Introduction

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for checking out my blog. I am really excited for my website to be up and running now. This is my first blog post and I want to give you a brief introduction of myself.

My name is Steven, and I was born in the small town of Barrhead, Alberta, Canada but raised in the nearby hamlet of Rochfort Bridge. I was born to a Middle Class family. My mom was a nurse and my dad worked at a local saw mill. I was the oldest of 7 children.

My upbringing was very conservative. Until I was about 12 I attended the Mayerthorpe Christian Academy, a Christian school located in the basement of our Baptist Church. It was a strict school that used a Texas based curriculum called Accelerated Christian Education or ACE. They taught us, among other things, that women were to be subservient to men, that non-believers were by default evil and to be avoided, and the King James Version of the Bible was the only one that were were allowed to read. Shakespeare was banned, but we got a full dose of Old English when it came to our Bible reading.

When the school shut down we were homeschooled. My parents refused to send us to the public school, and even during our home education we continued to use the ACE program. Despite it being theologically unsound, it was very subpar and I graduated without a proper High School diploma and I found myself unprepared for the real world.

I moved to Edmonton when I was 20 and within a few years I had come out as gay, which was one of the hardest things that I have ever done in my life. My family is not very supportive and it has caused me to lose childhood friends. Since then I have hated conservatism and do my best to promote liberal and progressive causes.

I still feel anxiety over my upbringing, and have recently realized that I am showing symptoms of something called Religious Trauma Syndrome, or RTS. Fortunately I love to write, which has turned out to be a good form of therapy. I have two published books, and a handful of short films, available on Youtube.

Thank you very much for checking out my website and blog. Please check out my work and connect with me on social media 🙂