I can open my heart to be able to receive more love. A member of the team of helping spirits that I work with explained that my child self learned to direct all of my emotions, especially anger, towards myself because I had no other options or resources as a child to cope with the tremendous trauma happening to me. This spirit showed me how directing anger towards myself keeps me from having a deeper connection to my body, receiving love fully and being able to care for my whole self. Now that I have a better understanding of these underlying dynamics, I am working with my helping spirits and my therapist to develop new practices and patterns of routing anger outside of my body and away from myself. This is making space for a new relationship with love, care and my body, including my relationship to exercise and food. In this case, the spiritual healing I received was being able to name what has been happening to me so that I can understand it and grow more supportive and loving ways of being in relationship to myself. Going forward, I can undertake additional journeys when I get stuck in old patterns or dynamics, or visit other artifacts and memories, in order to keep building my capacity to absorb the love my partner offers to me, eat nourishing food or move my body.

It is difficult to explain the resounding impact that these journeys have had on healing my spirit. With every journey and healing, I have a greater sense of the magnitude and potential of the fullness of my life and myself, a deeper connection to my body and presence to the world around me. I have learned that journeying is a tool for my own healing and a process wherein I take an active role in that healing with the help of an incredible group of compassionate spirits with unwavering constancy. I have been witness to my own transformative process of transmuting my painful experiences into storied artifacts that have new meanings and no longer hold me back. My museum is filled with the same artifacts that feel completely different to me. And by training to be a shamanic practitioner, I am now able to help clients on their sovereign, evolutionary healing paths with their own artifacts to heal. The path of the shamanic healer is a new mantle that I feel so fortunate to hold.

As a final note, it is important to mention that shamanic healing may not have been as effective for me if I had not pursued therapy first and in conjunction with shamanic healing. I often work with my therapist to become current and in congruence mentally and emotionally with the spiritual healing that occurs during a shamanic healing session. Shamanic healing is not a substitute for therapy. I have found that healing from trauma and maintaining wellness results from working regularly with a team, including a psychotherapist for mental and emotional health, shamanic healers and my helping spirits for spiritual health, an acupuncturist for energetic health, a primary care physician for physical health and others as needed for different aspects of my well-being. In doing so, I have experienced deep, interconnected layers of healing that I never would have thought possible and discovered that I am worthy of being healed.

Religion

How Shamanism Is Helping Me Heal From Sexual Trauma

I have always been fascinated by the depths our bodies can endure. The duality of our mind both creates walls and destroys them. When we are tested, we are capable of much more than we think. This train of thought has led me down a path of all different self-experiments and, in the summer of 2018, a perfect storm of sleep deprivation, drugs and an ultramarathon led me to discover “the edge.”

It began at my business partner's wedding, a beautiful affair on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Upstate New York. In three days, I was due to race an ultra-marathon on the other side of the country in the Nevada desert at Burning Man. I had the best intentions to behave myself at the wedding, but one cocktail turned into several, then someone slipped me some ecstasy and mushrooms, and the evening was off to a wild ride.

The night raged on and culminated with lovemaking at sunrise with a lady friend on a mattress we pulled out of a dusty supply cupboard. Sunday morning delivered one of those ghastly headaches that open bars at weddings are famous for. I ambled my way back to Brooklyn to pack for Burning Man. By the time I packed, I’d managed to eke out three hours' sleep before flying to Portland to collect our RV. 

We arrived in Portland on Monday around lunchtime and picked up our RV. The race was in 17 hours and maps said it was a 12-hour drive. We hit the road stopping only for fuel and supplies. We carefully hid a considerable cache of recreational drugs intended to last us six days at the Burn. My friend and I split the driving and, around sunset, I started to hit my first wall.

A wall for me is an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. It’s the body's “low battery” warning. I tried to nap, but by the time I found a comfy position in the RV, it was my time to drive again. I cranked a Red Bull and some techno music to find a second wind. We arrived at the famous Burning Man traffic jam around 3 a.m. By the time we were through the gates, only an hour remained before the race.

As I laced up my shoes, I hit my second wall. Three hours of sleep in three nights started to catch up with me. Imagine the finish line, I thought. I trudged towards the start line. Butterflies formed in my stomach, adrenaline coursed through my veins. The energy of 300 eager ultramarathoners brought upon a much-needed third wind and I was ready to race.

When people say Burning Man has something for everyone, it’s true. If your thing is subjecting yourself to a sustained battering of your legs, aerobic system and mind, then there’s an ultramarathon for that. These are the deranged masochists of Burning Man. Many are dressed in costumes. There are tutus, a Superman, a leprechaun. One guy is fully naked except for his shoes. The race is four full laps of the festival. I told myself I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Running is an easy sport. The only real thing you need to do is not stop. Some say it’s the art of dying the fastest. The hard part is convincing yourself to not stop. Your mind wants to throw up walls and convince you that you are in danger and should no longer go on, but the mind also has the power to overcome. It’s as much about inner strength as it is about outer strength. Mind over body.

At 5 a.m., the starting bell rang. We made our way through the dark campsites and out onto the playa, full of lights, art, cars and music. The Milky Way bore high overhead. By the second lap, light appeared on the horizon, and the sun rose over the playa revealing revelers who were still partying from the night before.

By lap four, the sun blazed overhead. I found myself sitting in 11th place. At 42 kilometers in, I felt a third wall coming on. My legs started to feel heavy. My mind convinced me that I was doing some permanent damage to my joints as my knees and ankles screamed in pain. My lungs stung from the heat and my eyes were red from the dust. My pace slowed to a crawl with the finish line in sight. I told myself to keep going but the body refused to listen. I stopped.

At this point, I heard measured panting from behind. A fully naked man in his 50s slowly jogged past me. I tried to move my legs to keep up with him, but my legs had no more to give. There is a slow sad irony of being overtaken by a naked man in a marathon. You can’t help but check out his dusty tanned butt cheeks as they slowly pass you. A strange torture.

In the wake of his cheeks, I found a fourth wind. If a naked man could finish this race, so could I. Using energy conjured from an unknown source, I found the willpower required for the last eight kilometers. Shattered and dusty, I rolled into the finish line in a little under four hours. An honorable finish considering the sheer lack of sleep. My friends were there to greet me.

