Knife No More

I don't know if I have ever posted this or not, but I'm a cutter. Right now I really, really need to cut because my heart hurts and the only way to release the pain from my body is by letting it bleed out. I've only cut three times in the last 54 weeks (which is AMAZING for me) and I am not cutting tonight, I am writing (and crying of course).

I am at a loss for words to type, my thoughts incoherent blankets blinding my vision. I want to be with my best friend and I want to take away his pain without causing him more pain by wanting to take away his pain. I think I need to grow as an individual and find myself. I am unspeakably petrified that if I become a healthy and "whole" person I won't be able to sacrifice myself for my best friend anymore. I am terrified that I won't want to marry him anymore. Isn't it right to want to sacrifice everything for someone you love? Should marriage be your biggest sacrifice or should it not be a sacrifice at all? Maybe it is just so unhealthy that I want to marry him when he doesn't love or appreciate me back. Tonight he told me that I need to reach inside myself and uncover the reasons I joined the Church in the first place. My thought: those feelings are locked behind a wall of repression, protection, and justification and I don't know if I can dig them out. Perhaps they have disintegrated. Maybe I want them to have disintegrated. I don't want to believe that salvation and exaltation only come through misery. If we are here so that we can have joy, why the hell can't gay people have love???

1. Repentance- even if the Gospel is as it has so far been revealed we can all repent of EVERYTHING we have done, regardless of how bad our actions have been.
   

   
    

2. Thoughts from a convo with a great dad at the MoHo party- there is a gray, gay, middle ground. I left the party tonight thinking that salvation and homosexual partnerships (marriages?) are not at odds. We know that we have little knowledge of the Gospel because there is so much that has not been revealed. We are commanded above all to love G-d, ourselves, and our neighbors and gay partnership can easily be based on following all three of these commandments. There really is little in the quad scriptures that condemns homosexuality, much of it is from modern revelation. The men who lead the Church are human, and as with blacks and the Priesthood and Joseph Smith and the plates, have been known to make human judgments. What if the strong denunciation of homosexual activity is from human thought and not Devine instruction? Then my best friend asked if a "what if" is worth jeopardizing your salvation for.
   

   
    

3. The first- the Gospel is true and there is a narrow path to salvation. This is the typical notion (and is it typical because it is common or typical because it is true?) in which we are told to follow the Gospel so far as it has been revealed, which means we cannot act on homosexuality. Here we sacrifice everything for Christ and trust that our surrender of this world will be made up for in the next life. This is living today based on tomorrow, boxed into solitude or marriage with someone of a sex they are not attracted to. Isolation for my best friend because the one girl he is in love with won't consider him because he is gay, or blind faith that someone else will come, or that the Church offers more than natural love and pleasure ever can?
   
   

I don't want my best friend to be in agony because he has denied himself in order to follow the Gospel word for word. I don't want him to go to hell if he chooses to have earthly love. I don't want to look at my testimony because I'm afraid I will find something I don't want to believe.

Maybe it is about future generations, about an ideal that we all strive for but few achieve of a loving and in love husband and wife healthfully raising their own children. I looked at the amazing and beyond incredible children at tonight's party, they are perfect, maybe the sacrifices are for them. If the parents had not striven to live the Gospel as it is currently presented none of those beautiful children would exist. One wife told me she worried that her husband would leave one day to seek the life he is missing, but as I watched this family I only saw the amazing wife and children he currently has, I have to think he would be giving up more than he could ever find. Another husband had his arms around his gorgeous wife and his hands in her pockets, love.

But how could someone like Cog be going to hell? It doesn't make sense- it isn't right. How is it fair that so many gay people are never given the "truth" so they don't have to choose sacrifice based on revelation received by Man or choose to gamble their salvation based on something that seems fair, sensible, and natural? Why is one tenth, a tithe, of the population expected to give up who they naturally are, to sacrifice physical love and the connections that come through this love?

I wish no one had to wait "unit the time comes" (The Classic Crime) when waiting is just suffering. Are we happier sacrificing in the Gospel and hoping for change or living logic and nature?