Keep On Going

Warning: contains references to depression and the church's attitude towards the LGBTQI+ community.

Chapter 2: A Brand New and Difficult Beginning

I would start my first year of high school and finally settled in, making some new friends after a year, only to find out my parents were planning to move to Australia. My dad’s best friend had previously moved over there after getting a job and convinced my dad to follow suit after he was also offered a job over there. So we took a holiday over there to experience what life could be like and my parents decided they liked it so we moved over. At the time I was extremely annoyed with my parents, as I’d finally settled into high school only to be uprooted from England to Australia, away from all my family and friends and starting a brand new life, in a country I knew very little about. After spending a month or so in Glen Waverley, Victoria, before settling down in a small suburb called Rowville. I started at a local school. I really struggled through the first few years of high school and no doubt unknowingly went through a period of intense depression, trying to fit in and discover who I was. While I did have a few so-called friends of sorts, at the time, it wouldn’t be till much later down the track that I would meet my best friend, Jamie, and gain some genuine friends. This, outside of my primary and early secondary college career, was probably the happiest I'd been for awhile and it would last till the end of my schooling career, before we all parted ways and moved on with our own separate lives. I stayed in touch with my best mate, but the rest of our little gang moved on with their lives. This is when I bounced back into another period of depression. Having ended the schooling career on an above low average for my ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) of around 21.5. I wasn’t exactly set up to get anywhere in regards to pursuing university afterwards, even though I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. When i was younger i wanted to be a zookeeper, but my priorities had since changed to something like a psychiatrist (like Fraser Crane from Frasier, which i’d obviously been watching way to much of), it wouldn’t be till later down the track that i realised that working with youth and young people might be my passion.

The school was so insistent on us getting a good ATAR, it was kind of depressing and basically stating to us if we failed our , we failed life. Which is a lot of pressure to put on a young person and i’ll always hold a grudge against the teachers and school for putting me through that and numerous others, but it was probably due to the fact that their jobs relied on us doing well as well as the school’s reputation as a whole, not that that should condone what they stated.

I spent years after high school struggling to find my place in life and doing what I could with what little qualifications I had to get any kind of work. I started off doing a paper round and eventually got a job as a labourer for a guy I knew from the local church I was attending and did that for about a year, before I got let go, due to doing a fairly poor job and only needing the extra hand for a specific job, i since learned i was not equipped to be a tradie (Aussie slang for Trades person or builder) and added it to my never going to do again job list.

Chapter 3: Becoming A Christian

Growing up in England, I never really considered my family religious, but I was baptised when I was born. My mum would regularly attend church services at the local church. I would occasionally go along, but saw no merit in it, so stopped attending. My dad is atheist, so I figured the only reason I'd been baptised was due to pressure from family, no doubt from my grandparents on my mum’s side. It wasn’t until I came to Australia that Christianity would play a significant role in my life for around 8 years, before I ended up leaving the church, due to clashing beliefs. I started attending the local youth group, after my friend invited me along. I enjoyed it so much, I made the effort to attend every week and while it took awhile for me to feel comfortable and fit in, I enjoyed hanging out at a place where everyone was friendly. A normal night would consist of about an hour and a half of games, followed by a 10 to 15 minute talk about a particular story in the bible that would relate to some aspect of life and then have a 10 to 15 minute discussion in small groups about it. I never really paid much attention to the talks, but enjoyed the nights, non the less. It was probably these discussions though, that discouraged the rest of my friends from regularly attending nights.

I would continue with the youth group until I finished high school and still wanted to be involved somehow, so I became a youth group leader. It was around this time I also started attending the young adult bible study and regularly attending church services on Sunday and became fully involved in whatever programs and various event that church would host, as a result i got to know about 2/3rd of our congregations, it was a relevantly small church, which i liked and felt less confronting then some of the bigger more mega church around. I liked the community aspect of the church and being a smaller church made it feel more personal and less dominating, you’d come in and see the same regular faces, rather than seeing a lot of different people each time. I would also be involved in the band, which was a great experience for me and really gave me the feel of what it would be like to be in a band dynamic, I loved every moment of that.

There was an event at a local christian convention centre, which i attended one night with the youth group. I can’t remember much of what the preacher said, but there was a specific thing he said that really stood out to me, something like ‘being a person who doesn't have god in his life is like an empty egg, it’s completely hollow, has no purpose or depth, where as a person who does have god in his life, is like a full egg’. For some reason this really struck a chord with me. I’d been looking for a purpose in my life and while I liked the whole idea of working and raising a family, I always felt like there was more to life. Becoming part of the church felt like a step towards that, but this moment was when it really turned my head and I felt like I had found my purpose in life.

Soon after I agreed to get baptised, as I felt being baptised at birth didn't really have any significance to me, as I was forced to do it. Now I was old enough to make my own decisions, this felt like the right time to truly declare my love and adoration for God. My dad has never been one to pry and while opinionated in a lot of things, never would force that onto other people, which i was extremely glad about, therefore i was supported in going through with this after discussing it with the family, even though my dad didn’t really understand.

Chapter 4: My Faith In Jeopardy

Several years later when COVID finally hit, i began to have a crisis of faith so to speak. I’d had issues with the church in the past that all ironically linked to the church’s stance on the LGBTQI+ community. I watched a really good friend and mentor, several years earlier, who was a youth leader at the time I attended, get discarded by the church community after being offered a high up position job in the church and expressing his opinion that people from the LGBTQI+ community should be allowed to get married under god’s name. After that he felt he no longer was accepted at the church and left, this really took a toll on me, as he was such a great guy and had done so much for the church over the years, yet in one instance, due to his opinion’s they’d cast him aside, i’ll never forgive them for doing that.

On top of that there was another time where we went to a neighbouring church to have a bible study session with the young adults at the church, i specifically remember one night the topic being on the LGBTQI+ community and the discussion we had didn’t do anything to change my opinions of the church’s attitude to this community. I basically got the vibe that ‘we should love and respect them, but condone their actions’ which seemed like a really fake way of trying to accept people from this community into the church.

Once COVID hit, this gave me time, due to church no longer being in person, to think more in depth about this topic than I had been able to over the years and after much deliberation i decided i had to leave. Plus without the community aspect of church, it had no merit to me and I felt i’d done my time, so to speak, being involved with the church and COVID was a good opportunity to end things. So I quit being a leader at the youth group and eventually made an announcement on the church Facebook page to say I was leaving and if people wanted to know why, they could privately message me. One of the member’s who was also the dad of the family i worked for as a support member, who i knew quite well, took me out for lunch one day to discuss it and while we had a good chat, it didn’t sway me in anyway, as did conversation with other key members of the church. I was glad to be unburdened of this weight I'd been carrying for years and while I do miss my time there and the fact it helped me keep really busy. I’m definitely glad I took the opportunity to leave. I should also point out that in my teens I had an identity crisis and thought for a while I wanted to be a girl, mainly due to the pressures of masculinity and being a very sensitive individual, which may have been the main reason I felt so strongly about the church’s views of the LGBTQI+ community. But after much deliberation, I decided I was perfectly happy being a guy, but wanted to be able to express my more femine side from time to time.

Chapter 5: The Next Stage Of Life

After leaving the church I went through a bit of depression again. I Found myself with way too much time on my hands and not knowing what to do with it, while also trying to deal with sufficient work. On top of working for the family from church, which I was still involved with, I was also regularly assisting my best mate who has an eye condition, meaning he can’t drive. This was sufficient work to get me by, but not for moving forward in my life and having stopped working for him has put my life on a bit of a stand still, as i try to figure out the next direction for my life.