Nothing There

I wasn’t particularly religious as a child. God existed somewhere in the general background, alongside various other things adults seemed confident about and I had no immediate reason to investigate. I didn’t dislike religion; I just didn’t understand what people were getting from it. It seemed like an enormous amount of ceremony devoted to someone who had never made himself especially obvious.

It wasn’t that I found the world easy without him, but I had other things to worry about. I was already occupied with trying to understand other people and why being around them seemed to require knowledge everyone else had received in advance. Questions about God could wait. I was having enough trouble with the people I could actually see.

That changed as I got older. I didn’t suddenly receive a revelation or feel God making any particular effort to reach me - I went looking for him. I tried to become a Christian, and I can’t honestly say it gave me nothing. There was comfort in the idea that my life was being witnessed by someone who understood it completely, especially when I couldn’t explain most of it to anyone else. Suffering was easier to tolerate when it could be placed inside some larger purpose, even one God had apparently decided not to explain in advance.

The forgiveness was the part I kept coming back to, I think. Christianity allowed for the possibility that you could tell the truth about the worst parts of yourself and still be loved afterwards. Not excused, not misunderstood, just known completely and not rejected for it. I wanted that more than I knew how to admit. I wanted somewhere I could be honest about all the shame without having to soften it first. I just never felt certain there was anyone on the other side of the prayer.

Deism became the compromise I could live inside. I didn’t stop believing in God; I stopped believing he had anything to do with me. That was easier than believing he knew everything and had simply watched me struggle without answering. I made his absence impersonal because indifference hurt less than rejection. Somehow it was easier to believe he answered nobody than to keep wondering why he never answered me.

I wasn’t a casual deist either. I believed in it with a level of devotion that probably seems strange for a philosophy built around a God who doesn’t actually do anything. Even so, his existence mattered to me. It meant the universe had come from something conscious rather than existing without intention, and that was enough to make me feel less alone inside it. I didn’t need God to answer me. At that point, I only needed something to be there.

When I was eventually diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder, I began to question what exactly I had been believing in. The diagnosis gave me another explanation for why deism had felt so convincing, and it was one I didn’t want. I had taken how natural the belief felt to me as a reason to trust it. Now I had to consider that it might have felt natural for reasons that had nothing to do with God.

Unfortunately, that belief also began to fall apart quietly. There was no dramatic crisis of faith, only the increasingly difficult task of pretending something could be true simply because I needed it to be. I wanted there to have been intention behind all of this, but wanting it didn’t make it true. God had been useful to me, certainly, although usefulness is a rather generous standard by which to determine whether something exists.

Atheism did not have the decency to make me less schizotypal. Ordinary things could still feel aimed at me, and coincidence could still carry more meaning than it should. God disappeared, but none of that did. I only lost the kinder explanation for it. What I might once have called a sign became something I had to question as a symptom.

Religion has a way of making certain experiences socially acceptable. Feeling that events carry hidden meaning can sound concerning in one room and spiritually insightful in another. Believing that something unseen is aware of you can be written into a medical record or repeated in prayer, depending largely on the vocabulary involved. Of course, I’m not saying faith is illness. I’m saying the border between the sacred and the symptomatic can become surprisingly dependent on context.

I know that border because stress has a way of moving me across it. When I’m overwhelmed or haven’t slept properly, it’s only a matter of time before I start hearing or seeing things that aren’t there. Those experiences don’t become less convincing simply because I have a diagnosis for them. I still have to separate what feels meaningful from what is real. Religion once made that distinction softer. It allowed me to believe that the presence I felt was someone watching over me, rather than an illness making me feel watched.

I notice belief more now that I no longer have it. Someone tells me they are celebrating Eid, or excuses themselves because it’s time to pray, and what stays with me is the complete lack of hesitation in the way they speak about God. He isn’t an idea they have to defend, but part of the structure of an ordinary day. I find something beautiful in the way Muslims make room for him inside the day itself, stopping wherever they are, washing, facing the same direction and returning to prayer again. God isn’t only someone they think about. He is someone they live with. It’s easy to dismiss religion in theory. It becomes harder when you watch what it gives people in practice, knowing you can admire that closeness without ever feeling it yourself.

When I sit in church with my grandparents, I sometimes find myself watching them more than anything happening at the altar. Their belief seems so settled. They don’t appear to be negotiating with it or checking whether it can survive another round of questions. They simply trust that someone is listening. I sit beside them, moved by the same music and surrounded by the same symbols, but whatever reaches them stops somewhere before it reaches me.

I envy them, although not in the sense that I think I could choose to join them. Belief doesn’t return because you miss it, any more than love returns because loneliness has become inconvenient. I can sit there wishing I believed the prayers were going somewhere, but wishing is exactly what made deism impossible to keep. I know what it would mean to trust that someone was listening. I know how much easier certain parts of my life would be if I could. Knowing why I want it so badly only makes it harder to pretend.

As a child, I didn’t understand what people were getting from religion. I do now. It gives them a way to keep going when their own reasons have run out. It tells them that what broke them is not all there is.

Understanding the comfort of it has only made its absence clearer. I don’t think anyone ever heard me, watched over me, or placed meaning where I was desperate to find it. There was no silence to interpret because there was nobody withholding an answer. There was only me, speaking into an empty room and hoping emptiness might love me back. Losing faith was mostly learning to stop waiting for the room to answer.