It was 9 a.m. and my crew was rested and ready for action. Someone slipped me a tab of acid and we were off on our bikes exploring the playa. The acid and excitement of exploration brought on a fifth wind. The acid negates the exhaustion and we bounced from party to party. With a little top-up of ketamine, we headed off to a sunset dance party. By the time 4 a.m. rolled around, I was in awe of my body. Still standing and into my fourth sleep-deprived night. Alas, the sixth and final wall hit me. I knew this experiment should end. Delirium overtook me and I asked my friend Nicole to escort me safely back to camp. We zig-zagged home and on the final turn before our camp, the world turned black.

Nicole dropped her bike and raced over to my dusty, tangled body. She removed my bike from on top of me as I regained consciousness. My eyes fluttered open and I saw a frightened look upon her eyes. I laughed like a hyena. “What’s funny?” she said. 

“Only those who have been over the edge know where the edge is,” I said. “And we found the edge.”

Adventure

Drugs & Alcohol

Running a Marathon on No Sleep and Lots of Drugs: Discovering the Edge

It was my girlfriend Liv’s 21st birthday. Because I have ADHD, I naturally had forgotten to get her a present. That day I was meant to be meeting her to spend an evening drinking cocktails at overpriced bars. Instead, I spent a guilt-fueled morning gathering a collection of token presents for her, so she wouldn’t instantly remind me that I was the worst boyfriend ever. The problem was that none of the presents was quite “right.” After all, this was her 21st. I had to get her something spot-on. 

Fast forward six months to the summer we were traveling through China. On one train ride, I had been flicking through a Lonely Planet travel guide when suddenly I saw my way out of the predicament of the present. 

We’d just finished the summer teaching in Chinese classrooms and earning our TEFLs (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). Then a few weeks traveling the big cities: Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi’an.

By the time we got to Beijing, it was time to spring my surprise. I snuck out of the hostel early and spent the morning alternating between the fire that was the Beijing smog and the frying pan of Beijing’s smelly, crowded subways. I returned an hour or so later, feeling both lighter due to the pride that filled me and heavier for all the camping gear I carried. 

I sat at the entrance to the hostel and got chatting with a traveling group. They were heading to Shanghai that day and had some weed on them. Do I want to buy it? They can’t risk taking it through the airport-style security you must go through to get on China’s high-speed trains. 

Weed is especially rare in China. So, what do I say? “Sure!” This is a camping trip, after all. 

I return to our room to explain to Liv what her birthday present is—a camping trip on the Great Wall of China. She asks me if it's legal to camp on the Great Wall. Not exactly, I explain. But it’s 13,000 miles long; they can’t patrol it all, right? 

If you ever go to Beijing and visit the Great Wall, you’ll probably go to Badaling. It’s the part of the Wall that you see in tourist pictures, all rebuilt and shiny new, prepared for your tourist photos. That was not where Liv and I went. We went up to Gubeikou—via six hours of bus rides with three changes. We’re trying to avoid being caught, remember?

So, we get to Gubeikou and to the gate that admits entry onto the Wall. No other English-speaking tourists must ever make it this far because the admittance attendant didn’t have anything to say to us other than “closed.” However, we hadn’t come this far to turn back now. Plus, I was still trying to redeem myself for forgetting my girlfriend’s 21st birthday. 

As I said, it’s a big fucking wall. So, we simply walked away and began to climb again. 

An hour and a half later, we had hiked high enough away from the small village below us and up onto the Wall. Our tent was made and basecamp was established for the night. Liv offered me a wink and a wry smile that said “Well done, you.”

At this point, I pulled out the weed. It was pre-rolled so no messing about. We smoked and smoked and watched as the sun set. At that moment, we were a little pearl in a giant oyster of a Chinese summer adventure. 

It is remarkable how quickly a picture-perfect scene can be so quickly disrupted by the eerie, unnerving descent of nightfall. For weeks, we had taught in classrooms and toured the big cities. Now, up here on the hills of remote China, it was quiet. Too quiet. Unnervingly quiet. There wasn’t even a dog howling at the moon. 

“What was that?” said a startled Liv.

I brushed it off. “Nothing, of course, just some animal.” 

But the sniffing grew louder. Without any light whatsoever, it was too easy to let the shadows play with our imaginations. 

“James,” Liv said, “What animals do they have in Northern China?”

We had Chinese SIM cards, so we quickly loaded up Google to settle our nerves. No such luck. Our search revealed that they have both bears and wolves in this part of China. Now we’re panicked.

We rush into the tent. Inside it, I try to collect myself. Liv has lost her head. She’s sharing her location to her group chat and telling her friends to make sure her mum knows she loves her. I interrupt that there’s no time to think about that now. Sending those kinds of messages would somehow make this whole nightmare more real.

How could I have been so stupid? Why didn’t I check? Surely this isn’t how I’m going to go? To a fucking bear on the Great Wall out in the middle of nowhere? I’m not the live-fast-die-young type. Let me grow old in a care home somewhere. 

“Liv. What if we get outside of the tent?”

“If it is a bear, what if we go out?”

Liv looks at me like I have lost my mind. (At this point, there’s a good chance that I have.) If it merely smells us, it might come to investigate. But on the other hand, if it sees us, then it might turn and leave us alone and go hunt some smaller prey. Between us, we can look big in the dark, right?

She leans forward and says I should go first. We find the time to rock-paper-scissors. My heart is banging.

I lean forward. Liv lets out a scream with anticipation. I turn around to shush her sternly, fully aware I have no idea whether a scream makes a situation like this better or worse. There is no precedent for the process of my decision-making. Every reaction is now a hot mess of instinct, conditioning and my brain scrambling to piece together any scrap of Ray Mears and Bear Grylls that I’ve caught over my life.

The sniffing grows ever louder. It’s screaming in my head over against the absolute silence from a petrified Liv in the corner.

I lean for the zip. I take several attempts to grasp it because my hand is shaking so much. Eventually, I manage to steady my nerves long enough to take hold. Do I do it slowly or all at once, like a Band-Aid?

Band-Aid. Go! Zip open. I clamber out. My best foot forward. Or kind of forward. It's shaking so much that it oscillates six inches either way with every inch that I creep forward.

I see what’s going on and my brain pieces it together even though it’s forgotten all other functions. I scream. Liv practically backflips in fear. She has no idea what I’ve seen.

