I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

[September 2026 as we approach the Days of Awe]

I'm not sharing any of this to be performative.

I quit social media in 2016 and haven't looked back. In fact, part of the reason I quit AO3 in late 2025 and DeviantArt in January 2026 is that both had started to feel too much like social media platforms. I'm too autistic to give a shit about clout from random strangers.

I'm sharing all of this for two reasons.

First, while I generally believe in separating the art from the artist, I also think a lot of us put pieces of our souls into the things we create. It's perfectly normal to want to know something about the person behind the creative works you enjoy, particularly when that person has spent years putting so much of themselves into those works. In my case, I wrote roughly three million words of queer fiction, much of it involving a semi-self-insert, so pretending that my creative work exists completely separately from who I am would be bullshit.

This is me sharing some of myself. It's also me being honest about where I am in my spiritual journey rather than presenting some sanitized version of myself that isn't actually true.

Second, maybe some of this will help someone who is struggling with similar questions.

I've spent a hell of a lot of time wrestling with what I believe, what I don't believe, what I need from spirituality, what I can't accept anymore, and what still calls to me even when I don't have easy answers. My path has not been neat. It has not been linear. There have been some spectacular detours, some hard fucking lessons, and more than a few occasions when I've had to completely rethink what I thought I knew.

So this is me telling the story as honestly as I can.

Sit back, relax, and prepare for real shit.

I was born during Sagittarius season in 1979 in New England, to Florida Man and a mixed-race woman from rural New England. Both were children of immigrants. Both came from large, fucked-up families. And they were absolutely horrible for each other.

My father was an alcoholic and a cocaine addict. My mother had done a lot of drugs in the 1960s and 70s. She followed the Grateful Dead around for a while in the 70s, most of which she didn't remember afterward. Then she joined the Brother Julius cult and left about a month before she met my father.

In my early childhood, my mother was a member of the Worldwide Church of God and followed the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong. I was indoctrinated from a very young age.

My mother sent me to Catholic school even though neither of my parents was Catholic, because she figured that when it came to Christianity, something was better than nothing. This turned out to be an interesting decision when applied to a child who had absolutely no filter and took everything literally.

I was constantly getting into trouble for asking questions. I was branded a smartass when, in response to being asked who the four Apostles were, I answered, "John, Paul, George and Ringo." I wasn't trying to be funny. I genuinely meant it.

I spent a lot of time on the "thinking bench." I occasionally experienced corporal punishment, usually being slapped with a ruler. And a few months before I finished first grade, I was expelled from Catholic school for singing "Like a Virgin" by Madonna. Again, I wasn't trying to be sacrilegious. I deadass thought the song was about the Virgin Mary.

I was subsequently diagnosed with autism and placed in special education in public school for a few years before eventually being mainstreamed. 

Looking back, this was probably one of the earliest indications that putting an autistic kid into a highly rigid religious environment and expecting him to intuit all the social rules everyone else seemed to understand was perhaps not the greatest fucking idea.

And yet, despite being expelled from Catholic school, I found something about Mass comforting. There was something about the ritual, the music, the repetition, and the sheer sensory experience of it that spoke to me. So I kept going to church faithfully every week. Eventually, I was confirmed as a Catholic.

That was when my mother's parents and her brother Chris, who was the same age as my half-brother, became very, very interested in me. They began sending me up to spend summers with them in Maine.

While I was there, I got born again.

And I wanted to go to a new church.

My mother had been raised Pentecostal and had developed an allergic reaction to that particular brand of Christianity, despite the fact that Pentecostalism was actually my preferred denomination after I "got saved." So we compromised. I went to a Baptist church.

I didn't fit in particularly well.

Most of the people there were upper-middle-class, and everybody already knew everybody else. Meanwhile, my home life was becoming increasingly chaotic. By this point, my mother was backslidden, abusing drugs, picking up random dudes at bars, and spending a lot of time at the casino.

So I went to church by myself.

