An Honest Confession

When I had the idea of writing a Substack, I didn’t know how I would structure it or what my emphasis would be. I knew it would talk about my life and about the most recent massive change — the complete collapse of my faith. Many people had understandably asked me to explain what happened, and honestly, that answer was complicated. It took two decades worth of life being examined to fully understand the reasons. So I wrote my first essay with the expectation of explaining what happened, and after publishing it — with no followers and without sharing it with anyone — I went to bed ruminating on what I had done.

I woke up the next morning feeling a deep sense of embarrassment about the essay and decided I was going to scrap the whole project. I even told my wife I had decided it wasn’t a good idea and planned to stop. It wasn’t until therapy later that day that I was able to shift my thinking. My therapist asked me if I could just do it for myself and no one else. As I sat with that, the idea suddenly felt lighter. I even realized how I could write this for my daughters as well as myself. I never had to hit publish. It could just be a digital record of my life’s experience — for my own therapeutic process and for my girls to have as they got older, or if I died before they ever got my full story.

As I wrote my second essay, something happened. I began to truly enjoy the process of writing and I was even able to cry. As I put my thoughts into tangible words, I realized how writing allowed me to access the emotions that went along with these stories. The essays began pouring out of me. I wrote fifteen in the span of a week. I had found my voice, my reason for writing, and I was loving it.

But like everything else in my life, the gaping wound of my father’s absence began to pull on this project. As I stopped writing and shifted toward exploring the work of other authors, I began noticing the gravity that many other writers carried — the scale of their audiences, the weight of their platforms. The old wound of achievement rushed back in and started making me feel pressured to gain recognition for my writing. My subconscious began running a familiar loop: if you don’t achieve a high subscriber count, your story isn’t important — and neither are you.

So I began to spiral emotionally. I started thinking about how I never finished grad school and how I needed to go back and get a PhD. If I had those credentials, my writing would carry more weight and I’d be taken more seriously. It took my wife calling out the cycle — she knows my cycles and sees me deeply — to finally break the loop.

I went to my office and began writing about my father and the pain I still felt, and about how my new hobby had already been tainted by that wound. It had taken less than three weeks for the black hole of his absence to begin tearing apart this newfound joy. And in that moment, I realized what this project is really about. I thought it was about losing my literalist faith in Christianity, and in many ways it still is — I even own the URL survivingdeconversion.com. I had originally built this Substack with that being the main emphasis and named the publication to match. It wasn’t until my wife’s prodding exposed what was actually occurring beneath the surface.

I realized this project is actually about the gravitational pull that my father’s life and absence exerts on everything I do. The writing about the loss of my faith had more to do with my longing for his presence than it did with any theological or philosophical argument for why the faith wasn’t true. Ironically, AI was the first to point this out. As I wrote my articles and had AI help me clean up my messy thoughts and terrible grammar — I unapologetically love AI for writing; it helps clarify my thinking and more cleanly express my own ideas — it was able to reflect back to me the major themes of my own writing and the thread running through my story.

So after breaking the loop, I realized I had too quickly named this publication around the loss of my faith rather than the real reason I write. I write to process the loss of a father whom I deeply loved, and who loved me as well, but had his own demons he couldn’t conquer to be fully present. I needed to make a pivot. I needed to change the publication name — I really didn’t want to do this since I already own a URL — but I realized that not doing it wouldn’t be honest to the spirit of what makes this project so therapeutic and life-giving. If I couldn’t be honest and vulnerable, and instead sought to gain followers and present myself perfectly, then this project would just be a continuation of the long-running theme of proving to my dead father that I matter because of my influence and success.

But I don’t want that. And I want to put this in writing — to remind myself of this truth and to let my readers know it as well. No matter the scope of this project or its influence, I want it to be a life-giving outlet for honest engagement. And if I help others along the way, that will bring a glimmer of hope that the suffering I’ve experienced wasn’t entirely meaningless.