(love letter to myself)

By Glo Anne Pauline Guevarra

Dear Glo,

You’re turning 33 this month. It’s been almost a decade since you began your messy, dark, tumultuous, beautiful, and incredible journey of self-discovery and acceptance.

It’s quite serendipitous to be writing this letter to yourself today. You were just seated in the Shang Bake Shop coffee house this morning thinking about what your 23, 24, and 25- year old self needed to hear from the present-day Glo. Consider this your honest attempt to hold space.

So here goes. Dear Glo. It isn’t lost on me how much you still can’t seem to grasp where you are now compared to where you’ve been. Growing up in an evangelical Christian household for most of your life, your story is not unique but your journey is. Your early years of self-discovery were rife with confusion, shame, guilt, and a soul-shattering internal dissonance that only someone raised as a church kid with unidentifiable and unspeakable “deviant” desires could understand.

You thought back then that it wasn’t possible to be both Christian and gay. At least that’s what you were taught all throughout your formative years. Sure, you were a little bit tomboyish and did not fit the mold of a typical girl. What mattered was what was inside, right? But you very quickly learned that both your inner and outer world did not conform to what you were taught. And how that “deviance” manifested in how you loved people for who they are regardless of their gender.

You thought making little changes to your external expressions would shift your inner world to the “straight and narrow” path. You adapted parts of yourself to appear more palatable to people around you who felt you “just weren’t fitting the mold.” Of course. Because a dash of pink, some feminine accessories here and there, and perhaps growing your hair out, were the keys to “staying straight.”

Then you got older and were told that transformation starts from the inside out. That it requires a life-long unconditional surrender to a Creator who happened to install the “wrong” sexual operating system in the process of creating you. That’s why you had a proverbial “thorn in your flesh.” Somehow, the Creator got it right with the straights. But you, and many others, had a deep flaw in your identity that you had to hate, deny,  and even “kill” daily for the rest of your life. You just needed to do that for 70-80 years until you were free of your queer mortal coil in heaven along with all the other Christians who “made it” by the grace of repression and self-denial. If that isn’t “unconditional” love, you don’t know what is.

In the middle of this deep indoctrination, somehow there was a part of you that believed in a world, a universe, a cosmos, that had the capacity to hold multiple truths. That life wasn’t a matter of “or” but that there will always be room enough for “and.” That you can “be” without diminishing any part of yourself by saying “but you can’t be Christian infinitely loved” by God just because. Unconditionally.

That deep belief made itself known through the darkest years of your life as a 23, 24, 25-year old. But as you learned how to love these parts of yourself more and more with the help of your therapist and the people who love you for you (without any reservations, conditions, or secretly hoping that you would change your mind and repent one day), something profoundly life-changing happened.

You became free. You became powerful. You slowly learned to accept the love you deserved that embraced your entire existence without question. You started living your life in love and no longer in fear. You grieved the friendships that did not and could not love you for you, and welcomed the throngs of new friendships who do. You met the love of your life, Keisha, who became one of the most beautiful additions to your already whole identity.

You started uncovering parts of yourself you never knew existed because they were buried deep but were too bright, too beautiful, too precious to hide. It has not been easy, and there were many days when you thought it was a mistake to come into yourself fully because some of the people you loved the most could not understand that. But I write to you with the purest gratitude for what can only be described as “providential” events in your life that made you who you are today. Allow me to extend this gratitude to you through this love letter.

Thank you for sticking it out through all those impossibly painful nights when you felt the most invalid and unlovable. Thank you for allowing yourself to be loved unconditionally in the truest sense. Thank you for not giving up and for doing the work you needed to heal and be whole. Thank you for believing in the stories of the people who overcame years of feeling unworthy or invalid. Thank you for staying long enough to be part of these stories of triumph, strength, and love. Thank you for loving you.

Thank you for staying long enough to see how beautiful your thirty-third year of existence could be. I can’t wait to write to you again soon.

Love,

Glo

Photo credits: Jorge Rellores’ FB (for black and white banner photo of the author); Katie Cleng (for the banner caricature); all other photos were supplied by the author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Glo Guevarra is a seasoned social impact and development professional with 12 years’ experience in development policy, impact measurement, and impact-focused global value and supply chains. Glo completed her Master of Science in Labour, Activism and Development at SOAS University of London and an Executive course on Impact Measurement at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University. Glo’s sector specialization focuses on economic empowerment and private sector-led social impact.