In The Affirmative: Hold on to love

A  painting by Wendy's wife Jo which Wendy says reminds her of 'the deep dark place I was in during my last few weeks in high school'.

“In my daily life I don’t feel like it is difficult to be gay, or Christian, or even a gay Christian. This is a position of real privilege that I only reached in the last decade. ”

OUR MOST READ BLOGGER since 2022 is back with the second of a new series sharing more of her story, which this month includes her experience of mental distress and suicide.

In the Affirmative is a monthly blog from Open Table member Wendy Young. Wendy shares her life, thoughts and experience as a queer Christian living in Britain. We’d love to hear from you, too: Wendy invites readers to add their own responses and reactions as we build community together. You can read the first in the series here.

Welcome back! I’m so glad you’re here.

The Oxford English Dctionary says that affirmative is ​a word or statement that means yes; ‘an agreement or a confirmation’. I hope we can spend some time together in this blog-space saying yes to one another. It will be challenging at times, but we have at least one thing in common: we love God and God loves us. In my opinion that is the most important thing about us.

It is easy to get distracted though. I often hear people say ‘we didn’t have that in MY day’, referring to anything from autism to preferring oat milk, and the notion of having to use gender-neutral pronouns is ‘just too much, honestly’! There are wars and fires and floods and famine - as I write, 12 people have died in the deadliest migrant boat tragedy in the English Channel this year. Meanwhile, the Church of England is at a crossroads:

‘...either we have reached the point of separation, accepting that different views cannot co-exist within the same Church, or we must shift the debate to the question how we live well with difference…’

- Living in love, faith - and reconciliation, Church Times 25/01/24.

It’s a lot to deal with and I am just trying to hold onto myself, white-knuckled, most days. I watch the young people around me navigate this ship in their own way: some are bed-bound with anxiety; others are thriving and I wonder what makes the difference.   

In August my wife and I took part in our second Pride march. I reflected on my first Pride march here. I found this year’s march a bit… relaxed, and mentioned to a straight ally that it didn’t feel like a protest. I’m sure I looked quite smug in my Pride fishnets eating a goat curry on a rainbow picnic blanket with my wife, in the middle of a park in the town where we live, entirely unashamed.

The next day my friend from church posted about how someone shouted ‘That’s absolutely disgusting’ at her as she was leaving the event. Another local posted about never returning to a certain pub because of the hate speech she overheard from the owners while trying to enjoy a post-Pride-pint.

Not a protest, eh?

In my daily life I don’t feel like it is difficult to be gay, or Christian, or even a gay Christian. This is a position of real privilege that I only reached in the last decade. LGBT+ youths are twice as likely to contemplate suicide, a survey found in 2021.

In my youth I certainly not only contemplated suicide but very nearly went through with it. 

Being a teenager sucked. Completely. I hated it. I felt unhappy, ugly, frustrated and lost. Moving around a lot didn’t exactly help. My mum was settling into a liveable rhythm of emotional ups and downs, thanks to a good run of bipolar meds. When I was halfway through the penultimate year of high school (it was called standard nine in South Africa in the 90’s) I refused to move again, and stayed behind in boarding school. I was given the only unoccupied room, which was meant for teaching staff and had an en suite bathroom . It was too easy to ignore the strict bell-rung-regime - soon I spent days on end writing in my journal, listening to music, all by myself.

It was a darker place to descend into than I had anticipated. The difference between the me that had just been confirmed in the Dutch Reformed Church and the me that was in love with my beautiful home economics teacher was making me physically ill. In search of an answer I started sneaking off to other, more charismatic churches, but the anti-gay-rhetoric was the same: I was going to go to hell if I didn’t fix the problem. Quickly.  

In my first blog in this series I referred to being taught that the devil was always on the prowl; my personal version was hanging in the corner of the ceiling like a bat, showing me on a loop the worst things about myself. After barely scraping through two school terms I convinced my parents I needed to see a mental health professional. Within weeks I was on my knees on the floor of my hostel room cupping a handful of antidepressants. In one sense I had prepared well - I had read up on how many it would take to do the job - but in another I hadn’t: I forgot to lock my door and a classmate walked in.  

The end of this episode is that I was sent home to recuperate under the watchful eyes of my parents, both like deer in the headlights staring at their incomprehensible daughter.  

It is very important that you don’t go away from this month’s blog believing anything about yourself other than these words Jesus said:  

‘Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.’

- Matthew 5:11-12

Hold onto yourself, knuckles white if need be. Hold onto the love God has for you. It is more than you can ever imagine. 

Wendy