An Annal

I have written and re-written my story so many times that I do not know how to tell it any longer. I have only but to tell it again and hope that you can understand the language I use. No writer who has ever come before or who is to come, least of all myself, could ever put into words the experiences of my lifetime. There is no way in which I can really make you appreciate what it was to live my life. You could only understand it if you had experienced it yourself. Such is life. Still, I will try as I might to tell you the story, so that you might better understand who Nathaniel Lee Flowers is. I will ask you only to try to understand that. And, know that I am not the sum total of my experiences, nor am I now who I have been at various other stages in my life. We are all dynamic individuals, who grow and change. Before you can appreciate how my experiences have helped shape my life, you must first understand who I was when I was born into this world. I was a sensitive child, bright-eyed and curious. I was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy, Hitler's dream, but born with the potential to be much the opposite. I was endowed with an uncommon clarity of vision, an unparalleled spirit of compassion, and a sensitivity to the emotional and the spiritual. I was fragile, naïve, curious, and inborn with an intense need for physical intimacy and verbal approval. It was all well and good to exist in this state as long as I was confined to my loving, Christian home and adoring family, but once I was exposed to the outside world, my intrinsic nature became fatal flaws. Sensitivity becomes frailty, fragility becomes weakness, and curiosity leads to a heart that is jaded. If it happened, it happened when I was very young, four or five, and I have no memory of it. I do have peripheral memories, which are highly suggestive of something terrible. If it happened, I believe it must have only happened on one or two occasions. If it happened, I think the one who did this terrible thing must have been a throwback from the heyday of Satanic Ritual Abuse, a sexual vampire, who had ventured out onto the Five Steps to the Light of Illuminism. I will not go into such things. My life was pretty much uneventful for a while after that. I remember my first day in the first grade. It was very scary for me. It was very different from kindergarten, and I was not highly adaptive. I really do not have any positive memories from school. I excelled at academics but failed miserably at this subject called friendship. I really have to wonder if I was not the product of an alien insemination. For one thing, I was never, nor am I now, like my parents in any way. For another thing, I seem to be totally inept at functioning as a normal healthy person in normal social situations. Too, it is as though people sense I am not one of them and do not belong. But, I digress. So, it was that I happened to be devoid of friendship, save for a few childhood playmates at various times in my life. I was not terribly disconcerted by not having friends, as people generally did not treat me well. In truth, people treated me like less than human garbage, and consequently, I did not like to be around people. So, it was that I headed down a long and dangerous road. For ten years or so it went on like this. Three hundred thirty thousand words and yet so clumsy is our language. The only words I have to describe it are these: I was systematically abused and tortured for those years. Day in and day out, every moment of every day, every look, every stare, every cruel word, every violent act, I was subjected to no less than abject humiliation and torture. I don't suppose it got really bad until about half-way into this decade of abuse, when I was no longer only at war with my peers but also at war with my God and myself. It should not, in retrospect, be so surprising that I became depressed and suicidal at this time. Having accepted the saving grace of Christ at the age of eight, and having lived five years of hell thereafter, I was convinced there was only one absolution: self-destruction. Indeed my peers and 'friends' were doing a good job destroying me, but someone needed to end it, as I saw it. I was assured in my life after death through my faith in Christ, which made me feel very unrestricted in ending my life. I could see no end in sight to the abject humiliation and torture that had become such a systematic destroyer of my life, so it seemed to be the perfectly logical and humane thing to end my suffering and enter into the next world, which by all indications was indescribably better than the life I was living. So, it went on like that for a further five years, I would spend every waking hour of every day being the victim of a very informal but systematic kind of abuse, only to come home and think of new and more terrible ways of ending my life. Most of my waking hours away from the abuse was spent staring blindly into the glow of the television in my darkened room, contemplating an end to it all. I would often cry myself to sleep in absolute terror, knowing the kinds of terrible things that would be done to me the next day. It was psychological torture. I would pray every night that God would take me in my sleep that I might not endure another day of this torture, and I would awake each morning, cursing God for letting me live, losing heart and losing faith. I would often times then spend my mornings in the bathroom, violently ill. I was often late for school in those last years of depression. Of course, by that time, my parents were becoming aware that something was wrong, though they were oblivious to what and how severe. I can only imagine that they thought I was just going through those rough teen years as all boys do. I never told them. I never told anyone what I was going through. There was some measure of fear and shame in me, a fear of what the response would be if anyone knew and a shame for letting it go on. Not as such as there was anything I could have done, but I often considered enacting a massacre on my school and my