In 2009, a new chapter of my life began. Freshly graduated from junior high school, I couldn’t wait to start senior high.

In Ghana, junior-high-school graduates are assigned schools based on their Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) results. While I didn’t get admission to my first choice despite passing with distinction, I still got into one of Ghana’s finest all-girls institutions.

As I prepared for boarding school in the next couple of months, everyone I knew gave me tons of encouragement and advice.

“Don’t go and make any friends,” was the theme. Friends will lead me astray, they said. Some of these kids are evil. When they see how bright your destiny is, they will try and destroy it. So go and focus only on your studies and come back home safely. Don’t eat anyone’s food. Someone will try and poison you. Or worse, give you witchcraft.

Yes, we Africans are dramatic like that.

I don’t deny that most were pretty solid advice. However, many were so ridiculously superstitious that I wouldn’t have taken them seriously had I heard them today.

But I was fourteen years old and ate it all up.

One such advice was so powerful that it shaped my mindset and identity throughout my teenage years and early twenties.

It was a conversation I had with a distant relative on my father’s side of the family. I’m still not sure how we’re related, so let’s call her my aunt.

“Torshie,” she said to me with utmost sincerity, “don’t allow any student to get too physically close to you, or else someone will infect you with the demonic spirit of lesbianism.”

She said single-sex schools were excellent in academics but notorious for homosexuality. There were rumors of a so-called spiritual kiss on the cheek that would instantly get someone possessed with homosexuality.

“Be very careful around people who seem touchy-feely. That’s how they pass on these demonic spirits.”

To say I was paralyzed by fear would be a gross understatement. Throughout our conversation, all I thought about was one thing:

Had I been possessed by this demonic spirit of lesbianism?

As a naive fourteen-year-old, I had never thought of myself as a lesbian. Hell, I only found out that word existed at the age of thirteen. To me, people liked who they liked, and it didn’t matter if they were of the same sex or not. So although I was a deeply religious kid, I never saw anything wrong with me for liking girls in ways I should like boys.

Hearing my aunt speak, though, something in my mind shifted. For the first time, I felt a profound sense of shame while recalling the few sexual encounters I’d had with girls.

The thought of sinning against God this whole time scared the shit out of me. It didn’t help that my aunt painted graphic word picture of a burning abyss of brimstone where all these demon-tainted girls ended up one day. Since she didn’t want me to go to Hell, she hoped I would maintain my innocence and stay away from such girls.

I said a silent prayer to God to forgive me since I hadn’t known homosexuality was a sin. I vowed never to entertain such bullshit. I would go to school, keep my head low, study hard, and not get physically and emotionally close to any girl. I would dare not incur God’s wrath.

If I suppressed my feelings and never acted on them, everything would be fine, I thought.

And that was exactly what I did while in boarding school.

As a Christian missionary institution, lesbianism was the gravest offense a student could commit in my school. Mere accusations could lead to stigmatization, and ultimately expulsion if proven true. I guess we were lucky — in boys’ schools, it could quickly escalate into a police case (homosexuality is a crime in Ghana).

While all these are harrowing experiences, the worst part about the whole thing — in my opinion — is the tainted lens through which people perceive you.

In their eyes, you’re practically the devil incarnate. Daughter of Lucifer. Sure, everyone sins, but you are the ultimate evil. They deride you, often behind your back, yet you sense the cloud of hostility looming over you, like a hawk encircling a chick, ready to strike from above.

Just in my first year, I heard so many rumors about different students, some stories too ridiculous to believe. I wondered if these girls were really lesbians. Or did the gossipmongers simply have too much free time on their hands?

A common feature among girls accused of being gay was their outrageously striking bone structure — the consensus by the general student body was that leaders of the ‘lesbian gang’ only recruited stunners.

And my senior, Ruby (not her real name), was the epitome of grace and beauty. She was the kind of person who would enter a room and everyone would stop whatever they were doing just to stare at her. You didn’t have to be a lesbian to notice her; she was damn fine.

Imagine how rife the rumors of her sexuality were.

“She’s the entertainment prefect’s lesbian partner,” someone told me. Ruby was a member of the Entertainment Team and often seen with the entertainment prefect — an overly confident tomboy with equally striking features. Together they looked like the perfect couple.

According to other rumors, Ruby and her best friend were sleeping together because they were always so close.

I didn’t know if the rumors were true or not, and quite frankly most of them sounded fabricated, but Ruby didn’t seem to care at all. She never left the Entertainment Team, nor did she stop talking to all those people she’d been accused of sleeping with.

I wish I had that kind of courage in my teens.

My Christian high school was big on prayer.

Every evening after supper, we were all mandated to pray for about twenty minutes or so, before heading for prep (personal night studies).

Before the construction finished on our school auditorium, we did everything in the Pavilion — from church service to revivals, entertainment to quizzes. So of course, we convened here for our night prayers too.

The Pavilion was no auditorium, but it was spacious enough to hold close to a thousand girls. On any ordinary day, however, the Pavilion was literally a classroom block for two first-year classes.

One of these classrooms was mine.

With how crowded the Pavilion got during prayers, I often went outside, through the backdoor, where a bench sat under the lonely night. Sometimes a few other students would already be there. Sometimes I would be all by myself. It didn’t matter; nothing unusual happened during prayers.

But one particular night, I experienced the most emotional incident out of my four years in high school. Having the crap beaten out of me by a senior while in my second year didn’t even come close to this.

