Day Zero.

I would venture to say you have no idea how your actions and words have infiltrated and impacted my life .  How your hatred continues to deliver slight yet direct blows with an attempt to utterly destroy me.  How your infectious plague has trickled down to sabotage every aspect of who I am, who I am yet to be and those lives which are directly and indirectly trussed to mine.  

You- homophobia are a disease. You infiltrate the minds of individuals and symptomatically cloud their view so their eyes can’t see humans as they are despite all other attributes but solely on the grounds of who they love. You take the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year. Congratulations - You are an epidemic. You destroy families. You create homelessness and increase desperation leading to suicide after suicide after suicide and oh homicide. The greatest symptom of your debilitating affect is hate which grows unrestrained to convince one to murder another of our own kind merely for the minute factor that they love differently than you.  

Like the most aggressive form of cancer you are the cells that multiply out of control in the minds of so many.  Although I don’t know that there will ever be a cure for you, I know that my speaking out brings light into your terrifying darkness and a sword that will pierce hearts and open minds. The reality is my speaking is all but a mere effort to save my own life because It’s time, I’ve had enough.

I’ve been lead to believe you’ve stolen my dignity and self respect. My integrity and professionalism, tenacity and ability to share with the world something good are tainted and greatly discolored by your rampant blows.  It has all been shattered by your darkness. You have crippled me and pushed me in to hiding.  I’ve become a person who’s disability forces them to not leave the safety of my 4 bedroom walls. My anxiety and depression and post traumatic stress disorder, created by the assault you’ve had on my life holds me hostage in my car in moments when I’m supposed to be serving my patients and families. It holds me in the aisle at the grocery store because I know there’s someone infected with you on the other side who previously audibly accosted me in public.  

My joy has been diminished, my reflection in the mirror resembles a weak and weary soul who is desperate for freedom of oppression.  Perhaps it’s because you have taken from me literally everything and anything that I possess of any worth.  Through it all I am forced to realize what I have left.  Most of which is forever unrecoverable.  The patient experiences, the longevity necessary to build my career, the relentless attempts to leap forward and build again a life with hopes of building a meaningful legacy.

It’s 2020, times have changed and our society is vastly attempting to eradicate you.  Yes I am aware, “we have come so far!,” and I have heard countless comments about, “marriage is legal, you have your rights, what more do you need?,” etc. I’m not convinced, I continue to survive your attacks and others need to abolish the blinders from their eyes and then encourage others to do the same so as to understand and trust that just as sexism, ageism, and racism to name a few are still globally viral, you homophobia and your horrific affects thereof continue to kill and destroy many.  How you might ask?  

Lets start with the time that you violently through the judge and our legal system took my children away from me for three months because you were convinced that my being gay must be a mental illness or life crisis.  The moment when I learned they were told I abandoned them and didn’t want them anymore because my sin was more important and my desire was to sleep with a woman.  When you diminished Who I am as a person, a mother down to only my sexual orientation.

That time that you walked into the trauma bay and recognized me from church and your loved one was barren on the table and I actively performing CPR on them.  I was literally the heart beating for him, I alone was circulating life through his lifeless body.  You refused to see me at all, only my sexual orientation.  Although I, one of the most trained trauma nurses in that room you began to scream in front of my peers for me to be removed from him and told me to step away and surrender my position and life saving efforts to a nurse who graduated just weeks prior with no experience.  

How about the time you took me in to your office and with cowardliness hid behind vague words and use of irrelevant rationales to inform me that my being a lesbian did not fit the culture of your practice, your values and beliefs system and therefore I was no longer welcomed to work next to you.  Interesting though the day prior, before you heard the news that I was married to a woman, you told me that I was one of the best nurses you’d hired with the most beautiful bedside manner you’d witnessed in years.

Or the latest attempted terminal blow when you suddenly ripped me from the bedside of the the most frail of patients, the dying.  Tragically eradicating and severing ties between myself as a hospice nurse from several patients and their grieving weary loved ones without an opportunity for closure.  You severed a bond and forced me to abandon my patients.  THEY WERE DYING and suddenly all the times I’ve cried with them, prayed with them, sang to and with them, bathed them and dressed them, listened to their greatest joys, deepest desires and fears have become tainted by your dark hostility.  
Your a coward and quietly ashamed of your bias and You’ve covered yourself with deception claiming my nursing skills or abilities or boundaries were lacking or flawed thus directly deepening your diseased affects on my self view.  It became apparent that at any moment anything can be taken from me NOT because of my sexual orientation but due to your hate.  

