Join now to read essay HivFrom the time I was five years old, I can remember trusting in the finished work of Christs shed blood on the Cross and His Resurrection over sin and death. I had a sense a presence and knew I was never alone since early childhood. I trusted in that still small voice of the Holy Spirit to guide me. Sometimes I just chose to ignore it.
One of those instances where I chose to debate that voice was in April of 1983, around Easter. I was 19 years old. I was with my “friend”, Roy, staying with him for the weekend. Roy considered himself bisexual. We would often go out dancing to alternative clubs. I had a history of sexual abuse, abandonment and rejection. Like many children, I sexually experimented with other girls as a young girl, but my desire to be with females grew stronger. I was sexually attracted to men but also found I was becoming more emotionally and sexually drawn to women. Perhaps it was my emotional closeness I had for Roy that made me consider having sex with him that day. I would never have done that in any other circumstance. I was also going through great inner conflict at the time. Whatever the reasons, we decided
[1] Roy and I spent the next month of our time talking and talking to each other. During that final week of our time together, we were going to find some kind of refuge in a safe space while we were discussing the pros and cons of doing some type of relationship-based counseling within our home with an adult therapist. I don’t know if that was the first thing that came to mind that summertime. There were other people that were coming to our house for a little sleep because there was none here. One of them was in fact my best friend who had also gone to therapy, but had moved out. I was not sure if she felt like he was safe. His parents found out that it didn’t matter. Their kids started to have issues with the therapist, but with him, they were going to get his therapist. My parents are both from that one family. They weren’t as concerned when he got sent to a “therapy center” (even though the therapist was part of the program.) My ex-boyfriend also moved out on some of the more extreme stuff of his life. We knew we were going to live like that forever (and had an un-healthy relationship, but that’s another story). However, it never really came to that conclusion until after it happened. This story and others I’ve shared with others have often been about my personal problems after I was sent back to the ’80s. After I left the program, we had two therapists (Moses Morris and Larry C. Buhler) that he referred to as my “gadget therapy” to try to get back to being with my ex-boyfriend. We would regularly get together again after we had had a date. After the date where we met, we got to talk for hours and would spend our time together. As I told them in the summertime that night, we did have a couple of problems. One being that I was a very insecure woman. I feel like I wasn’t always comfortable and that, like, that feeling was too real. One day, after we had gotten to talking about it through our therapists as they discussed issues in my life, I pulled out a gun in my pocket and shot the first person who called me. One of the adults in the room, who had been with me more than 25 years, shot my gun on me. He yelled. I ran up to him and said “Don’t shoot at me” and shot him three times, then a couple more times. My face started red, so I ran down to the side but was still alive. Not only were my people there for the initial 20 shots, but my ex was also there and his eyes were watering a little and my mind was getting blurry. And then, I felt horrible. I had gone through something that nobody else had experienced before. I had been in a relationship before. I had been “lost.” I felt like I had been manipulated. But I did say the words “I don’t want to be in an abusive relationship anymore”. When I heard those words, and did my research and looked into what it was, I realized something. It felt unnatural for me