Lent 2025 Day 20: Healing Isn’t Linear

"We deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise." - Elliot Page

Under the Stars, Junior Prom 1991. Joseph Barajas and me.

Growing up, I always had a big circle of friends—but a few, like John and Joe, held a deeper place in my heart. In high school, they were my closest friends—one loud, one quiet, both proud, beautifully chaotic gay men who became my chosen brothers. I used to joke that I wasn’t a very good lesbian because I was raised by feral gay men. It was true.

When I first came out at sixteen, I wasn’t hanging out at lesbian bars. I was sneaking into gay men’s clubs with a fake ID—don’t try this at home, kids. That scene? Remember, it's the late 90s in the Bay Area. It was awesome. Drama for days. Before I had my first girlfriend, I had already learned how messy queer love could be just from watching my boys cycle through scandal after scandal.

When I took Joe to junior prom, we weren’t fooling anyone. We were out. We were queer. And we were surviving in our own way.

Joe recently got married to the love of his life—and I couldn’t be happier for him. We lost touch for a while, like many of us do in our twenties. He moved to San Francisco. I moved to Berkeley. Life moved forward. But thanks to Facebook, we’ve reconnected, and I got to witness his joy. I also got to remember the chaos, the laughter, and how far we’ve all come. Thirty years ago, that kind of love wasn’t even legal. Congratulations, Joe. Love is love is love.

“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” – Ephesians 4:32

Isn’t forgiveness weird?

We don’t forgive to erase what happened. We forgive to let go of what we’re still carrying. Not for them—for us. Forgiveness is about reclaiming space in our hearts, in our bodies, and in our spirits. It’s about making peace with our own choices—even the ones that hurt. It’s about releasing the guilt of letting someone close enough to wound us.

Vulnerability requires trust.

You don’t hand over your heart to just anyone. You only bare your soul to someone who’s proven they can hold it. But sometimes, people wear masks. They come cloaked in promises of love, only to show you later that their love was conditional.

“If only you weren’t so… If only you could just…”

That’s not love. That’s manipulation. That’s control. Sometimes we confuse love with trauma bonds—because the pain feels familiar. But just because something is familiar doesn’t mean it’s safe. We get into relationships hoping someone else will fix what’s broken inside of us. We want to be seen, to be chosen, to be healed. But healing doesn’t happen when we give ourselves away to people who only want the version of us they can mold. We are not projects. We are people.

This society doesn’t make it easy to practice self-love or emotional honesty. It shames vulnerability. It punishes difference. It demands perfection while thriving off our insecurity.

But I’ve been doing the work. I’ve sat with my pain. I’ve named my patterns. I’ve stopped romanticizing emotional abuse. I don’t want to be loved for my potential. I want to be loved for who I am, today.

Mature love—real love—requires compromise, not coercion. Honesty, not gaslighting. Empathy, not expectation. We’ve all got scars. But scars aren’t a sign we’re broken—they’re proof we’ve healed before. Healing isn’t linear. It’s messy. It’s layered. Like skin forming under old emotional wounds. And sometimes, we keep picking at them—because they’re familiar. Because even pain can feel like home when it’s what we’ve always known. No. Not anymore.

I don’t want pain to feel like home.

My dad’s been gone for over fifteen years. I’ve carried more than enough hurt for a lifetime. It’s time to let that shit go.