September 26 F1647 Brooklyn
[excerpt]

One thing I’ve been meaning to bring up in therapy at some point is all the religious stuff. I think she knows I grew up in a strict environment but I don’t know to what extent. There’s the martyr in my family who was executed, the endless rosaries, the compulsory reconciliation where I remember distinctly one of my very first confessed sins at nine-years-old was that I sometimes told my parents I was done with my homework but was playing video games instead. (In hindsight, the priest was very amused whereas I felt so guilty I thought I was going to hell for not doing my homework, which seems kind of harsh for a third grader.)

I was literally on my knees praying every single night because I was afraid of the creative ways god would express his anger if I didn’t. Every little bad thing that happened—whenever I embarrassed myself, whenever something I wished for didn’t happen, and so on—was directly because god was punishing me for doing something wrong. I didn’t always figure out exactly what it was for but I prayed for forgiveness anyway because god sees not only our actions but also our thoughts and after a while I got used to being in a constant state of fear.

Things were challenging in fifth grade when I finally learned I was gay. We were taught that homosexual thoughts are tolerated but homosexual acts are not, which never made any sense to me. (My dad would always comment “What a sick person” in Vietnamese when he saw anyone he thought was gay.) Still, I didn’t want to take any chances, which is why I began thinking of killing myself shortly after my eleventh birthday. I was fully convinced that it was the correct and honorable thing to do and that if I wanted to show I was a good person, I didn’t have a choice. My only redeeming qualities to the adults in my life were that I was religious and eager to please.