If I show you mine, will you will show me yours?

When I was about 7, I showed my penis to my friend Stephanie. In my haziest memory, she immediately put her hands over her eyes. I know now that it was so innocent and common, yet I was racked with soul crushing guilt for years, begging Jesus for forgiveness, feeling guilty long after I left Christianity. Thirty years later, I actually got to ask her about it, still feeling guilty — worried that I’d traumatized her for life.

It turns out she didn’t even remember.

Kindergarden in Harlem. Guess which one is me, and which is Stephanie. Hint: We’re the white ones.

For better or worse, I’ve come to a pivotal moment in my life where I feel I can open up about the most intimate details of my life. I have met quite a few people in the last few months who seem to relate profoundly when I open up to them.

It seems confession is good for the soul after all.

The only thing to do is jump over the moon. Here goes.

Three years ago, in the middle of a mental breakdown, I lay in a locked psychiatric holding room at Norfolk Sentara hospital, losing my mind.

I was under stress from every direction, trying to recover from the financial crisis, losing my home, losing direction in my career, and becoming more and more distanced emotionally from my family.

One moment in that tiny locked room is perfectly clear. All of the mixed up metaphors in my head — making sense to me but terrifying everyone else — united into one voice telling me what I must do.

I told my closest friend that I had been extremely unfaithful in my marriage. I admitted I had been seeing prostitutes throughout the course of my life, and I had kept it a complete secret from everyone.

From that moment, I was a different person — both to myself and to those who had known a version of me that was hiding part of who I really was. There’s no worse feeling than looking into the eyes of someone you love dearly, knowing they can’t see you — if they can even look at you at all.

Seeing one’s own life through a completely new context is very much like negotiating two different realities, the “me that was” and the “unified me.” But somehow admitting all of my darkest secrets allows me to see my past more clearly, and start to put the pieces of myself back together.

I’m attempting to walk through the dark reckoning of past shame to get to the light.

My first sexual contact that I remember was with another boy from church. I wouldn’t call it abuse, though the older boy was the initiator. Now, I understand this experience was fairly normal.

One night at a sleep over, he put his mouth on my penis, and then encouraged me to do the same. I remember being aroused, and not wanting to reciprocate, but I think I did. I have a vague memory of being grossed out by pubic hair. I think he had it, and I didn’t yet.

I was racked with guilt over this moment for years.

Shame is a feedback loop — my mind was telling me that these feelings were good and bad at the same time, and this dissonance ran deep.

We met this family at our Pentecostal church. Our fathers worked for The Christian Broadcasting Network — for Pat Robertson, one of the most successful televangelists of the 1980's.

While Pat and the local churches spoke of the evils of casual sex and homosexuality destroying America, the children of his employees were traumatized with guilt and shame, isolated for fear of eternal damnation.

We were on our own, sexually. It was especially harsh on those who were homeschooled, as this family was — there was little natural flow of sexual information from peers.

Adults regarded sex as “danger!” “sin!” “fear!” or silent avoidance as our hormones exploded. I was taught I was born broken, and that I was fighting very real demonic spirits.

Entertech Water Gun like the one we played war with as children

We liked hanging out with our friends from church. It was the late 80's, and we did normal kid stuff, playing GI Joe, Nintendo, riding our BMX bikes around our neighborhood, and staging water gun wars with realistic looking Entertech toy machine gun water pistols.

Our CBN/Church friends had a television, but they were only allowed to watch certain shows. During the commercials, they lowered a sheet over the screen, to remain “pure.”

The brother of the boy who I experimented with went much further in his unguided sexual exploration — he molested my sister, Lizzie, who was a toddler at the time. Racked with guilt, years later, he confessed and apologized.

The pastor of the church where we met this family resigned because of a sex scandal.

A youth leader of the same church resigned because of a sex scandal said to involve his own adopted daughter.

My parents sent me to Christian schools or had me homeschooled from preschool through 10th grade, in an attempt to raise me as good person, and keep me safe from the world, but at the end of the day to indoctrinate me in evangelical Christianity. All of the textbooks were Christian, and our science books taught The Bible as fact.

By the time I was 12, I was an overweight charter member of the Freaks and Geeks before it was remotely cool to be one. My parents had enrolled me in Atlantic Shores Christian School — a small, strict baptist school in Virginia Beach. My father told me they sent me there because they really liked the Pastor and the academic reputation.

Mac 10. My classmate killed our teacher with this model gun.

A fellow outsider and therefore de-facto friend, Nicholas, was teased so mercilessly in the care of Atlantic Shores Christian School that he brought a Mac 10 to class on December 16, 1988 and killed the teacher who taught us both the skill I’m using at this very moment to tell this story.

I was in Bible class at the time of the shooting. I didn’t see any violence first hand, but I did lie on the floor and nestle close to the larger boy next to me, Brian, for comfort.

Besides the POP POP of the gunshots from the other side of the thin wall of the trailer, one of my strongest memories of the incident is that intimate contact with another boy — something that I felt guilty about for years.

Nicholas was the only black student at the secondary school, and as a soft spoken, gentle boy he was obsessed with fashion and teased mercilessly. Nicholas was called “niggerlips” and “faggot.” My algebra teacher rarely intervened. This was still 9 years before Columbine.

Nicholas brought 200 rounds of ammo to school that day. I often wonder if he would have shot me if his gun hadn’t jammed.

I was interviewed for the local news — little 12 year old me telling the reporter how it wasn’t my friend Nicholas, but the devil who did this.

It’s always the devil, it’s always sin, it seemed, it was never us.

This is the flip side to original sin — we just shrug and say “we’re all broken, see?” — the presumption is that we can’t actually improve the situation, because we’re born this way.

The pastor of Atlantic Shores would later resign because of an adulterous sex scandal.