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It took six months, but after I graduated from college in May 2007, I managed to find a job in my major—print journalism—in November of that year. I started at a congressional paper at age 23, young by any standards, especially in the cutthroat world of news. Since the paper covered the individuals that worked on Capitol Hill, I started soliciting senators and members of Congress for op-eds on themes like energy and the environment and transportation. I looked forward to writing the neighborhood sections, where I was sent out to explore different neighborhoods in the D.C. area. It was then I truly got to know the city. To this day, I love to check and see if my restaurant review is still hanging up outside the women’s bathroom at a downtown steakhouse.After a few years of being the special sections editor, I was given an extremely unique opportunity. The paper wanted to start a website about the social scene in D.C.—a Page Six of Washington, if you will. I was given an old Kodak point-and-shoot digital camera and a notebook, and my iPhone went with me everywhere to take notes, snap extra photos or record interviews.It was daunting at first, to go to a party being media and not technically being invited. There’s nothing scarier than walking into a fancy party not knowing a soul. My very first opportunity came at a breakfast event for Avon. I was able to interview Reese Witherspoon, as she was the honorary chairwoman of the Avon Foundation for Women. Reese had a cold that morning, but she was just as nice as ever. After that interview, I was hooked. It’s hard to believe it was 12 years ago.

I had plenty of surprises.

I Met Celebrities and Had Unique Experiences While Covering Local Events

I think the most fun I had working at my first job was getting to attend three White House Correspondents’ Dinners. They were held every year at the Washington Hilton in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of D.C. Imagine the biggest ballroom you can think of draped in gold, with the finest linens and stemware. The funny thing is, the food must not have been something to write home about—I can’t remember a thing I ate. Being in my early-to-mid-20s, it was the perfect time to be out late attending parties, as I was not tied down with a child, pet or husband (let alone a boyfriend for that matter). It was during those dinner weekends that I got to meet so many celebrities. My wall in my office at home has photos from those fun memories, including me with Kim Kardashian (she was so nice—her mom was the pushy one), Diane Keaton (an absolute delight) and Jimmy Fallon (as hilarious in person as he is on TV), among others.I got to meet Mindy Kaling, who actually stood and talked to my friends in the media and me. I remember tracking down Paul Rudd the first year because of my love of Clueless. He looks as young as he does in photos. My youngest sister is jealous of the photo I have with the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato and Danielle Jonas. I am forever grateful I had such a singular opportunity at such a young age to meet all of these celebrities.Of course, during my five-and-a-half years with the print paper, I had plenty of surprises. One of the biggest ones I like to share is when Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie were in D.C. for separate events. I’ll never forget that during Aniston’s event, she came out for a brief minute and waved to us and then disappeared. I was annoyed that we stood in the press line for about two hours and she didn't really give us the time of day.Jolie, on the other hand, during a premiere of her movie In the Land of Blood and Honey at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, took the time to speak to every single person in the media line. I was impressed with how she took her time to answer at least one question from every one of us. I thought it was very meaningful, especially given the seriousness of her movie, set against the backdrop of the Bosnian War.For all the celebrities I got to meet, I was able to interview lots of people famous in D.C. I interviewed Ben Bradlee, best known for his coverage of the Watergate scandal. I also got to interview various ambassadors, which opened up invitations for me to attend opera balls, which were always hosted at area embassies. I was lucky that my two best friends are men, as I just alternated taking them to various balls and galas, and boy, did we have a blast. As 25-year-olds, we had no business hanging out with older millionaires, but we did. Not only did we get to try food we wouldn't normally get a chance to eat and sample cocktails with liquor that cost more than a few weeks' rent for us but also we learned a lot about how important it is to not take yourself too seriously (because a lot of the people did). We also learned more about our own tastes—what foods, musicals, operas, art and shows we liked.

It turned out to be the best thing for me.

I Love My Current Job, but I’ll Never Forget My First One

Unfortunately, the paper closed their social site due to budget cuts. Toward the end, it got very competitive and cutthroat, and I was tired of trying to work from home before remote work was in. I would get phone calls offering media tickets to certain events and my co-workers would make up stories that I was inviting my boyfriend to things. Meanwhile, I was 100 percent single. I would be constantly in trouble with co-workers for coming in around 10 or 11 a.m. when most nights I was out until 10 or 11 p.m. and stayed up until midnight or 1 a.m. adding the pictures I took and doing a write-up of the event I attended.When I did get let go, I was so upset. It turned out to be the best thing for me. I am now my own boss as a freelancer and have had the opportunity to interview celebs like I did when I was younger, and I get to make my own hours and choose my own assignments.I call it a win-win, although I am very grateful for the experience I did have in my 20s.

It was my first week as a social media associate at a big New York City agency. I was being trained for the job by another junior-level employee and, at some point, I realized that a large portion of our conversation centered around how to protect myself. This should have been a red flag, but I was naive. Advice that seemed innocuous enough—put everything in writing, explain your rationale and always have at least one senior team member sign off, in writing, on what you're doing before you do it—just seemed like good business practice. In fact, they were going to become defenses I’d have to employ daily to avoid the finger-pointing, blaming and lack of ownership from the agency’s senior leaders. I would say thank goodness I always had the receipts, but sometimes even that didn't save me. Excited to be working my first “real” job and eager to be a good soldier, I adopted the practices I saw around me: Show up early, stay late and if a client asks for something, the answer is always yes. I’d come in at 6 a.m., posting and emailing on my commute, and kept working after I got home at night. Through spoken and unspoken norms, the message was clear: The agency would always come first.

The agency would always come first.

Work Always Came First—No Matter What

About a year into the job, I broke my wrist. On a Sunday night, as I took the subway home from urgent care, my wrist wrapped, padded and slung for protection, I shot a quick email over to my manager. “Hi,” it said. “Unfortunately, I broke my wrist this evening, so I will not be on tomorrow morning and will miss our call. Thanks for understanding.” The response came quickly, despite the lateness of the hour or the Sunday-ness of the day: “So sorry to hear that! No worries about the call, just message me once you’re on.” If that message wasn’t clear enough on its own, the email I received the following morning—with the headline, “IMPORTANT When You Sign On - DUE,” followed by that day’s date—cleared up any ambiguity. I was expected to work, in one piece or not. In total, I took off a whole two hours for my broken wrist, returning straight to work after my doctor put a cast on. That I might benefit from taking the day off to rest and recover was never considered.At the agency, “working hours” seemed a laughably obsolete concept. Every hour was a working hour if you were dedicated—or scared—enough. It took me a mere matter of weeks to realize that behind every 8 a.m. corporate tweet was a 23-year-old who’d been online for four hours trying to make sure that the link works properly. Often, that 23-year-old was me. The least senior employees were expected to be available at any hour, for any problem, no matter how trivial. But where credit was concerned, there was a clear understanding that any accolades would go to a senior team member, while in the event of any failure, the least senior member would be blamed.At every level, gaslighting was common. Claims of unfair, rude, abusive or unprofessional speech—both verbal and via email—were met with snark and denial. If employees offered even a minor complaint or piece of not-entirely-positive feedback, we’d be asked what we did wrong, how we could have fixed the situation for ourselves. When I finally built up the courage to express that I was feeling burnt out from working 70-hour weeks, I was asked what was wrong with my time-management skills. No one thought to ask my manager why I was staffed at 160 percent.

I Finally Reached My Limit

As my time at the agency progressed, I found myself living in a state of constant anxiety. The preexisting culture was significantly exacerbated by COVID, and the need to be "on" 24/7 only increased. Co-workers would multitask on calls (a practice which was the expectation, not the exception) to commiserate that they, too, had not taken even a short break in hours to use the bathroom or get food. "If this client doesn't stop talking soon," they'd say, "I'm going to pee myself," smiling with dead eyes on the video call all the while. There were days when I did not move from my computer screen for 12 hours at a time. One pandemic afternoon, I took a sip of coffee while on a video call with a co-worker, and she gasped. I looked around startled, wondering what in my absentminded actions could possibly have elicited such a response. “Where did you get that?” she asked, pointing at my coffee cup. “When did you have time to go out?” Realization struck hard—she had noticed the Starbucks logo. “I didn’t,” I said, the urge to laugh warring with the very real resentment this comment engendered. I was quarantined at my parents’, and my mom had been to Starbucks the night before and brought it back for me. In truth, I couldn’t remember the last time I had left the house during daylight hours, let alone for the luxury of obtaining my own coffee. My co-worker smiled knowingly. The final straw came on a Wednesday night in the winter of 2020. I had sat down to work before the sun was up and was still there long after it had set. I hadn’t moved all day. Every time I’d tried to stand up and take a break, a call had come through with something that was “timely” and “just couldn’t wait.” My sister had brought me a snack around midday. Despite my protestations, my family had decided to wait for me to eat dinner. “How late could it be?” my dad asked. At 8:30 p.m., I descended the stairs, exhausted, wrung out, eyes ringing with 14-plus hours of staring at a screen. I let out a sigh of relief as I pulled my chair out to sit. As I moved to take my seat, however, my phone began to ring, the incessant tone letting me know it was business rather than pleasure. “Hi, are you free?” the voice at the other end inquired. “Actually, I was just sitting down to dinner,” I replied, making every attempt to keep the cascade of sass I could feel building out of my tone. “Good,” the voice replied. “Then you’re not busy.” Without missing a beat, the voice began a deluge of “urgent” work that had been relegated to the evening because she had been on too many calls during the day. Tears welling, I stood up, shrugged a deflated apology to my family and returned to my desk. I remained there until after 10 p.m. My food had long gone cold by the time I was done.

My food had long gone cold by the time I was done.

I Quit My Job to Save Myself

I left the agency the following February, essentially as soon as I could get a new job. If I’d needed my decision validated, hearing a co-worker reprimanded for attending a family member's funeral without "advance notice" during my final week was more than enough.Shortly after I left, there was a mass exodus. The environment of agency-before-all-else had finally borne its rightful fruit. There were multiple mental and physical breakdowns and uproar among employees. I’m told it changed nothing.It’s been nearly a year, but my time at the agency has stayed with me. I still wake up in the middle of the night expecting an accusatory email alerting me to some sort of pseudo-emergency that demands my immediate attention. I check everything I send at least three times before it goes out and am sure to have a paper trail to back up why I’ve taken even the most minor actions. A former co-worker, who has since left the agency as well, recently told me they still bring their laptop home at night, even though they’re the only one at their new job who does. “I can’t relax unless it’s there,” they told me. “I’m still afraid of that late-night call or angry email. I always think it’s coming.”

Like many cultural reporters I know, I got into journalism for selfish reasons: I like to write. There’s a fair share of us, I must assume, who were actually drawn to reporting because they are genuinely fascinated by the art of collecting information and delivering it to the masses. But many of us are here because we like the sound of our own words read aloud.I didn’t realize the fault in this approach to journalism until my first real newsroom internship, when my editor pushed me to write and publish a story that had style—not content—that made me squirm with unease. The story, a delicate subject with a main source that had brushed with death, was ripe for stylistic exploitation and my editor encouraged me to juice it for all it was worth. The result? An overly subjective, dramatized recounting of events that, while factual and approved by my source, felt to me to be a gross injustice to the story at hand. Since this story, I’ve never looked at narrative journalism, once my dream medium, in the same way.The fact of the matter is, while narrative storytelling touches readers and can stay with them for years (I think of this article often, even five years after first reading it), it is a tool that should only be deployed when appropriate, yet is often abused by view-hounding editors like mine and literary-minded writers like myself. When inappropriately applied, narrative reporting can warp a story beyond recognition, obscuring necessary facts and magnifying others until the final product transforms into literature with little journalistic purpose.In the worst cases, the hidden voice of the narrative journalist can steer readers to a predetermined conclusion. The reporting surrounding the “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” controversy comes to mind; readers felt manipulated by reporters, specifically because they could barely parse the story facts from the writer’s opinions. While reporting can never be unbiased, no matter the medium, I believe readers deserve news that gives them the chance to form their own opinions—or at the very least, identify the journalist’s personal logic and disagree.This, I believe, is why readers desperately need data journalism.

Many of us are here because we like the sound of our own words read aloud.

What Is Data Journalism and Data Visualization?

Although data journalism technically describes any form of reporting that uses data as a key source, its definition has changed dramatically over the years and varies depending on who you ask. The data journalism to which I’m referring is more accurately called “data visualization” and takes the form of interactive graphics that allow readers to easily explore and manipulate a data set. You likely became familiar with data visualization during COVID while perusing the interactive maps depicting infection rates around the world.I personally became acquainted with data visualization when, a year or so before the pandemic, I stumbled upon The Pudding, a cultural publication whose data essays changed the way I view the format. As you might have noticed, the two articles I have criticized in this essay—my click-fueled drama narrative and “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”—don’t seem to lend themselves to data visualization, mostly because they are human interest stories. That’s how I used to view data visualization: as an inventive but narrowly applicable tool. If you peruse The Pudding’s stories, however, you might be surprised at how apparently effortlessly these journalists apply data visualization to human interest stories—from colorism in high fashion to women’s minuscule pockets.It was this discovery, of the infinite applications of data visualization in any given sector of reporting, that ultimately convinced me to go back to school for a master’s degree in data science. Pursuing a career in data visualization was a no-brainer for me, not only because I’m a visual learner but because I struggle with the knowledge that my inherent biases will always impact my work and, by extension, my readers.

This, I believe, is why readers desperately need data journalism.

How Data Journalism Can Kill the (Silent) Author

Click through a map of COVID infections and you’ll start to get an idea of how data visualization can allow readers to hold more power over their own learning by doing away with what I like to call the Silent Author. The Silent Author is the quiet bias journalists bring to their reporting, the assumptions, personal opinions and blind spots we (intentionally or not) sprinkle throughout our articles and which often go unnoticed by the author as well as the reader.Say a reader is investigating infection rates around the world to plan a trip. A data-driven article outlining the safest countries to visit during COVID might be informed by the journalist’s interpretation of infection data, but it is limited to just that: their personal interpretation, which likely includes unconscious biases, like which countries are worth visiting in the first place. For a multitude of reasons, these biases can go unnoticed by the reader; for example, it is difficult to perceive when the scope of an article is warped or when an author makes an interpretive leap that they wouldn’t agree with. Many readers simply don’t think to question a journalist’s authority, especially when they publish with a major news outlet.In contrast, an interactive map of the same data set allows readers to peruse infection data free of the Silent Author’s guiding voice. Of course, data journalists usually accompany interactive graphics with their own analysis, but their biases are no longer silent; readers can approach the author’s interpretations with a critical eye by exploring the data themselves. Data visualization takes your middle school English teacher’s instruction to “show, not tell” seriously, with the added bonus of allowing you to do both and giving the reader the opportunity to determine whether your “show” and “tell” match up.

