I am about to tell a story that is hard for me to tell, because I don’t know how to tell it and it is one that I think I will be trying to tell for a very long time, piece by piece, for however long it takes.
Originally, when I started this blog as, what I called, an “ongoing writing project,” I thought I would be able to jump right in with writing short, pithy pieces about old shelved ideas and new pressing thoughts that I didn’t want to see slip through the cracks and wind up as old ideas, too.
I also thought I’d have no problem choosing what to write. Sure, there were long-term “big rock” writing projects about things in the very back of my brain, but those things could wait! Meanwhile, I’d write about these things!
But then, that didn’t happen. In short, I realized that I actually have to start with the heavy things—those massive and seemingly unmovable boulders, stories that can’t be reduced to a seven-minute read, things that feel a lot heavier and frankly more vulnerable to start writing about.
That are much more difficult to ask you to hold with me.
I worry: if I don’t give them a big push to get them moving now, maybe they’ll never budge—and can I afford to stay stuck underneath these inarticulate truths?
And I feel: sometimes you have nowhere else to begin. You’ve searched and searched for another pathway into writing. You’ve tried and failed to identify one, but now, you have to go back to that one road that you can see—even if it’s a long and sacrificial one.
For me, it feels as if, in beginning to write—to freely, authentically, truthfully write about this—I’m solving for the first few crucial moves in a game that will allow me to play the rest of the game.
So, what exactly is it that I need to start with?
As much as I’ve tried to privately grapple with this over the past few years, what I need to write about is my experience growing up in the Christian evangelical church.
I’ve re-written and re-written and re-written the upcoming post, which I will publish sometime in the next few days. First, it was an ordinary blog post. Then, out of fear of it sounding too serious and me too certain of myself, I revised it to be a one-woman monologue play in which I wrote in subtle self-deprecations to the reader in the stage directions. Then, again, I revised it back into a blog post.
It is part one in a story about “how I lost my faith”—a phrase that feels too Christian-y for my taste. See? There. I think that’s why telling this story feels so terrifying: I know I lack the language to talk about it objectively. I must be patient with myself and trust the writing process.
So, a blunter and more transgressive way of putting it:
It’s the story about why I’m not a Christian anymore, as of about five years ago, which entails the story about why I was.
I am telling this story here, now, in this space, and in this way.
Therefore, I acknowledge that my telling of it is limited. It is finite. It is full of its own set of beliefs, doubts, and uncertainties, some of which are probably right, and some of which are probably wrong.
I’m not writing to exploit every detail of my memory and relay every trauma from ages x to y.
I’m also aware of the “ex-Christian got woke to science and ideas and became an atheist” type of caricature and narrative that I sometimes feel my own writing falling prey to. I know my story is much more complex than that, so I don’t want to write it in a way that falls along those lines.
It’s complicated. Patience. How do I become aware of these things?
Even as I’m writing in a way to expose difficult truths, I am, at the same time, not writing with an agenda or some kind of overall anti-religion—or even anti-Christian—sentiment. That’s not me.
Losing or rejecting one’s faith does not mean losing or rejecting a desire for this thing called Faith.
Like I said, it’s complicated.
And it only gets more complicated. There are people that I love who I don’t want to hurt, as much as they have hurt me. I’m not here to cast stones. I kind of just need to tell the truth. And truth is heavier than fiction.
No, I’m not here to cast stones. I’d much rather say, I’d like to roll them away from a grave that is the silence I feel I must keep in order to keep a peace that isn’t even real.
So, in a few days, I’ll publish Part One. And I want to know what you think. Thanks for letting me evolve in this space, and letting this space evolve, and as always, for listening.
A Story That Will Take a Long Time to Tell