The weed’s got us way too high. I still hear the sniffing still but it’s not a bear or a wolf. 

It’s a rabbit. A big rabbit I must say, but a rabbit, nonetheless.

I turn to her with a huge smile on my face. I can’t even explain at first. God, it really is the biggest kind of rush thinking you’re going to die. Now don’t get me wrong. At this point, I realize I never was in any actual danger, but I thought I was. I genuinely believed I was going to die and so my nervous system acted accordingly. Blood had drained away from every non-essential area and was coursing through my body. I mean coursing. My heart was throbbing right into the underside of my ribcage.

I started to laugh and I just. Could. Not. Stop. 

Liv looked angry, as if she were going to kill me. Still laughing, I leaned in and kissed her. It was meant to be a quick kiss. A reassuring kiss. However, the combination of adrenaline and relief, it turns out, makes for a potent aphrodisiac.

I tried to pull away, but she pulled me back in. She kissed me hard. I could feel her breath panting. There was something in her breath, a heavy breath outward, the kind that would usually be rude, right in my face. She opened her eyes but didn’t look up when I pulled away.

A switch in my mind just flipped. My heart hadn’t slowed down from the scare, but my nervous system managed to spare me just a little blood for one essential purpose. And so it went—the hottest, most passionate, most animalistic sex that I ever had. There we were, young, alive and fucking on the Great Wall of China. 

Goosebumps

NSFW

Travel

I Thought I Was Going to Die and Then Had the Best Sex of My Life on the Great Wall of China

It took me until my Saturn return to figure out I was trans. I got along just fine as a gay boy for many years. Well, mostly fine. Looking back now, it’s easy to see early signs of my egghood. (“Egg” being the sometimes endearing, sometimes condescending term for a trans person who hasn’t figured out they’re trans yet.) There were lots of little examples, like raiding my mother’s closet when she wasn’t home or opting to sit with the girls in middle school once I was freed from the confines of my religious, single-sex grade school. 

In a diary entry from Halloween four years ago I wrote, “I feel so good in women’s clothing.” There were other entries about how thrilling it was to wear heels, how poised and powerful I felt in them. But I wasn’t trans. I just donned a slutty witch costume for one weekend a year all through my 20s. And painted my nails, and wanted long flowing shampoo commercial hair, and only felt truly safe and at home in the company of other girls growing up. 

My annual Halloween cross-dressing ritual carries a deeper significance to me now. I realize what I was feeling was my first experience of gender euphoria, the heady glee of engaging in high femme antics mixed with a deep feeling of relief.

If I had to point to one moment in my gender awakening—the thing that officially cracked my egg and made me admit my transness—it would be hearing a nonbinary trans femme talk about their hairline dysphoria, and the dread they felt about going bald. It wasn’t a matter of vanity, they said, it was a matter of being in the wrong body. 

For the previous couple of years, I’d been scrutinizing my hairline in the mirror every morning, willing my fivehead not to get any bigger. I wallowed in despair at my looming baldness. I’d kept my hair short for most of my 20s, hoping that would get me more attention from gay men. It felt like a cruel betrayal of my body, imagining I could see my hair thinning before my eyes just when I had decided to grow it out again. 

Hearing that enby speak, I had a surreal out-of-body moment. How they were speaking aloud my secret innermost thoughts. Me, a cis person! 

After that, I slowly acquired more and more trans friends. I insinuated myself in trans spaces as someone who was “questioning.” Feeling emboldened by my peers, I started going by they/them pronouns and calling myself nonbinary. 

I felt such a rush of relief that I didn’t have to be a man anymore. I could set aside all the expectations of masculinity that I never really lived up to. Even surrounded by cis gay men, I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I felt despair that I couldn’t find comfort there, in the community I was supposed to feel at home in. I thought I was plagued by some debilitating anxiety disorder, but no. Just trans.

Then the pandemic happened. I lost my job. All my acquaintanceships evaporated as the Zoom happy hours quickly lost their appeal. I left the house as little as possible. Freed from the burden of other people’s expectations, I was able to imagine how I might like to live without fear getting in the way. 

My curiosity and explorations eventually led me to a Zoom call with a doctor I’d never met in person, who thankfully believed me when I told him I was trans and I wanted to try hormones. 

Once I had the prescriptions waiting for me, I hesitated. I was terrified of trying hormones and changing my mind later. It wasn’t that I was worried about what it might do to my body, or what society would think. I was more scared of letting my trans friends down, that if I started the process of transition only to stop later, I would somehow be damaging “the Cause” and alienating myself from the community I had found. It was grandiose to think the integrity of the entire trans movement would crumble at my hypothetical future detransition. 

One friend told me, when I called them, spiraling, that starting hormones wasn’t like jumping off a cliff—it was more like wading into water, and I could slow down or turn around at any point if it didn’t feel right. I would still be trans even if I decided hormones weren’t for me. No one could take that from me. 

I told myself I was only starting hormones in an effort to keep my hairline from receding, but I have been so grateful for all the other changes. It’s like I needed plausible deniability in my own feminization. After nearly a year on testosterone blockers and synthetic estrogen, I cry more easily. I laugh more easily. My backne went away. Once the antiandrogens got my testosterone low enough, I stopped making semen and instead now produce a small amount of clear nectar when I come. Pre-transition, for many messy years, I was an extremely heavy shooter, which I always found vulgar, a distasteful hassle and one I’m relieved to be done with.

The most pleasant surprise of transition is how much I’ve enjoyed growing tits. I’ll be honest, they’re not much. At my own appraisal, I’d put them at maybe a double-A cup. (The little thrill of pride I felt at being “double” anything evaporated when I learned that AA is actually a step down from a singular A cup.) I hide them in public, but won’t shut the fuck up about them with my close friends. I’ve basically made these little lumps my whole personality at this point, even though they’re too small and pointy and weird and, oh God, asymmetrical? No, wait. They’re fine. Endlessly scrutinizing my boobs and willing them to be bigger, rounder, different: a quintessential experience of early-30s teenage girlhood. 

