There’s a feeling I don’t have a clean name for yet, which is annoying, because I’m a writer and naming things is supposedly my whole deal. I literally name all the plants in my yard, my cars and random inanimate objects.
And yet, I can’t identify this feeling I have been sitting with for a week.
It’s not guilt. It’s not schadenfreude — though I’ll admit schadenfreude has a certain joie de vivre I respect. It’s not grief, though grief is in there somewhere, worn smooth like a stone I keep finding in my pocket at the worst possible moments. It’s something stranger. Something I’ve been sitting with since Alan’s arrest, since Peter LaBarbera’s predictable exploitation of it, since the whole wreckage of that world started showing up in my news feed like a relative I specifically did not invite.
The feeling is something like: I made it out. Now what?
I spent years in a world built on the premise that I was broken. Not poetically broken — actually, spiritually, fundamentally broken, requiring constant management, like a check engine light that never goes off. I believed it. I taught it. I helped build the very systems that transmitted this belief to other people who were also, it turned out, completely fine.
And then, slowly but all of a sudden, I left.
I did the work — the therapy, the grief, the identity excavation that takes approximately four times longer than anyone warns you. I found love that didn’t require me to be someone else. I built a life that is, on most days, genuinely good. Not perfect. There have been spectacular messes, pressing through a few of those right now. There was even a snake. But good. Real. Mine.
And now the world I came from is on fire, and I’m over here having a perfectly nice morning with my avocado toast and Pepsi Zero.
Here’s the strange math: when someone from your past falls apart, you’re supposed to think there but for the grace of God. Humility. Solidarity.
No thanks. I don’t relate to what Alan did as anything other than a sexual abuse survivor (was sexually abused as a child and r**ed as a teen.)
But there’s another truth right beside that one, less comfortable to say: I made different choices. Not from some position of superior character — I had luck, I had people who told me the truth, I had advantages others didn’t. But choices nonetheless. I chose to leave the masks of exgayness and religious piety in the trash. I chose to stop performing. I chose to look at the thing I was most afraid of (being out and proud gay man) and decide it probably wouldn’t actually kill me.
Spoiler: it didn’t.
The disorientation is that I’m not sure I’m allowed to say my life is good while grief is still happening twenty feet away. Is that unseemly? Is there a protocol? A form I was supposed to file?
I’ve been sitting with that question and I think the answer is: no. There’s no protocol. I just have to hold both things at once, which is uncomfortable and also, apparently, just called being a person.
My life is not a rebuke to anyone’s. It’s just a life — messy, ordinary, and full of things I didn’t think I was allowed to want. A husband who actually knows me. A kid who makes me laugh until I can’t breathe. And fur-babies who have never heard of Peter LaBarbera, and I intend to keep it that way.
The strange math of outlasting your own past is that you don’t leave it behind — it just becomes one layer of a life that kept going. The damage doesn’t disappear. But neither does the good that came after.
Both things are true. That’s always been the whole thing, hasn’t it?
If you’re still inside a world like the one I left — or recently out, or just carrying something heavy — I see you. You’re not broken. And the math on the other side is better than they told you.
Wayfinder lands midweek for the things that are harder to say in the daylight. Subscribe below, and share it with someone who might need it.
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