A birthday letter from forty-year-old me to my inner child: a car is no longer your home

TRIGGER WARNING: suicide, homelessness

Hey kid,

Twenty-two years ago today, you were thrust into the world of adulthood. It was already a bumpy ride to that point. Before your eighteenth year, you saw a lot: Y2K and Columbine, the towers falling, and your friends shipping off to war. I would like to tell you that all of this trauma would be validated by the grownups around you, but it1 won’t. You’ll be silenced by them saying things like, “I saw the president assassinated on live television,” as if that is in any way comparable to watching your schools turn into war zones. You will carry a lot of resentment around for far too long, and it's going to take some real bumps and bruises before you heal that chip on your shoulder.

As a grownup now myself, I just wanted to let you know that it really was as bad as you thought.

When our grandpa died, he left us a little money, and I hate to break it to you, but Dad spent it. This is going to become a decisive moment in your life. See, Grandpa gave us that so you could start a life. Sure, by most standards, it wasn’t a huge amount: $800 or so; we will never really know the total amount. I’ll be honest with you: it doesn’t matter how much it was because it was supposed to be yours. Instead, the gift you will receive on your birthday will be debt. Dad is going to tell you that he will “pay you back” by getting you into a car. You don’t know fuck all about how the world works, and you will take the deal. What really happens is he will pay the first three notes, and you will have a debt that compounds over time, which will set life off with a limp. I am so sorry that happened to you but, I promise, it is going to work out in the end.

Just a few months after your eighteenth birthday, you will sit in that car in the parking lot of the Pensacola Little Theatre with a blade to your wrist. There are a million little pieces that led you to this moment, traumas so deep and dark you won’t even scratch the surface of them for decades. With tears rolling down your eyes, that blade will betray you, and you’ll have a split second of clarity. Instead of dying, you will choose to run away from home so that you can actually live.

It will take you a long time to unpack that leaving when you are eighteen doesn’t count as running away but we will get there eventually. In the middle of the night, you will enact your great revenge by stealing our dad’s credit card and “running away” in the middle of the night. It’s a great feeling. You’ll get your first big boy job, and it's going to be weird. You’ve got a lot to learn. You’ll ironically be working in a print factory in Nashville, Tennessee. Trust me, this will be funny later. One day, you’ll catch your boss eating out of the garbage can, and that will be the first moment you find someone who made it out of homelessness and succeeded. You will also realize that those scars will last forever, but it can get better.

Surprisingly, you will wait until marriage, but it will not prevent your heart from getting broken a thousand times. Your inability to find a space in this world will make you a little chaos goblin without any ability to lay down roots. You will break a lot of hearts in the process as you try to find steady ground. Neither Nashville nor Pensacola will fully feel like home because nothing does. After all, you haven’t met home yet.

When you turn twenty, you are going to do one of the more batshit crazy things you have ever done, and you will walk from Pensacola to Nashville. You’ll sleep on church doorsteps and stay in homeless shelters and couch surf. This will feel very comforting, a lot like the life you had when your family was sleeping in the van or motels or on the couch at your parents’ friends' houses. This will be a huge moment in your healing, but it is going to come at a considerable price. Whenever you walk toward something, you are undoubtedly walking away from someone, which will break a very sweet girl’s heart.

You’ll think about walking further, maybe out West. Hollywood is calling you; you are sure of it. Then, a still small voice will echo in your head, indicating that you have a higher calling. You’ll abandon all of those dreams and decide to move to Pensacola. You will begin giving food to those living on the streets because empathy has been implanted into your heart. You will fight the city and win, but you won’t do it alone. You will make so many friends along the way. One of them is going to change your life. She is nothing like what you expected and everything your mother feared, but she will be practically perfect in every way: her name is Tashina.

She will become your best friend, lover, truest confidant, and the mother of your children. As a matter of fact, while you are out there roaming the world, walking from place to place, trying to figure yourself out, she will be lying on a bed giving birth to your first child. You won’t be there, but it’s not your fault. You aren’t her dad yet, but you will be. You and Tashina are going to fight like hell. She is going to challenge everything you’ve ever thought was right, and it will be frustrating. Y’all are going to break up… a lot. Then, one day, you will walk down the aisle. That wedding will look nothing like what you expected, but it will be perfect. Then again, don’t worry; you are going to get another chance at this.

