I went to church for the first time since the pandemic three Sundays ago—an awful thing to admit for someone who won the North Louisiana Bible Bee back in elementary school.
Granted, my attendance was less about faith and more because the music director was desperate to find a stand-in pianist to accompany the choir, but I was there. And I didn’t burn underneath God’s wrath for the distance I took from Him like I thought I would.
For the past year, I’ve come back to Anis Mojgai’s words in “For Those Who Can Ride in an Airplane For the First Time.” They go “and I dream too much and I don’t write enough and I’m trying to find God everywhere.” I have my reasons for leaving organized church (blame an anti-establishment mindset), and it’s been so long since I’ve surrendered my all to a higher power. But I get it. I get the need to put your trust in something greater than yourself. I get the need to believe that life goes on.
It’s awfully tiring being the sinner, the saint, and the priest. I don’t practice what I preach, but I believe in what I say deeply; I don’t do the right thing most days, even though I think they’re for the right reasons; and, as much as I try to be a good example for those I love, I fall short often. I feel like the people around me think too highly of my character, expect too much, receive too little. I’m afraid of losing control over my reality. There are days where I pray hard and there are days where I’m angry at God and there are days where I write these Substacks like they’re confessionals. I’ve been going through existential crisis after crisis lately.
Regardless, life goes on. I’ve appreciated the abstractness this past year has offered me—the ability to explore versions of myself I never would have touched. Oscar Wilde once wrote that “to define is to limit.” In the context of everything before April, I’m glad I got to live in a personal era of no definitions.
Ever-indecisive, I don’t define most things: what constitutes best friendship, where I stand in my faith, expectations on social reciprocity. I used to find those concepts to be ineffable—why label when you can, in the words of Kamala Harris, “just exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Living by values instead of strict codes is perhaps a defense mechanism. It’s harder to get hurt when less pressure is on adverse calculations, it’s easier to forgive when metrics aren’t black and white.
But I’ve spent this summer surrounded by risk monitoring analysts and at a company that weighs costs and benefits as if the world depends on them (true, the U.S. financial market does). According to the broker-dealers we work with—market strategists and the economy’s top traders alike—the ideal risk/reward ratio for worthwhile investments is 1:3. Anything less and the decision to invest is for answers to ‘what-if,’ not to expect high profit.
For most of July, my brain has only been able to measure in twisted risks and rewards. I am not meant to be an investor. Heart over head, the process of transitioning back to school triggered an onslaught of academic, medical, professional, emotional, and social anxieties—enough to keep me up until 2, 3, 4AM every night. Itching to return to Philadelphia with a lighter conscious, I selfishly shoved ego and repercussion aside and forced conversations that didn’t meet the requirements of a 1:3 outcome. If you had the choice, would you be honest with yourself?
A quarter of my friends warned me that answers are never worth the heart or headache. The plague of ‘what-ifs’ will pass, they said. I disagree. I relate to Anne Sexton when she said “I am a collection of dismantled almosts,” solely for the realization that—as much as I love to romanticize the world that we live in—there is comfort in rationality.
My dilemmas were all-consuming. Whether it was impulsive or mature, I needed to define boundaries and recognize limitations for my own sanity, to move on.
Quietly, I don’t know if the decisions I made were the right decisions—I’ll never know, to be honest. I risked or ruined friendships and future opportunities in ways where I don’t foresee them ever coming back to what they used to be. Maybe down the line I’ll find those sins forgivable. Right now, I’ll admit, as much as I feel relieved for being truthful to myself, the redirection still stings.
But life is a series of decision trees, and, like trees, any direction you take is still growth. What I do know is that I won’t take the actions of this last month for granted—the career pivot, academic choices, emotional vulnerability, etc. Melodramatically, at the end of the day, you should never regret being honest with your wants and needs and feelings. I confess, I’d die by that. At the end of the day, whether I’m the sinner or the saint or the priest, life goes on.
Would I do the same? Yes. I had a fever a couple weeks ago, and the nausea mixed in with throwing up was a pain so immense, I started becoming borderline religious. 😵💫😵I started praying to a God I’d never talked to, and I don’t think anyone deserves this type of physical pain but I strangely found myself trying to search for a lesson in it all, (& past situations that had me reeling)