#not into reading christianity into spn but as i lay dying makes some points

[caspock]

do u think cas would think of him and dean as dressed in sin.

[destielrose]

A Different Kind of Conversion

I don’t know how to do this. I’ve allowed myself to become so invisible that no one can see me anymore. I’ve battled suicide my whole life and I’m so tired. So very tired of fighting. I’m hitting middle age and all of those things I told myself I would do, would become, would conquer: I haven’t done, haven’t become, and haven’t conquered. And I feel like I’ve run out of time. 

I want to slay my demons and stand on their fiery carcasses and know that I will not need to fight them anymore. But I’ve lived just long enough to see life cycling back on itself; those demons keep coming back. There isn’t anything to stand on and nothing is certain.

 I identified as gay when I was a kid, but was shocked to fall in love with a man. I’ve been married to him for sixteen years and I love him tremendously. There have been a lot of trials and I’ve been sick, too. Mentally and physically. I tried to end my life a lot. One time I came particularly close to succeeding. I lay next to my children and listened to them breathe after I took too many pills, wrote letters to them on their bodies with permanent marker. I think I was trying to make something of myself stay with them. I believed in heaven and was eager to see God. I just didn’t want to be in pain anymore. 

But dying hurts. When things started to get painful and my heart sped up, I stumbled to my husband and asked him to drive me to the emergency room. It wasn’t my first stay in the mental ward, but it was my last. When my mother in-law came  to pick me up, a woman who almost never shows emotion, she was broken. I began to see how my death would affect those around me. I was mentally ill enough at that point that I genuinely believed I would need to be institutionalized long-term and that I would be a burden on my family forever. But I could see that even this burden would be preferable to my death, in the eyes of my family. So I made the decision to survive.

But suicide is an attempt to solve a problem. When i resolved not to die, there was nothing left to do and no end to the pain. I had already tried everything out there: buddhism, special diets, wicca, medications, spiritualism, therapies, addictions, self help techniques, and lots of quackery. Everything. And there was a great void inside me that nothing could touch. I could see my life swirling around me; I even knew it was a good life; I just could not feel it. It was as if I was under water. Everything was out of focus and far away. Distorted. And cold.

In that void, the nasty voices that I’d tried to keep at bay with all those therapies and religions and addictions had no obstacles, and they chattered at me all day long. Like Lucifer in Sam Winchester’s delusions, self-hatred and loneliness were my constant companions. I was nothing. I was worse than nothing.

But slowly another voice broke through. “Come home to me,” it said. “You belong to me.” And somehow I recognized that voice as Jesus. Yeshua, the Savior I had met as a young child. 

“How could you want me?!” I asked. “Don’t you know what I’ve done? I’ve broken every one of your rules. I even tried to murder myself. I’m a whore. A coward. You couldn’t possibly love me.”

But, having nothing else to do, I read the Bible. And I discovered that Jesus has a special affinity for whores and outcasts. And he hates hypocrites and the self-righteous, which is all I knew Christians to be. Slowly, he drew me to himself and one day I decided that I would give myself to him. 

“Please,” I cried. “I can’t do this anymore. Please take my life and do with it what you want to do.”

And everything changed. Life bloomed in technicolor and surround sound. I had an anchor. Truth existed. I knew reality. For a blessed six months, I had no depression. There had been so little of me left inside, it was like the Holy Spirit just moved in and filled me up. 

Please keep reading. This isn’t a typical conversion story.

Knowing nothing else, I joined an Evangelical church. The biggest roadblock to my conversion had been the whole gay issue. I had identified as gay. Many of the people I loved were gay. But I knew the church thought that homosexual sex was a sin, always. I did research, but the more I dug into the Bible, the less I could hold onto my old way of thinking. I would just have to trust God on this issue, as much as I didn’t like it. 

I was not the only one struggling with the gay issue. I don’t have to tell you that it is the singe most hotly debated topic in society today. But I was loyal to my God and my church. I even went to a Christian college and got a degree in theology and English. All of the voices in my echo chamber were saying the same things about sexuality. I knew in my head that my old desires were wrong. 

But it never touched my heart. I LOVE gay men. Oh my goodness, I do. I went through a period of time where I was so steeped in slash (Smallville, in case you are curious) fanfiction that I began to think that I might be transgendered. I wanted to inhabit those stories. They kept me alive in the time between my resolve to live and my conversion to Christ. In fact, it was my discovery of dominance and submission in those stories that created in my heart a longing to submit to someone or something bigger than myself, something true and kind and firm and absolute. People laugh (uncomfortably) when I say that BDSM led me to Christ, but it is true.

I had to abandon those stories when I became a Christian, though. Because I felt they were wrong. They were part of a sexual addiction that had nearly decimated my marriage (and honestly a big part of the desire for suicide, too). Unchecked lust can destroy a person. Not to mention a marriage and a family. 

Six years later, my teenage daughter and I have just finished watching Gilmore Girls for the second time through, culminating the experience with the newly released A Year in the Life. It was such a good experience. I was amazed at how that show had allowed us to bond. We had a language all our own, and the situations Lorelai and Rory found themselves in always gave us openings to talk about the deep things in life that just don’t come up naturally. But twice through is enough. We needed a new show. 

Conveniently, Jared Padalecki had left Gilmore Girls to do another show. It was in the horror genre and I wasn’t quite sure if that would be appropriate for either of us. My girl is pretty young and I’m a big wimp when it comes to the scary stuff. But I was also a huge fan of Doctor Who and I was becoming inured to the gore and the jumpscares in that incredibly safe universe. Also, I’d heard of the SuperWhoLock fandom and knew I was required to at least check out the Supernatural show to keep my fan cred up to date. 

So we watched. 

And I’m not sure how I got here. Seven seasons in and my worldview is in shambles. It isn’t the kooky pseudo-Christian mythology that has me tied up in knots. It’s the way this fandom has wormed its way into areas I thought could only be reserved for the sacred, has challenged issues I thought I had long since put to bed. 

Is it wrong to love a TV show *this much*? What is real? What is virtual? Shouldn’t I be concentrating on real life? Am I just mindlessly consuming? What is worship? Am I worshiping celebrities? What is family love? What is romantic love? Where do the lines exist between them? I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents or brother; is that why I read romantic love into every situation? But the show also seems to be teaching me about the power of family and the depth of love. In fact, it shows me redemption and the face of Christ over and over again. In a show about broken people in a world even more broken than ours.

I have started reading fanfiction again. I even wrote some. And it is slash. And…it. is. so. beautiful. Which makes me question the nature of goodness and of God. I’m reading the other sides of the issue of homosexuality and it turns out that there isn’t a good case on either side. And if that’s true, shouldn’t I default to love and beauty? And shouldn’t I know, of all people, having been on both sides of both issues (homosexuality and Christianity), how much weight either can carry? And if beauty and goodness and true love can be found in homosexual relationships, how can that possibly be a sin?

I have no one I can talk to about these things. I feel like I have come out of the closet in so many different ways in my life and now I feel like there are closets everywhere, fracturing my personhood. Do I walk through the door that leads back to my church? Do I walk through the one that leads to a new (SPN)family? Could they ever, possibly, converge? 

How do I know what is true? And who will help me here? Will I never find a home, a community where I fit?

Please respond if this calls to you at all. I am so conflicted over all of these things that I’m feeling suicidal again.