Like Me

by Chely Wright

  I did not pray that Kristin would call or that she and I would work it out. I didn’t ask Him to stop the crying or the pain for good. I simply asked for a moment’s peace. I asked God to please grant me a second or a minute or whatever amount of time He saw fit of peace. “Peace.” I’d heard that word used my entire life in so many contexts—war and peace, a peaceful meadow, peace be with you—but I never really knew what it meant until that moment.

  In God’s name, I prayed. Still on my knees, with fingers interwoven, I sat back on my heels and exhaled.

  I felt relief. I didn’t have to think about it or analyze whether or not I was getting the peace that I had asked for; there was no confusion. I experienced a complete sense of peace from the inside out and realized that I’d just been given a gift. I cried, but not one tear was shed from despair. The tears came from gratitude. When I spoke two more words aloud, I noticed that the gravel in my voice was gone and it took almost no effort to project those words. The sound of the words was even musical; like two different notes, I said, “Thank you.”

  I had to do something because “Thank you” was not enough. I wanted to do something different to show God that I knew I’d just been given a massive dose of grace and mercy. I should not, I could not, I would not squander this gift, I thought.

  I got up off my bedroom floor and went down to the second floor of the house. I made a stop in the laundry room and put two sweatshirts on top of the long-underwear thermal top and long-sleeved shirt that I was already wearing. I had a pair of flannel pajama bottoms on and a pair of long-underwear thermal bottoms underneath those. Then I made my way down to the first floor, kicked off my slippers, and put on my tennis shoes over the two pair of stretched-out socks that I’d had on for days.

  I keep a tube of lip balm in the entryway of the house, and before I headed out the door, I reached for it. It sat on the mantel and as I grabbed it, I noticed the gun. I took the lid off of the Burt’s Bees Lip Balm and smeared it on my lips, all the while staring at the gun. It looked different to me in the daylight. Smaller, less significant, almost like a toy. I did not touch it. I stepped out onto the front porch of my East Nashville house and noticed that the sky was spitting a little snow.

  My plan had been to bundle up and go for a walk. A little snow wouldn’t hurt me. I glanced to my left and saw my old bicycle sitting there on the porch. It was an inexpensive bike that I’d bought years ago at Target for $79. A few miles from my house was Shelby Park, which had a beautiful paved greenway that ran along the Cumberland River, but I hadn’t ridden since the fall. I pushed on the tires of my bike and was surprised that they still had air in them. I figured I couldn’t ride the three miles to the park, but I could at least go around the block a few times. I was skinny, tired, and weak, but I got on. Some people build a statue as a monument to mark a significant occasion or event. Some people write a song and dedicate it to the one they want to honor. Braving the cold on my bike would be my gesture to let God know that I was thankful for my moment of peace.

  After the first few blocks, I felt a burn in my chest. The air was so cold that it stung every inch of tissue it touched, starting on the inside of my nose, to the back of my throat, through my windpipe, then finally exploding in the center of my lungs. It hurt, but it was a good hurt. The muscles in my legs were quivering, not because of the cold but due to lack of use—I’d been bed-bound for a month.

  I remember every revolution of my pedals from that ride. I thought of nothing but being on that bike, and that my only duty in life left me focused on turning those wheels.

  As it turned out, I didn’t ride around the block. I rode to that park, over the entire eight miles of greenway, and back home. I rode thirteen miles in flannel pajama bottoms in the snow. I was building a statue—a monument of thanks, paying honor to God for the gift He’d just given me. “Keep pedaling, keep pushing, keep fighting for a breath,” I said to myself. “Because you are thankful.”

  My beloved Scott CR 1 Road Bike. After I took that ride in the snow in my pajamas on my old bike, I continued to ride nearly every day. I rode alone for a long time—nearly a year. Then my rides slowly became something I shared with others. Now it’s all about happiness, fun, health, and friends. 2008. (Jan Volz)

  I got home, took a hot bath, and put on a fresh set of pajamas. I heated up a can of tomato soup in the microwave and forced it down. As I headed up to the third floor for the evening, I picked up the gun, carried it upstairs, and put it back where I’d found it a few days before.

  Keep Your Friends Close, and Your Enemies Closer

  I have been thinking a lot lately about people in my life. The reality is that I let many of them stay or treat me poorly because I was afraid of them.

  I’d confided in a couple of people that I was gay, but there were other people in my life whom I hadn’t told, though they were close to me and knew many specific details about me. Perhaps their knowledge of my life led them to make assumptions. I couldn’t control what they thought they’d figured out. I certainly could have made the choice not to have friends, but that’s not how I wanted to live.

  I wanted friendships in my life, and if some of those people knew that I shared a house with a woman and that we spent our holidays and vacations together, that was just how it had to be. Now, as I recall those years, I realize that I allowed myself to be held hostage by a couple of those relationships.

  I had an employee for a few years with whom I’d had a business relationship since the mid-1990s. She’d been close enough to me since that time to know certain personal details of my life, but I didn’t confide in her that I was gay until late 2005. My doing so was really a matter of necessity; otherwise, I would have left it as it had been for a decade.

