A Year of Re-Orientation
This year wasn’t about losing faith. It was about losing fear, borrowed certainty, and frameworks that no longer matched lived reality. What replaced them wasn’t rebellion or nihilism, but agency, responsibility, and a quieter understanding of God that doesn’t require surveillance, coercion, or self-erasure.
What follows are the key insights that reshaped how I understand God, morality, mental health, free will, and myself.
God Is Not a Surveillance System
One of the biggest shifts this year was letting go of the idea that God is constantly monitoring my thoughts. For a long time, I lived as if every intrusive thought, unwanted image, or passing impulse was being observed and evaluated. Prayer became less about connection and more about self-monitoring. It created anxiety, hypervigilance, and confusion.
What finally broke that framework was noticing its effect on mental health. If thoughts alone carried moral weight, then people with anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorder, or intrusive thought patterns would be condemned by their own nervous systems. That didn’t line up with compassion, wisdom, or reality.
Letting go of thought surveillance didn’t make me less responsible. It made me calmer and more honest. Prayer stopped being internal policing and became quieter and less performative. If God exists, I no longer believe God needs to read my thoughts to be present or real.
Thoughts Are Not Actions
Closely tied to that realization was a clearer distinction between thoughts and actions. Thoughts arise. Some are helpful, some are disturbing, some are meaningless noise. Many are not chosen.
Action is where will shows up. Direction is where responsibility lives.
This distinction matters deeply for mental health. Intrusive thoughts are not intent. Temptation is not failure. Awareness is not agreement. When I stopped collapsing thought and action into the same category, my inner world became less hostile and my behavior became more intentional.
Morality rooted in behavior and direction is sustainable. Morality rooted in mental purity is not.
Fear Is a Terrible Moral Teacher
Another major shift was letting go of fear-based theology, especially the idea of hell as eternal torment. I don’t believe that model is true, but more importantly, I don’t believe it produces good fruit.
Fear can produce compliance, but it does not produce maturity. It trains avoidance, not wisdom. What surprised me was that when fear loosened its grip, I didn’t become reckless or indifferent. I became more accountable.
When coercion disappeared, responsibility increased. I had fewer metaphysical excuses and fewer external forces to blame. My choices became more clearly my own.
If a belief system only works when people are terrified, that says more about the system than the people inside it.
The “Spiritual Realm” Became a Catch-All for Psychological Harm
For years, I interpreted internal experiences through a spiritual warfare lens. Thoughts were spiritual. Moods were spiritual. Symptoms were spiritual. Anxiety, mania, or intrusive thoughts were framed as attacks or influences from outside myself.
That framework was destabilizing. When mental illness is spiritualized, people learn to fear their own minds. Insight is replaced with vigilance. Medication becomes suspect. Therapy becomes secondary.
Letting go of a literalized spiritual realm operating inside human psychology was grounding, not disillusioning. It didn’t flatten reality. It made it safer. My mind became something to understand and care for, not defend against.
If there is a spiritual dimension to existence, I no longer believe it hijacks human psychology or speaks through mental illness. That belief didn’t make me holy. It made me unstable.
Prophecy Undermined Trust in Reality
Prophecy also quietly eroded my sense of agency. When decisions were framed as divine revelations about my future or identity, I learned to distrust my own judgment.
If things went wrong, I misunderstood God. If things went right, they weren’t really mine. Either way, authorship disappeared.
Over time, prophecy functioned less like guidance and more like narrative control. Meaning was imposed from the outside instead of emerging from lived experience.
Walking away from prophecy didn’t make life empty. It returned decision-making to where it belongs: wisdom, evidence, values, and responsibility. My future stopped being foretold and started being built.
Prior Causes Explain, They Do Not Excuse
This year took me deep into questions of determinism, trauma, biology, and prior causes. Childhood shapes us. Mental illness affects impulse control, mood, and perception. Context matters.
But explanation is not authorship.
Understanding prior causes can bring compassion and clarity, but it can also become a way to avoid responsibility. Somewhere in that tension, I began thinking in recursive terms. We are shaped by prior causes, but we also shape ourselves over time through awareness, choice, and repeated direction.
I stopped thinking in terms of moral corruption and started thinking in terms of alignment. Not good versus evil, but oriented versus misoriented. A compass, not a courtroom.