peers. I thank God, every day, in shame, that I never once stopped turning the other cheek. As much as a patriot feels a passion about what he fought for, I feel a passion about what I suffered to uphold my beliefs. There have been those, people I once looked up to, who have blasphemed my integrity. They have said that Christianity does not teach us to turn the other cheek, that sometimes it is right to 'fight back.' They have sullied my integrity. It is that kind of philosophy, which has been used to justify high-school massacres and bombing third-world nations into oblivion. That kind of philosophy negates the human cost of such wars and devalues human life. I shutter to think what would have come had I 'fought back.' That angriest time in my life is the one thing that I regret from my whole life. My resolve was weakened a little bit, and for that, and that alone, I am sorry. It was the one regrettable circumstance of my whole life that I had power to do anything about, but though my resolve was weakened, it was not lost. There are many specific incidences of abuse, which I could recall. I have in many previous versions of the telling of my story very explicitly shared some of those incidences, but I now feel it imprudent. I have an ideal by which I live, and it is to live my life as open and honestly as possible. I believe in being very direct and open, as well as very honest and vulnerable. But, I do not feel that recalling such specific happenings in my life really does anyone any benefit. If you really want to know anything, you have only to ask. I suppose it would be prudent to discuss some of the aftermath of all those years of abuse. There were many psychological effects of the abuse and loneliness. I came out of it with posttraumatic stress, social anxiety disorder, cognitive dissidence, and a borderline agoraphobia. There are probably many other psychoses that I take from that period in my life, but I as yet have not categorized any of them into any set of psychological terms. I probably see them more as quirks. There are also several physiological effects that I have taken away from the years of torture and depression. They call these physical problems somatoform disorders. The body responds to psychological trauma, and when the body and mind are under this level of stress and anxiety over a prolonged period, the body develops disorders in response to those stressors. I have taken from all of those years of systematic abuse chronic migraine headaches, as well as, a heart arrhythmia. I still don't know how I ultimately survived those years, and it is apparent that I did not survive them without some lasting damage. But there is life after high school. I went to college at Judson College, and the difference between my life in high school and my life at college was as dramatic as night and day. It is true that I had problems making and keeping friends because of all of the psychological baggage that I was taking with me, but I was still able to achieve some level of social contact and acceptance, which to me, having lived the life I had lived, meant the world. There were many nights that I sat alone in my dorm room, because I was terrified of social settings. I might have made more friends, I might have established better friendships, and I was still very lonely. But, my life was so much better than the life I had before. And, I was happy, for really the first time since I was a child and too young to know the difference. There were still problems in my life. I had still not 'come out,' and I was still a part of the ex-gay movement, although I had long since left Exodus International behind me. When I was only seventeen, still in high school, when I should have been at parties or out on dates with cute guys, I was going to clandestine Exodus meetings in anonymous church basements. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be a senior in high school, a gay Christian teen at war with himself, a seventeen-year-old sitting around in a church basement with a bunch of overweight, over-the-hill perverts, whining about how much they had masturbated in the previous week. It was a terribly screwed up situation to be in and more than a little awkward for a seventeen-year-old kid. Thankfully, after only a few months in Exodus, I stopped attending the meetings, but I maintained my relationship with the ex-gay movement for the duration of high school and most of my college years. It really was not until I left college and made a move to Oceanside, that I truly reconciled my orientation with my faith. I was truly sad to leave Judson and all the friends I had made after only two years there in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicagoland, but I know, now, it was for the best. Life circumstance mandated that I move with my parents from the only home I had ever known in Illinois to Oceanside, California in North County San Diego. My first year there was very difficult until I made some local friends and began to come to terms with who I was. The last year has been very reparative for me. I'm comfortable with who I am, my orientation, all my frailties and weaknesses, and comfortable in knowing that my God still loves me, never stopped loving me and wanting what was best for me. My compassion has survived, my resolve has survived, my faith has survived, and I have survived my life, in tact, as a whole person. I do not know where I am headed in the future. I look back on how far I've come in my life in wonder. It is as though I have lived a thousand lifetimes in one. If you had told me four years ago that I would be here, now, in this place, doing what I'm doing, living the life I'm living, I would have said you were insane. I could never have imagined that I would come this far, so I dare not imagine where I am headed in the coming years. I am confident, now, in who I am, so I can be confident that God can take me to the next place and time in my life, and that when I arrive, it will be a great and exciting thing, as it has been.

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