Faith doubts: You're Not the Only One

My mum keeps asking if I’m excited, if I’ve got cold feet, all that jazz. …

I remember sitting there, in the hushed quiet of the temple, the scent of jasmine and old wood everywhere, and my heart was just… a hollow drum, you know? …

I've been going to this prayer group right... …

There’s this mural, commissioned for a local house of worship, depicting— well, divine figures, really, and I find myself completely unable to access the requisite emotional or spiritual affect for… …

Like a cognitive dissonance, realizing all those pronouncements about a woman’s place, the prescribed domesticity, were just arbitrary social constructs and not, as I'd been led to believe, divine… …

I am 31 and I have what some would objectively categorize as an ideal life and I have all the boxes checked on the suburban manifest destiny checklist and I have the perfect house and the perfect… …

you ever just hit a wall you know that feeling like you’re walking through thick air and suddenly it’s just brick or something immovable yeah that’s where i’m at these days feels like i been pouring… …

and I just… I look at her and I feel this… this hollow thing in my chest. …

I don't know if this really belongs here—I'm an old lady, after all, and most of you are so YOUNG—but I think maybe the worst part of all my corporate triumphs was realizing that the old joy, the one… …

i don't even know why I'm writing this down you know like it’s just something that's been… percolating for a while and it's getting kinda intense now it's like a constant low-level hum of cognitive… …

It’s like a cognitive dissonance, where the external markers of contentment are all there, but internally, it's just… static. …

I was commissioned to paint a mural for our local house of worship – a big one, for the community hall, depicting scenes of divine grace and spiritual communion. …

I’m looking at these sketches, these doves and halos, for the new mural down at the chapel – you know the one, everyone chipped in, such a sweet gesture – and I… I just don't feel it, the… numinous,… …

You know sometimes you just wake up and you're staring at the ceiling and it's like two in the morning and you're thinking about trilobites, or maybe some hominid jawbone they dug up last year and… …

spiritual anhedonia, I suppose. …

But then, you know, life happens, and you get older, and you stumble into things, like, oh, I don’t know, a scholarship to study evolutionary biology, and suddenly you’re in lectures, dimly lit… …

Sometimes you’re just sitting there, you know, in a pew, and the sermon’s all about a loving God—and honestly, it's not a big deal but my mind just drifts to... …

The air conditioning is blasting, makin my bad knee ache, and the preacher is up there talkin about God’s plan and how he watches over us. …

I just… it’s the holidays again and I’m just going through the motions. …

A quiet sorrow, maybe. …