I had no idea how much joy growing breasts would bring me until they started to grow, although I think it’s worth mentioning how much of a fiend for nipple play I was as a gay boy, too. It must be fate, to have my nipples waking up, growing and exponentially gaining in sensitivity in transition. They’ve always been erogenous on switches for me, so it feels like I was destined to have luscious tits. I just can’t believe how long it took me to figure that out. 

I’ve been able to undergo my first full year of medical transition in quarantine, only sharing the intimate details of my gender journey with my closest friends. I wouldn’t trade my itty bitty titties for anything (except maybe some bigger ones, God willing), but with the weather warming up and vaccination looming, I now face a dilemma: How do I cope with people’s reactions to the changes I’ve gone through? I’ve been able to start my transition in a bubble, and I’m dreading the moment it pops. Part of me is tempted to gaslight everyone in my life who doesn’t know I’ve started transitioning. “What? I’ve always had these. It’s so weird you don’t remember that.” As tempting as that is, I think I have no choice but to face the reality of Coming Out. Again. 

I feel blessed to have had this time and privacy, but I am tensing in anticipation of how frequently I’ll be misgendered. I have had massive internal shifts, but on the outside, not that much has changed. Early transition is so awkward. Being pubescent again in my early 30s feels like a cruel joke. I have no idea how to dress myself. I have constant identity crises of what kind of girl I want to be. Some days I’m a hormonal wreck and I almost miss the dead-inside stoicism I had as a boy. As much as I love being more in touch with my feelings, being brought to tears by the love between the nanny and Mister Sheffield makes me feel a little emotionally incontinent. 

Despite how delighted I have felt about transitioning, I rarely leave the house in full femme attire. I prefer invisibility on my little pandemic walks and trips to the store, wearing my nonbinary uniform of baggy track pants, a shapeless denim sack of a jacket and a surgical mask. I feel too fragile most days to go out into the world as a "clocky transsexual"—words I hate, but that my Reddit research of trans womanhood has seared into my brain. 

So mostly I hide, and my hiding makes me feel like a coward and a fraud. Feelings of fraudulence and inadequacy are essential parts of the trans experience, I’m told, so I think I’m right on track. I hope that soon I’ll be ready to take the plunge and be trans everywhere I go. I’m too old for the exhausting emotional acrobatics of leading a double life. 

A quarantine transition is what I needed, a chance to reach an understanding of my gender in private, safe from the scrutiny of coworkers or my family or any of the casual acquaintances I’d normally have to interact with. Even though I feel so thin-skinned and fragile, I know I’m moving in the right direction. Every step I’ve taken towards feminization has brought me joy and brought me closer to God (who is definitely trans).

Coronavirus

New Beginnings

LGBTQ Voices

Quarantine Inspired Me to Finally Transition

Growing up, my mother and I were really close. My father walked out on us when he and my mother divorced, so, naturally, she and I had a pretty decent relationship. We moved back to her hometown when I was nine and, when she wasn't working, we usually watched movies or went for scenic drives. 

Sometimes we'd have long talks about our family or what was going on in the world. I had a parent, a mother and a friend. I'd come home from school and I'd know that after all the constant bullying, low test scores, struggling to pay attention, I could confer with my mother. There would be no backlash, no ridicule. I depended on her for that.

After I'd turned ten, she met an abusive and narcissistic asshole. He made our lives a living hell. He'd come home from work, sit down, have a beer and watch TV. Three beers turned into ten pretty quickly. He had a nervous disorder and was prescribed an entire list of medications, none of which mixed well with alcohol. One time, I went downstairs to find that he was using a floor lamp as a baseball bat. He aimed a Mason jar at my head like he was hitting a fastball. 

My mother and I were both the victims of his hate.

They were married after four years but finally separated around my junior year of high school. It felt like a completely different world with him gone. He ruined our lives for seven years. However, there was a part of him still with us after he left: his political beliefs.

My mother was a moderate Republican before she met him. And when I say moderate, I emphasize moderate. She was mostly indifferent about the government, never really going out of her way to worry about politics or bring it up around others. She lived in her own bubble. She had hobbies and dreams, she was pretty happy. And when she wasn't happy, she didn't focus on her unhappiness. She'd go through the emotions she needed to and she'd move on. However, she was impressionable. 

He, on the other hand, was insanely right-wing. He worked at a correctional facility and often came home spouting racist obscenities about the inmates. He'd say the hard "r" at the end of the N-word without remorse. I remember asking my mother why she was dating a racist, and she'd go, "No, he's not racist, he just deals with a lot at work." He was very clearly a racist, and I don't know how she could excuse it so nonchalantly. 

His interests started to meld into hers. She started hating illegal immigrants (even though she had been an illegal immigrant for a while until she finally got her citizenship). She said she wasn't racist toward people of color, but that she was just "prejudiced," as if being racist and prejudiced wasn't a possibility—or even the same thing. She would call Latino communities "chimichangas" without a second thought. Seeing both of them carry on like this made me extremely uncomfortable.

I was taught from a young age about that ancient way of thinking, and here it was, in my own environment, the fire being fueled by the people with whom I shared a house. I not only avoided having my white friends over, but I also avoided having any friends over. I didn't want my white friends thinking that I was the spawn of racists, and I didn't want to take the chance that any of my friends in other ethnic groups would be mistreated by my mother and her boyfriend. I'd come home and hear them agree with each other while they watched far-right propaganda on TV, and soon after, I'd hear them get into a screaming match. He was a domestic abuser. They hated each other. I don't know how they were together for seven years. But it seemed like their whole relationship was built on the hatred of each other and the hatred of other people.

After he'd left, I was just finishing up my junior year of high school, which was also my last. I had enough credits to graduate and I wanted to escape the area I grew up in—I wanted to meet new people and, most importantly, I wanted to get a break from my mother. She was still the person he'd transformed her into, even after they separated. I was pretty much a stereotype, at least, for the military recruiters in my area. I was a lower-class white kid wanting an escape.

Sure enough, I joined, shipped out to training, came back home for two weeks (most of that time being spent with my girlfriend), and prepared for a new life. I had a pretty decent run in the military after that, and my mother was doing fine. Until my time in the military came to an end.

By the time COVID-19 hit in January, phone calls with my mother were getting shorter. It was like she was a completely different person. I'd see her post on Facebook saying the virus was a PSYOP or that the 5G towers were spreading it. It was like my mother had been replaced with another person. She started talking to me on the phone about someone named "Q" and how she thought JFK Jr. was still alive and was fighting an "underground war.” She even told me that there were secret underground tunnels run by Satanist, adrenochrome-injecting, Democratic pedophiles.

