A Whole String of Failures
An essay on coming out, faith, and Van Gogh by Andy Winder (@andyjwinder)
When I imagined freshman year over the previous summer, I’d imagined poetry slams, sneaking out to wild places at midnight with roommates, caffeine-fueled finals study sessions that turned out positive against all odds. I’d imagined making my parents proud of me. I’d even hoped that I’d find someone to fall for in the way I’d never let myself before, because I’d made an effort to never let someone know me, not all the way, not fully. Holding my head in my therapist’s office and telling him I didn’t think I could make it through winter break, however, didn’t top the list.
That was the year I first admitted that I was transgender. It was the first time I told someone that I wanted more than anything to be a man and that every time I saw myself in photos or got called by my birth name, it hurt like little shards of glass digging into my skin and I didn’t know how long it’d be before I bled out. And telling someone else all of that also meant admitting it to myself, which wasn’t something I knew how to handle.
It wasn’t something I’d planned on doing, not freshman year or any subsequent year for the rest of my life. When I signed up for my university’s counseling program, it was for your garden-variety anxiety and depression. I didn’t want to tell anyone, not even a trained professional, that when I looked in the mirror I saw a man staring back at me, and he was trapped in there, and he was scared.
After the first months that my counselor and I discussed my fear and sadness and guilt, most of it came down to two facts: a) that I felt like I was born in the wrong body, and b) that I felt I was unlovable because of it — that no one, not my parents or God or anyone else, would ever love me if they knew that I was transgender.
My therapist was incredible — one of the most Christ-like people I’d met at an actual Christian university — but he was also just an intern. At my first appointment, he looked so young that I thought he was a student escorting me to the real counselor until he shut his office door. And I think having an eighteen-year-old kid in his office tell him that they’d been having suicidal thoughts scared him.
It scared him enough that he closed his eyes and, for about twenty seconds, whispered words in a way that I recognized as praying because I’d seen people around me do it all my life. It was probably the most desperate and vulnerable prayer I’d ever seen someone give. And for the first time in months, I felt God more powerfully than I had before in that room.
But that doesn’t mean anything like comfort filled my heart. What flooded in was pain I’d been holding inside me when I was alone, that I’d never let myself feel before. Crying before church while putting on a dress in the dorm bathrooms because I didn’t want my roommates to see. Falling to my knees and begging God to make me a good person so that someone would love me because I was starving for love. Hurting myself because I thought that if I kept cutting, eventually I’d cut out the parts of me that I wished weren’t there.
***
Ever since I was young, I had an affinity for Van Gogh that went beyond words. To me, he embodied someone who turned his suffering into something that mattered, something beautiful. I always considered him someone to look up to in life, despite the tragic way his ended.
Van Gogh created “At Eternity’s Gate” at one of the most hopeless times of his life, while staying at a French asylum after the psychotic episode that caused him to cut off his own ear. The original name for the painting was “Worn Out.” I imagine it was meant to describe how he and many people who battle with mental illnesses feel at times, but it was more than a hopeless painting made by a troubled artist.
Vincent and his brother Theo, an art dealer, were very close. As the sons of a preacher, both men exchanged their philosophies about religion, philosophy, and art. Vincent himself left the Protestantism of his youth at a young age, but he never stopped searching for a connection with the divine. When he wrote to Theo about “At Eternity’s Gate,” he explained that the piece was meant to convey “a feeling of belief in something on high.” Despite the subject’s anguish, his expression wasn’t meant to convey emptiness but a fullness that stirred emotions so overwhelming that sorrow became beauty and connection to the divine.
***
Sitting in my therapist’s office, hands gripping my head as I leaned over my chair, I felt like the figure in “At Eternity’s Gate” — hunched over with his head in his knees, on his last breath, and facing whatever unknowable end surrounded this life and the next.
“I care about you,” my counselor said, “and I will stay here with you until you feel strong enough to go home to your family.” Watching him pray for me, I could feel something much greater than myself–something that stemmed from one human being expressing compassion for another, but which seemed to reach far beyond that.
I did go home that night. And a few days later, I finally came out to my parents as transgender. My dad cried at the thought of “losing” his oldest daughter, and my mother urged me not to make any decisions until I completed therapy for depression. There were low moments my freshman year–the lowest being a trip to the emergency room for suicidal ideation followed by the longest drive I’ve ever had with my Dad after he picked me up from the hospital.
But they still held tiny pinpricks of something on high, I think, and they kept me going. As I came out to more people, they illuminated the darkness like stars in the night. And eventually, dawn came: I transitioned to male during my sophomore year. The testosterone shots stung and the scars on my arms faded into silver crescents, but the pain gave me moments to learn from, moments that made me laugh and cry, and moments to treasure.
When I picture “At Eternity’s Gate,” I like to imagine that there’s an outstretched hand just beyond the painting’s frame. Someone like Theo, who held his brother’s hand in the hospital and told him stories of their youth in Zundert after he cut off his ear. Or like my counselor, who prayed for me when I felt beyond salvation. The closest we can get to God in life is near other people. Whether we’re the ones pulling someone up or being pulled up ourselves, clinging to another person in our darkest and most hopeless moments turns pain into beauty.