Oh, and you become a priest.

I know it’s weird because we were raised Baptist and Pentecostal, but trust me, it will make sense how you got here.

During your time as a priest, you will help stop laws that prevent people from sleeping outside, and you will distribute hundreds of thousands of meals, which will be amazing. There will be a lot of heartache, though, and your body is going to pay the price. I wish you had spent more time doing things like brushing your teeth and flossing, but I will choose not to hold that against you. We will hold that against Mom for a little while, but we eventually learn that it was pretty hard for her to remind us of all the little details in the middle of all the chaos of our homelessness, and we will find space for grace; for Mom, for our dad, and for a lot of other people that are going to shock the shit out of you.

You’ll even learn to forgive Charlie.

I don’t know how but just one day, you will.

It’s probably easier because, spoiler alert, he’s dead.

Maybe you get there because of all the loss. You will sit at far too many deathbeds throughout your life. You will bury a lot of friends and lovers that people will never know about. You’ll wonder for a long time if she knew that you loved her after she chose to leave, and then, for no real reason, you will just know that she did. She loved you both so very, very much, but she just couldn’t live under the weight of this world that didn’t understand her yet.

Then, after nearly a decade of service to this God that you loved more than anything, Tashina is going to leave. She won’t be able to take all the hypocrisy of the institutional church anymore. You will fall to your knees and say, “If you are going to leave, I won’t stop you. I just have one request.”

“What’s that” she will respond through tears.

“Take me with you.”

You’ll sit down at your computer, just like I am now a decade later, and pen a letter resigning from the job that you thought would last a lifetime and into eternity. You will leave for the queer community and Pussy Riot and for justice and for peace and for the love of your neighbor, but most of all for the love of a woman, Tashina.

You’ll end up divorced anyway.

Mainly because you are an asshole, and I promise you, it’s your fault. Let’s not even argue about this, okay?

Then, one day, divorced and jobless, you’ll walk into a group therapy meeting and say, “My name is Nathan,” and you’ll get better. Not everyone will ever see it and you’ll find peace with that too. But Jesus, kid, you will be so fucking alone that you’ll start to think, “Maybe I should have ended it all back when I was eighteen,” but you will be really, really wrong because the second act is about to get really fucking cool and you will be glad you stuck around.

You’ll start a homeless shelter, and you will find healing that you never knew was possible. You will learn to love our mom and dad again because you will finally see them from the vantage point of an adult in the faces of all the folks you serve. You will save other kids from the same fate you suffered. You will show them how to brush their teeth and comb their hair and let them know that they are special just the way they are. Hundreds of people will find home again because of you. It won’t be easy, and that too will take its toll, but it will all be worth it.

You are going to do everything they told you that you couldn’t. When they said that your dyslexia was going to prevent you from ever reading or writing past a second-grade level, well, they were wrong. You will become a bestselling author and travel all over the country signing books. There will be limitations for sure. For example, you’ll learn that you’ve still struggled with writing by hand, but you’ll excel at typing. I don’t know why. But you will get great at setting boundaries and not doing certain things like personalizing books when you sign them. I know it sounds snobbish, but by the time you get here, people are going to be really understanding about that sort of thing, and interestingly enough, it’s going to be because you help change the conversation on this topic.

You will travel the country and finally see all those places your parents promised to show you.

You will take your kids to Disney World and you’ll get to be a kid again too.

You will raise amazing children who love and admire you, and they will not have the same complaints about you as you did about your father.

They will have different ones, though.

You must fight hard to be good; it will not come naturally.

You will hate God.

You will fall in love with Them again.

It’s all going to be very, very complicated.

Then, when you least expect it, when your world is crashing down around you, you will find love again, too. After years of healing and tons of work, you and Tashina will get married again. None of this will look like how you expect it to.

You’ll write a book that tells all the stories of what your generation went through, and it will be dedicated to the bar that saved your life when the church failed you. In the end, you will realize it doesn’t matter if it's bread and wine or beer and bar nuts; it’s all community.

Your marriage won’t be traditional the second time around. You’ll even stop calling it marriage at all. You will realize that love is not a binary and that it’s alright that your heart was made to give so much more than they told you at church. You will have partners who support you, love you back, and build you up. Some of them will be like comets who pass through every now and again, while others will be as constant as the moon. You’ll realize that this is a solar system but also that you aren’t the center of it.