We Can Never Get Rid of the Author Entirely

You’ll notice that even this essay is biased. Unfortunately for you, I have only just started my data science degree and am not yet capable of producing a graphic that allows you to compare the bias in traditional print journalism and data visualization. Instead, I find myself, a self-professed data visualization zealot, writing an article that focuses on the positive potential of this reporting style. But, in an attempt to be a Not-So-Silent Author, I will tell you that data visualization is not, and could never be, truly unbiased.One of the greatest flaws in data visualization projects is that we often mistakenly consider data objective when in reality, data sets are inherently skewed. Take our interactive COVID infection maps, for example. Not all countries are equally efficient or honest ind their reports of infections, China being a noted one. This alone will warp a graphic’s accuracy. In other cases, journalists might use data sets that are not large or diverse enough to be representative of the population or subject at hand. Worse yet, since journalists rarely collect their own data sets, there is always the possibility that a reporter might knowingly or unknowingly use one that has been produced by a disreputable source. And then, of course, data visualization does not solve the issue of story choice bias, wherein the stories that make it to publication always reflect an editor’s opinion of what (or who) is important enough to merit news coverage.All of these factors and more prevent data visualization from being some sort of perfect solution to media bias, but such a solution will never exist. Data journalism as a whole has long been heralded as the solution to any number of media woes: gendered harassment in the workplace, bias in reporting, the existential threat of how to provide reporting of increasingly higher quality, among others. While I don’t believe data visualization will solve any of these puzzles, the way I see it, it is the next step that journalism can take toward owning up to the natural biases that reporters bring to their stories.

In a year that broke the record for fatal anti-transgender violence, I knew it was my responsibility as a queer journalist to write stories in a new way. I wanted to cover transgender people working to end this violence and collaborate with them to craft stories. News needed coverage of gender-diverse people the community had not been granted before—movement journalism that pushed for change. While working as a news reporter at a traditional, long-standing publication, I strived to push against narratives that criminalize gender-diverse people. Although I’m paid to write news, I broke the arbitrary yet sacred rules of objectivity that have become ingrained in my profession. I penned an opinion article addressing the way media outlets frame gender-diverse people. I publicly came out about my gender queerness and the challenge of coming to terms with my identity while rhetoric blasted across my screens. Last year, a transgender person in Los Angeles was accused of being a predator while changing in a dressing room that aligned with her gender identity. Media outlets misgendered her and dismissed her identity. Right-wing pundits rambled on about the incident for days, using it to emphasize their anti-transgender takes. I decided a story needed to be told without prioritizing the idea of balance that journalism schools tell us news requires.I was the only person who could tell the story with such an impact at my publication. But I needed to bend the rules to do it justice.Writing that story took me months. It required me to scroll through Reddit threads where anonymous posters called people like me perverts and weaved together a made-up moral panic. It stoked my depression, dug my flailing mental health into a deeper pit. But there wasn't any support from my company—only constant reminders about the kinds of tweets we should avoid sharing in order to seem like we’re not taking sides on any issue. Meanwhile, leaders at my publication spent weeks debating if we should use gender-neutral pronouns in our content or write around them.

Although I’m paid to write news, I broke the arbitrary yet sacred rules of objectivity that have become ingrained in my profession.

For Me, Objectivity Is a Workplace Hazard

My therapist tells me I should take a break and write lighter stories. She’s told me I should figure out an escape plan from my current job, define what it will take to know enough is enough. But I worry that if I leave, no one will write about these pressing matters, the people and pillars holding up fragile populations.I haven’t quite figured out what’s going to be the straw that breaks this journalist's back. But I know bearing the responsibility of covering long-suffering populations is not sustainable. I know I won’t be able to push for justice and foster change by continuing to pretend like I don’t have an opinion, proceeding to abide by these antiquated rules that no longer fit what’s needed of journalism. Constantly having to validate facts I and others know from being immersed in these communities to be true by trying to obtain false balance will one day stifle me so much I’ll feel crushed.I can’t fully report on people who need more of their stories told with the myth of objectivity constraining me. Practicing objectivity erases what I set out to do as a journalist: to humanize issues, amplify voices and support people whom society has sidelined far too long. Journalists need to be humans first; we need to listen to the people we’re writing for. Questioning people’s needs or concerns to death takes the heart out of our work.

Who Are We Staying Neutral For?

Journalism schools drill into reporters’ brains that we must remain neutral, appear as blank slates without any obvious opinions. Media leaders need to accept that news has never been apolitical at its core. I’m working from within my mainstream publication to break these molds and be both an advocate and a journalist.I told my editors I want to focus on writing queer stories at the perfect time (for them). Shortly after the murder of George Floyd and the racial justice reckoning that followed, my publication decided to form a team of journalists dedicated to covering groups it had long overlooked. It’s a vague, nebulous beat, writing about “cultures of marginalized communities,” which is generally understood in my team as anyone who’s not white, straight, cisgender, financially stable or neurotypical. The publication assigned me and only four other journalists the responsibility of building relationships and expanding coverage of communities it neglected across several states. As the token queer person, I’ve strived to make up for lost time and form connections with LGBTQ+ people in my area. Like most people, LGBTQ+ folks are grappling with challenging years, from the high rates of anti-transgender violence to harmful legislation. Carrying the burden of being the sole person covering these stories weighs me down on its own, and my duty is balanced on top of the boulder that journalistic objectivity places on my back. More than a year has passed since my publication, like many others, vowed to transform both the makeup of our staff as well as the people featured in our stories. But we’re still not writing for sidelined communities—we’re writing about sidelined communities for the same readers as before. Our staffs are still overwhelmingly white, and pay equity has been reduced to a buzzword leaders use in speeches aimed at preventing employees from unionizing. We’re still creating content that’s palatable for certain audiences. Our work is boiled down until it appeases our white, older, middle-class subscribers. (Many of my stories, including those with information that could help low-income people, are trapped behind paywalls, but that’s another story.)Instead of connecting communities to information they could use and publishing stories that people can see themselves reflected in, the stories I write seem to be teaching the ignorant, both in my company and out. I’m asked in every article to spoon-feed information, like describing what they/them pronouns mean.

Our work is boiled down until it appeases our white, older, middle-class subscribers.

I Want My Work to Make a Difference

I set out to do this job to make a difference, and by no means do I think that makes me unique as a journalist. To do that, I want to highlight and reach audiences that mainstream media has not. I try to write pieces about triumphs and solutions LGBTQ+ folks found for themselves without the help of corporations, police or the medical-industrial complex, as well as other entities journalists have relied on as sources.We need to educate journalists, not just small teams like mine thrown together to give publications the appearance that they equally cover everyone. And by “we,” I don’t mean people who live through being a sidelined community every day. On top of my reporting work, I’ve been tasked to teach my colleagues about LGBTQ+ topics, work for which I am not paid. At the very least, pay your employees for their extra labor to fix your ignorance. Journalists should read content from people inside marginalized communities and understand their own privileges. They should read books like Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View From Somewhere, which breaks down the myth of journalistic objectivity and explains a new way of reporting that’s necessary for the stories that need to be told now. It’s time for the long-standing ideals that attempt to erase our humanity, our thoughts and our lived experiences to disappear.There’s room for journalists to also be activists and to support the communities we cover instead of merely reporting on them. People trust those that they know, whose beliefs they can see. It’s time for a change. Luckily, I’m quite young. Soon, the walls that journalism’s elite built up won’t stand any longer because of reporters like me.

I was invited into Clubhouse relatively early in the pandemic. It was August, a few months after the app launched and everyone was stuck in quarantine. The friend who invited me to join said I would love it; it would be the perfect place for me to engage in conversations and connect with new people and old friends. She had been participating in a political club on the platform that was focused on sparking youth engagement in the November 2020 elections.Upon entering Clubhouse, I was blown away by all the conversations happening amongst friends whom I’d known for years. It felt like an intimate place, where we could gather around our phones and chat about anything until the wee hours of the night. There was something unique about hearing other voices, their emotions and honesty, that made the app feel special, unlike any other social media I had ever experienced. It was like we were all gathered around a fire pit or hanging in someone’s living room.

I couldn’t believe I was actually making real friends with brilliant, creative, complex individuals through this digital social media platform.

I Was Able to Connect With Others on Clubhouse in a Unique Way

As more and more folks joined the app, there were waves of new voices and topics of discussion. Throughout those early days, I found the majority of conversations to be focused on big techie topics like investing, pitching your business, diversity and inclusion, media, arts and culture, health and spirituality. Though I had some interest in these topics, I knew there was a deeper layer where we could go to truly discover who we were. Instead of vying for the smartest sentence, we could share our honest stories and less of our opinions. As someone living with chronic disease and focused on studying love in practice, I knew in sharing my story, I could host that space for more depth that I knew was available. I started my own club and began hosting vulnerable, honest conversations about love, facing disease, mortality and creative expression. As the conversations transpired, I’d learn others’ stories and build relationships. My new Clubhouse friends became real friends, and we’d chat on the phone or via Zoom occasionally as well as co-host rooms together. I couldn’t believe I was actually making real friends with brilliant, creative, complex individuals through this digital social media platform. I had never found this level of connection on any other social media apps that espouse likes, loves, short-form comments and limited characters. Often when hosting an especially honest room about love and life, I would ask everyone to take a moment to pause and just feel the connectivity in the space. We were in the digital world, sometimes sharing our most intimate secrets with complete strangers who were tuning in from thousands of miles away, and we could all hold it together. We could all respect each other and lift one another up. The energy was palpable and powerful. It was also healing in a time of great international distress.Since those early days, my club has grown to surpass 75,000 members, and we've had hundreds of amazing salons on topics ranging from health and well-being to creativity, abolition and love (and it’s still very intimate based on the titles of the salons and the limited folks on stage at a time). This last year and a half on Clubhouse has shown me the power live audio offers in bringing disparate voices together and building bridges across our differences. I believe this is the path to a new value set in media where honest, emotional depth and lived experiences hold currency alongside intellectual debate.

I know this type of media is just beginning, and there is an immense opportunity to use it as a salve for our wounded communities.

Live Audio Could Be a New Type of Comments Section

I’ve discovered how live audio can transform media from one-sided reporting, opinion sharing or cross-talking battlegrounds to (when well facilitated) dynamic, inclusive spaces for debate, curiosity, expression, honesty and connection. I see the opportunity for live audio to become the basis for a new kind of comments section, a space where profane insults and trolling aren’t welcome but rather healthy, generative conversations can take place around any topic with a baseline of mutual respect baked into the agreements for the virtual shared space. The beauty of this opportunity is that it can also be recorded, with a new type of open conversation podcast format. The audio published would have the capacity to represent public debate and discussion on any issue, and audiences could be defined through various identifiers to better understand who’s in the room so hosts understand what bridges they may be building (or not) across diverse groups. Though my specialty may be focusing on personal narratives, well-being and exploring challenging life experiences, others could dive into politics, history, sports, art, culture, religion or anything else that brings people together to connect beyond just facts and opinions. The key to this framework, acting as a tool to heal our broken media landscape, is trained moderators and facilitators who infuse curiosity and strong moderation skills with excellent and well-defined boundaries and frameworks for discussion. From what I’ve experienced on Clubhouse and the myriad of live audio platforms—like Greenroom and Twitter Spaces—springing up, I know this type of media is just beginning, and there is an immense opportunity to use it as a salve for our wounded communities and our challenges with communication across difference. Jump in and let’s jam in the virtual living room.

In 2011, at the start of a boom, I started my own podcast. Plenty of people had already established themselves in this space, and many popular shows with celebrity hosts wouldn’t begin until much later. Eleven years ago, however, you didn’t need a theme for your podcast to set it apart—you just needed to be funny. I’d been doing comedy for years, recording just about everything I did, but I assumed that the world didn’t want to hear undeveloped comedy (I’ve since been proven wrong 10,000-fold). Still, I didn’t have to think for long to decide what my show would be about. Not only did my two best friends, Dan and Mike, grow up doing comedy as a group with me, but we listened to comedy records together, mostly on cassette tapes and many on vinyl. I decided that’s where I’d start (and likely end) my podcasting career: vinyl records.I spent the first year or so becoming an increasingly voracious comedy album collector, building up the guts to speak with some of my heroes. I could end this here and tell you that I recently interviewed my white whale, the comedian at least partially responsible for my friendship with Dan, as the show’s final episode. The thing is, though this episode was massive for me, it didn’t change my life or why I podcast. It would take a genuine mystery to do that.

My Friend Went Missing and I Started Sleuthing

This mystery had many stops and starts. I first interviewed a comedy historian about a stand-up whose true story was almost entirely unknown. He was a white guy from Arkansas who did race-positive humor in the ’60s, and that was about all anyone knew about him. I soon became obsessed with finding out why he had disappeared, but within a couple of weeks of research during my day job, I threw up my hands. I didn’t know where to start. Over the next three years, I’d publish my second book, sell my first movie and make hundreds more podcasts. The latter was an absolute compulsion, the easiest and quickest way I’d felt like I’d created something. I was churning out discussions and rarely editing (I didn’t need to since my guest would discuss liking a specific record). Then, in early 2018, amidst the normal blur of back-and-forth emails with comedians’ agents, I got a message that had nothing to do with comedy records.Mike had just been reported as missing. In fact, he’d been missing a few months after I’d first heard of this unknown comic. I spent the next few weeks in a fugue, searching not as someone with the fervent, distracted interest of a guy who didn’t care about his day job but with the passion of someone who didn’t want to believe the worst. I hunted down every lead I could online, doing the best near-forensic work I was capable of. I analyzed photos of this and that and checked out social media that might hold clues, desperately hoping to get in touch with Mike, to find out where he’d gone to and why he’d cut off contact with everyone.I didn’t entirely process my guilt over our mutual lack of correspondence; instead, I turned it into dread. Mike was the reason I’d become a director. He taught me the joy of telling childish jokes well past childhood. He reminded me to find the absurd in everything; I think he would appreciate knowing that I accidentally walked a few miles out of my way to go grieve at a bowling alley the following week.

