Alone in My Home

I spent my entire childhood and early adulthood in big groups and community spaces; after all, I am a minister’s daughter, the youngest of four. My father, not a minister of a church, but a youth organization, where rowdy meetings were held in our home at least three to four times a week, packed full to the brim of either junior high or high school students, and the older but still youthful leaders.

If that wasn’t enough, we still went to church on Sundays and were one of the last to leave, mingling with what felt like a million adults after the service that my parents knew. They knew everyone, all of the beach town where I grew up. 

“You’re R____'s daughter?” or “You’re B____'s sister, right?” was all too common; I could not escape or explore my inner workings. The religious but raucous meetings in my house were loud. There were fun songs, silly games, every crevice of our house was full with wild students sitting on the floor, chairs, and on the couches.

From babyhood on, I was passed around and socialized, so, in essence, rarely alone, and one would imagine, rarely lonely. Ahem, sadly, not true. Granted, I did always have little to no problem acquiring friends and even found myself in the throes of the popular crowd in middle school, but my mind seemed to overpower all that. Looking back at what I now see as searing anxiety and what modern-day diagnoses would call depression, and then later on, bipolar, swept itself in as my best friend and enemy.

Within this sect of Evangelical Christianity, even when a person was essentially alone, God was always with them, and my dad always proclaimed that we should turn all our thought life into prayer life. This never worked for me, but Lord did I want it to.

I prayed alright, every night with one of my parents before they would give me a kiss goodnight, Dear Jesus, with a thank you for something, and sometimes an ask and an Amen, and I sang all the praise songs in church fueled by tattoos and electric guitars alike, read devotionals and every book of the bible, but didn’t have words for how I felt when I felt disconnected, which was almost always, from this Evangelical world. I began to think myself crazy; it was the only word I had at the time. I relentlessly worried others would soon find out my crazy identity that I felt in my bones as the dark nights settled in with my ever-increasing brooding thoughts cascading into the depths of despair in desperate cycles. I could not make sense of it all, my thoughts deep and cavernous and full of bleak creative urges to self-harm, yet not self-aware enough to know that was my intention.

In junior high, where the anxiety and loneliness surged like the riptides I often found myself caught in while swimming, a girl told me that one can end their life by drinking bleach. I don’t know if I even fathomed what ending one’s life really looked like, but I did fathom the pain I was in, even though, once again, I was alone with little to no words, support, or companionship.

365 days in a year, most of which were nights infused by insomnia, heightened sexuality, listening to TLC’s “Crazy, Sexy, Cool”, and the other classic 90’s R&B on the radio by my bed, and contemplating praying to the devil in desperation (maybe he could help me at the price of potential damnation?!?!?), taking all the pills in the pill cabinet, or drinking bleach (I had a tiny little sip and, ew, gross, I just could not).

I must admit that during the course of my childhood, I tried all of the aforementioned insomniac self-harm ideations, including a prayer to Beezelbub (the devil in biblical terms), but never with a full gusto? I’m not sure; it’s somewhat hard to gauge and recall, but I keep saying every year that passes, I’m in awe. I've made it this far and have begun believing, or at least suspecting, in some form of guardian angels, even in my current agnostic state. I’m in awe, but I’m thankful and grateful to be alive.

I wish I could say that things got easier. They did a bit in high school, as I had a clan of 12 amazing, strange, and unusual girls who formed an outlandishly weird “gang” with an equally weird initiation, and we’d do wild, silly, and mostly harmless things around campus and in the community. These women are still my rock, but that’s a story for another day.

College was a nightmare, more or less, at a private Christian college where I realized I was queer, then met the two loves of my life, got diagnosed with bipolar, and other hardships ensued, but what made me less alone was loving myself and coming into myself as an artist, as a partner, as a nonbinary queer person, and taking the hurt, naming it, seeing it, putting words to it when needed but loving myself for all the puzzle pieces along the way, no matter how hard they were to find and put together.

The more time I spend with myself alone, as I have grown and aged and learned, the more I am at home. And it’s a lovely home, without all the meetings.

Lindy Giusta is a queer, outsider mixed-media artist and writer from the sunny shores of San Diego. They have their art and writing featured in various lit mags and a chapbook, "My Heart on a Platter," published by Bottlecap Press in 2026. When not creating, they can be found exploring cities and nature, playing their mandolin, reading great books, and always drinking copious amounts of coffee. Say hello and follow their work @lindydoesart