The Scorcha

Remembering Ryan Stollar

The story we tell is so important. The frame we choose.

Grievance gives you a villain rather than homework. Nobody likes homework.

Most homeschool kids never even had to do it. We just faked our way through, pretending we had, while looking for the answers in some book with gold leafed edging.

I’ve long since stopped interpreting revelation hidden in bible verses, looking for answers in the back of the book, or hanging with people who do. I may adopt a mocking tone towards the most sanctimonious among us now, but that’s a protection mechanism. Mostly I try to just live a more inclusive and respectful life than they taught me to. Whether or not I succeed probably depends on the day. Perhaps the hour even. Baby steps.

I get a text from a friend letting me know that a photographer who took pictures of my family at Quincy Pride has submitted a highlight reel to some local papers and magazines that contained a photo of my baby. I say that’s fine, and I’d given verbal permission at the time she took them.

They tell me me she’s kind of a big deal in LBGTQ+ circles. Having done nightlife and gay wedding and fundraiser and legal celebration work that’s been posted in major magazines and newspapers since the 90’s. Shared across the country and world when gay marriage was legalized. I say that in that case I’m even more proud to have my baby included among her subjects, her body of work. A picture of a child growing up with what I hope is lifelong tolerance and respect for diversity. Something not everyone has. Something I certainly didn’t have.

I firmly believe that when you have a hard life, or any sort of trouble being understood or fitting in, experiencing and documenting joy and peace and care becomes more important than ever. It can get you through a heat wave, tide you over in the rough spots.

Ahhh, ahhh, my bed is sinking in the lava! my five year old screams from the playroom. I will help you, I’m a superhero! my three year old shouts back, running to her as he falls, promptly bumping his head. It’s ok, my daughter tells me, dragging him across the room. I’ve rescued him from the lava and am getting him an ice pack for his head.

I gather the kids and bring them to the pool.

It’s a scorcha! A gardening friend later remarks about the weather, after we return, skin smelling like sweat, chlorine, and sunscreen. I am burning up.

I look at the mass of Virginia pepperweed, with beautiful purple-tipped seedheads. A native plant that randomly shows up and looks gorgeous, if you let it. The lavender is in full bloom, covered in bumblebees. The black eyed Susans just starting to open.

Both of our eastern tiger swallowtail caterpillars have been eaten, leaving nothing behind but their half-destroyed silk pads, a few chewed magnolia leaves, and perhaps some sustained baby birds somewhere.

I go inside and turn on the AC, looking for a new shirt for the sweaty baby. While I search she climbs up on the back of the couch half naked to stand precariously in front of the window unit, giggling.

You’re going to freeze your tiny nips I say to her, laughing as I take her down and wrestle her into a clean onesie while she shrieks for more air conditioning, as do we all.

I’m not the kind of person who is perpetually worried strangers will look at my child wrongly, or even make AI of my child (although that would certainly piss me off), but I do think about my children’s actual physical wellbeing a lot. I know we live in a dangerous world, largely of our own making. I also find the assertion, made by elders within my own extended family, that children are somehow less safe around the gay community as deeply offensive as it is inaccurate. Not because I know that they are safe there (they of course still require supervision and protection), but because it has been my experience (and the data back me up) that it is the most traditionally patriarchal in-person settings, whether those are educational or religious or cultural, where we must most closely guard our children from predation and harm. Where the belief that children should be respected in their personhood is lowest.

I look online to see if any baby photos have shown up, but they’re not out yet. I fall down a different rabbit hole, one of local anti-gay intolerance, and text a friend saying the Lea D crowd seems to have gotten out their Murica umbrellas and crosses to ward off the rainbows 🌈

I include a screenshot of the AI picture and caption it, saying either that’s a three-armed man in the pic, or someone else in their poly relationship is hiding behind him with an arm around the wife 🤣

I briefly think of Ryan Stollar, a former friend and colleague who would find this comment hilarious. He once described himself as king of screenshots and taking shots. He was very online and went viral for it several times. I learned a bit from him.