At this point, I was fully convinced that my mother had lost it. 

My time in the military, however, was shortened by the unluckiest of circumstances. I took the honorable discharge and got out. I needed a place to stay until I got back on my feet. So I went home. I was living with her. I couldn't walk in the kitchen to get food without her shoving some Q-adjacent propaganda down my throat. We'd get into countless arguments, back and forth, to the point where I started avoiding her. I hated talking to her. I hated the sound of her voice. The conspiracies got worse and my tolerance weakened. I was starting to lose my mind.

Then, the election came. Joe Biden won. My mother and her boyfriend were both in disbelief. Everything their Q had prophesied about Donald Trump staying in power and about the "war against the Deep State" finally coming to a turning point—it was proven false in one night.

Today, in the spring of 2021, we rarely speak while living in the same home. She tells me the vaccine will kill my girlfriend and me. She pleads for me to stay home to "protect against Chinese military invasions" through Canada. She and her boyfriend "gear up" with survival supplies and ammunition. She even asked me if I was ready to fire at police or military if Biden "ordered them" to come take away their guns. 

One of us will blindly fire at another American to uphold a conspiracy theory on the internet. One of us will not. And that is, sadly, the difference between us.

Collection

Politics

Insiders

Tearjerkers

Motherhood

I Lost My Mom to QAnon

I hear a lot of things lately described as “ugh, so cringe,” but have you ever really cringed? That full-body wince of reliving an experience that stops you in your tracks? There has to be a highly specific German word for the shame of a post-hypomania comedown. What unhinged screeds did I post online? Whose boundaries did I overstep when I was feeling gregarious but acting obnoxious? Oh, God, I went to open mics, didn’t I? Even now, years later, the memories still make me flinch, clench my teeth and shut my eyes for a moment. 

All these cherished memories and more come from the year I spent on the wrong antidepressant, making me perpetually hypomanic most of that time. But before those thrills came a long history of depression, starting in my early teens. 

Looking back at it now, I can laugh at how I used to shut myself in a closet to listen to Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” or Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely” on repeat in a very maudlin, very teenage way. Harder to laugh off were the persistent bouts of suicidal ideation I experienced or the all-consuming, debilitating sadness that kept dragging me to bed while the milestones of young adulthood passed me by.

For many years, I self-medicated with alcohol. I know: Treating depression with a depressant? Groundbreaking. Alcohol never really worked for me, although not for lack of trying. Eventually, I discovered stimulants, and things got much worse. No one at the sex party where I was introduced to crystal meth warned me that I wouldn’t be able to sleep or eat for the next two days. I was convinced that this drug was going to kill me, but also that I never wanted to do anything else ever again. 

Thankfully this revelation scared me enough that I asked for help, and I ended up in treatment, getting sober at the age of 26. The depression that had plagued me for years followed me into sobriety, though, so I also started going to therapy for the first time. 

To finally talk honestly about my sadness helped, but the sadness persisted. The first professional diagnosis I got was major depression, which at the time seemed a little dramatic. “I’m fine, really,” I insisted. “I’m not depressed depressed—just a little blue.” After many months of deliberating my therapist’s suggestions, I decided to try a pharmaceutical solution. I was terrified of starting. In my newly sober state, I worried that I wouldn’t be myself anymore if I let this outside substance tamper with my brain. On top of that, I had grown up indoctrinated by my militantly New Age mother to distrust any medication beyond a spoonful of turmeric and honey. 

But I needed help. I went on Wellbutrin, which didn’t make a dent in my depressive episodes, so after a short stint of that, I tapered off and went on Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). 

Zoloft. My dearest friend. You made it hard to sleep, and even harder to nut, but wow, we really made some terrible memories together, didn’t we? 

There were clear warning signs early on that things weren’t right, like the buzzing in my brain and the inability to sleep for multiple nights in a row despite being totally physically exhausted. I soon forgot about that, though. I was too busy enjoying my newfound fearlessness speaking in front of large groups of people. I was suddenly charismatic and able to strike up a conversation with anyone about anything, and I loved it. 

I had a lot of ideas that felt genius at the time, but that now flood my body with cortisol and shame when I’m reminded of them. For a while, I became fixated on being an amateur documentarian, infuriating my family by trying to film every aspect of our lives for a project I can’t really remember the point of. Once, at an open mic, I stripped down to my underwear for the punchline to a joke about terrible tattoos (of which I have many.) That artistic decision I actually stand by. I just hope to God no recordings of it exist. In those months I was also promiscuous in a way I’d never been before. Which I’m not against—I swear I’m not some sex-negative nerd. But my behavior sometimes led me back to sex parties and the company of active meth users, and brought me dangerously close to relapsing. 

Around this time I was promoted to the head of the tiny organization I worked for. I had a very forward-facing role, and I got an impressive-sounding title that inflated my already dangerously boosted ego. I thought I desperately needed all the energy I could get from the Zoloft. It wouldn’t dawn on me until much later that I never put any of it to good use. 

What I remember most about my year on Zoloft is how intoxicated I was by what I imagined to be my limitless potential. It felt like electricity coursing through me that I could use to accomplish anything, if only I could get all that energy focused in one direction for long enough. But I never could. I had a dozen projects started at all times, rarely finishing anything. 

My fast-talking, and the crazed pep in my step, made it clear to my doctor that I was hypomanic, and she suggested I taper off the Zoloft. The thought of giving up this new life, and going back to the depression I had lived with for years, terrified me—not to mention the fact I was a very important person by then, and I couldn’t afford to lose this new charisma and electricity. I had things to do, new visions to pursue, a world to change!

I convinced myself that what I was experiencing wasn’t hypomania, but just who I was when I was freed from the burden of depression. I was how I was always meant to be: unstoppable. At my doctor’s insistence, I went to a psychiatrist with whom I spoke for maybe ten minutes. I dressed in what I thought was chic, understated business casual attire. During our session, I deliberately slowed my words and dimmed my new charm just a little, and told him how seriously I had weighed my doctor’s words, but that I wanted to continue with the medication that had lifted me out of depression. He said great, you seem fine, let us know if anything changes. 

