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it seems like I've lied to myself since I was twelve. i know that i was gay before then. When I look back, it was always the men that I was most interested in. Jace. My former step-cousin Nick. It was clear from an early age that I liked other boys. But I lied to myself about liking girls, deciding that I must be bisexual because I was "emotionally attracted to girls". And my entire spiritual upbringing(Christianity) demanded that I adhere to pursuing women as partners. This was the first division. This was the point at which my instincts, my wiring, deviated from the ideals of my family and their paradigm. I felt that to betray that paradigm and turn away from it was the worst thing I could do. I thought, I must choose whether to be me, or to be the Me that my family wants me to be. Why was the entire question of my self-worth and loyalty to my family tied to their exact beliefs? Because it was all I had to refer to for my personality. I had been brought up in that false paradigm. I had been raised in a world veiled by ideals. I attempted for 7 years to marry my true self with the self that I thought my family wanted me to be. The real me was stunted. But Jake helped me throw off the veil, and see reality and acknowledge its value OVER the value of my and my family's ideals. So I embraced an approach of logic and pragmatism as my lens for perceiving the world. The safer, emotionally stable, ego-centric half of a healthy worldview. Entirely left brained. I switched sides. I nourished the real me, while ousting the part of me that was still tied to the past, the part of me that was my family and my faith. Real pieces of me, that suddenly seemed to be the cause of all the trouble, when in actuality, the cause of the trouble was having a wrong idea of the roles of those things in my life. This meditation has been the marriage of my logical and spiritual selves. Balance and harmony. The role of a family is to teach you how to be a mature, healthy human being and to teach you about faith. The role of faith is to answer the questions that logic can't.
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[But I discovered other forms of spirituality that resonated just as deeply in me and even, in some cases, regarded love between two men as especially devoted. Conveniently, I could tie them in with Christianity(sans that one little rule), allowing the influence of my family and upbringing to still have an equal share in my personality, which it would have had, regardless of my beliefs. But since I left behind that paradigm and tradition of my family's spirituality, I struggled to remember who exactly I was.

[In this bracket: Spencer figures out what really makes up his personality and how his spirituality fits into that--((Did I ever even know? I know I liked lots of video games. I specifically remember Banjo Kazooie. I always kind of liked Banjo's tiny yellow shorts. Also, professional wrestling on the Playstation. Lex Luger, in his skimpy wrestling costume. I liked detective stories as a child. I liked stories about Africa. I wrote stories about animals in the rain forest. Teaching each other. They all wanted to be able to do what the other animals could do. Each animal would teach another animal how to do what it did. I think this is indicative of my identity crisis. I couldn't find my niche. I was devoured by the approved Stephens brand personality. The personality I adopted so as to please everyone. So I borrowed niches from the people close to me. My niche is uber nerd. I liked video games and martial arts and cartoons and superheroes. I liked Captain Underpants and Powerpuff Girls. I wanted to make my own superheroes. I made Turtle Man. And his sidekick Croc. Croc was a knockoff of Croc from the video game. But then Jake was a turtle. He was a flying sea turtle who was going to save the world. So truth in correspondence is supposed to be a logical fallacy. But belief in God is not logical. But I do believe in God. So is logic a tool created by God for general functionality. Is it the evolution of human intelligence which has brought us logic? Either way, the creator instigated it, however indirectly. Logic is limited! God is not limited! God is the representation of spirituality. Physical reality is the representation of logic and order. just like the two hemispheres of the brain. So I can conclude that I believe in a sovereign, spiritual God who is our creator and designed us for a purpose specific to each individual. That purpose is for good, but we have the power to divert from it. Good is still achievable, but not the original good; the pure good. This deviation is called sin, and is inevitable. Sin was not conquerable by man, so God became a man and conquered it for the rest.))]

[In this bracket, Spencer examines why he turned from the beliefs of his parents-- ((I only ever left that God because the version of him that I was taught to believe in(the God of my upbringing, the spirituality of my upbringing) excluded me as an abomination. As one doomed, inescapably doomed unless I relinquished my personality and who I believed I was. My ego. It was painful to think that I, Spencer could have been so wrong for God to want to change me. Unfortunately, sex was not that simple. I prayed again and again to be changed. I guess I thought I just wasn't praying hard enough. I didn't try as hard as I could have to become straight. It was clear to me that I felt no physical attraction for women. I tried to make myself believe that emotional attraction was all I needed to be in love with a woman. But there is something important in the physical attraction and compatibility. I think that if I first had had sex with a woman instead of a man, I might have been straight. But that's not what happened. And I wasn't going to break a woman's heart that way for something I didn't even wholly believe in. I wasn't going to go into a marriage hoping that sex would make me that much more in love with her so that I could stand the thought of spending the rest of my life with her. No, there's something significant in the fact that I feel a physical attraction for men, because that is accompanied in very rare cases by an intense bond of what I can only call love. A binding of souls. I don't believe I ever would have had that connection with a woman. I would never feel as though a woman and I belonged to one another. And I think that's pretty necessary for a lifelong partnership. And that is why I am comfortable in a homosexual sex relationship. Because I cannot see that I would have worked in anything else, aside from celibacy, which would have resulted in frustration and stagnation of emotional and intellectual maturity. To adhere to my old faith would have meant keeping myself stunted, not allowing myself to grow and gain understanding(which is the whole game of Christianity. Christians don't trust their own common sense, so when they encounter something they can't initially understand, it's automatically irrelevant because they can't marry it to their current idea of the way of things, their current paradigm. So, all Christians are stunted. They've rejected all other explanations but one, which is exclusive and ignorant of some of the truths of logic. The don't realize that logic and spirituality can be maintained under the belief that logic is a tool of the creator, not the essence of the creator. the creator is the antithesis of logic.) So to pursue holistic maturity and gratification, I chose to follow my instincts and allow myself to be gay and leave behind the flawed paradigm that sad I couldn't.))]

First lie: the ideal that we let ourselves believe could be real.
second lie: I must fit that ideal because otherwise everything I know falls apart.
Solution: reality is not perfect, fantasy land. it's where things are messed up and inconvenient and nobody has their way. but it is perfect in its imperfections.