The Myths That Make Me: Part 8

I split this chapter into two parts. The first is the discovery; the second is the cosmology. I tried to force it into one but the concepts felt too large to suppress.

The next several years were spent in quiet rebellion against any church. I’d been scorned enough that I didn’t want rules or scriptures or to witness people believing one thing and acting another way. I was tired of hypocrisy and “grey areas.”

How was it that these religions had existed for hundreds of years but were so impossible to follow perfectly? The rules were simple. They were written right there. So why did everyone struggle with them? Why, if followed perfectly, did life suddenly become far more difficult?

I was exhausted.

And so I became a teenager. I released my responsibility to spirituality and attempted to cultivate my social status. Drinking, parties, girls, dating. And honestly, I enjoyed myself. I fell madly in love. I started having sex, which was a game changer. I started living my life more fully and, with a foundation already built in my relationship to God, I felt happy.

Twinges of guilt would arise when I’d think of all the “rules” I might be breaking, but I only felt guilty when the voices of the people governing them slipped into my psyche. I also had to contend with one person’s version of law allowing for one thing, then another person’s allowing for something else.

Here I could drink coffee, there I couldn’t. Here I could have sex out of wedlock, there I couldn’t. Here I could drink alcohol, there I couldn’t.

If God was all-powerful, why was He so inconsistent? Why did everything need to be parable?

Moses essentially came down and said: Do these ten things and God’s kingdom is yours.

History continued to add asterisks.

In my time alone, I began to devour spiritual texts. Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, The Tao of Pooh, The Alchemist, The Secret. I just wanted context. I wanted singular direction.

Everyone claimed they were right and the rest were wrong. Every. Single. One.

The pattern was maddening. Each book, each teacher, each tradition would offer something beautiful—and then inevitably claim exclusive access to truth. Even the more universalist texts carried a subtle superiority: “We’re not like those dogmatic religions. We’ve transcended that. We know better.”

I was tired of better. I was tired of right and wrong. I was tired of the spiritual Olympics where everyone was competing for God’s gold medal.

I just wanted to know if God actually loved me. Not loved me if. Not loved me when. Just... loved me.

This infuriating pursuit eventually led me back to Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch.

I’d skimmed through this book a couple of times already, having been given it by my mother at a young age. But I’d never really devoted my heart to the read. Or should I say, it never spoke to me the way it needed to. I wasn’t ready for it yet.

At thirteen, when my mother first handed it to me, I’d read it looking for answers to specific questions: Is this the right path? Will I go to hell? Am I doing it wrong? The book didn’t answer those questions because it refused to accept their premise. It dissolved the questions themselves.

But I wasn’t ready to have my questions dissolved. I was still looking for someone to tell me what to do.

Now, several years later, exhausted from trying to earn love I could never quite secure, I picked it up again.

This time, it was a literal godsend.

The concepts in the book spoke to me in a way that no other scripture had. It was clear, finally. Concise modern language and subject matter that actually applied to my day-to-day life. Not how many goats I should sacrifice for Passover. Not parables about vineyards and fig trees that required a theology degree to decode. Just straight talk about relationships, money, sex, death, fear, and love.

But more than the accessibility, it was the tone.

Every religious text I’d encountered spoke with authority. “Thus saith the Lord.” “It is written.” “The truth is...” Even the kindest, most inclusive spiritual books carried an undercurrent of instruction: Here’s what enlightened people do. Here’s how awakened souls behave. Here’s the ladder you must climb.

Conversations with God didn’t instruct. It invited. It questioned. It explored.

The God in this book wasn’t handing down commandments from a mountaintop. He was having a conversation. An actual back-and-forth. He listened. He acknowledged confusion. He even—and this nearly broke me—laughed.

God had a sense of humor about the whole thing.

But the concept that shook me deepest was this: I was finally introduced to a God that wanted nothing from me. That needed nothing from me. That truly, undeniably, loved without expectation.

No demands. No rules. No laws. No judgment.

Let me pause here and let that land, because for most of my life, every God I’d encountered needed something:

• The Catholic God needed my confession, my obedience, my attendance at Mass.

• The Evangelical God needed my verbal acceptance of Christ, my purity, my evangelism.

• The Mormon God needed my baptism, my mission service, my adherence to doctrine.

Even the softer, more mystical versions of God I’d encountered—the God of my mother’s SRF teachings, the God in Eckhart Tolle—seemed to need my practice. My meditation. My presence. My consciousness.

