Losing my Religion

What happens when you stop obeying the systems that taught you to distrust yourself?*

For weeks, R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion has been playing in my head.

Yes, I know the song isn’t actually about losing your religion. It’s about being at the end of your rope. Maybe there is something in that for me too. But mostly, I keep thinking about what it means to lose the things I once built my life around. The beliefs, identities, and rules I thought would always be part of me.

Over the past few weeks, I have been deconstructing Old Danica’s life by cleaning out my storage unit. I talked about that in last week’s Tea Time with Danica. If you’re new to my Substack, I go live on Sundays for Tea Time with Danica and I share what’s on my mind. Lately, I’ve been talking about resistance and other random things like clearing out my storage unit.

When I left my marriage, I put the things I could take from my old home into a storage unit. I am finally beginning to clear it out. There is grief in knowing that many of my most prized belongings are still in my ex-husband’s house and that I will probably never see them again. There is nothing in the world that could entice me to return for them. I gladly leave those physical objects behind as part of the price of my freedom.

I am happy with my life now. Happier in ways I struggle to explain. But that happiness exists alongside sadness, grief, and the pain of the people and pieces of myself I lost along the way.

As part of the cleanout project, I went through all my old knitting supplies and combined them into a single container. I untangled the yarn, which was weirdly satisfying and lovely. But then I looked at my unfinished projects and the yarn I had bought on special trips or chosen with a specific creation in mind, and I felt the grief of recognizing that I am not that person anymore.

I am not the person who knits.

Maybe I will be again someday. Maybe I won’t. Either way, I miss her.

That is the part we don’t talk about enough when we move on and create new lives for ourselves. We celebrate the life we gained, as we should, but creating a new life also means grieving the person who lived the old one. There are parts of her I really liked. There are parts of her I miss. And loving the woman I am now means acknowledging that I may never get some of those pieces back.

This week, I began to wonder whether writing might be one of them.

The Writer I Used to Be

I have made no secret of my struggle to write. I have spent a lot of time examining the block, trying to understand why the thing I have wanted to do for most of my life has become one of the hardest things for me to do now.

I will perform astonishing acrobatics to avoid working on a book. The whole reason I went to clean out the storage unit was because I thought, “I should write.” My immediate response was, “Nah, let’s go do this other emotionally and physically exhausting thing instead.”

For years, I pushed through that kind of resistance. I wrote because I had a contract, a deadline, or an obligation. I followed the familiar writing advice: write every day, be consistent, and don’t let yourself off the hook because you don’t feel like it.

Sometimes that advice is useful. Sometimes resistance means a scene isn’t working. Sometimes it means you’re stuck. Sometimes you do need to sit your butt in the chair and write the thing, especially when you have signed a contract promising that you will.

But before I conquer resistance, I am learning to listen to it.

Am I stuck? Am I tired? Is something else happening? Do I simply not want to write this particular thing? Is my resistance keeping me from becoming myself, or is it keeping me from returning to a version of myself I have already outgrown?

The advice that once helped me build a writing career also helped carry me into burnout. My body knows that, even when my ambitious little brain would prefer not to acknowledge it.

So I am learning to respect the no.

The Intention That Failed

Every new moon, I set an intention. I began the practice a few years ago when a friend who owned a bookstore hosted new moon gatherings there. The bookstore eventually closed, but the woman who led them continued welcoming a small group into her home. Life, travel, and my RIM™ training have kept me from attending recently, but I still practice the ritual on my own.

At this month’s new moon, I realized that the August new moon three years ago was the beginning of this entire transformation.

At that point, I knew I needed to leave my marriage. I had done everything I knew to do to save it. We were both miserable, and our misery was affecting the people around us. Therapists had been telling me for a long time that I needed to leave, but I wasn’t listening. I wanted to protect my family. I wanted to keep it intact.

I also had no idea how I could afford to go.

My ex-husband’s income had always been our primary means of survival. I had never needed to arrange my own health insurance, and because I am technically a contractor at my day job, coverage wasn’t available through work. I needed money for a lawyer, deposits on an apartment, and the many other expenses involved in starting over.

At the time, I thought the answer was obvious: I needed another book contract.

I had recently completed the final book in my existing contract. I did the math, and the signing payment from a new one would give me enough for a deposit on a small apartment and the other costs of leaving. My regular income, supplemented by the writing money, would allow me to survive on my own.

I created a proposal for a series I loved and sent it to my editor. Then I went to my first new moon ceremony and made receiving that contract my intention. I did all the things I knew to do to support it, and I felt certain this was the solution.

Later that month, my editor rejected the series. She didn’t believe the concept was sellable enough.

Fine, I thought. Maybe it isn’t this project. Maybe it’s another one.

I began working on a different idea that excited me even more. At the next new moon, I held the intention more loosely and asked for financial provision. Instead, I encountered even more financial difficulty.

What the heck, universe?

Looking back now, I can see that the rejection was not the failure of my intention. It was protection.

If I had received that contract, I would probably still be writing under it now. And I no longer have those books in me.

The audience for them was largely conservative Christian women. In the years that followed, I watched many of my readers and fellow Christians embrace beliefs that were completely incompatible with my values and with everything I understand Jesus to represent. I unfriended people who had been loyal readers, including people who regularly asked when my next book would be available, because I could no longer bear what they were celebrating and sharing.

I could not keep writing for an audience that expected me to fit inside a version of Christianity that was destroying me.

The contract didn’t come. The money did.

I received an unexpected bonus from my job, and it gave me what I needed to begin my new life.

The answer arrived. It just refused to come through the door I had assigned it.

The Religion I Lost

Some people will hear that I work with the moon, crystals, herbs, and other spiritual practices and tell me those things aren’t Christian.

I disagree.