My friend was no longer missing. He’d been found, just not at all in the way we’d hoped.

I Began Interviewing Family Members of Deceased Comedians

A few months later, we got the news that Mike’s remains had been found buried on his own property. I collapsed in on myself, unable to do much for my own good or those around me. There was no more searching to do to try and keep my soul afloat. My friend was no longer missing. He’d been found, just not at all in the way we’d hoped. It was no longer a mystery.Shortly after, I started a miniseries on the podcast interviewing the family members of album creators who were no longer with us. This was my effort to start using the show to tell the stories behind these records. These were mini-mysteries that could be solved in the room. In the quest to make busy work for a trauma-addled brain, I was satisfying the need for something good to come from loss. No one else was going to tell these stories if I hadn’t called them up to talk.Still, these were not much different than other podcasts. They were fun discussions about people who were almost lost to time. I wasn’t processing my need for them yet. Toward the end of the year, though, something suddenly clicked. I thought back to my hayseed in a needle stack, wondering if my skills in finding these other obscure names might help me find this country comedian.The worst that could happen was finding zero leads on this comic. The best I could hope for was that he’d be alive, want to speak with me and tell me his whole life story. He became an even stronger obsession than the search for my lost friend; there was no way I could be in denial about whatever was at the end of this tunnel. As for podcasts, this time the journey would have to be the episode, regardless of the outcome.

A Phone Call Changed My Podcast Career

I recorded what I did every step of the way, including my phone calls, and read newspaper clippings out loud. I kept writing physical letters to people who shared the comic’s stage name. I abused free trials to research websites (which only help you when the information you have is accurate to begin with) and kept coming up empty. I’d even found some information that told me this Arkansas comic was actually the son of a rabbi from New York City. But even then, no one knew his real name. One website said (in small print that I almost missed) that one potential name “may go by” the very stage name I had been searching for. It was too simple to be true, but I dug further. I found a brother, but I had to write another physical letter and wait for one back. It never came.Fortunately, though, I did get a phone call. The comic had passed away, but his family remembered him fondly. When I said earlier that the journey would have to be the story, I meant it. Even if the journey had sucked, I still would have published it. This phone call led me to finalize a script, something I’d never needed to write for a podcast.I included many interviews in this episode, but it primarily contained narration and royalty-free music to serve the story. I took years of album and film editing and used them to express my love for comedy and my passion for untold stories at the same time.

They brought tears to my eyes.

The Mystery Comic Now Plays a Crucial Role in My Work

It wasn’t obvious then, but Mike was part of the reason I had even learned to edit. Now he’d become the reason I had to edit, even if the story wasn’t his. The comic’s family loved it, especially his niece, who shares a name with Mike’s mom. She recently found two unreleased records of his, from his early days, which an archivist friend of mine digitized and cleaned up. They brought tears to my eyes. Not from laughter—funny as they were—but from knowing his story hadn’t ended.Archiving the lives and works of unknown comics is now my passion, even though I’ve ended the show. I’ve started searching for other comics to research, all in the name of preserving laughter, art and toil. As I write this, I’m helping to put together the Arkansas comic’s first vinyl release in over 50 years, working as his estate archivist and researching a book on his life, despite never having met the man. All this effort has made me realize I have more stories in me and more to find. I continue to search for the next comedy mystery to explore, in honor of the comic, my late friend and my own sanity.

There’s apparently an app for freelance writers that allows you to turn yourself into your own nightmare Taylorite panopticon, monitoring the prisoner/employer who is yourself. You’re supposed to log in at 15-minute increments, reporting to the manager (who is you) about whether the employee (also you) is optimally performing to maximize profits or is slacking off by getting a snack or messing around on social media or pausing to contemplate the yawning abyss of guilt and self-loathing that has opened in their soul for some reason. I found out about this app through a post on a professional network for writers. I will call this professional network “George.” George is a supportive online community where writers share past successes, talk about strategies for future successes, problem-solve barriers to success and explain how you, too, can get a byline in leading venues like The New York Times and also The New York Times.I sound helplessly bitter because I am a bad person and also bitter. I have never been published in either The New York Times or The New York Times. But, even so, George is a great community in many ways. There are helpful posts about job opportunities. People offer advice about how to pitch to this venue or that venue. The comments are moderated within an inch of their lives; it’s one of those rare internet places where you almost never see people being horrible to each other. Everyone is polite and upbeat and focused on success.That’s the good part of George. The less good part of George is that everyone is polite and upbeat and focused on success. It’s community as neoliberal self-help regime.

When people advise you not to write for less than $1 a word, and you are lucky to get a tenth of that in many cases, it doesn’t exactly feel supportive and inspiring to hear about the fortunes of your betters.

The Neoliberal Mindset Has Encouraged Self-Exploitation

“Neoliberal” is a word that gets thrown around with a certain cavalier disregard for context. Originally, neoliberalism referred to the Reagan/Thatcher deregulatory program of the 1980s. Conservatives of that time argued that everyone was better off without government oversight—that if you freed people from the chains of taxation and welfare payments, they’d pull themselves up by their toenails even if they didn’t have shoelaces. Old-school capitalism praised the capitalists. Neoliberalism still praises capitalists, but it also touts the potential capitalist in all of us. You (and you!) can be your own overseer, fashioning yourself into your own lucrative brand as a gig worker entrepreneur, vigorously exploiting yourself for the greater glory of yourself. George is the friendly hum of the neoliberal treadmill scrolling by in encouraging post after encouraging post. The community perceives itself as a collection of canny managers, all sharing strategies for getting the most out of their workforces of one. Network! Connect with editors! Don’t sell yourself short! Negotiate those rates up and up! Share your triumphs so people can see how awesome you are, improving your brand and setting yourself up for more triumphs to come.

Freelance Writers Do Not Control Their Own Fate

The relentless tread of triumph is, obviously, a little disheartening if you are not notably triumphing yourself and haven’t increased your modest yearly income in over a decade. When people advise you not to write for less than $1 a word, and you are lucky to get a tenth of that in many cases, it doesn’t exactly feel supportive and inspiring to hear about the fortunes of your betters. It feels like you are a losing loser who has lost the game of George.This isn’t about jealousy and sour grapes. Or, OK, it is about jealousy and sour grapes. But writing is often an exercise in jealousy and sour grapes. And that’s not because writing is an especially difficult, courageous, spiritual whatsit. It’s because writers are not, in fact, for the most part, hard-charging capitalist managers maximizing our abyss-gazing time via apps. We’re workers. And being workers mostly sucks.If you read George posts, you get the impression that freelancers control their own fate—that if you just get the right information, you can write the right pitch and take the next step in your career. But the truth is that most of us don’t actually have careers. We’ve got cobbled together gigs that lead nowhere in particular, except to the certainty of sporadic failure and humiliation. Freelancers—like most workers—have virtually no power and no leverage. I’m rarely in a position to negotiate terms or ask for more money. The industry standard is that you do the work, and then they decide if they’re going to pay you. Sometimes, an editor will reject a piece for no reason and refuse to give you anything for it. Sometimes, an editor will be rude and abusive for no reason. Editors can yell at you for disagreeing with them on social media. They can end a decade-long relationship with no explanation. They can just disappear and stop returning your emails. There’s nothing you can do about any of that, for the most part, except grin and bear it. Or not grin and sink into despair, as the case may be.

Being workers mostly sucks.

A Community of Empowerment Rarely Highlights Its Inequities

George isn’t completely oblivious to these dynamics. Every so often, you catch a glimpse of collective misery lurking there beneath the carefully preserved veneer of collective cheer. There are posts about trying to pry money out of editors and about editors arbitrarily killing pieces. There are posts about how the industry is dying. There are occasional despairing posts about how you, in fact, cannot get $1 a word anymore. But these are framed as obstacles to skip over on the road upward, rather than as regularly encountered walls in the dead-end maze. A community devoted to career empowerment isn’t going to dwell on collective powerlessness. If you’re lying in bed, contemplating the low ceiling and nonpayment of another invoice, maybe just get that app and pretend you’re a manager whipping yourself into a flurry of activity, controlling your own destiny by quantifying and regulating your own bathroom breaks.Even berating George is mostly an exercise in self-chastisement. How can I be better than George, after all, when I am in George? In the unlikely event that I ever get a byline in The New York Times or The New York Times, I will tell my mom, and then I will share it with George. When people say they are getting paid umpty umpty umpt and no less, I do not say, “Well, I’m grinding out listicles for a content mill at eight cents a word,” because who wants to tell your colleagues, “Hey, I’m a failure.” I pay attention to my brand and manage my time. My inner George gives me a thumbs up. I try not to gag on it.

As I scroll through the once-friendly space that is social media, I can't help but feel dread as I see yet another friend or family member fall to misinformation and selfishness. It makes me sad and angry that my relatives and acquaintances have put blind zeal above science and healthcare and become anti-vaxxers. I'm a devout Catholic, and I can barely recognize my church anymore.The church has long taught that caring for the sick is a priority and a noble deed. There is a list of “corporal works of mercy” that are like guidelines for good works. One of these works of mercy is to visit the sick, but it is extended to caring for and loving the sick and being present with them. The corporal works are meant to be calls to action, not a sedentary response. This is the place where many Christians fall short, including myself. We shout our beliefs but don’t help those who need it the most. We cry for justice and mercy but offer none. We impose morality yet do not live it.

I'm a devout Catholic, and I can barely recognize my church anymore.

Religious Exemptions Don’t Hold Water

Recent events among Christians have shown no regard for the elderly, the immunocompromised and the chronically ill. The people I once knew as generous and selfless are in fact despicably narcissistic. They cling to a religious exemption from the vaccine and hypocritically declare their selfishness to anyone in earshot. But while I am depressed to see their ignorance damage society, the church and themselves, I understand where they are coming from.I have friends and family who have claimed religious exemptions from the vaccine mandate on the grounds that the vaccines were derived from aborted fetal tissue. Those who believe an abortion is a death have said that they cannot take a vaccine that was derived from such means. From the religious point of view, forcing a vaccine mandate is forcing someone to take a vaccine they believe came from a death, which is highly immoral.I understand this logic because I am pro-life, but I still got vaccinated. For me, it was an easy decision. I’m an environmental engineer but also spend a great deal of my free time reading moral theology and philosophy. While many perceive this as a dichotomy, I believe in the cooperation of science and theology. They are not meant to battle, or even simply coexist, but to build each other up and help us understand God and our life on Earth. I believe that even though the vaccine was the result of a death, we should not let that loss of life go to waste. I believe good can come from bad.The vaccine has and will continue to save lives. Why reject something that has already been done? The church has an obligation to protect the sick, which is why even Pope Francis has requested all the faithful to take the vaccine.

Christian Anti-Vaxxers Are Hypocrites

We can see the irony in the defense that some use to seek a religious exemption. They steal an argument out of the pro-choice book and claim "my body, my choice." They believe their appropriation to be a strengthening juxtaposition, but in reality, it buries their argument in a shallow grave of ignorance. Catholics claim that abortion is not adequate healthcare, which leads many with opposite beliefs to think Catholics do not understand proper healthcare. The church’s response to the pandemic has only deepened those doubts. For a group so deeply enmeshed in the healthcare system, it is surprising that we would not jump to the safest and most reliable defense against a deadly disease. The Catholic Health Association of the United States runs over 600 hospitals and is the largest group of nonprofit healthcare providers in the country. To me, the most worrisome issue regarding this pandemic is that the Catholic Church will damage its reputation for healthcare, its pursuit of moral science and its support for those in need.When I have the opportunity to speak on this matter, I generally choose my words carefully. My purpose in discussing this topic is to start a conversation about selflessness. As Christians, we believe the greatest sacrifice one can make is for their neighbor. It’s the golden rule that is so ingrained in our culture: Love your neighbor as yourself.

We cry for justice and mercy but offer none. We impose morality yet do not live it.

The Unvaccinated Aren’t Beyond Redemption

I believe that those who choose to be unvaccinated based on religious grounds are selfish. On the other hand, I also believe it's selfish to dismiss these individuals as too far gone for redemption. Having discussions with your friends and loved ones about the importance of the vaccine is the only thing that will push them to get it.I have a friend who’s a nurse in a pediatric ICU. She has seen hundreds of children suffering from COVID over the last year and a half. Up until a month ago, she was unvaccinated for religious reasons because the vaccine originated from aborted fetal tissue. She decided to get vaccinated because she served so many children on the verge of death that she couldn't bear causing that pain to a child. Her husband is still unvaccinated. Their children are unvaccinated. My family continues to push for them all to become vaccinated.The vaccine should not be a personal choice—it should be a mandate, regardless of its origin. It will save more lives than its cost. I ask those reading to continue to have conversations with their loved ones about getting vaccinated. It may be obvious and directly in front of them, but they still may not see its grave necessity.

Researching the New World Order and globalism took me down many rabbit holes, one of which eventually led me to the most important realization of all: The Bible is true. It hit me like a ton of bricks to the face. And it changed my life forever—literally! That probably sounds weird to you, especially if you're not a Christian, but it's a true story. Yes, I know, I know: Everybody's testimony about how they came to know Christ is special and unique. You've most likely heard plenty of them before. But mine is really, really unique.