And I was so tired of being needed.

The God in Conversations with God didn’t need anything because God lacked nothing. God was whole, complete, perfect. God was All That Is. How could All That Is need something from a tiny piece of itself?

This God loved me the way the ocean loves a wave. Not because the wave does anything to earn it. Not because the wave behaves correctly. But because the wave is the ocean. There’s no separation. There’s nothing to earn. There’s only what already is.

But here’s what cracked me wide open: God’s greatest desire?

God wanted me to experience.

Not to be happy all the time—that’s a toxic spiritual bypass that flattens the richness of existence. God wanted me to live fully. To feel everything. The joy and the grief. The ecstasy and the despair. The love and the heartbreak. The expansion and the contraction.

God wanted me to stop treating my humanity like a problem to solve or a test to pass. God wanted me to stop spending my life trying to be good enough to earn the next one. God wanted me to follow my heart, trust my desires, honor my pain, and stop treating sadness like failure.

God wanted me to know that every emotion—even the ones that hurt, even the ones that felt like they’d destroy me—was sacred. That the darkness wasn’t something to transcend or bypass or “positive think” my way out of. It was part of the wholeness. Part of what it means to be alive.

God wanted me to know that I was already free. That I’d always been free. That the entire game was just forgetting and remembering and forgetting and remembering, over and over, and that both the forgetting and the remembering were equally sacred. The pain and the pleasure. The breaking and the healing.

All of it. Not just the easy parts.

Reading this, something unlocked in me.

I realized I’d been waiting my entire life for permission. Permission to trust myself. Permission to question. Permission to leave churches that hurt me. Permission to love who I loved. Permission to explore, to fail, to change my mind, to not have all the answers.

Every religion I’d encountered gave conditional permission: You can question, but only within these boundaries. You can explore, but only these approved paths. You can be yourself, but only the version of yourself we deem acceptable.

Conversations with God gave me unconditional permission.

It told me that my doubts were sacred. That my questions were prayers. That my confusion was part of the process. That my desires weren’t sinful distractions but divine whispers showing me where my soul wanted to grow.

It told me that leaving Christianity wasn’t abandoning God—it was following God more closely.

It told me that my mother, who loved more purely than anyone I’d ever known, was not going to hell. She was already living in heaven, because heaven wasn’t a place you earned. It was a state of consciousness, and she’d been inhabiting it all along.

It told me that I wasn’t broken. That I’d never been broken. That the entire concept of being broken was a lie designed to make me dependent on systems that claimed they could fix me.

I read the book cover to cover. Then I read it again. And again.

Each time, new layers revealed themselves. Each time, something I’d glossed over suddenly cracked open and poured light into a dark corner of my psyche.

I started journaling my own conversations with God. At first they felt forced, like I was making them up. But the more I practiced, the more I realized I wasn’t making them up any more than Neale Donald Walsch was. I was tuning in. Listening. Allowing the dialogue that was always happening to become conscious.

The answers I received were gentle but firm. Loving but honest. They never told me what to do—they asked me what I wanted. They never judged my choices—they helped me understand the consequences. They never demanded obedience—they invited alignment.

For the first time in my life, I had a spiritual practice that felt like mine. Not inherited. Not prescribed. Not performed for the approval of elders or the salvation of my soul.

Mine.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this book was laying the foundation for everything that would come next. It was building the scaffolding I would need to navigate heartbreak, addiction, loss, ecstasy, and transformation.

It was teaching me that I could trust myself. That my inner knowing was more reliable than any external authority. That the still, small voice inside me was God, and I could follow it even when it led me away from everything I’d been taught.

It was showing me that spirituality didn’t have to mean suffering. That devotion didn’t have to mean denial. That loving God could actually feel like freedom instead of a cage.

And most importantly, it was beginning to teach me what would take many more years to fully embody: that I was not separate from the Divine. I was not a broken sinner grovelling for scraps of love from a distant deity.

I was God experiencing God. A wave in the ocean. A drop of water in the infinite sea. Distinct, yes. Separate, no.

But those deeper cosmological concepts—the mechanics of how it all works—I wasn’t ready for yet. I was still integrating the emotional truth: I am loved without condition. I am free. I am enough.

That was enough to completely reorient my life.

Next: The cosmology itself. What Conversations with God taught me about the nature of reality, the purpose of existence, and why we’re all here. The soul contracts, the reincarnation, the meaning of it all. The God who split itself into infinite pieces just to know what it’s like to come home.