I had just shy of a year of sobriety at that time, and it didn’t enter my mind that I wasn’t being all that sober. I wanted to believe that by doing and saying only what I thought would convince that psychiatrist to let me stay on the meds, I was actually practicing self-advocacy as an informed patient. It felt important to have control over my own brain chemistry, despite the many years of boozing and drugging that proved I am the exact worst person to be in charge of that.

I continued to be unpredictable and unreliable at work, always brimming with grandiose, vague plans, but never following through on my promises. The thing that ended up getting me fired, however, was fostering a hostile work environment. I always thought I was cheekily toeing the line of what was appropriate, when in reality it was more like kicking down the door to tell explicit jokes that nobody wanted to hear. I had no filters. I learned too late that I was making everyone around me uncomfortable and cultivating an environment that wasn’t safe to work in. This is what I feel guiltiest about from this time, the thing I still lose sleep over.

Losing that job is what finally snapped me out of it. I found a psychiatrist who I could see regularly, and he patiently explained bipolar II disorder to me. He gently suggested that this SSRI might be making me worse, despite how spectacularly un-depressed I felt. 

Besides, I really wanted to have orgasms again. Just as there needs to be a word for the post-hypomania shame spiral, there also needs to be a word for that first toe-curling, earth-shattering orgasm once all the SSRIs have left your system. 

As well as the brain-melting, I’ll-have-what-she’s-having grade orgasms, I also regained clarity. I could reexamine my behavior of the previous nine months in the cold light of day. My filterless-ness, my impulsivity, my near-total lack of executive functioning—at one point the power in my apartment got cut off because I wasn’t keeping track of anything in my life. (A little on the nose as far as signs from the universe go.) In hindsight, it was easy to see just how much of a mess my life was, and how mismatched I was with Zoloft. 

I’m not alone in having this experience. Many people with bipolar II are first treated for depression, and many of them experience hypomania as a result, but they can feel reluctant to stop the mania-inducing medication. I forget where I first read that, but it was after I’d finished tapering off the Zoloft and I remember sobbing afterward. There is no greater relief than learning just how basic I am. 

Yes, I gamed the system. Yes, I manipulated a psychiatrist to convince him to keep giving me my drugs so I could continue my reign of terror as a charming, fearless, sleep-deprived and unpredictable egomaniac. But I’m not the first person to have pulled that kind of grift, and it doesn’t disqualify me from seeking treatment now. I was just doing the best I could with an imbalanced brain. 

I wish I could offer a comforting platitude—a promise that It Gets Better—but I can’t honestly say that it does. I’ve only recently gotten insurance again and regained access to mental health services. I have enough experience raw-dogging reality to know that I can’t talk or think or pray my way out of depression, so I’m once again faced with the decision: To medicate or not to medicate?

How is it that this choice ultimately falls to me, someone with a long history of such famously bad decisions? I still feel like I don’t deserve help after making such a mess of my life. I’m worried that I can’t trust myself to honestly say, “Yes, this pill is the pill for me,” considering my history with addiction and how much I loved—and I mean really loved—being high. 

But I’m done with thinking that I’m too tragically unique to get better. I’ve met too many people with bipolar II who had similar experiences but eventually found a medication that worked for them. 

I’m scared about asking for help, but hopeful enough to try again.

Mental Health

My Year Addicted to Zoloft: A State of SSRI-Induced Mania

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Money

“What would you give,” sings a rough tenor, and then another responds with falsetto keen, “in exchange!” Then they harmonize together, the voices intertwined, stretching for heaven. 

     What would you give in exchange for your soul?
     Oh, if today God should call you away
     What would you give in exchange for your soul?

The song is an old Monroe Brothers number from the ’30s, but my favorite version is a 1963 duet; Doc Watson provides the slow, delicate guitar strum, and Bill Monroe adds distinctive crystal mandolin runs and high tenor. It’s a song of almost unendurable longing, which manages to be both delicate and ragged, dreamy and bleak. 

It’s also a song about how I, personally, am going to go to hell. When they sing, “Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?” my answer is pretty clearly, “No, thanks.” I’m a Jewish atheist; I don’t believe Christ is lord, and I don’t even think I have a soul. Watson and Monroe are singing lovely harmonies to my wrongness and my eternal damnation.

You’d think it would be off-putting to have people tell you that your life choices are going to lead to such catastrophic consequences. But I’ve long been a fan of both white and Black gospel music and of other Christian performers as well. I love Johnny Cash’s “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” with Anita Carter providing heavenly high notes. I adore the Soul Stirrers’ “By and By,” with R.H. Harris’ sweet yodel urging on Paul Foster’s gospel shout. I can listen over and over to the hoarse, chesty bellow of Rev. Sister Mary Nelson or the icy quaver of Lloyd Chandler, even though I am definitely not ready for judgment and am unprepared for eternity. And I’ll wail along with Ozzy when he declares, “Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love!” 

I don’t think the world was made for me by anyone in particular, but if, like me, you’re obsessed with roots music, and with music in general, the Christians are hard to escape. Four-part harmony in Western music came out of the church, as did seminal pop vocalists, from Sam Cooke to Beyoncé. 

I don’t just like Christian music because I can’t avoid it, though. Like most Jewish people and most atheists in the U.S., I’ve spent the bulk of my life in a culture with a preponderance of Christian people. It seeps in. Christian aestheticization of wounds and death and despair is my weird death cult, too, from Grüenwald’s twisted crucifix to The Omen. 

When Roberta Flack sings, “I told Jesus/‘Be alright/If you changed my name,’” I’m moved by Flack’s light voice pulsing and soaring over Ron Carter’s soulfully ominous bassline. But the message of transformation, ostracism and triumph amid degradation (“He said, ‘Your father won’t know you, child/If I change your name’”) is meaningful too. 

You can’t live your whole life surrounded by crosses and not end up feeling like Calvary is meaningful. Even if you’re an atheist and a Jew, you end up carrying the cross around. When I curse, I often do so in Jesus’ name, and when I think about redemption or forgiveness, it’s bathed in Christian imagery and references to a heaven that Jews mostly and atheists definitely don’t think exists and are supposed to be barred from. Jews aren’t major targets of bigotry in the U.S. like some other groups, so the sense of disorientation isn’t hugely traumatic or something I have to think about a ton. But you do occasionally remember the dominant culture doesn’t consider you to be a part of something you are, in fact, a part of. Like all those Jewish people who got their patronymics anglicized by immigration officials or for their own convenience, your name gets changed whether you want it to be or not. 

