Amen or I Am
By Anonymous
Photo by Aaron Burden
I used to pray that God would fix me.
Kneeling at the edge of my bed, fingers locked, eyes shut, and I would whisper into the darkness: Please. Take it away. Please make me normal.
I was thirteen when I realized I loved differently than others. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a simple flutter in my chest when a girl laughed too long at my jokes. A warmth in my throat when she touched my arm and didn’t let it go right away. She made me laugh. She made everything feel lighter. And I felt sick about it.
In church, love was painted in soft colors, wrapped up in heterosexual ribbons, and tightly bound by verses about sin. Girls in white dresses. Boys holding the door open. Love was only between a man and a woman. Anything else was a detour to hell. There were no sermons about grace for kids like me. Just long pauses. Disgusted looks. Warnings disguised as silence. If the word “gay” came up at all, it was always with shame or a sentence that started with “love the sinner, hate the sin.”
So I learned to hide.
I became fluent in silence and secrecy. I wore girlhood-like armor. Ribbons, nail polish, fake crushes. I memorized verses the way other kids would memorize song lyrics, hoping that obedience would scrub me clean. Maybe if I recited them enough, they would erase the way I looked at her. If I was good enough, holy enough, I could undo myself and rebuild in a way that was acceptable.
But the prayers never worked. Over time, they stopped sounding like them. They became bargaining chips, then threats, then pleas. At night I would whisper: God, if you really loved me, you wouldn’t have made me like this. You wouldn’t have punished me.
I waited for lightning to strike me down. Or a voice to spew curses at me for ever questioning them. I wanted something undeniable. Something so holy that it would shake the fear out of me and say: You are still mine.
But nothing came. Just the soft hum of my fan. The quiet of the night. The sound of my own breathing that was too loud for the stillness. And the ache of being both too much and not enough for the God I had grown up with.
I kept asking myself questions that I didn’t know how to say aloud.
Why would a God full of love, punish me for experiencing it? Not lust. Not defiance. Not rebellion. Just love. The kind that bloomed gently. The type that made colors seem brighter. That made me want to be softer. Kinder. Better. The kind that made me feel alive. Why would something so tender, so real, so full of love, be the very thing that damns me?
It didn’t make sense. It didn’t feel evil. I didn’t want to choose between heaven and my heart.
It felt cruel. To grow up with faith as a comfort, as a guiding point, only to realize that the same faith now stood at the gate of heaven with a warning sign, preventing me from entry. I wanted both. I wanted to keep praying before bed and then dream about her in the same breath. I wanted to walk into church without shrinking away. I wanted to believe that holiness and love can coexist. That I didn’t have to cut one out of myself to keep the other. But no one has ever told me that was possible. The message was clear: You can be gay. Or you can be saved. You can’t have both. Pick one.
It felt like God had turned his back on me. Every night I held out my hands, waiting to feel grace, but instead I was met with silence. Silence that felt like rejection. Was he looking the other way when I prayed? When I cried? When I begged for both love and salvation? Was he no longer holding me close? Was I lost in a crowd of sinners he couldn’t save?
There were days when I wondered if I was truly beyond redemption. When I wondered if the silence wasn’t just God turning his back on me, but the world telling me to keep quiet and to stay hidden. Telling me that I wasn’t welcome anymore.
I hated myself. I wondered why I was defective. Why was this little part of me flawed? Why was it so wrong? Why is something as simple as love, something that should make me feel human, twisted into something sinful? It wasn’t just the world around me telling me I was wrong. It was me, too. I internalized the judgment, let it seep into my bones, and take root in my heart. I tried to ignore the way I felt. I tried to hide it. I thought if I prayed hard enough, if I forced myself to be better, to be purer, maybe this thing inside me would go away. But no matter how much I tried to make it disappear, the truth would always rise to the surface. And every time it came back, I hated myself even more.
I despised myself for being this way. For loving in a way that made me feel so distant from everything I had been taught was right. Why did this love, the same love that made my heart race and chest feel full, the very thing that made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to be loved by God? I didn’t want to have to choose between who I was and who God wanted me to be.
But slowly, painfully, I started to question where the hatred came from. And the more I pulled at the thread, the more I realized that it wasn’t God who taught me to hate myself. It was people.
People who mistook control for truth. People who were scared of anything they didn’t understand. People who used religion as a weapon and called it salvation.
They held the Bible like a sword, a tool to tear down. Verses were cherry-picked and sharpened to cut, not to heal. The same book that preached love and grace was turned against me, twisted until it only read judgment. They skipped the parts about compassion. About mercy. About how everyone was made in His image. They leave out the part where Jesus welcomed the outcasts, sat with sinners, and corrupted him into a being who would condemn anyone who was different. It wasn’t God who turned love into sin. It was the people who misused his name. It was the world that was more comfortable with judgment than understanding. A world that, out of everything, chose to hate love. A world that handed me scripture like it was evidence in a trial, proof that I was wrong just for existing. They distorted the message, turning a bond meant to be pure and good into something dirty, something sinful. It was their fear, their misunderstanding of God’s love that shaped my shame.
The day I moved to college was the day I felt free. Not all at once though. Freedom, I’ve learned, is rarely loud. It’s the first inhale that doesn’t come with guilt. The first morning you wake up without feeling you’re already doing something wrong just by existing.
For the first time, I wasn’t under the constant gaze of people who believed my love made me unworthy. No more pretending, no more smiling through Bible study sessions that left me hollow. In this new space, no one knew who I had been forced to be. I wasn’t the girl who sat perfectly still in the front pew. I wasn’t the walking confession booth, waiting to be cleansed. I was just me. The one who no longer shrinks herself to fit into someone else’s idea of holiness. Someone who knows that grace was never meant to come with conditions.
I finally stopped asking for God to fix me because what was there to fix? I endured their hate. Their whispers, their glares, the venom dripping from their voices as they claimed that my heart was a curse. I took it all – the rejection, the cruelty, the lies – because I know, in the deepest corners of my soul, that my love was never the sin. It was the only thing pure in a world determined to destroy it. Maybe I will always be torn between the faith I grew up with and the love that I know is real. But if my love is a sin, call me a sinner. My sin was love. Theirs was hate. We are not the same. And if they cannot see that, perhaps I am not the one who is truly lost.
rooms.
About the Author
The writer is a senior at Northeastern University, majoring in Cell and Molecular Biology. In their free time, they enjoy cooking, baking, and spending time with their dogs.