Under Odd Circumstances, I Read Books That Fueled Many Questions

It all started in college. After getting arrested for marijuana possession with some dumbass friends, a county court ordered me to do community service at a nonprofit if I wanted to stay out of jail. To be a smart-ass, I decided to do my “service” at a communist people's library in the college town where I lived. It's not that I was a communist, per se, but it just seemed like a funny thing to do, and reading sounded better than smashing big rocks into little rocks. Plus, even though I wasn't a communist, I was militantly anti-God, pro-abortion, anti-war and all those other things that make naive young liberals susceptible to communist manipulation—useful idiots, as they say. In fact, most of my “service” consisted of reading obscure books surrounded by a bunch of burned-out hippies. And naturally, a lot of the books were ridiculous. Next time, they promised, communism would deliver utopia. It's just that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot and all the other mass murderers did it wrong. But there was one book that would set me on a path that would eventually lead to Satan—and then Christ. Hear me out. At this point, I don't even remember the name of it anymore. It was over a decade ago, and I was a big-time pothead and drug user at the time. But I do remember what it was about. According to the book, the Federal Reserve was a private corporation owned by private banks, and the money system was basically a giant scam. “What?!” I thought. “That couldn't possibly be…could it? How could they possibly hide something like that from us for so long?” In any case, I decided this needed to be investigated further. I even called the Fed in Atlanta to ask if it was privately owned—and it was, by its member banks! As I researched, I learned that the book was generally correct. The proposed solution—have Congress nationalize the monetary system and print its own currency instead of paying interest to private banks on the currency they create through the Fed—was perhaps flawed. But the general outline of how the Fed worked was essentially true: It was a scam of monumental proportions.

I came to the conclusion that each one had some truth but that these religions were primarily tools of social control.

George Bush’s New World Order Speech Led Me to Research the United Nations

This newfound insight into the monetary system led me to investigate many other topics. Eventually, I came across the so-called New World Order. Then-President George H. W. Bush famously declared in a State of the Union that Desert Storm was part of a “big idea, a new world order.”“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order, a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations,” he said, alluding to global law. “When we are successful, and we will be, we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.'s founders.”A lot to unpack in that statement. A credible United Nations that would use its “peacekeeping” forces to impose the vision of the U.N.'s founders? At the time, I did not know much about the U.N.'s founders. But the more I studied, the more troubling this became. Joseph Stalin's regime sent a monster named Vyacheslav Molotov. America sent Alger Hiss, who was later convicted in federal court for lying about his role as a Soviet agent and spy. Those U.N. founders? Is he mad? On September 11, 1990, a few weeks after the invasion began, Bush made similar remarks before a joint session of Congress. “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective—a new world order—can emerge,” declared the late president, who, like his son “Dubya” and even John Kerry, was a longtime member of the bizarre Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University. What was with that phrase? It kept coming up over and over again. Weirdos like former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, who wrote the infamous National Security Study Memorandum 200 calling for imposing drastic population control policies on poor countries, seemed to parrot it all the time.

After Hearing So Many Politicians Say It, I Had to Know—What Is the New World Order?

Of course, it wasn't just members of the Bush crime family or Republicans who were peddling this. Leading Democrats are on the bandwagon too. Joe Biden has repeatedly touted the New World Order in public speeches. And on April 23, 1992, Biden even wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined “How I Learned to Love the New World Order.” In it, he proposed that America should “breathe life into the U.N. Charter.” Then-President Bill Clinton used the same exact language as Bush. “After 1989, President Bush said—and it’s a phrase I often use myself—that we needed a New World Order,” Clinton famously declared, echoing countless others around the world and across the United States. It was obvious that there was some kind of agenda here. The question was: What is it?Growing up in international schools around the world, I had always been taught to view the U.N. as a benign, if incompetent institution seeking “world peace” and closer cooperation among nations. The more I studied the “dictator’s club” and its freakish drive to build a New World Order, though, the more I became convinced that something nefarious was afoot. These warmongers didn't seem all that interested in peace. Rather, they seemed interested in power. In my final year of college, I came across a mind-blowing documentary that confirmed my darkest suspicions: The Untold Story of U.N. Betrayal. After learning about the atrocities perpetrated by U.N. “peacekeeping” troops to force the people of Katanga to submit to a Soviet-backed dictatorship, it became clear to me that the U.N. was, in fact, evil.

What the Bible Says About the New World Order Resonated With Me, but I Still Wasn’t a Believer—Yet

Years before all this, I had become curious about religion. Having grown up around the world with people of all religions, I decided to investigate what it was they believed. The library had books on just about everything, so I got some on Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and perhaps a few others. After reading or at least skimming them all, I came to the conclusion that each one had some truth but that these religions were primarily tools of social control.But something kept gnawing at me. The more I studied this New World Order, the more I kept thinking about the Bible. I decided to read the book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. I'll admit it was hard for a non-Christian with very little biblical background to digest. But one thing was very clear: Diabolical forces and world control went hand in hand. The more I worked on the college newspaper I founded with a few friends, the more I felt that we should at least be Christian-friendly. At one point, I even proposed putting a Bible verse, Leviticus 25:10, about proclaiming liberty throughout the land, in the upper corner of our front page. My two deputies, both proud homosexuals, refused to even consider it. But as time went on, that nagging feeling got stronger and stronger.

Oh my god, the Bible is true. It really is!

My Salvation Hit Me Like a Train—the Bible Is True!

Between the Adderall-fueled late nights, the not-so-infrequent magic mushroom trips and lots of studying about the effort to build a New World Order, my mind kept going back to the Bible. Every once in a while, I would even open a random page of an old Catholic Bible that my Aunt Jackie had given me years earlier. It always seemed to be speaking to exactly the issue that was on my mind. Was there something to this?One day, it hit me like a freight train: Oh my god, the Bible is true. It really is! Holy moly! I quickly ran outside to call my Aunt Jackie, the faithful Catholic who also happened to be my godmother and who had been praying for me to find God for all those years. I must have been speaking a zillion miles a minute because I remember her telling me to calm down. “The Holy Spirit has just opened your mind to truth,” I remember her telling me. “This is what I've prayed for all these years.” She did urge me not to go overboard, but the excitement in her voice was obvious too. Something big had just happened. And there would be no going back—ever. My aunt still rags on me about being a Protestant, but she's pleased nonetheless.

I Continue to Find Truth About the New World Order and Biblical Prophecy

As the years went on, and I studied the Bible in more depth, it became more and more obvious to me that the Bible contained the answers to literally all the important questions in life. Gradually, I began to shed my old beliefs—evolution, fornication, abortion and feminism, for example—as the reality of God's word penetrated my heart, mind and soul. Fear about the New World Order disappeared completely. I've never met anybody else with a testimony of salvation quite like mine. And many Christians still refuse to see the biblical answers staring them in the face about what's going on in our world today. But I know one thing: I thank God every day that he saved a wretch like me. And I pray that one day—if he hasn't yet—he will do the same for you.

Back in 2010, when I first heard Rihanna’s “Only Girl in the World,” I felt like the main line—“Want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world”—struck a nerve. Yes, I know what the song’s really about, but the line stuck. In a way, I’d always felt like the only (Jewish) girl in the world. Okay, maybe not in the world, but the only Jewish girl in my small town in northern Mexico. My dad’s Catholic-ish, and after a nasty divorce from my birth mother (who I cut ties with a long time ago, and whose Spanish family was uber-Catholic and uber-conservative) he married my step-mom (who I actually call mom), a Jewish woman from Mexico City. I was raised in a mixed religion household where we always celebrated both Catholic and Jewish traditions and holidays, some out of true conviction and some simply because we were used to it. As a kid, I read the Haggadah every year on Pesach and attended Midnight Mass on Christmas—begrudgingly and mostly for my grandmother’s sake. Despite the mixed religious vibe at home, in the “outside world,” I attended Sunday school and had a huge party for my First Communion (but not bat mitzvah), if only because it was what was expected of young girls of a certain age, social and economic standing in my community. Where I come from, Catholic life plays a huge part in daily life and social events, to the point where I even chose to attend a prestigious Catholic high school despite not sharing the beliefs they stood for. I always knew I wasn’t comfortable with the default Catholic path that had been chosen for me; it wasn’t my truth. I vividly remember sitting at the park where my Sunday school teacher would take us during spring lessons; I’d be that one annoying kid asking “how” and “why” about everything she said. The answer was always the same: “Because that’s the way it is; you gotta have faith.” That answer simply wasn’t good enough for me.

In a way, I’d always felt like the only (Jewish) girl in the world.

I Discovered Ways to Embrace My Judaism, Even When I Felt Isolated

Judaism felt more like my truth: I was not only allowed to question everything but I was often encouraged to do so. Things were never taught as black and white; there’s always a scale of grays to consider. I could explore and discover religion at my own pace instead of there being one absolute way of thinking and doing things. I remember first calling myself a Jew at around 12 years old. I never did this in public, just when I was alone, in my room, daydreaming: “Am I a Jew? Yep. I think I am; I’m Jewish.” I began throwing the word around more and more around my friends and my parents. It wasn’t until I was 15 that I finally decided to fully embrace this: I am a Jew. Of course, this sudden—at least it seemed sudden to most people around me—“change” in beliefs wasn’t always easy. As I said, a big part of social life in my small town was deeply tied to Catholicism. It was an uphill battle for me to be taken seriously. From my extended family refusing to acknowledge my desire to officially convert to Judaism to my father—who doesn’t even consider himself a Catholic anymore—constantly telling me “it is just a phase” I’d get over. Despite all this, I decided I needed to be true to myself. “I am Jewish, no matter what” is what I’d keep telling myself. “My Jewishness is valid, even in a city with this few Jews.” Living in a place where there was no real Jewish community meant I was alone on holidays (the few other Jews would usually travel abroad for holidays), save for my mom and grandma, both of whom had been losing interest in their Jewishness at the same time as I started becoming more interested in mine. I love my family, but it was hard not having a community outside of them that I could share this with. While my town had once been alive with Jewish life back in the early 1900s, there were now less than ten other Jews in the city, and none of them were even close to my age. I stuck out like a sore thumb; everywhere I went, I’d be called la Judía—the Jew.Yeah, I was aware that not everyone meant it in the best way, but I was still proud of it. I loved being different in a way that nobody else at school could. I’d always been in love with the spotlight, both literally and figuratively. I did everything I could to stand out: I joined my school’s show choir and drama club; I joined the Model United Nations team; I’d bake challah every few weeks and share it at school (not to toot my own horn, but everyone always raved about my “Jewish bread”); I volunteered with my high school’s community service brigade; and I ran for homecoming queen my freshman year of high school. At 16, when offered the chance to give a conference about Judaism to some seminary students, I jumped at the chance. I wanted people to know who I was and never forget my name.

I Experienced Antisemitism From My Family and My Community

Turns out, though, that standing out and being different in the way that I was different wasn’t always a positive thing. I’ve experienced everything from covert antisemitic attempts from my very religious aunts trying to make me “see the light” and reconvert me back to Catholicism and good friends trying to sneakily “show me the path of light” by inviting me to any and every Protestant Bible study group and youth retreat, to teachers at my Catholic high school telling me I’d go to hell for negating Jesus Christ as my lord and savior and classmates “jokingly” yell at me that I shouldn’t win the WWII debate in history class because “Hitler wiped away all of” us. The antisemitism I faced was mild and mostly passed off as concern or some other “positive” thing, but it was still very real, and while I usually tried to let it slide and make snarky comments to those who crossed me or questioned my Jewishness—“I don’t believe in hell, but either way, isn’t that where the party’s at anyway? It’s where all the fun people go!” or “Well, the guy missed a spot because I’m still here.”—the negativeness their words and actions carried did have some effect on me. I somehow ended up thinking that because of my less than traditional upbringing, I wasn’t a valid Jew. I constantly felt like I had something to prove simply because I wasn’t someone who had spent her childhood at sleepaway camp, going to shul on the high holidays and had a real bat mitzvah. I did not feel Jewish enough. I found myself regularly trying to overcompensate for this: I started dating more observant people, trying to validate my Jewishness through them. This, of course, never went well: I’d feel left out when they went to temple and shut their phone off for Shabbat every weekend; I couldn’t keep up with their use of Hebrew and Yiddish in casual conversation; and I struggled to remember every Jewish holiday (I now know I was too hard on myself back then; there’s too many to actually keep track of on my own—thank G’d for the Reminders app on my phone). Instead of finding the validation I so desperately sought, the feeling of being “not Jewish enough” was only exacerbated. But then again, when does trying to mold oneself into someone they’re not ever turn out right?

I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I Found My Jewish Community—and Myself

It’s taken a few years and a bit of trial and error to find comfort in my Jewishness and figure out how exactly I fit in the world as a young Jewish woman. I realized that instead of longing for a community that didn’t exist in my hometown, I could instead find one online—that’s the beauty of the internet; there are communities for everything and everyone. I started following Jewish artists, content creators, designers and writers. The pandemic helped this process, as it forced communities and congregations to go fully online and fully remote—finally! Little by little, I started finding my people—my tribe, if you will. My Jewish friend circle grew and with it, my knowledge about all things Jewish. In a way, it felt like finding home.Somewhere along the way, I started writing for a Jewish media site, which opened a whole new set of doors and brought some amazing new Jews into my life, some of whom I have shared experiences with, some who are showing me the many different ways that one can be a valid and worthy Jew in the world. In this process of spiritual discovery, I have begun to find myself, bit by bit. I’ve confirmed some personal beliefs that aren’t necessarily related to religion but are somehow supported by it. I’ve felt empowered to try new things, new foods and just generally to get out of my comfort zone. I’m slowly, but steadily, finding my place in the world as a Jewish woman and discovering how to navigate my Jewishness in a way that isn’t tied to my mom’s, my friends’ or my partners’—in a way that’s entirely my own.

Looking back, it is difficult to put into words what it was like to leave the Jesuit order after only a short stay. What I can tell you is that it was one of the most formative and influential times of my life. What I can also tell you is that when I left, I was certain that I had been there for the right reasons and certain that I still had a long way yet to grow. The lessons in patient trust that I learned there remain. I forget them from time to time, but the essence of what I was striving for—to live a life dedicated to improving the lives of others, to give voice to those unseen and unheard—remains deep, deep within.I am certain that had I been born in another country, or under the auspices of another religious tradition, that I would have found my way to another way of giving back to my community. I came to the Jesuit tradition because I grew up Catholic—forced church outings with the family, stuffy starched shirts for holidays. I was by no means a religious person. If asked, I would say, “I was raised Catholic,” a clean way of signaling that I was forced by my family to do Catholic things, but I certainly never went to church on my own. We were not a terribly religious family, but we had a tradition, which provided a lens through which I could imagine trying to live a life for others. When my high school and college history studies inspired in me a deep concern for my community and filled me with a desire to find an outlet for helping others, I turned to this tradition.

I felt deeply that something had to be done, and done now.