Who created the moon? Who created the crystals and herbs? Who gave nature its beauty, energy, and power? I don’t worship any of those things as gods. I see them as part of creation, offered for our benefit so we can live in relationship with nature rather than acting as though we are separate from it.

I still love Jesus. I still experience him as an important higher power in my life. But I no longer believe that the churches represented most loudly in American culture reflect his values.

I will not soften this part anymore.

Black lives matter. Trans lives matter. Indigenous lives matter. Immigrant lives matter. Women’s lives matter.

I cannot reconcile the Jesus who noticed the people everyone else ignored with a Christianity that celebrates cruelty toward people who are poor, queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, or immigrant. I cannot reconcile the Jesus who showed compassion to people without social power with Christians praising someone as the most godly president this country has ever had, even after a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse.

That is not my faith. That is not my Jesus.

The rupture became personal when I needed support in my marriage. After one particularly painful incident, I reached out to church friends. Instead of helping me recognize that something was deeply wrong, they gave me resources about becoming a better wife and submitting more.

I am not prepared to share those details publicly, especially when they involve people I love who may someday read this. But I can say with certainty that the answer was not for me to submit more. The answer was to recognize that the marriage was harming me and that I needed to leave.

I had spent years trying to become better. I am the queen of self-improvement. I read the books, took the classes, worked with therapists and coaches, and tried again and again to fix myself.

Through my RIM™ training, I have finally understood something radical: there was never anything wrong with me. I have always been, always will be, whole.

Every one of us possesses an innate wholeness that we sometimes forget but never lose. We do not have to earn it by following the rules correctly. We do not need to repair ourselves until we become acceptable. We need to return to the wholeness that has been within us all along.

This is why I no longer believe in religion as a system of rules enforced against other people. Too often, religion invites us to examine the speck in someone else’s eye so we never have to confront the plank in our own. I am no longer willing to spend my days inspecting everyone else’s specks. I have a plank of my own to tend to, thank you very much.

The people I choose to keep close now are also more interested in their own planks than in policing everyone else.

When Writing Becomes Another Religion

For three years, many of my new moon intentions have included my writing. I have intended to publish more books, sell more books, and build a more successful writing career. Some of that desire is financial, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

I live in a small apartment without air conditioning. I have asthma and terrible allergies, which make opening the windows during wildfire season a terrible idea. I would love to own a home with room to create, a garden where I could sit, and air conditioning that I am allowed to install. I don’t need a mansion. I want space to breathe, make art, grow things, and keep my belongings without playing an endless game of apartment Tetris.

Because I am a contractor and don’t have a large down payment sitting in the bank, I kept deciding that writing would get me there. I would publish a pile of books, bank the money, and turn it into a home.

Writing would rescue me again.

But when I looked at my writing during this new moon, I recognized that it has been asking something entirely different of me. Not, “How can you monetize me?” Not, “How can you make me solve your financial problems?”

It has been asking, “Do you remember the joy you once found in telling a story?”

Old Danica could write a book, work full time, endure a difficult marriage, take care of her children and their activities, manage a home, and volunteer any time someone needed help. For a long time, I looked at everything she accomplished and wondered why I couldn’t still do it.

Now I look at her with enormous tenderness and think, “You had so much on your plate. No wonder I am exhausted.”

Current, wiser Danica honors all the Danicas who came before her by refusing to load the plate that full again. When my body says it is tired, I listen. When it wants food, I feed it. When it wants to play, I play. And when it says no to writing, I try to become curious about the no instead of treating it like a defect.

The stories I am working on now are more aligned with who I am and what I believe. There will still be faith in them because faith is part of me. But it will not necessarily look like people attending church every Sunday. I am writing about what happens when life refuses to follow the plan. I am writing about rebuilding from nothing. I am writing about women discovering that the boxes they tried so desperately to fit were never shaped for them.

Years ago, an editor told me I was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole in the books I wrote for her. It hurt, but she was right. I knew how to write those books. I probably still do.

But when I try now, my body says, *This isn’t true for you anymore.*

Even fiction must contain something true enough to resonate with the writer’s soul.

I don’t know whether I will ever write with the consistency or output I once did. I don’t know how much of what I write now will be published and how much will exist solely for my own healing. I don’t know whether writing will ever buy me that house and garden.

And I am not attached to those outcomes.

I don’t want writing to become another religion, another system of obligations and rules that teaches me to ignore my body and distrust my inner knowing. I don’t want to force the thing that once brought me joy to prove it can still earn its right to exist.

Right now, writing is helping me heal. That is enough.

Reclamation

Maybe Christian women will still like what I write, but now I am writing for the ones who don’t fit. I am writing for every woman who is barely holding herself together while trying to meet a standard she was never meant to embody.

My faith is bigger than the box of Christianity I tried to squeeze it into. God is bigger than Christianity. The universe is bigger than our rules. There is more power, beauty, and connection here than many of us have been willing to see.

As I looked back at three years of intentions, I realized that the most profound growth did not happen in my sales numbers or publishing schedule. It happened inside me. It happened in the woman I am choosing to become and, even more importantly, in the woman I am finally allowing myself to be.

My intention for this new moon is reclamation.

Not reinvention. Not improvement. Not fixing.

Reclamation.

I am reclaiming that which I already am. I am peeling away the expectations, rules, and lies that taught me to abandon myself. I am learning to trust my body and my inner knowing. I am writing when something inside me says it is time to write, as it did today.

I am not becoming whole.

I am remembering that I always was whole. I AM whole.

And so are you.

A Note About RIM™

RIM™ has been an important part of helping me reconnect with my innate wholeness. I am currently completing practice sessions as part of my certification training. If you are curious about the process and would like to experience a complimentary session, reach out to me and we can work out the details.