the girl beneath the doctrine
She used to think spirituality belonged to people who were certain, the kind of people who could kneel without hesitation, who spoke about God with calm confidence instead of quiet fear, who never seemed to flinch beneath the weight of their own thoughts. She was never one of them. Even when she was deepest inside Christianity, attending bible college, memorizing scripture, shaping entire years of her life around worship and doctrine and obedience, there was always some part of her sitting quietly beneath it all wondering why faith felt so natural to everyone else and so painfully performative to her.
Christianity was never just belief in her life. It was atmosphere. It was architecture. It shaped the rooms she lived inside and the language she used to understand herself. It taught her what femininity was allowed to look like, what desire was allowed to become, what bodies were considered holy, what identities were considered broken, and what parts of herself needed to remain hidden if she wanted to continue being loved. She learned very young how to survive by becoming smaller. Smaller in voice. Smaller in longing. Smaller in visibility. Smaller in honesty.
And perhaps that is the cruelest thing religion ever did to her. Not the fear of hell. Not the sermons. Not even the shame. It was teaching her how to disappear so gracefully that even she stopped noticing it happening.
She spent years becoming digestible to other people while something underneath quietly starved. She spent years learning how to be a man.
the collapse of certainty
Leaving Christianity was not rebellion in the dramatic sense people imagine. There was no single moment where the heavens split open and she suddenly walked away enlightened and free. It was slower than that, sadder than that, quieter than that. It was erosion. It was sitting in church hearing herself speak words she no longer believed while everyone around her seemed perfectly comfortable inside the performance. It was realizing that the people preaching unconditional love often struggled to extend that love toward queer and trans people standing directly in front of them. It was understanding, slowly and painfully, that she had spent most of her life begging permission to exist from systems already uncomfortable with her existence.
The grief came before the freedom did.
People rarely speak honestly about that part. Losing religion feels, at first, less like liberation and more like standing barefoot in the ruins of a collapsed cathedral trying to figure out whether there is still anything sacred left in the world at all. Christianity had given structure to everything. Morality. Purpose. Suffering. Eternity. Community. Identity. Even pain itself had once fit neatly into a framework that promised eventual meaning.
Then suddenly there was silence.
And inside that silence came a much more terrifying realization: she did not actually know herself beyond survival.
Not deeply. Not honestly.
She knew the versions built for other people. The husband. The church girl hiding inside the wrong body. The people pleaser. The emotionally manageable version of herself that apologized constantly for existing too loudly, wanting too much, feeling too intensely, taking up too much space. But once those performances began collapsing, there was this awful moment where she realized she had no idea who remained underneath them.
That became the real spiritual crisis.
Not demons.
Not darkness.
Not the fear of punishment.
The possibility that she had spent decades constructing a life around avoiding herself.
lilith
Lilith did not arrive as evil.
That matters to say clearly because people misunderstand her constantly, flattening her into horror movie symbolism or edgy aesthetics without understanding why so many women, queer people, and exiles find themselves staring into her mythology like a mirror. Lilith did not feel monstrous to her. If anything, Lilith felt familiar. Not comforting exactly, but familiar in the way certain wounds feel familiar once you have lived with them long enough.
Lilith represented refusal.
Refusal to submit.
Refusal to disappear.
Refusal to remain digestible.
Refusal to kneel simply because authority demanded it.
For someone who had spent most of her life terrified of her own femininity, terrified of transition, terrified of longing, terrified of desire, terrified of becoming visible enough for the world to reject her openly, that symbolism mattered more than she knew how to explain at first.
Lilith became less of a literal figure and more of a language through which she could begin understanding the buried parts of herself. The monstrous feminine. The untamed woman. The self that leaves the garden instead of remaining where she was placed. The exile who chooses authenticity even when authenticity costs her belonging.
Something inside her recognized that immediately.
Because she knew what it meant to lose belonging in exchange for honesty.
She knew what it felt like to watch people recoil once the performance stopped.
She knew what it felt like to become real enough for other people to grow uncomfortable.
Lilith did not promise safety. She did not promise happiness. She did not promise transcendence. What she offered instead was something stranger and perhaps more valuable: permission to stop apologizing for becoming herself.
tarot, symbols, and the architecture of meaning
She does not think tarot cards magically predict the future with perfect certainty, and honestly she distrusts anyone who speaks with too much confidence about these things anyway. What matters to her is not fortune telling. What matters is symbolism, because symbols carry emotional and historical weight powerful enough to bypass the defenses people build around themselves.
The cards became mirrors long before they became divination.
When she lays them across black fabric beside candlelight late at night, what she is really doing is slowing down enough to notice herself honestly. The Tower means something different to someone whose life has already collapsed multiple times. Death means something different to a trans woman who has buried entire identities in order to survive long enough to become visible. The Moon means something different to someone plural, someone whose own mind sometimes feels layered, shifting, fragmented, difficult to trust.
The cards hold patterns human beings have repeated endlessly across centuries. Grief. Desire. Isolation. Love. Transformation. Ruin. Longing. Cycles of destruction and rebirth repeating themselves through generations of frightened people trying to survive their own lives.
