Notes to My Former Self
Advice I wish I could give have given myself in October of 2023
I wrote this piece with the thought of what would I say to myself in October of 2023 when the collapse happened and I was terrified and anxious about what comes next and if things would get better. Some of these points are universal to the experience of leaving a rigid dogmatic interpretation of the faith, but a couple of them are specific to me and my experience.
Identity and Meaning
1. You are not overacting, you are losing a surrogate father.
You need to know that the terror you feel is not about a lack of truth, but a lack of safety. You built a rigid, literalist theological fortress to protect yourself because your actual childhood home was a volatile war zone. Leaving the faith feels like walking into outer space because you are stepping out of the armor that kept you alive. It is okay to be terrified when you take off a survival suit you have worn since you were twelve.
Normal feelings to have:
You will constantly question your choice and be afraid of death and what comes next. After I left the faith, I would have dreams where something was happening that would result in my death and I screamed out for Jesus to save me. You still want that protection and that is okay.
2. The black hole of Nihilism is real, but it doesn’t have to consume you.
You are standing on the edge of what feels like absolute nihilism, terrified that if God and the Bible are not a literal truth you can plant your flag on, then your life has no meaning. You will soon discover that the divine and the transcendent moral order do not vanish just because a rigid dogma did. But it will take time to recalibrate and you will go through withdrawal. You need to be honest with people about it or it can consume you.
Normal feelings to have:
This will hit in waves as you had previously built your meaning and purpose on the certainty of knowing you held the one and only correct way to view the world. You will have to do work to begin letting yourself sit with the pain of the unknown. You will want to rebuild a new certainty but will find that you can’t, not in the way that you did before. But you’ll see that is actually more healthy and humble than what you held before.
3. Your value is not sitting on a scale that needs to be tipped.
Right now, you are panicking about what your life means if you cannot prove your worth by knowing that you possess perfect truth. You will try and make massive career achievements your next priority. You do not need to build an empire to prove yourself to everyone who doubts your decision. And even if you did, it won’t stop that desire to prove them wrong — because it’s more about how you feel about your own decision than what you are projecting they are thinking. You don’t need to be the best at something just to justify the space you take up on this earth. You can slow down and feel the weight of the decision.
Normal feelings to have:
The energy you put into the faith will naturally look for another outlet. You will feel the need to justify your decision by showing Christians that you are just as good as they are morally and you didn’t need prayer and Bible reading to get there. This is not a healthy place to be because the reality is that you are a complicated mix of emotions, trauma, and competing desires that will inevitably lead you to fall short of your own expectations for yourself and others. Don’t give into the need to prove your morality by being perfect. No one can do that — not even Christians.
Relationships
4. You will navigate a new normal with your spouse, but it will take work.
This will be one of the hardest parts of your decision, especially if you both were serious Christians when you got married. They will feel like you have abandoned them and that you are progressing on a different path without them, and to some degree that is true. You will need to hold space for them to grieve it as well. You will most likely need a marriage counselor who can act as a neutral party to help navigate the appropriate compromises.
Normal feelings to have:
You will struggle to feel like you are on the same team. You will be hurt by the statements they make about feeling abandoned and will want to challenge them and stop them from grieving. But the reality is that you left, not them. Even though you didn’t do it to hurt them, you will have to make space for their pain. This will be volatile and that is expected. Give it time.
5. You will feel isolated from your old Christian friends, and talking with them about why you left won’t always feel good.
Many of your friends love you and are deeply concerned about you. However, many of them won’t understand why you left and explaining it to them won’t always ease the pain. I had many conversations with friends at coffee shops and by the end of the conversation it felt like there was no true resolution for them. They want to understand but since they are still in the faith, the decision to leave isn’t something they can truly agree with. By the time you finish the conversation, you’ll feel disappointed because nothing you say can help them feel better besides hearing that you believe again. Some of them will also try to keep you in the faith and argue against you. This is coming from a place of love, but it will feel hurtful.
Normal feelings to have:
You will feel isolated and alone in a significant way. Try and find at least a few friends who can truly hold space and be empathetic towards your decision. You will also need to find a few people who have walked through this as well and are not aggressive toward the faith. When people want to meet to try and talk you out of leaving, you do not have to engage in that. You can if you feel comfortable, but don’t feel forced into the conversation. You don’t owe anyone an explanation, you can decide to give it when and if you feel comfortable.
Beginning to Rewire
6. Your body knows the way before your head does.
Stop trying to think your way out of panic loops and career anxieties. The panic is your internal protector trying to shield you from the raw grief and fear of the unknown, which is an important system. However, you need to cycle through it and begin to speak to yourself kindly, even thanking that protector for the work it did to keep you safe and letting it know it can put down the defense now and sit with the grief. The only way forward is by entering into it.
Normal feelings to have:
You will be afraid and cry more than you are comfortable with. Some days it will feel heavier than you can take but you can get through it. It’s okay to want that comfort from a heavenly father, even if you can’t believe it’s possible. I remember voicing that to my spouse and deeply mourning that.
7. Your brain will automatically try to replace the old rigid system with a new version.
Human programming craves certainty. When you leave a system based on rigid compliance, your subconscious will immediately look for a new set of rules to master so you can feel a sense of safety about the world. I immediately turned to starting a new company to deal with my pain, it worked for a few months, but ultimately the void came back. It’s easy to also turn academic achievement, political ideology, or even the deconstruction process itself into a new form of fundamentalism. Watch out for the urge to turn your new life into a performance test.
Normal feelings to have:
Your desire to create a new system is completely normal and expected. You’ve been in this system for years and it has brought peace and comfort. It’s okay to want that and even to cycle through this. I still crave that but it will get less and less intense as you get further from the initial leaving.
8. You will have to learn how to trust your own intuition from scratch.
Literalist frameworks teach you that your internal compass is inherently broken, deceptive, or sinful, forcing you to rely entirely on external authorities — texts, leaders, rules to live by — for direction. One of the hardest tasks is learning to listen to your own body and mind. This is the first time you are giving yourself permission to feel, adapt, and grieve ideas that you once struggled to make sense of and moral fights you might not have wanted to take up but felt obligated to because of the requirements in the text. Learning to trust yourself will take time but it will become more and more natural as you learn that your sense of morality doesn’t leave you once you decide to leave the faith.
Normal feelings to have:
You will fear your ability to hold things as sacred or morally important because you were conditioned to think that you can’t without the faith. However, you will see you are still able to discern things that you find harmful or good based on the results they produce in your life. Many of the moral imperatives are intuitive and experientially you’ll see that living by them will produce a life you want and going against them will cause more chaos. You’ll start to understand these moral truths not just as divine commandments, but as a reliable trail to guide you through life.
9. The divine and the transcendent do not belong exclusively to the system you left.
Christianity claims a monopoly on meaning, morality, and connection to the sacred through the text and the teachings of the New Testament. Because of this, leaving the institution can feel like diving into a black hole of absolute nihilism and unknowable meaninglessness. However, you will learn that it’s okay to be soft towards the things that were and still are true moral teachings in the faith. You can agree with and champion those things without feeling like you are committed to believing all of it as literally true. You’ll also begin to discover that awe, mystery, a transcendent moral order, and deep human purpose exist entirely outside of dogmatic frameworks and in other traditions as well. The sandbox you were in broke, but the universe did not.
Normal feelings to have:
You will want to reject everything about the faith because you want to fully separate yourself from it. It’s normal to desire to feel truly disconnected from it before you can feel soft towards it again. You might also find that once you are softer towards it, the desire to protect it as something unique resurfaces. That urge is normal and okay.