"i usually headcanon he has very deep religious trauma, anxiety (and slight sh) issues" pls say more on this 🙏🙏 spill ur hcs
ALRIGHT LETZ GO!! i'm so sorry it took me so long to reply to this 💔 here'a religious trauma internalized homophobia sad barty!!
tw: mentions of self-harm but no explicit details!
he grew up very strictly catholic. his family was always very conservative, he went to church every sunday and his parents were very strict about with whom he hangs out. for the longest times he only had "friends" from church.
he was very lonely in all of this because his parents never paid him any attention. when they did it was usually just to let him know how unwanted and troublesome he was to them. most of the time he just felt invisible.
when he was a child, he pretended to believe in god really earnestly because he hoped that one day he'd be saved and given a better life but his prayers always stayed unanswered and when he was a teenager he was finally able to be honest enough with himself about how he never believed god existed in the first place.
among them he always felt like an outsider because everyone else seemed so connected to their faith and he just felt like a ghost in between all of them.
even though he doesn't believe and never wants to go back to church, he has a weird sentiment around it because his whole childhood and upbringing revolved around it. it's kind of hard to let go of it entirely when you have no memories of childhood and early teenage years that don't revolve around it; when you feel like you used to be nothing without it all.
speaking of the weird sentiment; even after entirely stopping to go to church and being true to his beliefs as an atheist, he still always has a rosary in his pocket, wherever he goes
he also wore a cross necklace for very long, though it wasn't really a source of comfort for him, but rather a reminder of all the things and expectations he could never fulfill.
for a long time he prayed to mother mary a lot and imagined she'd watch over him and take care of him when he felt lonely
as a kid and young teenager he wasn't really rebellious because he was mostly just scared of his father, which led to him developing anxiety problems because he was never fully at peace at home and spent most of his time around his family
he never wanted to live a life to fulfill his parents expectations but when he started to realise he was gay it was like his whole world crumbled. when you've been indoctrinated to believe that queerness is a sin and romantic/sexual relationships are only good between men and women it's really scary to realise that that's not you. being "straight" was a little piece of normalcy in his totally messed up life and realising that he actually wasn't threw everything into chaos.
he dated a lot as a teenager, maybe to convince himself he could do relationships with girls, but most of the time they didn't last longer than a few weeks. he would get bored and no matter how hard he tried, he was never really interested in them. or maybe he was interested in them, but not as relationship partners. often he was broken up with over not caring enough or being too distant.
he also believed he had absolutely zero interest in sex for the longest time, because even after trying a few times it wasn't all that spectacular to him. mostly he thought that it was boring too and couldn't wrap his head around how so many guys thought it was so amazing. somehow he always felt like something was wrong afterwards but he couldn't quite place what it was
of course everything got even more messy when on top of that he started realising that he's been loving evan for literal years.
he prayed a lot to be fixed because praying was also routine he could cling onto, but obviously nothing changed.
he distanced himself from evan because of his feelings which made him feel worse and eventually he had to "give in" and seek evan again
in a away he envied evan for being so free since evan grew up without religious beliefs
he's had slight self-harming tendencies since his early teens, mostly as punishment for himself whenever he felt like something was wrong with
he's generally an overthinker and often anxious
(when he moves out of his parents house he starts going to therapy to heal and eventually he will be fine <3)