The church services were boring as fuck. The music sucked. And youth group was a nightmare. Not only was I an autistic weirdo, but I actually gave a shit. I genuinely cared about Jesus. I genuinely believed the Gospel was important. I genuinely wanted to spread it. Pretty much all of the other kids seemed to be there because their parents had made them go.

Additionally, even though I was "on fire for the Lord", there were some black sheep things about me nonetheless. I listened to secular music. My high school best friend was gay and I was the first person he came out to, and I met him with acceptance rather than judgment. Indeed, I thought of myself as a gay guy trapped in a woman's body.

Eventually, I left that church after my youth group locked me in the bathroom as a prank.

When I was seventeen, I told my mother that since I was going to be a legal adult in a year, it was time for me to be allowed to make some adult decisions. I wanted to try a different church.

We compromised again.

This time, I attended Vineyard, which was charismatic without being Pentecostal.

It would be the last church I ever attended.

And honestly, for a while, it seemed like I had finally found my place. The music was great. There was a live band. I love to sing, and they invited me to join the church band.

I also became very friendly with the drummer, Rick. Rick was thirty-one.

He began flirting with me. Then we started having groping and making-out sessions. He waited until I was eighteen before he initiated sex.

At the time, I thought I was in love. What I didn't know was that Rick was a swinger. While he was fucking me, he was also fucking other people. It broke my heart. Yes, I knew fornication was supposed to be a sin. Yes, I believed I was doing something wrong. But I also believed this man was going to be my future husband. I thought I had finally found the person who loved me. Instead, I found out he had primarily been after me for sex. And I was so starved for affection that I kept seeing him anyway. At one point, he date-r*ped me. I continued seeing him. That's how badly I wanted to be loved.

Eventually, the church found out. We were caught together on a date and brought in for questioning.

Looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight and a much better understanding of what happened, I can see that Rick groomed me when I was seventeen.

At the time, the church did not see it that way. They said I seduced him, even though it was the other way around.

Rick got away with saying, "I'm sorry, Jesus," and receiving what amounted to a slap on the wrist.

I was the one who was treated as the problem. I was told that I had a Jezebel spirit. They prayed over me to cast demons out of me. I was told I was damaged goods because I had squandered my virginity. I was told that nobody would want me anymore. I was told that I would have to become a Martha and spend the rest of my life celibate. And for a few months, I went along with it. I became essentially unpaid slave labor for the church, apparently in the hope that enough prayer, submission, and service could somehow make me acceptable again.

Eventually, in late 1999, I looked at the whole situation and thought: This is bullshit.

So I walked away.

And then, as if the universe wanted to add one final punchline, Y2K happened. The prophets at our church had proclaimed that the year 2000 would be the beginning of the end times. The disaster of Y2K would herald the Rapture. The world was supposedly about to change forever. And then midnight came. Nothing happened. No Rapture. No apocalypse. No end of the world. Just Y2K turning out to be a giant fucking nothingburger. That was the final nail in the coffin.

I'd spent my childhood being told that Christianity contained absolute truth. I'd spent my adolescence desperately trying to find the right church, the right denomination, the right way to be a good Christian. I'd believed with my whole heart that Jesus loved me.

And when things went horribly wrong, the people who were supposed to represent that love told me that I was possessed by demons, that I was damaged goods, that my best friend was going to hell for something he couldn't help, and that my life was essentially over because I had been sexually exploited by a man they barely held accountable.

Then the people who claimed to have prophetic knowledge about the future were spectacularly wrong.

I was done.

Or at least, I thought I was.

One of the biggest pieces of baggage I carried out of Christianity was the idea of a "personal relationship with God."

That was the big sell when I was growing up Christian. We were encouraged to treat Jesus like a best friend. Youth group leaders told us to talk to him the way we would talk to each other, to cast our cares upon him, to expect him to speak back. People around me regularly announced, "God told me this," or "The Lord said that." People fancied themselves prophets. People experienced signs and wonders.

Buddy Jesus had not yet become a meme when I was deep in Baptist, Pentecostal, and Vineyard spaces, but the vibe was already there.

I was "born again." I was sincere. I was completely immersed in it.