Blame lives upstream. Responsibility lives downstream.
Will Is Direction, Not Impulse
Free will stopped meaning “I can do anything at any moment” and started meaning “I can choose direction under constraint.”
I can show up to work. I can also not show up. Both are expressions of will. What matters is not the availability of options, but the direction I repeatedly choose.
I don’t show up because I’m terrified of consequences. I show up because that direction aligns with stability, dignity, and the life I want to inhabit.
Bipolar disorder doesn’t remove will. It changes the difficulty level. Medication, structure, and self-monitoring don’t eliminate freedom. They support it.
Free will isn’t impulse. It’s authorship over trajectory.
Sex After Illusion Is Different Than Sex Under Fear
For years, restraint around sex was framed through fear, obedience, and external authority. This year, that framework collapsed.
What surprised me was what remained.
After fear and illusion fell away, I didn’t swing into chaos. I tested reality. I saw what was actually on offer. And I found it hollow. Choosing restraint after seeing clearly is fundamentally different than restraint enforced by shame.
The behavior may look the same on the outside. The source is completely different.
Influence shaped the language I grew up with. The values I live by now are chosen, not inherited.
Judaism Gave Me a Healthier Moral Framework
This year, I explored Judaism, and it gave me language that clarified what I was already discovering.
Concepts like khata and teshuva reframed moral failure. Missing the mark wasn’t corruption. It was misalignment. Returning wasn’t resurrection from death. It was reorientation.
Judaism helped me understand human nature without demonizing it. There is an animal side of us. Impulsive, reactive, driven by appetite and fear. That doesn’t make us evil. It makes us human. What matters is which capacities we cultivate and allow to lead.
Instead of seeing myself as a sinner waiting to be overridden by grace, I began seeing myself as a moral agent responsible for choosing direction. That shift reduced shame and increased responsibility.
Judaism didn’t flatter me or excuse me. It told me I was capable and accountable. That combination turned out to be grounding.
Being Underdiagnosed Changed How I Understand Sin and Responsibility
Accepting that I was underdiagnosed for more than a decade reshaped how I interpret my past. For years, instability and collapse were framed as moral or spiritual failure when they were, at least in part, medical.
When illness is framed as sin, suffering feels deserved and treatment feels suspect. Responsibility becomes distorted.
Getting clearer about diagnosis didn’t absolve me of responsibility. It clarified where responsibility actually lives. I wasn’t corrupt or weak-willed. I was navigating life without the right map. Once the map improved, my capacity to choose wisely improved too.
Fairness turned out to be far more motivating than shame.
Luke 15 Reframed the Gospel
Luke 15 became one of the few places in Scripture that still held under scrutiny. The prodigal son wasn’t dead and replaced. He was lost and returned.
He didn’t need a new nature installed. He needed clarity and the courage to come home. The father restores dignity before interrogation. Relationship before performance.
That story aligns with repair, not annihilation. With return, not replacement. With responsibility without self-hatred.
Stepping Away From Church Revealed the Foundation
For about half the year, I didn’t attend church. That absence wasn’t rebellion. It was diagnostic.
Without weekly reinforcement, I could see which beliefs were load-bearing and which were sustained by repetition and pressure. Some held. Many didn’t.
Stepping away clarified how much of my faith had been intertwined with fear, performance, and external authority. It also revealed how much stability came from internal clarity rather than constant spiritual input.
Returning, With Some Doors Closed
When I returned, I wasn’t the same person. I came back without fear, without borrowed certainty, and without the willingness to suspend judgment for belonging.
Some doors didn’t open. Some conversations felt narrower. Some assumptions were no longer shared.
That loss was real.
But returning with agency meant I could see clearly what was being offered and what was being required. If belonging requires shrinking, dissociation, or denying lived reality, then distance becomes an act of care, not defiance.
What Remains
I didn’t lose faith this year. I lost misattribution, fear, and frameworks that couldn’t carry the weight of reality.
What remains is quieter and more stable.
Agency instead of surveillance.
Responsibility instead of terror.
Alignment instead of corruption.
Repair instead of replacement.
Less certainty. More coherence.
Less mythology. More direction.
This wasn’t deconstruction for its own sake. It was reconstruction for the sake of staying sane and living honestly.