So yes, part of the reason I like Christian music is that I’ve been assimilated into a culture that kind of thinks I’m damned (“Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?”). I enjoy Christian music because it’s my music, somewhat despite myself. 

But I think I also enjoy it because it isn’t my music. My wife, whose family is from Appalachia and who has honest-to-God Bible thumpers among her relatives, finds my enthusiasm for Christian music positively perverse. When the Louvin Brothers sing, “That word ‘broad-minded’ is spelled S-I-N,” she hears it in the context of some decidedly small-minded family members and their views on out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or queer people, or even going into bars. 

For me, though, Christian music is a lot less fraught. Yes, I live in a country with a lot of Christian people, but to the extent that religion has irritated me in a close personal way, my resentment is directed at Hebrew school, not church. There are definitely Christians in the political realm who would like to make my life and my family’s lives and the lives of most people in the country a misery, and I cordially hate them. But having people just preach at me doesn’t trigger any particular trauma. I wasn’t there when they crucified your lord. It’s not about me.

In her book Dialectic of Pop, Agnès Gayraud argues that part of the pleasure of pop music—by which she means music made for records, basically—is that it’s always both about you and not about you. The whole point of a record (or an MP3) is to get music out of its original context and take it somewhere else where it didn’t originate and where it doesn’t quite belong. That’s why there are so many pop songs about traveling. Pop is always motorvatin’ over the hill or leaving on a jet plane or, in gospel, putting on its travelin’ shoes.

Yes, Marion Williams and the Clara Ward Singers in “Travelin’ Shoes” are talking about walking right into heaven. But they’re also talking about leaving their selves behind and becoming disembodied voices. The joy of the song comes in part from a sense of togetherness in the community of the saved. And the joy comes in part from a sense of being freed from any one community, as you cast off the dust of this world for the next. And in part, it comes from the tension between them. It’s “the unresolved dialectic between roots and uprooting,” as Gayraud puts it, swooping between Williams’ earthy growl and the high pitched “ooooooo!” The song belongs here, and it belongs to everyone, at the same time, divine and human at once. 

Marion Williams’ producer in her later years, and her greatest fan, was Anthony Heilbut, another Jewish atheist. “What we admire is so clearly beyond our own reach,” Heilbut writes in his most recent book, The Fan Who Knew Too Much. That’s part of the wonder of it; the music isn’t yours. And then if you love it enough, in part because it isn’t, it is. Much great Christian music is about telling me I don’t belong. But it’s also about stepping out of those immanent boxes, Jew and gentile, to all be one in some divine something. You don’t have to give your soul in exchange. You just have to listen.

I’m a Jewish Atheist: I Love Gospel Music

Looking back, it is difficult to put into words what it was like to leave the Jesuit order after only a short stay. What I can tell you is that it was one of the most formative and influential times of my life. What I can also tell you is that when I left, I was certain that I had been there for the right reasons and certain that I still had a long way yet to grow. The lessons in patient trust that I learned there remain. I forget them from time to time, but the essence of what I was striving for—to live a life dedicated to improving the lives of others, to give voice to those unseen and unheard—remains deep, deep within.

I am certain that had I been born in another country, or under the auspices of another religious tradition, that I would have found my way to another way of giving back to my community. I came to the Jesuit tradition because I grew up Catholic—forced church outings with the family, stuffy starched shirts for holidays. I was by no means a religious person. If asked, I would say, “I was raised Catholic,” a clean way of signaling that I was forced by my family to do Catholic things, but I certainly never went to church on my own. We were not a terribly religious family, but we had a tradition, which provided a lens through which I could imagine trying to live a life for others. When my high school and college history studies inspired in me a deep concern for my community and filled me with a desire to find an outlet for helping others, I turned to this tradition.

I had the great fortune of encountering fabulous and daring teachers in school, who wanted us to explore, read and gobble up every drop of knowledge we could find. Through this process, living in a world of privilege, excommunicated from reality by the manner in which I was raised, I discovered, rather naively, that the rest of the world did not live as I did and, even worse, would never be presented with the opportunities that I had. This angered me. I felt deeply that something had to be done, and done now.  

Everywhere I turned in college seemed dedicated to an idea of self-absorbed consumption. “How do I afford to live in fancy oblivion?” It was only the voice of a distant past in my life, a tradition long forgotten, that helped me find another path. Religion made it OK for me to walk away from material wealth and the desire for a job that gave me nothing but a paycheck. It filled me with the hope that I could one day actually help people who actually needed help. 

And so it was, in the most circuitous of ways, I found myself learning about Jesuits, an order within the Catholic machinery that sets itself—or seems to set itself—apart from the rest of the priesthood, dedicated to a proposition that a life worth living is a life in service to others. This tradition had been there, in the background of my existence, for a long time, but until then, I had mostly ignored it. Now, fueled by a desire for change in the world, I began to reach out. 

When college ended, and others were scrambling to find internships or jobs or pay their rent, I was packing my bags. Through contacts from my childhood and new Jesuit friends, I had made arrangements to live and work at a school in Quito, Ecuador. The school was dedicated to teaching the poor and ignored the needs of the wealthy. This, for me, was a dream: to turn the world upside down, to make genuine opportunity a practical and obtainable reality.

My time in Ecuador was short. My days were filled with the routines of teachers, the most underappreciated of professions. Herding children between classes, trying to teach, trying to grab a quick bite between classes. Every day was a mess, and every day was filled with laughter and hope.

Resolved to continue this tradition, I informed my very shocked family that not only was I feeling religious, but I was feeling religious enough to live the vows of a Jesuit priest. I set off for Middle America to live and work in what many would call a seminary, but the Jesuits call a novitiate.  

While I was there, the romance and grandeur of it all swept me away. I was a novice, working and living with other novices: Class during the day, meditation at night, mentorship from Jesuits who had been living this lifestyle for years, decades even. For a few months, everything seemed to just fit into place, and I found myself in a place of growth. But as I would discover, it is the law of all progress that one must pass through some stages of instability that may take a very long time.

