What Losing My Faith Taught Me About Being Truly Alive

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“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grew up as the fifth of seven children in a strict religious family where faith shaped everything. From an early age, I learned to follow the rules, perform to be seen, keep the peace, and be good.

My religious upbringing taught me to give my power away. The church held the answers, the authority, and even forgiveness itself. I learned to seek approval from outside sources instead of developing a relationship with my own inner truth. It disconnected me from the very part of me that was meant to guide my life.

For years, I believed goodness was about compliance, not compassion. I was told that being good meant obedience, not connection or genuine concern for others. It kept me disconnected from my own body, my intuition, and my desire to experience life itself as something sacred.

When I began to question that, it was not rebellion. It was the beginning of taking responsibility for my own relationship with myself and my truth.

For a long time, I did what was expected. I was very involved in church and attended regularly, married young, and had a baby. I built a life that looked exactly like it should.

After my divorce in 2013, most of what I had been taught to trust began to unravel. I had (naively) assumed my family would be a source of comfort, but what I found instead was distance. The disapproval came in small but unmistakable ways. It showed me how fragile some of my relationships really were and how easily love could be withdrawn when I stopped fitting the mold.

For the first time, I began to see how deeply religion had shaped the way love was given and withheld.

I kept trying to make it work, like really tried, convincing myself I could still belong if I followed the rules and stayed small. But pretending only made me feel further from myself.

Then, in 2018, everything totally unraveled. A painful conflict within my family led to a level of rejection I could never have imagined. People I loved most turned away from me and my daughter. What I thought would be the place I could lean on became the place that hurt the most. The loss was total.

In the months that followed, I fell into a level of grief and despair I had never known. Days blurred together, and I moved through them feeling only numbness. It was as if color had drained from the world. I was not just sad. I was gone.

I did not know it then, but I was in what some might call a dark night of the soul, and mine lasted for the better part of seven years.

It was depression, yes, but it was also something deeper. I was not just emotionally unwell. I was spiritually unwell. The faith that once gave me meaning no longer worked, and I had nothing real to replace it with. I was lost inside a life that looked objectively fine from the outside but felt hollow at the core.

This is why our spiritual health matters. Spiritual wellness has little to do with religion or anything “woo.” It is about a deep connection to yourself, to others, and to the greater world around you. It is what gives life depth and coherence. When that connection is strong, you feel anchored and alive.

When we lose connection to meaning, we lose connection to ourselves. We start to live from the outside in, measuring worth by output and identity by what others reflect back. Life becomes something to manage rather than something to experience.

For a long time, I kept trying to fix myself the way I had been taught—pray harder, achieve more, be grateful, push through. But that only led me further away from myself. I realized it was mostly performative.

Eventually, survival required surrendering. I stopped trying to get back to who I had been and started asking who I was now. I pulled every lever I could reach—therapy, yoga, journaling, meditation, long walks, finding community, and even psychedelics. None of them were magic, but together they were medicine. Slowly, I began to build a spirituality that was mine.

I learned that I could still believe in something greater without needing someone else to define it for me. I could find reverence in the ordinary, in the breath, the body, and the kindness of strangers. I did not need a church to feel close to something sacred.

That realization did not come with fireworks. It came through small moments: cooking dinner for my daughter, breathing through anxiety, and allowing grief to move through me. Each moment of honesty stitched me back together.

Over time, I came to understand that connection is not something you find once and keep forever. It is something you return to again and again. Some days I still forget, and that is okay. Remembering is part of the practice.

Aliveness is not about chasing a spiritual high or waiting for life to line up perfectly. It is the decision to participate, even when things are uncertain. It grows through honesty, through presence, and through the willingness to be shaped by what is real. That is the work of connection, and it is the work of being human.

Why This Matters

When we lose connection, we lose direction. Without a sense of meaning, it is easy to slip into a version of life that looks fine but feels empty. We move faster, achieve more, and still feel like something is missing.

Reconnection changes that. It restores depth to experience and turns ordinary moments into opportunities for truth and awareness. It reminds us that we are not here to perfect life but to live it, to feel it, to engage with it, and to learn from it.

The world does not need more people performing wellness or chasing enlightenment. It needs people who are awake to their own lives and who bring meaning back into the everyday. People who show up honestly for themselves, for their friends and families, and in service to their community.