College Didn’t Offer the Education I Wanted

I had the great fortune of encountering fabulous and daring teachers in school, who wanted us to explore, read and gobble up every drop of knowledge we could find. Through this process, living in a world of privilege, excommunicated from reality by the manner in which I was raised, I discovered, rather naively, that the rest of the world did not live as I did and, even worse, would never be presented with the opportunities that I had. This angered me. I felt deeply that something had to be done, and done now. Everywhere I turned in college seemed dedicated to an idea of self-absorbed consumption. “How do I afford to live in fancy oblivion?” It was only the voice of a distant past in my life, a tradition long forgotten, that helped me find another path. Religion made it OK for me to walk away from material wealth and the desire for a job that gave me nothing but a paycheck. It filled me with the hope that I could one day actually help people who actually needed help. And so it was, in the most circuitous of ways, I found myself learning about Jesuits, an order within the Catholic machinery that sets itself—or seems to set itself—apart from the rest of the priesthood, dedicated to a proposition that a life worth living is a life in service to others. This tradition had been there, in the background of my existence, for a long time, but until then, I had mostly ignored it. Now, fueled by a desire for change in the world, I began to reach out. When college ended, and others were scrambling to find internships or jobs or pay their rent, I was packing my bags. Through contacts from my childhood and new Jesuit friends, I had made arrangements to live and work at a school in Quito, Ecuador. The school was dedicated to teaching the poor and ignored the needs of the wealthy. This, for me, was a dream: to turn the world upside down, to make genuine opportunity a practical and obtainable reality.

Service to Others Changed My Life

My time in Ecuador was short. My days were filled with the routines of teachers, the most underappreciated of professions. Herding children between classes, trying to teach, trying to grab a quick bite between classes. Every day was a mess, and every day was filled with laughter and hope.Resolved to continue this tradition, I informed my very shocked family that not only was I feeling religious, but I was feeling religious enough to live the vows of a Jesuit priest. I set off for Middle America to live and work in what many would call a seminary, but the Jesuits call a novitiate. While I was there, the romance and grandeur of it all swept me away. I was a novice, working and living with other novices: Class during the day, meditation at night, mentorship from Jesuits who had been living this lifestyle for years, decades even. For a few months, everything seemed to just fit into place, and I found myself in a place of growth. But as I would discover, it is the law of all progress that one must pass through some stages of instability that may take a very long time.Part of the Jesuit tradition includes prayer, or what I might call meditation. This daily “examen” calls upon the individual to focus on what worked today, to be grateful for that and to use that gratitude to focus on tomorrow. I was lucky enough to be in a place where I had the opportunity to meditate as a part of a daily routine. This was coupled with work for local nonprofits, classes and other volunteer opportunities. And through this process, I discovered a deeper passion within myself to be an unencumbered voice for others. It would lead me to walk away from the Jesuit order and the traditions I had found there.One of the most deeply held values with the Jesuit priesthood is that of obedience. It is a vow to serve the pope of the Roman Catholic Church and, by extension, all the people of Earth. This promise requires patient trust that the machine of the church is moving in the correct direction. This is both a beautiful and intimidating promise. And as I meditated on this tradition, I began to learn the deep value that these traditions held for those close to me at the novitiate. Many of my now dearest fellow novices came to the Society of Jesus seeking this tradition and depended upon it as a bedrock for the work they would go on to do. I was not coming to the Jesuits from the same direction. My bedrock was a deep desire to help others, and through that desire, I had found a tradition that gave power to the voiceless.

My bedrock was a deep desire to help others, and through that desire, I had found a tradition that gave power to the voiceless.

I Realized That I Had a Different Path to Take

I discovered that my trajectory and the trajectory of so many of the lives of my fellow novices overlapped. I also discovered that if I remained, my impatience for immediate change, my impatience to be a voice right now, would create friction in my life that could eventually fester into a bitterness that would then sap my passion and leave nothing but a bitter husk, unable to articulate how or why I had wanted this life in the first place.It was a beautiful—and, I’ll admit, terrifying—moment for me. I remember sobs shaking through my body. There was bitterness of the distant future I saw but gratitude to be lucky enough to spend time on myself, meditating and pondering the next deliberate steps of my life. When I reached out to my mentor and others, what I received was not only love and patience but an understanding that astounded me. It was as if they already knew and were only waiting for me to discover my path. They could see it before me but wanted me to see it first. As I sat among peers, friends and Jesuits, saying goodbye to a tradition and a lifestyle, there was a moment of happiness. Our lives had been brought together for a reason, maybe a reason we didn’t understand or comprehend. But that is how all growth is. It takes time. There will be stages of instability on the way to finding something unknown, something new, and that was happening to us before our eyes. It was a moment where all of us could accept the anxiety of feeling ourselves in suspense and incomplete but on our way, and it was beautiful. The Jesuits were gracious enough to offer me a path and allow me to walk alongside them for as long as my life’s work coincided. As it turns it out, my time did not last terribly long. But more than anything, when I did decide it was time to go, I was awed by their patient trust and happiness to see me on my way to whatever lay ahead.“You are like a race car,” my mentor and dear friend told me. “Some fancy, awful red thing on a mountain pass, so excited to speed along your way. But you are stuck behind a truck filled with chickens in the truck bed, discarding feathers and odors into what you had planned.”

I am an African American millennial and am only now realizing the microaggressions and weirdness I faced as a (now former) Catholic woman.I grew up going to Catholic school, which I attended from kindergarten to fourth grade. I wasn’t into being a Catholic because I was a kid and didn’t know any better. In hindsight, I can see toxic behavior at the school from early on. My older sister got more praise as an exceptionally gifted student and was made an altar girl. I was labeled the “dumb sister” and put into a special education program that took me away from regular classes. I was shoved to the side when it came to participating in the church, except for singing. Even then, my sister, who wasn’t a good singer, was given more praise than me. We left Catholic school because my mom couldn’t afford for us to attend anymore. As a single mother, she later told me that the school treated her like complete shit because she was late on the tuition payments so often. She told me that the principal favored children from more traditional families.

I Tried Other Religions

After we left Catholic school, my family stopped going to church. However, the feeling of being labeled as less than my sister followed me my entire life. I excelled in public school and graduated in the top 25 percent of my class—something that I don’t think a Catholic education would have allowed me to achieve. However, there was still something empty that I needed to fill.I tried different religions—from Baptist to Buddhist, from Satanist to Wiccan to agnostic. I briefly considered becoming Jewish after finding out that Sammy Davis Jr. had converted. But no other religion stuck with me. I realized that maybe I really was Catholic and this is why the other faiths didn’t connect. At the time, the worst thing I could be was not spiritual in some way.

There was still something empty that I needed to fill.

I Ended up Coming Back to Catholicism

In 2015, during a time in my life that was very volatile, I decided to do the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), which is a class for adults converting to Catholicism or who want to receive sacraments that they didn’t get as kids. In my case, I had been baptized at my Catholic school and completed both my first confession and my First Communion. The last sacrament I needed was confirmation. While I enjoyed the classes and did well in them, it felt like I needed to put in extra effort for the church and the Catholic community to respect me. Keep in mind, this was a different church in a different city from the one I went to as a kid. I could tell that the priest would rather have his favorite people reading “the word of the Lord” than me. I could tell that there was an air that I wasn’t Catholic enough. There were unwritten rules that I didn’t follow. I noticed everyone who was in my church was going to school to be a nurse. I didn’t want to do that at all and decided to help people in other ways. I also noticed that the income level at the church was higher than mine. Some snobby parishioners looked down on me because I was making a certain amount of money a year, even though I did manage to put a dollar into the collection basket every week.The church also respected Hispanic and white women a lot more than African American women. There was one other African American woman aside from myself. The two of us were ignored and weren't appreciated as much as others. I didn’t mind this as much at the time—everyone has their favorite people. But looking back now and seeing it laid out like this, it is very egregious.The only place where I felt welcomed in the church was the choir. Even then, people acted weird. I tend to be a joyful person with a good attitude about life most of the time. The people in the choir were on an unsettling level above me. It was almost like they’d been lobotomized. They seemed to laugh nervously at the end of a conversation. Also, I could sense extreme anxiety in others, especially single women. People in the church I attended very likely had mental health issues that had gone undiagnosed. As Catholics, we do not tend to our mental needs in a traditional sense. We are advised to pray on it and God will guide us to the right answer. I was also feeling a lot of pressure to hurry up and find my path, to either date someone or give myself to God, meaning become a nun. Married women in the church were not as anxious. I found it strange how the environment subtly pushed women to get married. RCIA met around the same time as the church’s marriage preparation classes. This was done on purpose. The church was in the middle of a college campus, further putting pressure on young women on top of the average stressors of college life. It seemed like the path was either marriage or becoming a nun, but the push was more on marriage than being a nun.

I can be a good person without the label of religion.

I Never Felt at Home in the Catholic Church

A few months after I got confirmed, I had to leave my house. I applied at a boarding house in the Catholic community, thinking that being there would bring me closer to the Lord. I got rejected because I was not Catholic enough. The priest who owned the boarding house told me, “The people living there are apostles. I don’t think you would fit in with the community.” I went to visit the house, and there was an air of inauthentic welcomeness. I felt like I had been branded as someone who wasn’t Catholic enough and wasn’t following the path they wanted me to. The final straw that made me leave Catholicism was when I discovered that my friend had been sexually assaulted by a priest. I took my frustration to another friend, who told me to “pray on it.” That got me even angrier. The Catholic Church chooses to turn the other cheek on sexual assault allegations. Some priests get moved from parish to parish when facing allegations of sexual assault—it's almost as if the religion doesn’t want to deal with its responsibility. On top of all of the microaggressions from being “not Catholic enough” that I had faced since I was a kid, things had become crystal clear. This religion is not for me. At that point, I decided to stop talking to anybody at that church.A friend who had attended an all-girls Catholic high school, whom I met after my experiences, told me horror stories about her experiences as a Catholic. They also told me how Catholicism falls into Steven Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control, which was designed to identify cults. I promptly looked up YouTube videos about Catholicism and the BITE model (which measures behavioral control, informational control, thought control and emotional control), and they were on point with some of my experiences.Although I didn’t experience firsthand the church’s teachings about puberty and sexuality, the school my friend attended gave all the teenage girls purity rings and made them promise to abstain from sex until they got married. The Catholic school also withheld certain topics in science, namely evolution, because it’s against the religion and taught creationism instead. I found this very unsettling. I now realize that I’m an atheist. The empty feeling I felt before was a lack of community, which I have since found by joining groups related to my hobbies, rather than religious groups. While I don’t feel comfortable sharing that I am an atheist to the people close to me—because it would imply that I am an evil, immoral person—I can be myself and also respect other people’s religions, cultures and sexualities without judgment.I can be a good person without the label of religion.

Growing up, my father was a man of the cloth. He was an amazing minister, and when he was at the pulpit, my lord, he could preach the word of God. I remember sitting in the sanctuary and seeing the nods of parishioners as he spoke to their hearts. After church, I would watch him talk with the parishioners, giving them undivided attention, patience, humor and kindness, and I just remember thinking: Why don’t I get this man? You see, when I was young, my father was an extremely functional alcoholic. He was addicted to prescription pain medication, and he got through his life of service by drinking. All day. Meanwhile, my mother struggled with her own codependency and depression while raising three boys. My mom got through her life by sleeping. All day.However, to the outside world, we were the “preacher’s family.” Whether you like it or not, you have a title in the community. Especially in the South, there was this unsaid understanding and expectation that we represented the church. We kept the facade up for some time, sitting in the back of the church so no one would see us but making it known we were there.I remember as a child going with my father to visit people in the hospital or the nursing home. I loved it. I loved seeing him pray with them. I remember fondly giving Communion with him to this elderly woman one time at a nursing home. It was as much Communion for me as it was for her. It was time with my dad, and he was centered and focused.

He got through his life of service by drinking. All day.

My Family Has Suffered Pain and Experienced Crises of Faith

These moments usually coincided with a stop at the gas station, picking up a tallboy six-pack and drinking it before getting home. At some point, my mom would catch on, a huge fight would break out and it would usually last for weeks. We were a family in crisis, and we fit the box of the classic alcoholic family system. Sadly, the God I heard my father preach about was not doing anything for me at home. In fact, it felt like God was this annoying afterthought in our household. One night, I remember sitting around the dinner table and asking if we could pray. My father said no. Even though he knew religion, he fought the idea of religiosity over spirituality. After my dad got sober, I remember him telling me that he made more money in the church—and was assigned to larger churches—when he was drinking. When he got sober, he just didn’t have the energy to put on a preacher’s face anymore. Truthfully, the bullshit that goes into the politics of the church is very separate from the spirituality we strive to find while attending church. The people with money have influence because they contribute the most to the church. Each day, I saw my dad struggle between doing what was right for the church and what parishioners thought was best. It was a crisis of faith for my father on so many levels, and it broke my heart to see him struggle.Over the years, I have suffered from my own addictions. I have been in recovery from morbid obesity, binge-eating disorders and pornography, sex and love addictions. Through my recovery, our family has suffered much loss and pain. My older brother has struggled with addiction, and five years ago, I lost my younger brother to suicide. He also struggled with addiction and had bipolar disorder. Watching a father officiating his own son’s funeral is an experience like no other.

When he got sober, he just didn’t have the energy to put on a preacher’s face anymore.

Many People Like Me Have Been Hurt by Organized Religion

I share all these dramas because the contradiction of growing up a preacher’s kid and the reality of my life exemplifies how complex and how simple it really can be. You might ask, “Where is God, and what does God mean to you?” “How do you separate your experience with the church and your father without bitterness toward God?” I’m not here to get you to believe in God.But here’s what I want you to know: Embrace the contradictions in your life. Contradictions are the greatest source of inspiration—they help define what you want and how to experience a higher power in your life. I held so much resentment in my life toward my father and the church. But as I grew into an adult, I had to own my life experiences. I had to admit that in my resentment, I was killing myself because deep down, I wanted to prove that God and everyone else really fucked my life up. I reached a point where I had to ask myself what I really wanted. I can easily prove to you how fucked up the church and its politics are. I can prove how deeply the church hurt my father, but at some point, I have to make a decision to choose my narrative. Sadly, so many of us have been hurt by organized religion, and we’ve stayed tied to the trauma of it because we still give it power.