And the expectation was constant two-way communication. You didn't merely believe in the Christian God. You hung out with him.

When I left Christianity and entered Paganism, I took that expectation with me. I found patron gods and eventually fell in with devotional polytheists. The conversations in those spaces often sounded remarkably similar to the Christian conversations I had left behind. People casually reported interactions with their gods, messages they had received, relationships they had cultivated. The vocabulary changed, but the basic premise was familiar. The gods were supposed to be talking to you.

At the same time, I constantly butted heads with strict reconstructionists, especially Heathens. I respected lore. I wanted historically grounded modern rituals. But the hard recons kept insisting that the gods had limited access to ordinary people, and when they did get involved with mortals in the sagas and historical traditions, it rarely ended particularly well for the humans involved.

I knew this firsthand through my own family lore. One of my distant ancestors on my Norwegian maternal side was Ragnar Lodbrok, who was said to have been touched by Odin. That divine attention did not exactly save Ragnar from a peaceful retirement. He died a particularly gruesome death. The lesson seemed pretty fucking clear: divine attention was not necessarily a cozy friendship.

I nevertheless doubled down. I insisted that treating the gods like friends and family was a good and holy thing.

It is probably important to clarify what I mean when I say that I "spoke with" these entities. I never heard disembodied voices. What I experienced was an inner voice that felt separate from my own ordinary thoughts. It wasn't like the hallucinations associated with schizophrenia. It was more like an internal presence or communication that I interpreted as coming from outside myself.

At the time, I took those experiences at face value.

By 2016, the whole structure collapsed. Severe bullying in the Pagan community began affecting my meatspace life in increasingly negative ways. Eventually I started wondering whether, if the gods were real, they simply didn't like me very much. That suspicion eventually hardened into outright rejection. There are no gods. Religion is a lie. All it does is divide people.

I walked away from everything.

I began looking at my former spiritual life through the lens of what I knew about C-PTSD and maladaptive daydreaming. Maybe all of those experiences had been a coping mechanism. Maybe I had built an elaborate spiritual world because I needed one, and eventually the whole thing fell apart because there was no there there.

But I also had to take a long, hard look at *why* I had been so susceptible to it in the first place.

I came from an abusive family. I was bullied in school. I was bullied in my workplaces. I'm disabled in a world that routinely equates human worth with productivity.

And there was a striking amount of overlap between the people I encountered in both Christian and Pagan religious spaces and my own background. A lot of the "prophets" from my Christian years and spirit-workers from my Pagan years came from dysfunctional or abusive homes. A lot of them had been weird or different in school. A lot of them were disabled.

I don't think I wanted to be "special" in the narcissistic sense of "look at me, I'm so important."

It was more complicated than that.

Part of me came from a family and a world that had repeatedly told me I was worthless, and I wanted to prove my worth to the Divine by doing something with my life.

If I could have a calling, if I could serve some grand spiritual purpose, if I could help people, perhaps that would prove that I mattered.

The other part was empathy. I was surrounded by other broken people, and I had empathy overload. I genuinely wanted to help. I wanted to provide comfort and encouragement. I wanted people to suffer less.

I suspect a lot of my former co-religionists were in the same boat.

Eventually I had to let go of the idea that I needed to prove myself to the Divine in order to deserve love and dignity.

I also had to let go of the idea that I could somehow "guide" other people through their psychological and spiritual problems without being properly trained in psychology. Good intentions are not a substitute for competence. And "I was called to do this" is not a substitute for knowing what the fuck you're doing.

There was another part of my life that I had to confront at the same time: drugs and alcohol. Substance use was woven through much of my spiritual journey.

My mother got me high for the first time when I was fourteen. I continued using marijuana as a teenager even when I was religious. At one point, I even rationalized it from a religious perspective, believing that every seed had been made for mankind to use.

I had my first alcoholic drink at twelve and began drinking to self-medicate when I was twenty. I quit drinking for the first time when I was twenty-two, but that same year a boyfriend introduced me to tramadol, wherein I developed an opiate problem, and I also got addicted to benzos for four years.

