I have concluded that the best way to get something done is not by worrying about it being perfect, but by just fucking beginning. Just begin. That’s it. Mountains are climbed one step at a time. Wrap your mind around taking the step before it only, or the weight of the entire journey will paralyze you from ever making it up.

This, finally, is the story of my spiritual awakening. How long have I wanted to write this, to just get it down. So often was I concerned about how the things I wrote would come across, so often was I subconsciously attempting to prove to my potential readers that my experiences do indeed point to the existence of something greater than us, something that has its origins in the non-physical, and that we very well may have the same origins ourselves – despite our apparent physicality, anticipating judgment or even ridicule. But fuck it — it’s time to get my story down.

Where do I begin? How could I possibly begin? Perhaps more daunting than writing the whole story is picking where to start it. A journey of this magnitude feels as if it has several beginnings, several pieces of thread that eventually begin to wrap around each other, parts intertwining into ever greater wholes, all culminating into one woven truth. That weaving of several different parts feels like the blossoming of my maturity as an individual – 

I cut myself off now. Enough. Time to write. 

I remember being a high schooler walking between classes, paralyzed by the weight of the world. I felt sickly, tired, and grey. Is this really it? I would think to myself. The classrooms I was condemned to 5 days out of every week felt like the introduction to a bleak, horrific reality: that the rest of my life would be spent in a cubicle. First, the box of the classroom, then the box of an office space, then, being boxed into my coffin. To me, they all felt the same: equally final, equally confining, and all meaning death in one way or another. 

The spirit of wanderlust existed naturally within me – perhaps more than was comfortable. No matter what, the call to adventure would never cease. That only made my circumstances all the more dreary and crushing. My soul longed for freedom, but the reality before me felt like I would feel like a fish longing for the great, wild ocean, condemned instead to a fish bowl, for my entire life. 

Walking heavily from class to class, or peering from classroom windows, I would look to the green mountains, visible from campus. A flicker of hope and happiness was produced by looking at what felt like home to me: nature. However, it was quickly dimmed, the fire snuffed, by the entrapment I felt. Before me was freedom, a carrot waved just in front of my eyes, taunting me, just out of reach. 

I wondered often why mankind ever civilized at all. The very structure and fabric of civilization felt like willing imprisonment. It felt like we traded the aliveness of the natural world for the deadness of this corrupted version of it. I fantasized frequently about tribal living. The scenes I visualized had an overwhelmingly deep feeling of rightness in sharp contrast to the constant, omnipresent wrongness I felt in our modern world. It felt like we had willingly given up Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the supposed fruit of knowledge only taking us farther away from ultimate truth, which could only be found in the bliss of the natural world, nonverbal and innate. 

An intense desire for meaning pervaded my whole being through all of this. Through this dark night of my soul, I longed for a higher purpose to it all. Pain, to me, becomes suffering when there is no purpose to it, no reason for it. It has been said in the book Man’s Search for Meaning that with a sufficient “why,” we can endure any “how.” Here I was with the weight of the world on my shoulders, and it was painful – all I wanted was a reason for the pain to make the burden worth it. And, to me, God was the ultimate why – or I at least wanted God to be. 

I was raised Christian. I went to Catholic schools all of my life, and as such, was raised supposedly knowing God. However, the more questions I began to have, the more light was shed on how little I actually knew. My weakening relationship with the divine, however, was fully severed when I met the shears of the scientific method. 

I was naturally a thinker, and never shy from entertaining the taboo. After being introduced to empiricism in the fifth grade, and subsequently stumbling upon atheist ideas online that cited a lack of scientific proof for the existence of God, I was stumped. I couldn’t deny that the existence of God could not be – or at least had not been – proven. Had an experiment been done to prove the existence of a higher power? Could an experiment be done to do so? 

Realizing that the strict sequences of cause and effect and dependence on the physical, tangible, and measurable that the scientific method called for seemed to go against the presence of the divine, not for, I lost my faith. From a young age, I began to identify as agnostic as a comfortable middle ground. Perhaps the divine existed in a realm beyond causality, or perhaps it didn’t exist at all. I simply did not know – which seemed to almost feel more condemning than being certain in any given direction, even if that meant atheistic nihilism. How much I would have liked to know, to just have something solid, and just get on with it – get on with life. However, my only certainty was my uncertainty. I was in the dark mentally, and so too did my spirit feel cast into darkness. 

Without something higher than me, where did faith, hope, and optimism come in? Without something higher than me, it felt like the suffering, pain, and toil I would face in this world had the final say – villains to reign over the world without their antithetical superhero counterpart to come and assert the dominance of benevolence and goodness in this world whenever needed.

So, when I found myself in high school experiencing the longing to transcend, made all the more acutely painful by the confinement of the mundane laid before me, I longed for a God I had long been cut off from. The how before me seemed insurmountable without a why. It all felt absolutely, completely, totally, and utterly pointless. Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. 

It felt like this reality was set before us as a sandbox with which we could build anything, and instead of building monuments of joy and creating lives of deep meaning and happiness, we willingly created prison cells for us to meaninglessly toil in for the rest of our days. And for what? Why? Why would we do this to ourselves? I saw the reality that modern humans had created for ourselves, and I wanted absolutely no part of it. I felt comfortably suicidal – not like a horrific ache or burning desire to rip myself from the planet, but more like a hollow apathy, a numb void, feeling as empty within as the world around me felt. Because the life set before us all did not seem like it was truly living, I was quietly perfectly okay with not living myself. 

I thank the heavens that I never gave up. I don’t think that was ever really an option – a fleeting fantasy, somehow producing some comfort as a type of weighted blanket, but never a serious course of action. Eventually, I did receive what it was that I had so desperately sought and so desperately craved, and it is more beautiful than I ever could have imagined, and the possibilities and potential are far greater than I ever thought was possible. 

I am simply so, so deeply grateful. And I am ready to share what that all looked like for me.