It’s Important to Decide the Kind of Relationship You Want With God

The church is just a building. The robe my dad wore was just cloth. The people in the church are just people. And communion is just bread and wine. These things have the meaning I choose to give them. This article may offend people, but it’s not meant to offend one’s relationship with religion. I just want to remind you that you, first and foremost, have a relationship with yourself, and in that, you decide the relationship you want with God or a higher power. At this point in my life, I don’t know if I identify as a Christian. I take what I like from so much, and I leave the rest that doesn’t work. Regardless, I want to share with you these verses from 1 Corinthians 13:11-13:“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

At the first Buddhist meeting I attended, I was taken aback by the chanting. It was so loud and fast. I had done chanting before during yoga teacher training, but that was slow and melodic. At this meeting, everyone was chanting vigorously, which didn't make sense to me at first. But the more I learned about this Buddhist practice, the more I came to understand why. Each person was trying to change their life for the better, and they were trying to do it through chanting. Whereas yoga is about finding inner peace, this Buddhism, called Nichiren Buddhism, is about becoming the best version of yourself and winning over obstacles. It’s a totally different vibe, and it was just what I needed. I had been practicing yoga for years but still struggled with depression and feeling lost. I had dropped out of medical school, and not knowing what to do next was unnerving. I was just working the front desk at a yoga studio, grasping at spiritual straws hoping to feel better. Then, one day, a yoga teacher approached me and asked how I was doing. “I’m OK, just tired.”“Your soul is tired,” he said. I felt that. “What about Buddhism?” he asked. Oh yeah! I knew a friend who did that with a lot of success. I always meant to go to a meeting with her, but never did, and we lost touch. This time, I was ready. He followed the protocol of connecting me with a young woman living in my area who could take me to an introductory meeting. He told me her name was Gaia, a unique name that sounded familiar. Sure enough, it was someone I knew from high school, a good friend’s sister. She brought me to that first meeting and the rest is history.

I am responsible for my own karma.

Through Chanting, I Learned to Take Responsibility of My Life

From that point, I pretty much just kept saying yes to things. I didn’t have a lot going on at that time, so I went to a lot of meetings and learned about the lay Buddhist organization that these people belonged to called Soka Gakkai International (SGI). After a few months, I officially became a member. This involved receiving my own gohonzon, the scroll that we chant to. It has a bunch of things written in Japanese that are meant to represent all of the possible life states: hell, hunger, anger, rapture, learning. Down the center, in bold, is “nam myoho renge kyo,” the phrase we chant, which is supposed to represent the highest life state of Buddhahood. This isn’t the type of Buddhism that worships the Buddha as a deity but rather one that nurtures our own inner Buddha, our inner wisdom and compassion. I don’t know if it’s the sustained breath control or the vibrations of the sound massaging my vagus nerve, but chanting made me feel calmer and centered right away, and my outlook on life began improving. According to Nichiren, the 13th-century Japanese monk who founded this type of Buddhism, everything is based on cause and effect. I realized that I wasn’t a victim of circumstances but rather a summation of my thoughts, words and actions. I am responsible for my own karma. Taking responsibility was difficult but also empowering. I realized that I needed to start making better decisions. It sounds so simple, but this was the first time I was doing it for myself, and not because I was guilt-tripped by a religion or authority figure to do what I’m “supposed to”.

I Became More Involved in Nichiren Buddhist Meetings

As time went on, other members would ask me to participate in meetings, and so I started acting as an emcee or helping with various presentations. About six months in, I was asked to share my experience with our district: a smaller subgroup of 30-40 people who met monthly to chant and have discussions. It wasn’t until I sat down to write about my experience with the practice that I realized how much I had changed. I wrote about two people. One was lonely and sad, directionless, stuck at home. The other had a new relationship, new job, new apartment, new lease on life. They were me, before and after chanting, and I couldn’t believe it. I guess my story was inspiring because they asked me to share it at a bigger meeting in front of hundreds of people. But these changes were relatively superficial; I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was supposed to be a doctor, and now what? Change to tech? Start from scratch? Some of the leaders who had been practicing for a long time and who I respected for their success, both in careers and life, told me that if I wanted to level up my career, then I needed to level up my involvement in the SGI.

The Practice Helped Me Find Direction in Life and Overcome Everyday Obstacles

Around this time, the opportunity came up to volunteer at the Friendship Center, ushering meetings and manning the welcome desk. I kept to my rule of always saying yes, as it had been working out well. In my entrance interview for the role, they asked me what aspect of my life I was challenging. I said that I really wanted to connect with my personal mission. I wanted to take the karma of being a med school dropout and turn it into something positive. A couple months later, I accidentally got an acupuncture treatment and was so inspired that, before I knew it, I was starting a master’s program in traditional Chinese medicine. I now had a path, a direction. It was a lightbulb moment, and my family asked why I hadn’t thought of it before. And that’s the crazy thing.I had gotten acupuncture the year before from a referral and was so underwhelmed that I brushed it off. But by chanting and showing up, I was able to reveal the potential of an opportunity that I didn’t see before. I realized I could still get a graduate degree, diagnose and treat patients and use all of my Western medicine knowledge in a way that aligned my spiritual side with my ultimate goal: to genuinely help people. They say chanting “polishes the mirror” so one can see things clearly. I feel like chanting polished my mirror, and I went from having no clear future to having a career path that I absolutely love. Since then, I have used this “strategy” countless times. When I’m facing a challenge and I seem to be hitting a wall or don’t know what to do next, chanting somehow changes the energy and unlocks potential in a situation. As one example, there was a time my boyfriend and I decided to get our own place. We thought it would be easy, so we put in our notice with the roommate. Well, it proved to be more difficult than we thought, so we had all of our stuff packed up in a U-Haul and still no place to go. Basically homeless and stressed, he wanted to keep running around to apartments filling out applications, but I insisted we go to the Friendship Center for my weekly young women’s meeting. While there, we chanted, and I talked to them about my situation, about how we couldn’t find a place and how I was probably going to have to have my dad co-sign with us. They encouraged me, saying that I would be able to find a place and to do it without needing a co-signer so that I could be truly independent. It seemed unrealistic at that point, but the thought was nice, and having other people believe in me made me feel better. And then, as we were driving away from the center, the leasing office from the apartment we wanted called us to say that we were approved without a co-signer! I couldn’t believe it.

They all focus on becoming happy and making the world a better place.

I Keep Coming Back to Nichiren Buddhism and Its Healing Power

I have dozens of stories like this, and so does everyone who has been practicing for a while. Sometimes, I don’t understand why more people don’t join, but then I remember how weird it all seemed when I first started. And maybe some people get the aspects of encouragement and support from family and different communities. There are aspects of it that aren’t always ideal, and it can feel religious at times. But as far as religions go (I was raised Catholic), this Buddhism is pretty chill overall. There aren’t any rules, just suggestions, and they all focus on becoming happy and making the world a better place. Would I love to get the benefits of practice without having to chant a strange phrase to an inscription I can’t even read? Sure. And attend countless (now Zoom) meetings? Yes. And I’ve always given myself that freedom. If I find something better or easier, then I will do it. If my depression and anxiety and self-doubt magically go away, then I will stop. I have actually taken breaks from it because it is work and, at times, annoying. But it’s been six years. And I always come back.I’ve tried a lot of different things for my mental health, but this one has it all. No one can argue with the fact that taking time out of your day to pray or chant and be mindful is good for you; no one can contest that aligning with your goals on a regular basis will help you achieve them; and no one can dispute that having the support of people who truly want you to succeed will add joy to your life. But for me, what I gain from this practice as a whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

“What would you give,” sings a rough tenor, and then another responds with falsetto keen, “in exchange!” Then they harmonize together, the voices intertwined, stretching for heaven. What would you give in exchange for your soul? Oh, if today God should call you away What would you give in exchange for your soul?The song is an old Monroe Brothers number from the ’30s, but my favorite version is a 1963 duet; Doc Watson provides the slow, delicate guitar strum, and Bill Monroe adds distinctive crystal mandolin runs and high tenor. It’s a song of almost unendurable longing, which manages to be both delicate and ragged, dreamy and bleak. It’s also a song about how I, personally, am going to go to hell. When they sing, “Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?” my answer is pretty clearly, “No, thanks.” I’m a Jewish atheist; I don’t believe Christ is lord, and I don’t even think I have a soul. Watson and Monroe are singing lovely harmonies to my wrongness and my eternal damnation.

It’s also a song about how I, personally, am going to go to hell.

Western Music Is Steeped in Christianity

You’d think it would be off-putting to have people tell you that your life choices are going to lead to such catastrophic consequences. But I’ve long been a fan of both white and Black gospel music and of other Christian performers as well. I love Johnny Cash’s “Were You There (When They Crucified My Lord),” with Anita Carter providing heavenly high notes. I adore the Soul Stirrers’ “By and By,” with R.H. Harris’ sweet yodel urging on Paul Foster’s gospel shout. I can listen over and over to the hoarse, chesty bellow of Rev. Sister Mary Nelson or the icy quaver of Lloyd Chandler, even though I am definitely not ready for judgment and am unprepared for eternity. And I’ll wail along with Ozzy when he declares, “Your world was made for you by someone above/But you choose evil ways instead of love!” I don’t think the world was made for me by anyone in particular, but if, like me, you’re obsessed with roots music, and with music in general, the Christians are hard to escape. Four-part harmony in Western music came out of the church, as did seminal pop vocalists, from Sam Cooke to Beyoncé. I don’t just like Christian music because I can’t avoid it, though. Like most Jewish people and most atheists in the U.S., I’ve spent the bulk of my life in a culture with a preponderance of Christian people. It seeps in. Christian aestheticization of wounds and death and despair is my weird death cult, too, from Grüenwald’s twisted crucifix to The Omen. When Roberta Flack sings, “I told Jesus/‘Be alright/If you changed my name,’” I’m moved by Flack’s light voice pulsing and soaring over Ron Carter’s soulfully ominous bassline. But the message of transformation, ostracism and triumph amid degradation (“He said, ‘Your father won’t know you, child/If I change your name’”) is meaningful too.

I Hear Gospel Music in a Different Context

You can’t live your whole life surrounded by crosses and not end up feeling like Calvary is meaningful. Even if you’re an atheist and a Jew, you end up carrying the cross around. When I curse, I often do so in Jesus’ name, and when I think about redemption or forgiveness, it’s bathed in Christian imagery and references to a heaven that Jews mostly and atheists definitely don’t think exists and are supposed to be barred from. Jews aren’t major targets of bigotry in the U.S. like some other groups, so the sense of disorientation isn’t hugely traumatic or something I have to think about a ton. But you do occasionally remember the dominant culture doesn’t consider you to be a part of something you are, in fact, a part of. Like all those Jewish people who got their patronymics anglicized by immigration officials or for their own convenience, your name gets changed whether you want it to be or not. So yes, part of the reason I like Christian music is that I’ve been assimilated into a culture that kind of thinks I’m damned (“Mercy is calling you; won’t you give heed?”). I enjoy Christian music because it’s my music, somewhat despite myself. But I think I also enjoy it because it isn’t my music. My wife, whose family is from Appalachia and who has honest-to-God Bible thumpers among her relatives, finds my enthusiasm for Christian music positively perverse. When the Louvin Brothers sing, “That word ‘broad-minded’ is spelled S-I-N,” she hears it in the context of some decidedly small-minded family members and their views on out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or queer people, or even going into bars. For me, though, Christian music is a lot less fraught. Yes, I live in a country with a lot of Christian people, but to the extent that religion has irritated me in a close personal way, my resentment is directed at Hebrew school, not church. There are definitely Christians in the political realm who would like to make my life and my family’s lives and the lives of most people in the country a misery, and I cordially hate them. But having people just preach at me doesn’t trigger any particular trauma. I wasn’t there when they crucified your lord. It’s not about me.

Even if you’re an atheist and a Jew, you end up carrying the cross around.

Gospel Music Can Transcend Boundaries

In her book Dialectic of Pop, Agnès Gayraud argues that part of the pleasure of pop music—by which she means music made for records, basically—is that it’s always both about you and not about you. The whole point of a record (or an MP3) is to get music out of its original context and take it somewhere else where it didn’t originate and where it doesn’t quite belong. That’s why there are so many pop songs about traveling. Pop is always motorvatin’ over the hill or leaving on a jet plane or, in gospel, putting on its travelin’ shoes.Yes, Marion Williams and the Clara Ward Singers in “Travelin’ Shoes” are talking about walking right into heaven. But they’re also talking about leaving their selves behind and becoming disembodied voices. The joy of the song comes in part from a sense of togetherness in the community of the saved. And the joy comes in part from a sense of being freed from any one community, as you cast off the dust of this world for the next. And in part, it comes from the tension between them. It’s “the unresolved dialectic between roots and uprooting,” as Gayraud puts it, swooping between Williams’ earthy growl and the high pitched “ooooooo!” The song belongs here, and it belongs to everyone, at the same time, divine and human at once. Marion Williams’ producer in her later years, and her greatest fan, was Anthony Heilbut, another Jewish atheist. “What we admire is so clearly beyond our own reach,” Heilbut writes in his most recent book, The Fan Who Knew Too Much. That’s part of the wonder of it; the music isn’t yours. And then if you love it enough, in part because it isn’t, it is. Much great Christian music is about telling me I don’t belong. But it’s also about stepping out of those immanent boxes, Jew and gentile, to all be one in some divine something. You don’t have to give your soul in exchange. You just have to listen.

At the risk of sounding like a complete poser, I believe it’s fitting to start an article about the current state of religion with the infamous quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Intentionally dramatic as the quote may be, through modern eyes, he’s got a point. Somewhere along the line, we’ve collectively thrown the baby out with the baptismal bathwater and begun eschewing religion for any number of reasons that we believe to be true and that we never think to question.Religion is difficult to define. To me, it refers to what you believe about humanity's relationship to a higher power (or god), with our chosen religion teaching us a set of practices and guiding principles to live by, such as being kind to others, telling the truth or praying. While this sounds good in theory, we face a real issue as a global society when we confuse church, religion and faith as the same thing, a mistake that muddies our mental and existential waters.

We’ve collectively thrown the baby out with the baptismal bathwater and begun eschewing religion for any number of reasons that we believe to be true and that we never think to question.