On that night, as I went outside to pray, a student was already sitting on the bench, engrossed in silent reverence. Through the dimness of the night, I recognized her silhouette. Ruby. I paused, contemplating whether to get back inside or join her. The latter won.

I thought she was simply sitting there with her eyes shut, but as I plopped myself next to her, I heard the words pouring from her lips ever so lightly. They were barely audible if you didn’t pay attention.

But I was paying attention.

Honestly, I tried to focus on my commune with God. I really did. However, Ruby’s prayer held me captive, and I dared not fight back. A myriad of emotions suffocated me, shame and fear typically. The prayer was coming out of Ruby’s lips, yet they felt like they were coming out of my own heart.

“I’m trying so hard to push it away,” she whispered, her voice heavy with emotion. “I don’t want to keep feeling this way about other girls. Everyone says it’s wrong. And you think it’s wrong too. I’m doing my best to stop being a lesbian. But I can’t. So please deliver me from this sin, dear God. Deliver me.”

She expressed the humiliation she felt when people said all those nasty things about her. Many of them weren’t even true, and yet she couldn’t help but feel guilty. She just wanted it all to stop. If God delivered her, it would all end.

For a brief moment, I wondered if she knew I could hear her. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. But none of that mattered, because, in that moment, I felt seen. Heard. I was her, and she was me.

Her words exhumed within me the very thing I had tried to bury for so long. My deepest struggles.

Like Ruby, I didn’t want to be a lesbian. I wanted it all to stop.

From the depths of my heart, I pleaded with God to deliver me too. This feeling I had for girls — one particular girl to be precise — was unnatural.

Deliver me, oh God. Deliver me.

Surely, I could pray the gay away, right?

Apparently not. I did whatever I could to suppress this urge; I built up an emotional wall around any girl that got close to me. Yet I still had crushes, found them attractive, and felt giddy around the girl I liked.

What was wrong with me? And more importantly, why was God not answering my prayers? Did he not want to save me? Or had he already condemned me to the fiery pits of Hell, and all I had to do was die and get there?

I wasn’t even sexually active in high school, yet the feeling of being attracted to the same sex tormented me.

By the time I was a freshman in university, I was so disgusted and frustrated with myself that I knew I had to talk to someone or things might get worse.

So I called my former teacher — one of the adults I trusted and respected most while growing up. He was a great listener and counselor, so I figured if anyone could help me navigate this crisis without judging me, it would be him. While alone in my dorm (I had three roommates), I called and told him about my affliction.

We had a sincere conversation, spanning over two hours long. While I don’t remember a lot of what we talked about, I still remember his advice to treat homosexuality like any other sin.

“Sometimes you may feel like doing the wrong thing,” he said. “What matters is that you don’t act on it. As long as you never act on your feelings, you’ll be fine. Just keep praying about it.”

Then he prayed for me, beseeching the Lord to heal my broken spirit and make me normal again.

Amen, I said.

My journey to self-healing was long and hard.

It started from hating myself for being gay to hating myself for how much I hated myself over being gay. Fucking insane, I know. But it was brutal.

Slowly, though, I began to accept myself, coming to terms with the fact that homosexuality was neither sinful nor demonic — just a part of the natural order of life.

Yet, I wished I had internalized this truth from the very beginning. I wished I had said something to Ruby, assuring her that there was nothing wrong with who she was. She didn’t need any deliverance from being a lesbian. It was simply who she was, like having rich dark skin or starry brown eyes.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know any better.

It’s been fifteen years and I still think about Ruby every now and then. What has become of her?

Is she still denying a part of herself to appease a god who created that very part of her?

Or like me, had she found inner peace? I hope it’s the latter.

Gay people the world over have been made to feel like our very existence is a blight on God’s creation. It’s already bad enough that a child feels the need to plead for God’s deliverance so they don’t go to hell. When you think things couldn’t be worse, you hear about children forced to go to conversion therapy or cultish prayer sessions by the same adults they trust to keep them safe.

That’s like forcing someone to pray away their blackness so they can be white. It would be hilarious if this stupidity was not so psychologically destructive to the victim.

Fifteen years ago, I felt small and helpless as Ruby prayed to God to exorcise the demonic spirit of lesbianism from her. I prayed along, hoping God would have mercy on me too.

If I could go back in time, I would tell that small helpless girl to embrace who she was.

You are valid and human, I would tell her.

Your sexuality is but one tiny part of who you are. People hate you because you’re different. After all, your mere existence goes against everything they know, their beliefs and values.

They persecute you and hold you to their standards. Yet, they would hate for you to return the favor.

They think they’re better than you because of their God. But in their arrogance and ignorance, they fail to see that God in his eternal creativity made you gay just as he made them straight.

They hate you for simply existing. And because they haven’t fully embraced all parts of themselves, and are forever in conflict about their true identity, your freedom of self-expression threatens them.

So you know what, my dear? Fuck those people.

You don’t owe a single person an explanation.

You don’t need anyone’s acceptance but yours. Own who you are; how everyone else feels is irrelevant.

You’re not an aberration, but a part of the infinite diversity of life.

Do not dare pray the gay away. It’s an insult to the creative power of the cosmos.

Torshie Torto is a writer, teacher, and storyteller. Sign up to her newsletter to get her stories straight into your inbox. If you love her work and want to support her, buy her a coffee or join her fiction subscription.