Tarot gave her a symbolic vocabulary for emotions too large to explain directly.
And perhaps more importantly, it gave her permission to ask questions without immediately demanding certainty from the answers.
Modern life worships certainty. Algorithms. Diagnoses. Categories. Statistics. Productivity. Optimization. Definite conclusions. Ritual moves differently than that. Ritual allows ambiguity to breathe. It allows mystery without immediately flattening mystery into explanation.
That mattered deeply to her because so much of her suffering came from trying to force herself into rigid answers that never actually fit.
shadow work
The internet loves aesthetic darkness. Candles. Black clothing. Velvet. Red lighting. Performative sadness shaped carefully enough to remain beautiful from a distance.
Real shadow work is uglier than that.
It is sitting still long enough to notice the parts of yourself capable of harming people. It is recognizing how trauma mutates when left untreated for too long, how survival mechanisms become weapons sharp enough to wound both yourself and the people trying to love you. It is understanding that pain does not automatically make someone gentle, wise, or morally pure.
Sometimes pain just makes people bleed on each other.
Shadow work forced her into deeply uncomfortable conversations with herself. Her anger. Her resentment. Her fear of abandonment. Her tendency toward isolation. The strange ways she could both crave intimacy and fear it simultaneously. The ways dissociation hollowed her out. The ways she still sometimes sought validation like a starving thing. The ways survival taught her to disappear before anyone else could reject her first.
None of this felt mystical.
It felt painfully human.
But there was something sacred in finally refusing to lie to herself anymore.
Healing, she realized, was not purity. Healing was honesty sustained long enough to transform you.
And transformation is rarely graceful while it is happening.
mirrors, dreams, and the body
The obsidian mirror sits quietly beside candles and scattered cards while the city hums outside the apartment windows. People ask whether she sees spirits in it, and sometimes she laughs because the truth is far stranger and far more difficult than ghosts.
Most nights the mirror simply reflects her back at herself.
That alone is terrifying enough.
There is something deeply intimate about staring into your own reflection long enough for the performance to loosen around the edges. The brain searches for meaning in shifting shadows. The self becomes fluid. Familiarity begins dissolving. Some nights she sees grief there. Some nights rage. Some nights softness she still does not entirely trust. Some nights she sees the frightened little girl buried beneath years of careful survival mechanisms trying desperately to keep everyone else comfortable.
The mirror became important because it interrupted dissociation.
So much of her life had been spent disconnected from her own body, disconnected from femininity, disconnected from desire, disconnected from authenticity itself. Ritual slowly brought her back into physical existence. Baths became meditation. Jewelry became intention made visible. Makeup became reclamation. Dresses became honesty. Candles became grounding points during panic attacks and nights where the world felt too loud to survive comfortably.
Even dreams changed.
She began paying attention to them instead of dismissing them immediately. Certain images repeated themselves often enough to feel emotionally significant whether they were supernatural or not. Trains. Flooded buildings. abandoned houses. Wolves. Mirrors. Teeth. Churches collapsing quietly into the earth. Strange women standing beneath moonlight. Children she could not protect. Versions of herself wandering hallways searching for rooms that no longer existed.
Maybe dreams are spiritual.
Maybe they are psychological.
Maybe there is no meaningful distinction between the two.
She no longer feels the need to force certainty onto every mystery.
ritual as authenticity
Everything eventually returns to authenticity.
That is the center of all of this. Not enlightenment. Not superiority. Not purity. Not aesthetic performance.
Authenticity.
The willingness to stand in front of yourself without flinching away every time you encounter something difficult, contradictory, emotional, plural, grieving, complicated, ugly, beautiful, frightened, or unfinished.
Transition taught her this more than anything else ever could. Living publicly as a trans woman forced honesty into her life with terrifying intensity. Once she stopped pretending to be someone else, other forms of dishonesty became harder to tolerate. She began noticing how many people survive through performance, how many lives are built from carefully maintained disguises constructed for safety, approval, or belonging.
She understood why.
She had done the same thing for most of her life.
Still does sometimes.
Authenticity is not simple. It can destroy relationships. Families. Careers. Entire identities carefully built over decades. It demands vulnerability in a world that often punishes vulnerability brutally. But pretending was killing her slowly. There is no softer way to say it than that.
So she stopped apologizing for softness.
Stopped apologizing for emotion.
Stopped apologizing for femininity.
Stopped apologizing for being plural.
Stopped apologizing for wanting beauty.
Stopped apologizing for surviving.
Stopped apologizing for existing visibly inside a body and identity the world often wishes would remain hidden.
Authenticity became less of a personality trait and more of a spiritual practice.
And perhaps that is what ritual truly became for her in the end: not escape from reality, but deeper entry into it. A deliberate refusal to abandon herself again. A way of remaining present long enough to finally meet the person hidden beneath years of performance, shame, fear, longing, grief, transition, silence, and static.
Not perfectly.
Not completely.
But honestly.
And honesty, she thinks now, may be the closest thing to sacred she has ever found.