My Initial Distaste for Religion Started With My Mother

Religion has always been defined as a belief in a higher power—oftentimes labeled God with a capital G—and the practice of religion involves praying to, or worshipping, that God in a church. But my faith in religion and the established norms and practices of worshipping said God in a church is tenuous because while my faith comforts me, the very act of religious practice, whereby I need to be somewhere on a Sunday morning at a set time to have someone rebuke my day-to-day actions and proclaim eternal damnation, leaves me a little reticent. This goes a long way to explaining why God, church, religion and all the associated tropes are creating an increasingly secular Western society. It would be all too easy to place blame on the increasing secularization of Western populations on a variety of issues: the inappropriate sexual behaviors of clergymen; the focus of many religions being ruled by an outside authority rather than self-reliance; outdated rules about same-sex marriage, condoms, etc.; and that religion, for the most part, divides people, causing ideological disharmony, conflict and war. But I believe the greatest threat to the future role of religion and faith in society is our inability and unwillingness to openly discuss, debate and deliberate on this highly contentious topic.Case in point: My first date with my wife was the stuff of Hollywood rom-com legend. We clicked right away and spent several hours energetically chatting about our lives, our hopes and plans for the future and everything in between. However, when I brought up the topic of faith, she clammed up and became evasive, an odd response for someone who had previously been a church pastor for well over a decade. In time, I showed her I was coming at the topic without judgment as a man of faith, albeit a faith I had, for the most part, kept hidden from my fellow man out of fear of judgment. And yes, I see the irony of penning an article on encouraging people to openly discuss their faith, or lack of, even when I hid mine for so long.My reticence to share my faith and religious views was born kicking and screaming, much like leaving the womb, dragged into a church by my mother when I was a young teen. She wanted to let me experience religion firsthand to make up my own mind; however, her approach was inadvertently inappropriate, as she immediately inculcated my distaste in religion by forcing it upon me, as is often the case across countless cultures.

I’ve Learned That Most People of Faith Don’t Care About Differing Beliefs

To further confound people’s willingness to find and share their story of faith and enact the truisms of their chosen religion, we still have the age-old debate that “my religion trumps your religion because [insert answer here].” I’m not sure when religion became a competition, but surely the debate is moot if we view faith and religion as individual pursuits, which have nothing to do with what other people choose to believe. That’s why I’ve finally clambered cautiously out of my religious closet and begun speaking more freely about what I believe when invited to do so. I’ve come to accept that the majority of people I know who are Muslim, Jewish, Presbyterian, etc. are all happy and equally served by what they believe. They don’t give a rat's ass that my beliefs often run contrary to their own. To say this discovery was liberating is an understatement.I know this because, in recent years, I became curious about the role that faith and organized religion played in the lives of people whose religion and faith are their own. People who don’t proselytize, knocking on doors and thrusting propagandistic pamphlets into the hands of unwilling passersby, but those who simply live their lives by the tenets that serve them, their families and their communities—oftentimes, in such a manner that no one is the wiser to the higher power they worship guiding the reigns.The aphorism “what was once heresy is now commonplace” could well be applied to modern religion and the church. We now have female pastors and priests and church services that are as much rock concerts as devout moments for worship; yet even with these modernizations, we are still by and large loath to have the courage to rethink and unlearn our previous beliefs. And more so, to have the courage to speak openly about what we believe and why we choose to live in line with a widely diminished faith.

They don’t give a rat's ass that my beliefs often run contrary to their own. To say this discovery was liberating is an understatement.

I’m More Open to Talking About My Faith and Accepting Others’

I’m deeply glad I met my wife and that her faith is such an important part of her life. She’s given me the courage to share my own beliefs and views with her and to dive courageously into dangerously edgy conversations with angry, ill-informed atheists who blatantly push an agenda that belittles people of faith's ideological beliefs simply because they believe otherwise. Any way you look at it, even as religion undergoes different forms of change, it still remains one of the most important social, cultural and political actors in societies around the world.Part of the problem with the emotional discourse around religion is the societal predilection for oversimplifying the world into black or white, right or wrong. This leaves us in a predicament where anything that runs contrary to our beliefs must be wrong, and so we dig our heels in and rant, yell and rail against the “other” instead of listening. When I interviewed people about why they had committed murder or killed someone due to circumstance, I learned the skill of appreciative inquiry: the art of inquiring about another person’s beliefs and appreciating that they are as true and real to them as my own beliefs are to me. Though our species is constructed of similar DNA, our beliefs and convictions are shaped by our culture, community and experience. But what we seem to forget is life is fluid, and we respond differently as our maturity, intellect and circumstances change. What I believed as a teenager and man in my 20s and 30s has shifted in ways now that I could never have anticipated. Where I once viewed religion as a salve for moments where I was in need or distressed, I now find myself rethinking the value of faith and religion because I have taken the time to really hear my wife’s belief in salvation and trust her faith as something that serves her and that likewise may serve me. Maybe if we all took time to use our mouth and ears in the appropriate ratio, we could reduce the angry rhetoric, frustration and fighting and start to accept that some people believe, some don’t and some are still finding their own answers. All three options are OK.

I was born in a family with two poles of belief. My mom was a Hindu devotee and my father was an atheist. We didn’t have many conversations about the gods and religion. It was my mother’s routine to pray and burn incense. There was a different prayer for every different god and a different day set aside to pray to each.My dad used to tell me this was all bullshit, that there is no God. For a while, I chose to believe him because I thought he was more intelligent than my mom. But when I started watching horror shows based on true stories, I started to have my doubts. I thought, if religion wasn’t real, how could the priest make the ghosts go away? I firmly believed in ghosts, and I figured if God isn’t there, then we’re screwed.

My dad used to tell me this was all bullshit, that there is no God.

I Saw Firsthand the Effects Faith Can Have on People

My first deep knowledge of our gods came from TV shows like Ramayan and Mahabharat. Every child in India grows up watching these shows. And just like people have favorite actors or actresses or superheroes, in India, children pick out their favorite gods. It didn't take long for me to find mine. The god of destruction is Shiva, who is portrayed as an angry man who destroys everything when he gets mad. I didn't like that. The god of birth is Brahma. He looked too neutral and old for me. Then, there is Lord Vishnu, who nourishes. He looked cheerful. His incarnation was Lord Krishna, and he looked even more cheerful, handsome and flirty. I loved him. He became my favorite god. Every other god in Hinduism is said to be the incarnation of those first three. And some other religions also emerged from Hinduism. Gautama Buddha is said to be the incarnation of Lord Vishnu as well. Then, there were lady gods. One was for knowledge. I had to respect and pray to her because I was a student and without her, how would I get the knowledge I was looking for?When I was a child, I had an experience that I could never decipher. My mother came from an isolated area. It was approximately 200 kilometers from our home. My grandfather used to live there, so we went there once a year to visit him. My father never came with us when we visited. We got off the bus and crossed a river on stones that rose up out of the water. Then, we climbed a mountain and there it was: only two or three houses, set far away from each other. They were self-sustaining, with many kinds of crops and fruits growing around. They didn’t need much from the market.One day, the people of that area met at the house of one of the inhabitants of the area. A ritual was happening on the top floor, with drumming and singing. We were with my mother's brother, and he suddenly had an extreme change in personality. He started tearing the cloth he was sitting on with his teeth. I asked my mom what was happening to him, and she told me that he had the spirit of a goddess inside of him. I was scared and amazed at the same time. I thought, what if the spirit enters inside my body? What would that feel like?But it never did. That ritual was performed to have a better connection with the goddesses. It almost felt like the people there were high on God. If chemicals can give people confidence, imagine what kind of confidence one can get if they can feel that ultimate source of power is within them? I don’t know if those incidents were true or not, but if they weren’t, then it was certainly a powerful placebo effect.Finally, my mother's brother vomited something out of his mouth and then he was normal again. Then, the spirit moved inside someone else. I never told this incident to my father. He never saw this side of my mother's birthplace.

My Mother’s Religion Never Connected With Me

I came across similar types of incidents later in my life when I grew up. There were people who claimed that they can be a portal for the human-and-God connection. They claimed that they can harbor the spirit of God. They showed the same extreme change of personality and different voices after they repeated mantras. And people who were watching that person were amazed that they were meeting with God. They surprised me too.Later on, my mom and dad got divorced. I chose to live with my father. When I was 14 years old and my dad thought I was ready to understand, he told me that in ancient times there were no police and no laws, so some intelligent people decided to make gods to scare people so they wouldn’t do bad things or else they’d be punished. They made three gods to fit the cycle of life: one for birth, one for nourishment, one for destruction.That made sense to me. But there are consequences when you stop believing. You don’t enjoy the festivals as much because most of them are related to gods. When you go through a bad phase, you don’t believe that something good will come out of it or that it’s part of God’s plan.In India, the number of atheists is still small. You have to go to the temple, or your friends take you, and you bow your head in front of the god to pray to him or tell him your troubles or ask for favors. But whenever I bow, it only seems like a yoga pose to me. I close my eyes and pretend to pray. Inside, I’m actually blank.

Inside, I’m actually blank.

I’m an Atheist, but I Still Believe in a Higher Power

After a few years of living like that, I came to the conclusion that people should believe in something that gives them hope, that someone is there for them even in the loneliest of times. So I finally decided to believe in a higher form of energy that has no shape or religion at all.To feel that higher energy, I don’t have to go to the temple or give it a donation, which seems like a scam to me. I just have to go into a deep state of meditation and silence my mind. Most of the times we meditate, we keep speaking to ourselves. If you don’t silence your mind, you don’t give higher energy a chance to speak to you or give you an insight.I’m not following any religion right now, but if I had to choose one, it would be Buddhism. That Siddhartha Gautama guy really gave us some techniques to be eternally happy.I don’t like the division that religion causes, though. I hope one day we will all believe in higher energy—and that’s all. Consequently, the war due to religious divisions will end completely. There will be more love between the human species. In my mind, the connection between God and people will be meditation; this will be the means of praying to the higher energy. And I have seen the benefits of meditation. I firmly believe in the core, mentioned by Nikola Tesla, from which he said he obtained knowledge, strength and motivation. And I believe that in order to connect to that core, we need to sit silently and allow the portal to be formed in between us and the core. That knowledge will upgrade each one of us into the 2.0 version of ourselves and then the earth will be unstoppable, an Earth 2.0.

My parents met when my eventual stepsister Kenya and I were 12 years old. My dad and I grew up Christian; she and her mom practiced Islam. But one of the first things I remember learning as our families merged was respect.With my dad being a deacon, during his first few dates with my soon-to-be mom, I was left in a very naive bubble thinking that going to church and serving the Lord would just become part of a routine that we all shared. But that’s not how it went. In fact, that’s not how it went at all.

Learning Boundaries When Two Faiths Meet in One Home

Kenya was paramount in establishing the ground rules the first time our parents decided to have a tennis date. “Respect my house!” she said when I had pushed a boundary regarding being able to play video games in her room without permission. I loved Super Nintendo, but I would soon learn the true meaning of boundaries and what that would mean for us to get along. Kenya taught me that I needed to respect her space and things all by her demeanor. She was able to establish boundaries by showing her distaste through facial expressions when I crossed a line I shouldn't have. She and Mom weren’t practicing Islam when we met them, but my sister called herself a Muslim because she still did some of what Muslims are raised to do. That included being respectful to parents, not wearing shoes in the home, not eating pork, not celebrating birthdays, not celebrating the calendar holidays and offering greetings in Arabic.I learned during my teenage years to respect their privacy and follow any instructions I was given about their meals. Kenya was also diabetic, so diet was always a source of concern. There was no pork allowed at any meal whatsoever, but I was a bacon lover, so I often asked my dad for snacks to eat before visiting them.

I learned early on that the Quran and Bible have a lot of similarities—both recognize Jesus as the Messiah—but the differences between them didn’t matter as much to me.

Communication Is the Key to People of Different Religions Living Together

It wasn’t until I was 17 that I became a devout Christian, and by that time—between events involving my grandmother and dad—my stepmom had converted to Christianity. Kenya still remembered her prayers in Arabic, but she'd undergone a momentary shift to Christianity as well, even attending church with us each Sunday.I learned early on that the Quran and Bible have a lot of similarities—both recognize Jesus as the Messiah—but the differences between them didn’t matter as much to me. My dad was already in a relationship that had sustained and embraced an understanding between the two religions, and our parents talked lovingly to gain clarity instead of trying to shove their religious disciplines down the other’s throat. It helped that within a year of our meeting, Mom was already starting to transition to Christianity. It left Kenya and me in a space where we could embrace our differences, even though I think my knack for stepping into a room and naturally taking over annoyed her at first. Once she saw that I was willing to listen, understand and respect her, our love bloomed, and we quickly became inseparable, joking about our differences and the many hiccups we would encounter playing video games together.

My Mother’s Interreligious Marriage Was Founded on Respect

For my mother, the move from Islam to Christianity involved some questions. She wondered whether it was right that men and women could be born with gifts given to them by Allah, but women weren’t allowed to freely use them in leadership positions. When she raised these questions to others in the mosque, she was advised to speak to the religious leader, called an imam.As she made an appointment with the imam, she had the impression that her question was inappropriate, that she should “sit down and shut up." The imam never answered her question, so she searched for some way to be able to use her gifts and for others to have God’s blessing to use their talents to their full ability.When I asked my mom how she found her voice and freedom she so eagerly sought, she said that she and my dad "had an understanding since the beginning that he’s a leader in the military and in the church and the head of our home, which I respect, but he doesn’t stifle my ability to learn and/or teach in education or business, which are my strengths. We respect each other, and there’s never been a question or inhibition about what I’d like to pursue."My mom went on to receive her master’s in education from Strayer and another degree in business, and I thought back on the last 20 years that we’ve been family. It’s been a privilege to witness my parents’ relationship and utilize the same principles of respect and understanding, defining love not by the religious boundaries we have but by a person’s character.

I grew up in a house where civil discourse regarding religion took place over dinner without resulting in public protest, and I’m thankful for it.

