Forty years, kiddo. Forty years since you lay in bed with a book called Communication: The Key to Your Marriage open on your lap after eleven years together with your first wife (yes, there will be another-but that is another letter) and told each other the truth about your pasts. Forty years since you first realized you were going to die.

You won’t believe me, but that second thing matters more than the first. Everything else on this list grows out of it.

Here’s what I’d tell you, if the years unfolded the way dreams do and I could sit across from you in that tiny windowless office in South Florida and hand you this letter instead of a Bible.

1. You are not immortal, and that’s the whole point. Twenty-eight is when it will hit you, the reality of your ending, not the theological idea of it. You’ll call it depression because that’s the only word your world gives for a mortal man staring at his mortality without a script. It isn’t depression. It’s one of the first honest thoughts you’ve had. Let it sit with you a little while. Don’t medicate it with more ministry and endless hours of work. And oh yeah, I know for a fact you are going to live at least 40 more years, so I dare you, read these and go and do likewise.

2. Religion poisons everything. It will poison your marriage with unreasonable expectations. It will poison your career, keeping you on a stage built for someone else’s version of you. It will poison your children, handing them a fear they didn’t choose and won’t easily set down. And it will poison your country, long after you’ve quit drinking the Kool-Aid, in ways you won’t believe. Get out before it gets its hooks any deeper into you and the people you love.

3. Find a qualified therapist now. You are three decades into cult indoctrination, and you don’t know it yet. You need a wise guide for that kind of damage, not a cheerleader. Skip the Christian therapist and the Christian coach; they’re still inside the system that hurt you, and they’ll hand you the same dogma with softer language. Find someone trained in Jungian work, someone whose mind actually meets yours. You’ll know the gel when you feel it.

4. Leave. Now. Faster than now. You have decades of usefulness in you and the ministry is going to eat the best of them. You can write. You can create things. Technology is about to remake the entire world, and you’ll want a hand in it. Author, entrepreneur, creator, any of these fit you far better than the pulpit does. Every year you stay is a year you’re not becoming your true self.

5. Don’t raise the girls inside the cult. You already have two daughters. Don’t bring them into the machine that’s about to eat your best years, because they may never find the door out the way you did. Children raised inside the system inherit the fear along with the dogma. Encourage them to see and experience the world for themselves. Give them you, free and unshamed, instead of the required and regulated version of you existing for the ministry.

6. The attention isn’t the problem. Believing it’s dangerous is. Women and men want you; they are attracted to you. They want to be near you. You already sense it, and you feel guilty for sensing it. Charisma isn’t a temptation to manage; it’s a gift you’re built to carry. Carry it gently. The shame you’ve been taught to attach to it will cost you more than the charisma itself ever could.

7. Every rule they gave you about desire was a lie. Lust in your heart, they said, and you’ve already committed adultery. Fantasy is sin. Masturbation is sin. Pornography is sin. Homosexuality is sin. Hell waits for men like you, they said, men wired for sensuality. Write this down and believe it: desire is not a defect in your being. It’s an essential aspect of who you are.

8. Masturbate. Often. Without apology. Sex with yourself is healthy. It feels good, and that’s reason enough. Nobody needs to confess it, repent of it, or ask forgiveness for it. Your body belongs to you before it belongs to anyone else’s theology.

9. There is no heaven and no hell. There’s this. One life. That’s it. Every song you’ll sing about eternal reward and eternal punishment is a leash somebody else built to keep you walking their line. Take the leash off now. Live this life like it’s the only one, because it is.

10. Embrace pleasure. The ascetics had it backward. Quit sacrificing your soul on the altar of self-denial. A body starved of pleasure doesn’t get closer to God; it just gets starved. Eat well. Fuck well. Touch well. Taste everything. You’ll spend enough of your life saying no to yourself out of duty. Say yes out of hunger instead.

11. Marriage-for-life is a doctrine, not a fact. You’ve been told the vow outlasts the truth of two people changing across decades. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it shouldn’t. You’ll spend years trying to keep a covenant alive after the two people who made it have become strangers, and you’ll call the trying virtue. Some of it will be. Some of it will be fear.

12. Sexual mismatch isn’t a moral failing. It’s just a mismatch.
You’ll spend decades treating trouble in the bedroom as something to confess and pray away. It was never a sin problem. It was a communication problem. Nobody sits you down at twenty-eight and tells you two people can want completely different things sexually, and neither one is broken for it. I didn’t hear that said plainly until the second half of life, reading Nina Hartley of all people. Go and find that compatibility now. Don’t wait forty years for a stranger’s book to hand it to you.

13. Shame is not a character trait. Refuse it the moment they hand it to you. You’ll spend your whole first half of life being told shame is the appropriate response to your body, your longings, your questions. They are poisonous liars. This unhealthy emotion is a tool, and men in pulpits used it on you because a shamed man is an obedient one. The moment anyone hands you shame, hurl it back. You are allowed to do this at twenty-eight. You don’t have to wait until you’re sixty.

14. Ethical non-monogamy exists. Find out about it now, not in your sixties. You don’t yet have language for wanting more than one kind of intimacy, with more than one person, honestly. That language exists; it just isn’t in your church library. Go this moment and find and read Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer by Ryam Nearing. Somewhere out there, people are building honest, consensual, non-monogamous lives instead of secret, shame-soaked ones. Find them. Read them. You’ll save yourself and everyone you love a great deal of grief.

15. Friends-with-benefits is not a sin against God. The problem was never the shape of the intimacy. The problem was always the lying required to have it inside a system that only recognized one approved shape. Honest, mutual, consensual arrangements between adults, whatever form they take, cost much less than secrecy does. You’ll learn this the hard way, decades from now, after affairs you told yourself were necessary because honesty wasn’t an option. It was always an option. You just weren’t given it.

16. Your desires and longings are not the enemy. Your dishonesty about them is. You will spend your whole life running from wanting things, and then run from having wanted them, and then run from admitting you’re still running. Stop. The longing was never the sin. Hiding it from yourself and believing the lies was.

17. Be joy: to yourself, your companions, your community, your world. Actual joy, the kind that starts as a private decision and radiates outward because it has nowhere else to go. You are a charismatic kid. Start “charisma-ing” for the people who deserve it, starting with the man in the mirror.

18. Stay young. Stay playful. Feed the curiosity. Don’t let the institution age you into irrelevancy and grey solemnity before your time. Curiosity and creativity are not a phase you grow out of at thirty: they’re the secret to a joyful and free life. Keep reading everything. Keep asking the questions nobody in the room wants asked. That hunger is one of the truest things about you.

19. Tape this to your mirror: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Auntie Mame said it and she was right. You’ll spend your twenties and thirties standing at the edge of the table, hungry, watching everyone else eat, telling yourself hunger is holiness. It isn’t. Pull out the chair. Load the plate. Eat like you mean it. Nourish your essentials.

20. Speaking of your essentials. Memorize these four words and this simple mantra. Sensuality. Curiosity. Intimacy. Freedom. These describe the essence of who you are. If your daily life integrates these four essentials, you will be who you are. Then the phrase that emerges from those words: Taste the body. Feed the mind. Bare the soul. Free the spirit.

I wish I could hand you this letter across the years and watch your face change. I can’t. What I can do is write it down, all of it, unshamed, so that whoever needs the same permission I did might find it here instead of forty years from now.

You made it, kid. Barely. But you made it.

— R.