  I’d wanted to end our working relationship for a couple of years because I needed someone with more experience in her position. Before she worked for me, she worked for a large corporation, and I knew that she used the company credit cards for personal expenses, often taking her friends and family out for meals. After she began working for me, there were times that I thought the expense reports she turned in were questionable. I suspected that I (my corporation) was buying meals here and there for her and maybe for her family too. I wanted to tell her that whether or not what she was doing was technically stealing or illegal, it was sneaky and unethical. I didn’t because I was afraid that she’d use my secret against me. I felt trapped.

  There was an incident one summer where she went too far. She was adept at keeping certain things from me when dealing with my business associates. There is a particular advantage to being selective about the truth, and she put together a scenario that I wouldn’t have endorsed and she knew it. I suspect she thought that I’d never delve into all of the details of it, but I did. This time, though, the one who was slighted in funds was not my company or her former company—it was a nonprofit organization with which I work on occasion.

  I carefully gathered the facts, then had a meeting with her and asked her to explain it to me. I laid out the information I had and gave her a chance to correct me if I was wrong. She claimed she’d just been kidding with the nonprofit when she told them they’d have to satisfy certain needs of hers in order for the tour to happen. They met her needs, however, and she was fully aware of it every step of the way. She hadn’t been kidding with them—she just didn’t think that I’d find out.

  Thousands of dollars were spent on satisfying her “needs,” which she was allegedly joking about. She would even go on to accept cash from the organization. If she’d been sneaky with my business, I would be the one to lose. I allowed that because I was afraid to have her hurt me, but I wasn’t going to allow a charity to be forced to spend more than it needed to.

  Days after our meeting, she e-mailed me and said she thought she had explained what had happened and asked me why I couldn’t just let it go. She claimed that the organization wouldn’t even notice the financial hit—a weak rationalization. I told her I’d made up my mind: she had
been unethical.

  A few days later, she e-mailed and said that she was resigning.

  I knew that by confronting her I’d made myself vulnerable, and I worried about whom she would gossip to.

  Another person who was close to me for a long time—and is no longer in my life—started out as an intern in an office that handled my career. I eventually hired Brandon to work exclusively for me. After a few years, he moved on to another position with a new company and I was happy for him. We remained good friends, and he became friends with the other people who were close to me. We spent holidays together, leaned on each other during hard times, and shared in each other’s lives.

  Although Brandon was no longer my employee, he was still involved in some of my work-related functions like Reading, Writing & Rhythm, a nonprofit organization that I founded. Brandon’s involvement was an integral part of its success.

  Brandon would make up fantastic stories—some might call them lies. All of our friends would laugh at his tales, and on occasion we’d ask one another if a particular story was true. They rarely were—he wasn’t careful about keeping his details straight, telling each of us slightly different versions. The few instances when we all took the time to compare details left us laughing. “That’s just Brandon,” we would say.

  His reaction to being challenged was to be nasty and mean. This often happened when he was intoxicated. His inhibitions would be down and his retaliatory impulses up. He had a sharp tongue, and it was never good to be on the receiving end of one of his rants, but he seldom attacked me.

  During my breakdown in early 2006, when I needed my friends the most, Brandon and I came to a juncture in our long relationship. I was on the phone with a mutual friend who asked me if I’d talked to Brandon in the past few days, and if so, did I know how he was feeling. The friend told me that Brandon had been having episodes of blacking out and that he had been told by his doctors that he had some kind of lesion or growth on his brain.

  I quickly sent Brandon an e-mail asking him how he was doing. Later that evening, I was shopping in a boutique, near downtown Nashville, owned by Valerie, another of our mutual friends. I asked her if she’d heard about Brandon. She hadn’t.

  I mentioned that I had reached out to Brandon and that I was going to call my friend Dr. Moses, a respected physician at Vanderbilt Hospital, to see if they could get Brandon in to see one of their specialists as soon as possible. Frankly, I had been so consumed by my sadness that I was happy to have the chance to do something helpful for someone I loved.

  The next day I received an e-mail from Brandon addressed to Valerie and to me. Valerie had contacted him and asked him what was going on with his health. He said that if he wanted his private information out in public, he would send out a press release. I explained that I had only wanted to offer to try to get him into Vanderbilt Hospital. He wrote that he had already undergone intensive testing, that the Mayo Clinic was studying the results, and that he’d know what treatment plans were available to him when the results came back. His e-mails were rude, snide, and completely out of line.

  I was in an emotional black hole and wasn’t spending any time with my friends anyway, so I retreated to my solitude. A few months after the e-mail exchange I heard that Brandon’s grandmother had passed away. I sent flowers to her funeral. He thanked me and told me how much that had meant to him. I told him that no matter what we might have gone through or what we might go through, I loved him. And that was true.

  A week or so later, I was told by a mutual friend that when Brandon was asked if he and I had “made up,” he said, “That bitch is trying to be my friend again.” I’m guessing that he wanted our friends to think that I’d come crawling back with my tail between my legs begging for his friendship. That is a game he plays, and I had always let him play it because I was scared of him.