After I split from my abusive ex-husband in 2013, I started drinking again to self-medicate. I stopped in 2014 when I finally recognized that I had a problem.

Then I became what people jokingly call "Cali sober": consuming enormous quantities of weed. I smoked it. I ate it. I was higher than Snoop Dogg most of the time.

I don't remember most of my thirties.

Eventually, in 2024, cannabis gave me Cannabis Hyperemesis Syndrome, and that was the end of that. I quit weed and went through withdrawal that was just as bad as when I quit benzos and opiates.

Since then, I've been clean from all non-prescribed substances except for a relapse with opiates in September 2026, but I managed to get right back into recovery after my slip.

My spirituality has played a significant role in helping me stay clean, but this wasn't some magical moment where I suddenly became a different person. Recovery has involved confronting the reasons I used substances in the first place, learning that I cannot chemically anesthetize every unbearable feeling, and accepting that I actually have to live inside my own life.

That matters to my spiritual story because I spent decades looking for something outside myself that would make everything make sense.

Sometimes that something was Jesus.

Sometimes it was Odin, or another god.

Sometimes it was an imagined divine purpose.

Sometimes it was a fucking chemical.

Eventually I had to start asking what remained when I stopped trying to escape myself.

in 2021, I caught COVID before vaccines were available. I nearly died. During the fever, I experienced a vivid hallucination of a Grim Reaper-like figure. And somehow, in a way I still cannot neatly explain, she shoved me toward Judaism.

That sentence would have sounded completely fucking insane to me at several earlier points in my life. But then again, my spiritual life has never exactly been conventional.

The funny thing is that I already knew two things about myself as a child.

1. I wanted to be a boy.

2. And I wanted to be Jewish.

I never grew out of either one.

In 2013, I came out as a trans man. In 2020, I came out as a gay man. Before that, I had identified as bisexual, but eventually realized that my relationships with women weren't actually based on genuine attraction. A lot of it was not wanting to be alone and not wanting to hurt the feelings of women who had developed feelings for me. The boy part had been there all along.

So had the Jewish part.

In 2023, I finally began the conversion process. I took the Hebrew name Zev, meaning wolf.

Becoming Jewish did not magically resolve every spiritual question I had been carrying around for decades.

I still wrestle with belief in a literal Supreme Being. Some days I feel that Hashem is there, the Force that holds existence itself together. Other days, Hashem feels like a beautiful idea that I cannot actually confirm.

And that's okay.

I converted because Judaism spoke to me through its culture, its traditions, its ethical framework, and the story of a people who keep choosing life. Certainty of belief was never the price of admission.

On the days when my belief feels solid, my understanding of the Divine looks absolutely nothing like what I practiced when I was a Christian.

Obviously, I do not believe that Yeshua is Moshiach or divine.

And while I am technically a henotheist rather than a strict monotheist, I direct no worship toward any other gods.

More importantly, the entire texture of my relationship with the Divine has changed.

I pray. Sometimes I pray formally. Often I pray informally and messily. When I was inpatient in 2024, getting sober and going through withdrawal hell, I prayed something along the lines of: "Hashem Adonai Eloheinu, I am a broken, fucked-up mess." That was my prayer. No theological masterpiece. No carefully constructed liturgy. Just me, telling Hashem exactly where I was.

I've poured my heart out in my native language. I've sung ניגונים, those wordless melodies of "lai lai lai, yai dai dai" that somehow carry things that structured words can't. Rebbe Nachman's teaching about honest, unpolished prayer resonates deeply with me.

But Hashem is not my buddy. That distinction is enormously important.

Hashem is the King of the Universe. He sustains every atom, every galaxy, every drop of rain, every chaos butterfly, every complicated human heart. He is not stopping by for tea like some devotees claim their gods do with Loki or Hera or whichever entity they happen to feel close to. Ironically, my understanding of the Divine is now much closer to the "gods of limited access" position held by the strict reconstructionists I used to argue with so vehemently. Hashem is busy doing Hashem things. And thank G-d. Of all the deities that have ever existed, He is probably the last one you want personally telling you to "Do Epic Shit," because that usually involves plagues, building arks, wandering around in deserts, getting swallowed by whales, and other generally inadvisable activities.

