I’m sitting here in sweats and a tiara, crying. This has become normal. Tiara’s I tell me people make even the worst things better, but that’s a lie.
This week my congregation, a group of people that I have loved for four years got an email telling me I’m leaving the church. The email didn’t come from me. The email didn’t even tell the truth about why I’m leaving. The email came two weeks after I would have told them. Tomorrow for the first time they are going to get to ask me why their pastor is leaving. Tomorrow for the first time in six months I’ll have to tell them something about how hard the last year has been. Tomorrow I’ll have to somehow keep it professional and not damage their relationship with the head pastor while not lying to them. Tomorrow feels overwhelming.
So I’m sitting here wearing a tiara hoping to make it better somehow. I know I can’t make it better, that’s why I’m leaving. I can’t save them from this pastor and I can’t kill myself trying, not when they aren’t paying me or valuing me in any real way.
A month ago I finally broke down and told D about the church. He doesn’t come to church with me. He isn’t a Christian. He hates organized religion but he cares for me. He held me as I cried recounting one of the most painful meetings I’ve been in, and quietly told me it was time to leave. He was right. I knew it. I had come to the same conclusion.
He wants desperately to fix things for me so he gives me tiaras. Sparkles to make me smile. Tiara’s make everything better I tell myself.
We are cuddling in bed when I tell him that I’m not sure what Feb is going to be like. I’m not sure he’ll want to be here for it. He knows I’m going up to the town I grew up in to see the people who raised me. He knows I’m going to tell them I’m done with their abuse that I want no contact from them. I tell him I know I’ll come back emotionally shattered or emotionally shut down. I say that I can’t tell him which one it will be and I get it if he doesn’t want to be here for the shit show that is going to be February.
He adjusts my tiara and tells me he’s coming with me on this trip.
A thousand conversations later and with a whole lot of fear, the car is rented, rooms are booked and I’ve been trying to make him understand what he’s signed up for. Sometimes I wear tiaras to tell him what life with the devil was like.
No matter what I wear he kisses me and calls me Princess, a name I never thought I would want but have now come to adore. And I begin to realize that it’s not the tiaras that make everything better. It is this man.
This man who told me at the beginning of the relationship he doesn’t do emotions with his secondary girlfriends*. This man who will never be able to give me more than two nights a week. This man who will never marry me, who the world tells me I have no future with, this man is the biggest gift of all. Even if he walks away.
*To be clear, he’s poly not married. I know his other gf. We go on double dates with her and her other bf. She’s great.
The Confessional 