Oh, and the bullies were right, you are queer. It’s all quite complicated, and I wish there was an easy way to explain any of this to you. But it will be worth it.

You will make friends again. You will rebuild yourself. You will be okay.

And, somehow, you’ll end up in Hollywood anyway.

That girl you left, when you walk away to find yourself, she’ll be out there.

You will thank Baz Lurhmann to his face, and he will hug you.

You will share a stage with The Dresden Dolls.

Stormy Daniels will call you friend.

You will leave the church in support of marriage equality because Pussy Riot opened your eyes to the atrocities happening at the hands of your church, and then a decade later, perform the wedding for Nadya and her husband, John.

And, in a weird twist, you’ll move back to Tennessee.

Basically, kid, what I’m trying to tell you is that none of this will turn out how you expected; it’s going to be so much better than you could have imagined.

On the dawn of turning forty, you will get into a car accident. Your head will spin around to make sure that your babies are okay. They will be okay. You will not be okay. Physically, you will be fine, but it's going to send you on a tailspin, and you will almost fuck up. Something remarkable is going to happen; you will be honest with the world about what you are going through instead of holding it all in this time. You will not become angry or bitter or let that chip on your shoulder crack back open. Instead, you will let people pour love into you. You will receive a dividend for all the love you’ve put into the world, and you will, despite the odds, be all right.

I suppose when I started this letter to you, I wanted it to be a little update to let you know that it all works out, but I can’t promise that. Hopefully, we’ve got at least another forty years to go, and I’ll be writing another one of these to my forty-year-old self, explaining how much weirder it got from here. Who knows? I surely don’t! I thought we’d be dead by now, if I’m being honest. I guess what I really wanted to say is thank you.

Thank you for not pushing down harder.

Thank you for choosing to run away instead of dying.

Thank you for trusting the process.

Most of all, I wanted to let you know that your car is no longer your home. Right now, as scary as not having a car was, you are going to figure it out. You will be sitting at the fancy antique writing desk that you bought yourself for your birthday, and this will be the very first thing you write on it, just to let you know it’s going to be okay. You’ll do it safely in your home, with your beautiful kids sleeping in their beds, and the weekend of your 40th birthday, you will head out to perform comedy to a sold-out show in front of hundreds of screaming fans. I honestly do not know how the fuck we got here, but it’s going to be awesome.

I almost forgot, you do comedy now.

Steve Hofstetter will call you “hilarious” and I’m not going to give you anymore context than that but, just trust me, it will come at a moment when you really need it.

You’ll write a beautiful series on religion that millions will read. So when your friend James suggests this, definitely go for it; he is right.

And your atheist friend David will edit your series on religion.

It’s all pretty fucking weird.

It’s all pretty fucking great.

So, hang in there, pal. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Enjoy every mile.

I love you so very, very much. Thanks for sticking around, kid, because it looks like there is a lot to be hopeful for about the future we built together. You’ve been with me every step of the way, even when you didn’t realize it. You’ve shaped me into the man that I have become. A man worthy of love, worthy of affection, worthy of the space we hold in the world, and worthy of holding onto the title of father, no matter what the haters say. You are going to have so many children, young and old, that will find healing because you chose to find healing and I am so very proud of you.

And you’ll find home again, not in a car, not in a house, not even with the mouse, but in a woman and her name is Tashina.

Acknowledgments: I want to thank, as best I can, and to the best of my memory, Mom and Dad and my siblings Julie, Timothy, Emily, Anna, and Aimee for crafting me into the person I have become, to all of my friends who helped me survive the fall-out from leaving the priesthood: Steve, Max, Kat, Landis, Julie, Daniel, Brandon, Courtney, Gabby, Quint, Michael, Billy, the Mikes, Larry, Becca, Charles, Abby, and Jess.

To those who came along later and helped me learn that you can love again: Amanda, Stormy, James, Evey, Steve, Lisa, Mary Katherine, Patrick, and Itzel.

To those we lost along the way: Sean, Dolores, Thomas, Keith, Jeni, George, and Bunker.

To my remarkable children, you will go so much further than I ever could, but I am not mad about it at all; I was busy clearing a path for you to walk down.

And, always & forever, Tashina, I cherish you.