Part of the Jesuit tradition includes prayer, or what I might call meditation. This daily “examen” calls upon the individual to focus on what worked today, to be grateful for that and to use that gratitude to focus on tomorrow. I was lucky enough to be in a place where I had the opportunity to meditate as a part of a daily routine. This was coupled with work for local nonprofits, classes and other volunteer opportunities. And through this process, I discovered a deeper passion within myself to be an unencumbered voice for others. It would lead me to walk away from the Jesuit order and the traditions I had found there.

One of the most deeply held values with the Jesuit priesthood is that of obedience. It is a vow to serve the pope of the Roman Catholic Church and, by extension, all the people of Earth. This promise requires patient trust that the machine of the church is moving in the correct direction. This is both a beautiful and intimidating promise. And as I meditated on this tradition, I began to learn the deep value that these traditions held for those close to me at the novitiate. Many of my now dearest fellow novices came to the Society of Jesus seeking this tradition and depended upon it as a bedrock for the work they would go on to do. I was not coming to the Jesuits from the same direction. My bedrock was a deep desire to help others, and through that desire, I had found a tradition that gave power to the voiceless. 

I discovered that my trajectory and the trajectory of so many of the lives of my fellow novices overlapped. I also discovered that if I remained, my impatience for immediate change, my impatience to be a voice right now, would create friction in my life that could eventually fester into a bitterness that would then sap my passion and leave nothing but a bitter husk, unable to articulate how or why I had wanted this life in the first place.

It was a beautiful—and, I’ll admit, terrifying—moment for me. I remember sobs shaking through my body. There was bitterness of the distant future I saw but gratitude to be lucky enough to spend time on myself, meditating and pondering the next deliberate steps of my life. When I reached out to my mentor and others, what I received was not only love and patience but an understanding that astounded me. It was as if they already knew and were only waiting for me to discover my path. They could see it before me but wanted me to see it first. 

As I sat among peers, friends and Jesuits, saying goodbye to a tradition and a lifestyle, there was a moment of happiness. Our lives had been brought together for a reason, maybe a reason we didn’t understand or comprehend. But that is how all growth is. It takes time. There will be stages of instability on the way to finding something unknown, something new, and that was happening to us before our eyes. It was a moment where all of us could accept the anxiety of feeling ourselves in suspense and incomplete but on our way, and it was beautiful. 

The Jesuits were gracious enough to offer me a path and allow me to walk alongside them for as long as my life’s work coincided. As it turns it out, my time did not last terribly long. But more than anything, when I did decide it was time to go, I was awed by their patient trust and happiness to see me on my way to whatever lay ahead.

“You are like a race car,” my mentor and dear friend told me. “Some fancy, awful red thing on a mountain pass, so excited to speed along your way. But you are stuck behind a truck filled with chickens in the truck bed, discarding feathers and odors into what you had planned.”

Why I Left the Catholic Priesthood

Ten years ago, my closest childhood friend was given a life sentence for murder. For that decade, I’ve been trying to come to terms with that.

Kyle came from what the judge would later describe as “a good family.” His parents were still together, and both had respectable, well-paying jobs. Kyle was their only child. They lived in a big house out of town, and as teenagers, that’s where Kyle and I would hang out after school.

Kyle was one of my smartest friends, but he was a rebel too. Like me back then. In summer, we explored old, abandoned factories together. We used to light firecrackers out in the desert, and, in later years, crude homemade bombs that we cooked up with farm chemicals in his barn. We were always trying to make a bigger explosion than the one before.

By our late teens, we were getting into drinking and drugs as well. One night, completely smashed, we spent hours rearranging traffic cones and diversion signs to create an impossible maze around town. We were planning to stay up all night to watch the havoc when the commuter rush began, but the cops caught us in the act. They eventually let us off but only after making us put everything back where it came from. Other nights, we'd just sit in Kyle’s room, drop LSD and watch Quentin Tarantino movies.

Kyle and I shared a self-destructive streak, and one time, we dared each other to down whole pints of vodka. It was an experiment in excess—part challenge, part bonding pact. We linked arms, locked eyes, then raised our glasses. The worst part of downing a pint of vodka is when you have to take your first breath. You gasp, and it bubbles up through the liquid in front of your face, and you realize you’re not even a quarter of the way through yet. It’s not like a shot, where the drink’s already in you before you know what’s happening. Drinking a pint of vodka takes patience. It doesn’t want to go down. It’s chewy, and your gullet tries to protest, but Kyle was still going, and so I kept going, too, arms linked, gagging and gulping, until eventually both those glasses were drained.

That night, Kyle and I ended up in separate bathrooms, heads down our respective toilets and then sleeping curled around the pot on vomit-smeared linoleum. Later that week, Kyle’s father cornered my mom in the supermarket. He said I was a bad influence and told her, “Keep your no-good son away from Kyle. My boy’s got great things ahead of him.”

I got the call almost 10 years later at something like 2 a.m. The screen said Tina, a name I hadn’t seen for a while. We’d been in a relationship years before and then Tina was with Kyle for a time, but we all stayed friends throughout. I guess she became just another thread that connected me and Kyle. When I answered, I immediately knew it was trouble. Tina was a mess, hysterical at first, but I told her to calm down, and she explained: “Kyle killed someone. Holy fuck, he actually killed some guy.”

The story wasn’t in the press yet, but Kyle had called Tina before getting picked up by the cops…and she didn’t know who else to share it with but me. The story I heard—the story that he told Tina—was more or less the same as what his lawyer would say in court: that Kyle invited some guy up to his apartment for drinks that night, but the visitor suddenly attacked him, and Kyle found himself fighting for his life. The only thing within reach was a baseball bat, so Kyle grabbed it and struck his attacker repeatedly in self-defense. He never meant to kill him.

The prosecution would tell a different story, though. They suggested Kyle had lured his visitor in, then assaulted him without warning—dealing roughly 20 heavy blows to the victim’s head and neck before hiding the body in a cupboard for a week. During that time, Kyle had apparently begun making plans to bury the corpse out in the desert. Character witnesses came forward to describe the victim as a popular, wholesome kid, a grade-A student who was loved by all he met. Meanwhile, Kyle already had a record for drug possession and other petty criminal misdemeanors. It didn’t look good.

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