Narrated by the author, Peter Michelsen.

At nineteen, Peter Michelsen lost everything in a single night.

Raised inside The Church at Carson City, a strict religious cult in rural Michigan, Peter was taught that obedience meant safety, love had to be earned, and anything outside the church could cost him his family—and his soul.

Then the church cast him out.

With one decision, the only world he had ever known disappeared. He lost his faith, his family, his identity, and the place he had been taught to call home. What followed was not a clean escape, but years of searching—for belonging, for love, and for someone who might finally choose him.

From Chicago and Houston to the Arizona desert, Peter tried to build a life as a gay man while carrying wounds he did not yet understand. Freedom brought adventure, sexuality, friendships, and love—but it also exposed the abandoned boy still living beneath the surface. When the end of a relationship pushed him to the edge, he was forced to confront a truth he had spent his entire life avoiding:

No one else could come back and save him. He would have to become the one who stayed.

Inside these pages:

• A childhood shaped by control, fear, and public shame inside The Church at Carson City
• The night Peter was excommunicated and separated from his family
• The complicated freedom of discovering life and sexuality outside the church
• Love, heartbreak, and the abandonment wounds that followed him into adulthood
• EMDR therapy, nature, and sacred medicine as paths toward healing
• The quiet transformation from waiting to be chosen to finally choosing himself

The Boy Who Walked Himself Home is a raw memoir of religious trauma, gay identity, heartbreak, healing, and the lifelong search for belonging.

It is not a story about having all the answers.

It is the story of a boy who spent years searching for home—only to discover that home had been waiting inside him all along.