He and I were raised under a different (or perhaps not so different) umbrella diagram. The now-infamous Bill Gothard one. (Incidentally, Bill Gothard just had a heart attack and is in a coma now. Probably the best place for a man like him to be. Pity it wasn’t sooner for such an inveterate creep.)

Why so many umbrellas? someone later asked. Because they’re clearly leaky as hell, Ryan joked.

On Tuesday at midnight I get a text from someone I haven’t talked to in a couple years letting me know Ryan has died.

Good riddance is my first thought, and it immediately feels uncharitable to have such a reaction. Because there’s a lot more to it than that.

I watch cause and effect get transposed all the time, things that are an ecology problem get treated like a pathogen problem. Partial results treated like final verdicts. Impatience and intemperance held up like a virtue. Punitive behavior described as love. Exploitation called opportunity.

But however easy it is to judge all that, it’s easy to hold a grudge as well.

The reason Ryan and I became former friends is that he tried to kick me when I was down (or more like outright destroy my then-fragile post-divorce mental health), after using my work and writing to burnish his own projects and credentials, then later attempting to manipulate me into clearing his name when he was thrown out of those circles (for a bit different reasons) in much the same manner. We didn’t speak again after that and I don’t think either of us minded. We had no further use for one another.

For years he hammered away on child liberation theology and ways to protect children from abuse, built a career out of it, fueled by what he wished he’d had as a child. But he never processed or understood that one of the most important ways to do it is by treating the women in your life well and holding patriarchy accountable. Systemically dismantling it where you can.

During the time we were friends, he was never more alive than when wreaking what he saw as vengeance while performing an expose’. At first he just seemed really good at it, and I believed it was for the right reasons. But later a different side emerged and I realized it was an unchecked compulsion. A retributive violence that could be directed at anybody who triggered him. Something that eventually got directed at me.

His legacy includes relentless online bullying of the late theologian Rachel Held Evans, and joining the right wing pile-on against Girls actress and director Lena Dunham.

Whatever his mental health issues and diagnoses, he wasn’t just a purist but a hypocrite. The kind of man who would weaponize therapy speak. One who would expect perfection from you while quietly doing who knows what. Find a reason why it was noble to sign a group letter firing you from your original ideas and then take a chunk of your work for his own.

After our falling out, I had his writing hidden from my feed when I was on social media, and later when he showed up on Substack. I also systematically unfollowed anyone who shared it.

But the truth is that the person I really hold a grudge against isn’t him, but myself. For not seeing what was there in front of me until I’d put in too much time and energy, gotten attached. For who I trusted and worked with without properly verifying. For not protecting myself better. It was not a good circle for me. I learned the hard way that we were not creating a community simply by making the abuse we had faced public, and also that doing this retraumatizing work was leading to news headlines but not the deeper change of seeing any of it being legally corrected.

I did not yet realize that the vein of these power dynamics run so deeply through society and survivor circles that it distorts everything, and looking at it too long is like staring into the sun.

It was hard to see that despite the shock value of exposing the abuse to those outside the circles we were raised in, nobody powerful enough to make a difference actually cared enough to change our way of life. That this country was instead on the cusp of voting in trump, who revels in imposing it.

That, like the Childish Gambino song says, this is America.

Once I did realize, I did what I could. I detached from that environment and salvaged what I could of my time, built a totally different life. One where that experience was just a chapter.

The only umbrella I carried was my own.

I wish I could say it’s been easy. It has not. There’s been struggles. Marriage. Health. Finding community. Figuring out who I want to be and what I want to do, now in my 4th decade of life. But it’s been worth it.

I’ve done a lot of reclaiming. Reclaiming pollinator gardens from scraggly patches of grass. Reclaiming my autonomy from parenthood and a wife role. Reclaiming what I can of my health and my body. Reclaiming my existence from what I was taught I was, as a parentified female child in a fundamentalist subculture.

