The ache of millennial dread

Or, as a friend put it: Is it PMS? Is it just a bad day? Is it my constant grappling with how to serve the souls entrusted to my care?

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Me & my Abuela, who went to church every day and twice on Sundays. I wonder if she felt this dread.

I feel a familiar sense of heaviness today.

If you’ve ever battled with depression, you might know it, too. There’s a weighted blanket feeling that isn’t comfy cozy. You didn’t snuggle under this blanket of your own volition — someone else threw it atop you without hesitation and walked off. And just like that, there you lie, paralyzed and without the strength you might have had moments before to say No. No! I don’t want to be under here right now. Please — take it off!!

I’ve never written about this while I’m still in it — maybe this is progress, or a sign that I’m not really in it anymore. I admit that I’ve found some source of energy today that isn’t typically accessible to me when I’m in this state of being.

I first became familiar with this feeling — intimately familiar with it — as a senior in college. Now, 10 years later, it’s changed in texture. It’s still heavy, dull, and dark, but there’s also a teeny tiny spark. I’m curious about what lies beneath it in a way that wasn’t accessible to me before. I’m not sure when or how this curiosity arose, but I’m grateful for it. It makes these days more manageable.

Somewhat recently, my curiosity has pointed me in the direction of an unlikely potential antidote: faith. Specifically, religion. The declared antithesis of my nature — of my very being — for as long as I can recall.

I’ve been feeling a pull to go back to church for a few years now.

I float the idea by my husband every so often to see if it might become our family’s way. The pull was subtle at first. I’d drive by a church and think, Maybe we should try it.

Today, it feels urgent. Like my savior truly lies behind those doors and if I don’t enter, I don’t know what will become of me. Like maybe this heaviness is an existential dread of a variety that’s unique to Atheists — me and all of my millennial peers who threw the kind, compassionate, life-giving baby of religion out with its foul bathwater. Maybe I laid claim to this heaviness the moment I declared to my parents: “I don’t believe in some GOD, I believe in the goodness of manKIND!”

My mom said my belief in my fellow humans was beautiful, but that it wouldn’t be enough. I thought I understood what she meant and I’d list off all my friends and family members that I knew I could rely on in times of need. (“Karina has saved me before. She took care of me and scrubbed the blood out of my shirt when I got those stitches in my armpit. Where was God to soothe me then? Would God come scrub my shirt for me like that?”)

But, of course, that’s not what my mother meant at all. And it turns out this was yet another life lesson that she tried to gift me, but that I insisted on learning through experience.

I grew up going to Sunday School (PSR), until one day (as my mom tells the story) I returned to my mother after class with a solemn face and an urgent tone: “Mom, we are all. SINNERS.”

My mother, it seems, was hoping for more lighthearted / New Testament tones for my religious education, and she saw the writing on the wall. I’ve always been a sucker for strict rules and self-flagellation, so she pulled me out of PSR lest I torture myself with lifelong penance for every secret spilled from my mouth to her ears. (Secret-spilling was my childhood vice of choice, much to my mother’s delight and my siblings’ chagrin.)

We continued going to Sunday mass, but my religious fervor soon faded, morphing first into ambivalence and eventually disdain. My brother and sister both went to Catholic high schools, but I opted for non-denominational. My high school experience pulled me further away from any religious inclination and into the arms of Nietzsche — God is Dead became my truth.

I spent college winter breaks back home arguing with my parents on Sunday mornings, rolling my eyes and muttering under my breath as soon as we took our seats at mass.

Then, my senior year, I found myself wandering to the Center for Religious Activities (we didn’t have a chapel) on campus during a painful time in life. I felt lost and alone and I needed something to help me re-ground, re-center. I was desperate for a space where I wouldn’t have to explain myself, to give all the context and backstories, but where I would still find the comfort I desperately sought.

This something turned out to be mass. I couldn’t believe where I was going even as I was on my way. I felt awkward and embarrassed at myself for crawling back to this place I’d always rejected. But the moment mass started I felt comforted by a familiar sense of belonging. That dinky little center with the plastic chairs and rotating services for a moment felt like home.

It was the strangest realization — that I found my sanctuary here — given I’d wrapped my entire identity around being anti-religion and spent years of my life scheming how best to get out of such religious services.

Any sense of belonging feels worth exploring.

I now recognize how rare — almost unattainable — that feeling can be for so many of us in life. The sense of belonging I felt at mass might just have been because I was indoctrinated at a young age (even if I thought I wasn’t) — the familiar rhythms and rituals would make anyone with that upbringing feel at home.

Of course there’s truth to that, but the feeling that day has stuck with me all these years later, nagging me to explore something else that’s there — something deeper and sincere.

This is not a post to convert you to Catholicism or any other religion. I still don’t know how I feel about all of it myself. But I’m thinking maybe I didn’t have the whole of it figured out at 18, and maybe there’s something in those teachings worth discovering.

I’m thinking out loud here because I know I’m not alone on this wandering path, and maybe there are others wanting to explore this friendly nudge, too.

I suspect being part of a community in service of any higher power might ward off some heaviness.

I have always believed in something bigger than me, even when I declared myself an Atheist. I still do believe in this higher power. I tend to refer to it as The Universe rather than God and I hold the belief that we all pray/speak to the same higher power — whether we call this God, Source, Allah, Brahman, Universal Intelligence, or something else entirely.

Some days I have all the love in the world for myself and my life. But on days like today, when things feel bleak and less purposeful, I have to wonder if my religiously inclined friends feel the same type of dread as me, or if their bleak days carry a different tone. A tone that still holds a firmly rooted sense of belonging. If their conversations with God carry them through these days with more a little more ease.

I wonder if we’ve given up too much by decrying religion and all it stands for.

I’ve become familiar with a lot of Buddhist teachings over the years as a mindfulness teacher and practitioner, and I’m very drawn to that world. I think there’s such beauty in it. I think the non-theistic nature of Buddhism allowed me to loosen my hold on atheism, and now to invite an exploration of my theist roots, too.

There’s a nudge telling me that there’s so much wisdom and truth that I threw out without examination, in service of making my God is Dead allegiance swift and dramatic.

And maybe it’s not Catholicism, per se, that’s calling to me, but a deeper community connection around faith in general. In Buddhism, this community aspect is called the Sangha. A Sangha — a community coming together in shared practice — is the piece that we most often throw out of Buddhist-inspired mindfulness teachings in the West, as if it’s an optional add-on. As if we can really do all the same things by ourselves.

Maybe this all just leads back to the core pull I feel: to spend more time in real-life communities, rather than online (which I know is ironic to share in my online publication).

Everything in my world right now just seems like a call to spend more time in physical spaces that foster connection, rather than online spaces that breed connivance.

I’m curious if you feel this pull, too.

People say to teach from your scars, not your wounds.

I understand the value in this, but today’s heaviness feels like more of an ache than a wound, and sharing feels like the right thing to do for this very reason. I think that maybe sharing from an ache allows both of ours to heal in resonance. Healing is a relational practice, after all.

So whatever aches linger for you today — existential or otherwise — I am sending my love to them all ❤️

I’m grateful for each and every one of you! 🥰