A Lonely Road?

Well, I did it. I came out of the closet. Except ... I'm not gay, so I guess I would have to have come out of somewhere else, huh? Like, maybe the pantry??? Anyway, I submitted one of the short stories that I wrote last month to my writer's group, and I got their feedback tonight. Now I should mention that I've worked with these people for over a year now. A year and a half, even? They have read a lot of my work, but I've kind of held myself back some. Well, I didn't hold back tonight. I had a year long conversation with someone last year that left me gutted like a trout in the bottom of rowboat, and I'm afraid I ruined that friendship with my idiotic flailing while under the knife. But the truth of the matter is, I can't go back to pretending anymore. It's not so much that I don't WANT to pretend. It's that I simply can't. So I gave them my story, which was about a family sitting around after Grandpa's funeral, fighting over the family Bible. They don't want to TAKE it, though. They want to pass it off to someone else -- someone who clearly needs it more than them -- and they end up getting into a fight and Grandma ends up dead. (That darn coffee table corner just got in the way ...) The narrator ends up holding the massive volume, thinking of the family tree inside (a discussion of which started the story), and feeling the weight of the blank lines beneath her name ... The End. (Or the beginning, depending on how you look at it.) WELL ... the other Christian gals were just a wee bit uncomfortable. I heard comments like, "Well, you warned me you have a dark side." "She's just a little left of center, isn't she?" "But you're such a good Sunday School teacher..." Excuse me a minute while I go pull out my hair. Okay, I'm back. Just ... can somebody PLEASE tell me why a person cannot be devoted both to teaching children about God's vast love AND to pointing out the way we Christian tend to destroy each other with our religious arrogance? One gal wanted me to redeem the story. "But you ARE a Christian," she said. She wanted me to put one more line, something that showed that the narrator realized the "truth," how in Christ things don't have to be this way. Put some hope in there. Something. "It feels unfinished," she said. "It IS unfinished. You're supposed to feel uneasy." "Well, I did!" "Good," I said.

Some might say I should find a new writers group, a bunch of people more in sync with where I'm at right now. But here's the thing: I took a personality test once that informed me that my key trait is loyalty (perhaps to a fault?). If I have thrown in my dice with yours, I'm in for the long haul. You may make me tear every last hair off my scalp in frustration, but I will find a way to understand you and make something productive of our relationship. I have a feeling though that the others may soon find that themselves "too busy" to make it to writers group. Sigh. I cannot be different. I'm sorry. I just can't anymore. But I have a feeling this could end up being a lonely road.