But more of that old world than I’d like still lays claim to me. And even when it doesn’t, it remains there, hot and bubbling underneath everything else.

After the news of Ryan’s passing, I looked him up, landing on his website, since he was still a blogger. I saw that he posted and sent everyone who follows him a suicide note on his way out, leaving a couple homeschool abuse survivor pages on Reddit full of people understandably devastated.

There’s already a few half-baked obituaries out on sites that cover religious news. I run across some blog with a cross for an avatar, noting that he’d cursed God in the post he made before he committed suicide, two things leading to what is assumed to be a future of eternal damnation. A real scorcher. They end a heady description of his perpetual torture by calling for prayers for his family.

How about calling for prayers for yourself, you heartless bastards? I think.

They of course do not mention the fact that he cursed at God for inexplicably leaving him alone with a child molester as a boy and ruining his life.

What about the spiritual fate of the man who took advantage of his family’s trust and abused him? That crime can of course be forgiven in this lifetime, if the pedophile asks for it. Seeks ritual atonement. He may even be welcomed into a church (or an elected office) somewhere. Under an umbrella. Perhaps even one with kids in it. Seen as straight and narrow in the USA no matter where he reaches his many hands. But not Ryan. He’s gone to hell.

I start crying while I make my kids’ lunch. This is the second person in my friend circle whose past sexual assault directly contributed to their suicide in adulthood, years after them getting masters degrees and collecting accolades and learning that those and all the other trappings of adulthood and success can’t make it go away.

It doesn’t escape me that his suicide note blog post is accompanied by a half-erased picture of his estranged wife. He mentions in the post that he decided not to honor her request to divorce quietly and out of the public eye.

I feel relieved she had left already and he didn’t decide to take her with him on his way out, erase both of them. I hope she’s ok. Or whatever semblance of ok she can find, given what I imagine this awful ending to years of difficult marriage to him must have been like.

Yet clearly I still have some love for Ryan, underneath my resentment, grief, and sheer horror at the circumstances, plus the harm I fear may emanate from the final shocking communication he made to an already vulnerable population.

I am sad he never got the opportunity for a messy midlife reclamation. I wish he had more opportunities to reinvent or renegotiate or re-up ahead of him. To find a hobby that has nothing to do with harmful events. To be more inclusive. To foster tolerance and healing for himself and the next generation. These are available for everyone who needs them.

Depression lies to you when it tells you past abuse precludes future happiness, or that you are a burden, cannot atone for mistakes and bad decisions, or have no one who would miss you.

I find myself wishing that I could go back in time to when Ryan was first planning on starting the Homeschoolers Anonymous project (of which I was a founding member), to where instead of the conversation we had in which I’d encouraged and supported him in it, I would say “no, let’s just go build ourselves good lives rather than a repository of child abuse stories.”

Because I figured out at some point later that I couldn’t handle all the vicarious trauma and had to get away. Like a baby in front of an air conditioner, I had to cool off. But he stuck with it tenaciously until it partially destroyed him, and he became destructive too.

Yet if I truly had the power to go back in time within his life, I’d of course go back to the day when he was a young homeschooled boy, his parents had just hired a tutor to help him with his education, and demand that he never be left alone with that man.

But considering that time travel is not an option, and all of the layers of damage have been done, the best way I can think of to honor his memory is by sharing a piece of information that he always really and truly desperately wanted to get out there. And that is that it is much much easier to not break a child than it is to repair a broken adult.

May his memory, complex as it is, be a blessing. May his soul rest in peace, whatever peace and souls look like or where they go to rest. May the good parts of his work find a home in the work and hearts of others who take it forward. And may we each look to the children in our lives who need our protection and care, honoring our role as facilitators of safety and joy within this world, as we rise to the occasion.