  Shame and fear caused me to tolerate that abusive behavior. If I’d been able to be open about my sexuality and if I’d had nothing to hide, I would not have allowed him to treat me like that. I’d also been told over the years that he had told people that I was gay and claimed that I had confided in him about it, which was not true. I was a good friend to him even though he wasn’t always good to me.

  Now I value myself far too much to share my life with anyone other than ethical, honest, and kind people—who cherish me and let me cherish them.

  One of My Angels

  In late 2006, after nine months of my producer and friend Rodney Crowell’s hearing my songs in their barest form as I was writing them, he called to invite me to dinner. We went to a restaurant in East Nashville. We’d barely been seated when he said, “Chely, I’m emotionally invested in these songs of yours. You need to make your record, and you need to let me help you.” I was so broken at the time that I hadn’t even entertained the thought of beginning a record. I was without a record label then, and Rodney asked if I had the money to make an album. I said I did. He explained that we would put every dime that I wanted to spend into the record and that he wanted nothing for it.

  My shepherd—Rodney Crowell—and me. 2007. (Tiffany Scott)

  I stared at my plate and then asked him why he, one of the most respected singer/songwriter/producers of modern music, would be willing to do that for me. He smiled, with an appropriate amount of sympathy, and said that it was rare to stumble upon an artist “really going through a creative change and not afraid to give in to it.”

  Before Rodney and I parted ways that night, I told him that I wasn’t ready to begin recording—the songs were still coming to me. He assured me that we wouldn’t start recording my album until the time was right.

  I thanked him for dinner—for everything—and said good night to my newfound shepherd.

  The album Rodney and I started the following summer happened the way that I’d always imagined records were made—with true inspiration and what would come to be an honest heart.

  A Million to One

  When I was in second grade, my elementary school started a project that would take almost an entire school year to complete. There had been discussion among some of the students about the number 1,000,000. None of us were really able to conceptualize how big that number was, and we struggled to imagine what a million of anything looked like. Our teachers decided that we should actually see 1,000,000 of something to understand the meaning. We, the students, were going to collect one million pull tabs—the disposable pieces of metal that used to be on the top of soda cans. The new stay-on-the-can pull tabs were already in use, but our small community was littered with the throwaway kind, a danger to the naked feet of children in rural Kansas. By collecting them, we’d be doing a good thing for the safety of the barefoot population of Wellsville (which was considerable), and we’d also get a math lesson.

  Each day we delivered our bounty and counted the contributions. We competed to see whose class could gather the most, and a tally was kept every day. Once we filled our Folgers coffee cans, Ziploc sandwich bags, brown paper sacks, lunch boxes, and often our pockets with those little razor-sharp treasures, we’d make our way to the grade school gymnasium to deposit them in the designated corner. Before long, our pile reached gargantuan proportions. We all marveled at the size of it. One million was big.

  My entire life since then, when I’ve considered a million of anything, whether it be dollars, miles, or fans, I’ve always thought of that pile of aluminum pull tabs.

  I’ve never been certain how many people are actual fans of mine, but I have it set in my head that I have one million fans. Not two million, not seventy-five thousand, but one million. I allow myself this estimation based on a couple of things that I know: I have sold a million records and I have played live concerts for at least a million people.

  There was a time in my career, until recently, that I was fixated on maintaining the approval of all of these one million people. For instance, I don’t eat food from McDonald’s. A commercial music artist is taught not to make divisive public statements about any one group
or establishment, especially a corporate entity that might be a potential sponsor. McDonald’s could likely be the favorite restaurant, or perhaps the employer, of some of my fans.

  My policy was that if something I might do or say were to put off just one of my one million fans, I wouldn’t take that risk. I believed that I had it in my power to maintain the approval of all one million people, and anything short of pleasing every single one of them was unacceptable to me. I was afraid to let anyone down.

  I knew that if my fans found out that I was gay, I’d certainly disappoint a good number of them.

  As I thought about how I’d been trying to win the approval of one million fans for more than a decade, a new truth slowly and powerfully became obvious to me. I had deprived myself of a basic human need—love. That deprivation caused emotional, physical, and spiritual damage. Had I allowed it to go on, it would have killed me for sure.

  I finally realized that the one million mark that I had set was not a need at all but a want. During those very pivotal months of solitude and sadness, my system of measurement was slowly, systematically, reset. Material things, which I had worked so hard to acquire, were of little or no importance to me anymore. I’d never been hung up on money or things, but I’d always understood that I couldn’t live on dreams alone. I’d been frugal in my spending and aggressive in my saving. I didn’t have my eye set on money so that I could buy cars, jewelry, and lavish things—that’s never been my style. My objective was to save and invest every dime I made.

  I started buying real estate and stocks in my early twenties. I watched my contemporaries in country music blowing through their newfound wealth, but I knew better. I anticipated that my moneymaking opportunities could, at any time, come to a screeching halt if it were ever revealed that I was gay. So I buckled down even more than a typical former low-income, blue-collar farm girl from Kansas might have.