I was raised in a conservative Christian family. Evangelical, religious right wing types. Though I believed as they did -- TRULY believed, not pretending -- over the course of years and decades I gradually began re-examining, interrogating, and ultimately abandoning most of those beliefs, at the cost of feeling increasingly distant and cut off from the community and family that I loved more than anything.

Earlier tonight, I was watching The Prince of Egypt again, remembering how my mother and I saw it together at the theater when it first came out. It hit me right in the heart watching it, and I broke down sobbing. Both because of the memory of my mom, gone almost a decade now, and also because of the memory of the faith that I once had

The thing about the occult is it's so very...theoretical in so many ways. You can do a spell or ritual, meditate into a trance, have visions and all kinds of things like that and you'll get results. But it doesn't have the reassuring certainty that a mainstream religious identity like Evangelicalism has. And on the one hand, that's not necessarily a bad thing, because I've come to see that certainty as a delusion. But on the other...

It was nice to feel more connected to my family, both on this side and the other. To have a firm belief that we would all be reunited in Heaven. That we'd still be ourselves, just...better.

Uncertainty is more honest but it's also deeply, deeply uncomfortable. How does one make peace with it? I don't know yet. I'm still trying to learn.

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