Time and time again I’ve experienced this but now it has spread through me and into the lives of others.  You’ve raped me and have USED ME to spread your vile disease resulting in heightened doubt and fear.  I have  questioned to my very core who I am and who I once was down to my professional being. I’ve become desperately symptomatic of fear and one surviving your hold and retreat deeper into my self because I CANNOT allow myself to continue the vulnerability. I refrain to connecting with anyone because I must prevent bringing additional pain and suffering, undue harm especially to my patients who have invited me in to journey with them through one of the most intimate times of their lives, dying.  I’ve come to believe your lies that I had no business being there or being a part of this ministry, this profession any more.  

I will admit you have crippled me in so many ways. I am coming to understand why I suffer immensely at times with depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Why I’m living with post Traumatic stress disorder.  I’ve bought in.  I now see what others see when they look at me.  I believed your projection of who I am is in fact who I am. I have allowed you’re sick and disgusting view of me to shape me into this disabled body because I’m unable to get outside of my mind and the fear of facing another human who embodies you restrains me inside my own living hell. I am shattered and broken but make no mistake, I am still alive. 

Let me explain something to you. At the end of the day you can’t change my DNA. I’m not sure you heard or understood what I said, your efforts have failed because YOU CANNOT change my DNA.  You see my DNA and who I am is not in anyway just that I am a woman, an Italian, a lesbian. Its not merely that I have green eyes and sun-kissed skin tones. My very DNA structured my dignity. It carries my tenacity, my vulnerability, my personality which in case you missed the memo can outshine even the darkest of nights. My life experiences have groomed me into a survivor, a fierce survivor.  I will take every single integral microscopic cell that embodies who I am and with all that I am that is woven into my very DNA And I will defeat you.  I will grow stronger and brighter and I will be in this world what I am called to be because no matter how much you hate me and no matter how much you think you can destroy my life you can’t have it because it doesn’t belong to you!

You see I’m educated. I know how this works and I’ve seen life and death. I have experienced life and death. I am one of the best nurses you will ever meet and when given the chance I will show you a love and compassion that you quite possibly have never experienced before.  What’s more is that I’ve held the hand of more than one individual who’s attempted to take or did take their life because the darkness was too heavy and the light although you could not completely diminish it was no longer enough.   I refuse to fall victim to this.  

Homophobia - like cancer when all other treatments have been exhausted and they are no longer responding appropriately we take the frail human body down to the cellular level to the brink of death.  You’ve already done this for me. At that point stem cells are planted and those particles of DNA that are woven in us from the moment of conception take hold of them and start to grow something new.  Cells that were already created and a part of my DNA and you have no control or power over. Today is my stem cell transplant, it’s Day ZERO, and I will make every single effort to allow every particle of me to become who I am first and foremost above and around you regardless of your desire to put me in the grave.

So I want it back. I am taking my life back. Not the life that I am surviving right now but the one I was created to thrive in. The one where I am out in the community and serving and loving and showing Christ - like compassion and forgiveness and so much more. Yes you heard me right I am a lesbian who loves Jesus and I know that you homophobia would like the world to believe that this is a counter diction but it’s not. And you no longer have a place in my life and how I move forward living it. I will walk with my head high and no longer feel like I am a disgusting person or somehow a disgrace on this earth because of who I chose to marry and love.

Homophobia like one of the most infectious diseases known on earth is rampant and it’s time that we start exterminating it for the sake of all especially those who we love. I’m going to promise you this no one was born with a genetic condition of hatred. Its time we start vaccinating against it and raising up our children to love and embrace our fellow human beings despite their differences, despite their sexual orientation.  

Nevertheless, it’s in my DNA to tell you that I’m going to chose to love you, to forgive you and to have a greater hope for change in your hearts, your minds and your actions. If for nothing more but because my soul deserves peace.

Today is my Day Zero.

Relentlessly Yours,

Mrs. Tennille Marie Dobbs