My Sibling and I Have a Good Relationship, Despite Different Religious Views and Practices

Kenya has been a practicing Muslim for years, but when we talk, we have the same balance between us. She teaches seventh-grade math; I sell electronic components for a corporation. When we recapitulate the events of our days, our love and support for one another is an insurmountable, indiscriminate bubble that holds us both to a promising future and a loving present. Because I live on the West Coast and she lives on the East Coast, my account of the day will often run into her time for prayer, at which time I’ll cut myself off or ask her to call me back when she’s finished. She’s such a solid support as I navigate being a parent, divorcee and employee, and I’ve come to appreciate her as if we’ve been family our entire lives. I don’t have to question if she feels the same.

Maintaining Interfaith Dialogue Was More Difficult Outside Our Home

The question my mother raised about the role of women in Muslim culture is one that has been raised by others in the past and is a source of true contention and controversy. After my mom made the choice to convert to Christianity, she was excommunicated from the mosque community and ostracized by her former friends and colleagues in the Muslim community. The church has, in contrast, completely embraced my mom’s ability to teach. She currently leads Sunday school and is superintendent for a local church school as well. My dad currently serves as a Christian education leader and IT/cybersecurity professional at the same church, serving on the church board as well. Ultimately, I feel like I’ve had more than half a lifetime learning about the hostile beliefs outside our home. I grew up in a house where civil discourse regarding religion took place over dinner without resulting in public protest, and I’m thankful for it. The Torah, Bible and Quran come from the same Lord, and before the earlier texts were altered, all three had the same message about God's rules for his people. They beg questions about how the differences are deliberated and why slogans like “coexist” remain relevant.All we can do is continue to love one another as a family and hope that eventually, somehow, the rest of the world will catch up.

I was raised Catholic. Not a cultural Catholic who’s part of the hatch, match and dispatch brigade of churchgoers (those that only attend for christenings, weddings and funerals). I mean I was a fully-fledged, church-every-week type Catholic. I never missed it. Even if my family took me on holiday, come Sunday morning, we would be listening to the priest celebrate Mass, regardless of whether it was in a language we understood or not. I never questioned the existence of God. Nobody around me ever did. Our family friends were part of the church; my godfather was a priest. I was even an altar boy. I stood up there with the father on the altar, in my white gown, and rang the bell when required (that’s not a euphemism).I think faith is a difficult thing to lose. It rarely happens all at once and it’s hard to put your finger on the moment when it started, but I think for me, seeing the Communion, that sacred body of Christ, brought in in cardboard boxes as it was bought in bulk to be stored at the back of church had a lasting effect. Surely you can’t be stock ordering 10,000 pieces of Jesus himself?So, as more time passed, I grew further and further away from the doctrine. I stopped going to church (except for on Christmas—mum insisted). One of the cruelest tricks piety plays is that it tricks you into a reassured confidence that everything will be okay and gives you the naive notion that someone’s looking out for you. One of the more long-lasting challenges is to learn to face the fact you really are on your own. I developed my own interests; I read my own books; and I devised my own worldview. Nowadays, I subscribe to a strictly empirical view of the world. I deplore the notion of faith, which I see as belief without reason. If faith is belief without reason, I decided to only believe in something due to reason and reason alone. I want to claw my hair out when somebody thanks God or refers to “his” plan. More often than not, I see it as an avenue to pacification and a means to acquiesce to the status quo. Or an adult version of Father Christmas. That being said, whilst I detest religion, I love churches, or better yet, cathedrals. In the words of ABBA: gimme, gimme, gimme. The Sagrada Família, Notre Dame, St Paul’s, I want them all. Maybe I enjoy the conflict they generate inside me. The beauty of the architecture and the disgust of the object of its worship. The hypocrisy of the “treat others as you wish to be treated” mantra whilst their gold-lined ceilings refused to house the poor who prayed there when in need. Maybe it’s the nostalgia, the throwback to a familial routine. Or perhaps it’s just that a very talented architect once clearly spent a lot of time making it look nice. Whatever it is, I can never resist.

Surely you can’t be stock ordering 10,000 pieces of Jesus himself?

I Snuck Into Bellapais Abbey

That’s exactly what happened one summer when I found myself in Cyprus. I was staying with a friend and her family when they took us to dinner at a restaurant in a place called Bellapais. It was high in the hills and the view outwards over the Mediterranean was outstanding. However, the most interesting part was that the courtyard that hosted the restaurant’s al fresco area belonged to Bellapais Abbey, a glorious, semi-ruined, 13th-century monastery built into the hillside and just sat waiting to be discovered. Its golden light arches standing tall against the backdrop of outer walls. Some of the old foundations seemed to be used to house the restaurant’s pizza oven. The only problem? It was closed and I left the next day. Oh, why hadn’t my friend brought me sooner?I looked at her and asked if we could go have a look. “I think it’s closed,” was her reply. I was undeterred. “Well, let’s just get a little closer,” I said. On further inspection, we could see there were several metal turnstiles, where a ticket officer ushered you through to enter the attraction. Only on this evening with the abbey closed, the ticket guard had gone home. Meaning? Meaning there was nobody there to stop us. I grabbed my friend’s hand, we vaulted the turnstiles, and in we rushed, just out of the eyesight of our fellow diners we left behind. Now, I thought a monastery was beautiful before, but having a whole one to ourselves? Perfect. We snuck up and down the twisting flights of stairs and darted across the roofs. I felt like Harry Potter sneaking around Hogwarts by night or Howard Carter getting an exclusive snoop inside Tutankhamun’s tomb. Outside the abbey was a beautiful pristine lawn. The abbey itself, I came to learn, was immortalized by Lawrence Durrell in his book Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, chronicling his time in the village of Bellapais. Legend has it, and Durrell was compelled to agree, that those who sit under a tree in the abbey’s grounds will become so relaxed they are unwilling to work. I could easily understand immediately why. The views, the abbey, the grounds—it was pure bliss on this warm, late summer, Mediterranean night.

If I'd built a violent, hypocritical cult over 2,000 years, I might not be so quick to condemn someone for wanting to have a look around.

A Priest Found Us as I Was Doing a Mock Sermon

The inside of the abbey, the parts that were normally off limits, were notable for their distinct lack of typical church features. There were no stained glass windows, no artwork. This was very much a ruin nowadays. But the walls were still intact and rose high over the floors. Circular podiums now stood where once tall columns holding up a now nonexistent roof would have been. I took the opportunity to perform a mock sermon to my private audience of one. It was at this most inconvenient moment that a priest arrived. He was slow to question and quick to scold us on our flippant use of church property. Harassing and hurrying us out the door, he took a serious tone whilst he pushed us and prodded us back to the exit. Now, in spite of my disdain for the claimants of religious authority, that of a divine power, I have quite a fondness for some of the rules. Treat others as you want to be treated. That’s a motto I can definitely get on board with. Now, I understand that I wouldn’t necessarily want someone to break into my house, but if I'd built a violent, hypocritical cult over 2,000 years, I might not be so quick to condemn someone for wanting to have a look around. Another takeaway from the church I wasn’t so fond of: repentance as a means of entry into heaven. But I’d been to enough Sunday school to know it sat pretty high up on God’s, and subsequently the church's priorities. Therefore, when we got to the exit and the priest turned to us saying, “I should call the police! I’m seriously angry about what you did tonight. Haven’t you got anything to say for yourselves?” I knew enough to turn sheepishly to him and say, “Forgive us?”

I run a global institute for awakening with students from 35 countries. It’s an 18-month program first packaged as a health coach/life coach training that will soon be certified as a Master of Science in applied epigenetics. It’s essentially a fast track to “enlightenment.” Not in the Buddhist sense, but in the self-realization, “I’ve found peace within” sense. We base our growth in understanding the complexity of modern life, embrace of non-duality (existing beyond good/bad, right/wrong) and acknowledgment of childhood trauma as the filter through which we see life. Our goal is to hold higher standards for humanity. And as Michael Jackson advises, we are starting with the (wo)man in the mirror.The untrained, cynical eye may scoff us off as a cult. Yep, the students totally look up to me as a guru. But the great part is that whenever they try to give me power or want me to tell them what to do, I liberate them back into connection with their own inner knowing. That’s the only way to dissuade dogma.No matter what I teach, I’m teaching critical thinking. My most famed words are, “Don’t believe me; verify me.”

Embodied research is my insurance policy against cultism.

I Challenge Students to Tap Into Their Innate Self-Knowledge

This constant experimentation leads them down their own path of truth. We constantly speak of the field of wisdom versus that of knowledge. Wisdom is embodied learning from your own subjective experience (aka “embodied research”). Knowledge is someone else’s wisdom. We’re allergic to dogma in this space; we pioneer embodied research. Whereas it might look like I “teach” a course with a full-on curriculum in order to pass on knowledge, I actually do it to crack open their psyches and worldview to see the world through a new, expanded lens. This pressure cooker for profound transformation is an undeniable straight shot to facing oneself. The community constantly reminds one another that it’s going through the course that’s the real learning, not the curriculum. From having to complete several assignments in a short period of time, revisiting traumas of being good enough or smart that stem from childhood experiences, and needing to produce content that is relevant to move the human species forward, being a student at our institute is not an easy task. But facing the challenges and academic rigor and triggered traumas in self-awareness are what makes it so healing and growth-oriented. This embodied research is my insurance policy against cultism. As the founder and main spiritual steward, I’m definitely the one onto whom they project all of their mother wounds and infantile thwarting of authority. I’m 75 percent used to it by now. The more we can talk about it, the easier it makes things.However, therein I tread a fine line—the tightrope between non-duality and duality. (For all you non-spiritual seekers out there, between “nothing is real; we are all one” non-duality and “get the fuck out of my way, bitch, this chocolate is mine” duality.) When we surrender to what is happening and look through eyes of curiosity into the deeper meaning and symbolism of events in our life, life becomes richer. It’s for us—not against us. We put down our shields and our swords. We let our hypervigilant nervous systems relax. Our experience of life becomes much more pleasant. No one is out to get you. Everyone is conspiring in your favor—whether it looks like that or not. This is a process of seeing life from a more expanded point of view. This is living non-dualistically in a dualistic society.

I Refuse to Let My Ego Get in the Way of This Work

When I’m deep in with someone, he’s reliving his 4-year-old abandonment trauma, and I hold space for this process. Then the next day, he’s complaining about money issues from a fear/scarcity mindset (“I have to put food on the table”) and attempting to imply how the institute is indirectly causing them. I have to be very delicate about how I bridge the two issues. (For perspective, his money issues are definitely not our fault. My role is to hold him to a higher standard of becoming. “WTF does that mean?” you ask? Being more emotionally intelligent and self-resourced. Not complaining about external factors or situations as the source of his problems but rather looking within. He’s the common denominator amongst all of them.)My ego has to be hugely kept in check.I must be willing to be wrong in every situation.I could easily manipulate the truth and his psyche to get him to “do self-work” on my behalf. I have to be really fucking squeaky clean to work with people while being their “teacher.”“We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.” This is a central tenet of our institute. It takes us far.Nonetheless, if I react or have one weak moment of simply being human and definitely having an ego (no matter how evolved it may be), it’s like feeding fish to hungry alligators. They come running! Like once, in a moment of exasperation from working too hard on operations (I’m not made for that), one of the students who is teaching a short course for us was negotiating to increase his profit share. And in response, I said, “The institute still has to stay afloat.” Unsurprisingly, he went in for the attack, hyperfocusing on that phrase and saying, “It’s not my job to keep the institute afloat.”Then, life becomes anything but fun and games because rather than defend and protect (as one would predict), I let myself be feasted upon until they’re satiated. (In this case, I immediately said in response, “Did I say that? If those were my words, it was a moment of weakness, and I definitely didn’t mean to imply it’s your responsibility.”) At which point, they still have the same core issues and in the end realize it’s not about me.But this constant ego sacrifice is indeed what keeps the operation afloat and what allows me to lead from a place of humility and common inquiry.

The only way I’m able to run this spiritual institution without it becoming a cult is because I don’t want to be here.

I’m Only Running the Institute for Five Years to Protect It From Becoming a Cult

In writing this now, I feel Jesus’ path, the turning of the other cheek. Well, I fucking hope my story doesn’t have a martyr ending. To buffer for that, I’m very clear with everyone involved that I’m on a five-year plan.The only way I’m able to run this spiritual institution without it becoming a cult is because I don’t want to be here. Go back in history and look at cult leaders gone awry…mostly men who grew intoxicated by power and privilege (and vulnerable female attention), from Osho to John of God to Bikram. My ego itself has no interest in having a training school. These initial five years until I can step away and the organization runs itself, governed and owned by the graduates. I constantly push away power and encourage students to think for themselves about everything, from food questions about the chemistry of digestion to understanding how they can approach a coaching situation without bringing in their ego agenda. I don’t teach what to think; I teach how to think. And they catch on.What happens when they don’t? We sit and find the entry into their inner knowing. No “take my answer” is accepted. Most of the time, they get an answer that asks them more questions. “How’s that for a non-answer answer?” I hear myself say. Dissuading dogma at its best.

I Hold My Students—and Myself—to a Higher Standard

We are not here wanking off on self-growth for ourselves. Yes, it makes life much easier and fun to have a widened perspective of reality…but at the same time, it can be lonely at the top of a mountain (not the mountain—don’t project assumptions upon us, dear reader!). We have perspectives on ourselves, society, power dynamics and more, which drastically change how we show up in the world. (The Australian medical practitioner who’s been through our program over the past two years now has massive confidence walking into any situation. The flavor of her strut only comes from deep self-knowing, a regulated nervous system and the emotional intelligence skills to know that we can work anything out, and if we can’t, it wasn’t meant to be.) We are inherently privileged to have even been able to take this hike. And what do we do with that privilege is the real question.Dedicated to “upleveling humanity” and holding higher standards for our species, the only way I can lead this mission is by continuing my own journey. So I stay human with the students. I constantly reinforce that I’m not perfect. I’m mindful of my trauma and my bias, and I own it and voice it. I’m open with them about my own challenges—never pointing to something outside of myself as the issue and always revealing my own shadows to whatever extent I’m able.When we look back in history for movements that made an impact, the best of them were leaderless. Think the Apache, Napster or Craigslist. With blockchain technology and true democratic governance encoded into the human future, decentralization gives hope to organizations like ours.I am here as a catalyst—to awaken leadership inside of the humans at the institute—so that they can, in turn, change the world.