There is something else Judaism gave me that I didn't realize I desperately needed. It took away the burden of having to be fucking special.

In evangelical-charismatic Christianity, there was often a strong emphasis on being on a mission from God. Some people were prophets. Some were healers. Some were evangelists. Some were "prayer warriors." Some were musicians in worship bands. Everyone seemed to need a special calling.

When I moved into Paganism, the vocabulary changed, but the basic idea remained. There was the Great Work. Spirit-workers described themselves as bards, makers, priests, healers, mages. There was always this sense that you had been burdened with glorious purpose.

Judaism offered me a profound relief from that weight. For the vast majority of us, the calling is simply to be a decent human being. I think of Gandalf's words:

"Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I've found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love."

That feels like tikkun olam to me.

Hashem does not need me to become some great spiritual figure. He does not need me to become a prophet. He does not need me to save the world. He does not need me to be extraordinary.

I just need to be a decent person.

Hashem does not talk to me the way I once imagined Jesus or various gods did. Prayer is different now. It isn't transactional. It isn't a conversation with a cosmic pal. It is reaching toward something vast and ultimately unknowable, offering what I have, and trusting that listening is enough. Hashem does not need to speak back in the ways I once craved. The universe keeps turning. My small corner of it asks me to be kind, to pursue justice, and to do what I can to make the world suck less. That is work enough for one lifetime. 

Not everyone needs to become a great scholar or a rabbi. If I had found Judaism in my twenties, I might have pursued rabbinical school. I might have become a hazzan. I also might have flunked out, given the requirement to live in Israel for at least a year and my strong opposition to living in what I see as an apartheid state and an endless war zone.

But none of that is required. The tradition does not demand that I become exceptional.

I don't use this space to preach, either. I share perspectives as a queer Jewish layperson for people who are curious. That's conversation, not proselytizing. I no longer need to feel chosen for some grand destiny. And it is a fucking relief.

The phrase "G-d's chosen people" carries layers that many outsiders miss. It isn't about superiority. It isn't about being inherently better or more important than anyone else. It is about responsibility to a covenant.

I don't claim special status.  I'm also not constantly getting in my own way chasing whatever I think some entity wants me to do with my life.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And plenty of people who insist that their lives are following some grand divine trajectory turn out to be absolute trainwrecks.

Looking back, I can see the progression. Christianity taught me to expect intimate friendship with the Divine. Pagan devotionalism reinforced that expectation with multiple gods who seemed personally invested in my life. When both frameworks failed me, I assumed the only remaining explanation was that there were no gods at all.

Judaism showed me another possibility. A relationship with the Divine does not have to be based on constant reassurance, supernatural messages, or dramatic callings. It can be built on awe, covenant, prayer, responsibility, and quiet persistence. I don't need to "hear" the Divine. I don't need to feel chosen for greatness.

I need to show up. I need to do the next right thing. I need to let the King of the Universe handle the rest.

There is something almost funny about realizing that after decades of seeking epic spiritual significance, the healthiest spiritual path I've found turned out to be the most ordinary.

Pray when you need to. Sing "lai lai lai" when words fail. Then go live your life. Be decent. Fix what is broken within your reach. Love the people around you. That is the Work.

And it is enough.

But that doesn't mean I've completely found what I'm looking for.

Because my Jewish life does not fit neatly into what people expect a Jewish life to look like.

In 2025, my roommate and I had to move after her divorce. Our financial reality meant that we ended up in a rural area about an hour from the nearest shul. I don't drive. There is no public transportation anywhere remotely convenient. Taxi is expensive. So regular in-person Jewish community is largely inaccessible to me.

And there is another complication. I'm post-Zionist. I believe the Israeli government is committing genocide. I want justice for Palestinians, and I want Israeli Jews and Palestinians to be able to work toward healing and peaceful coexistence. The closest shul to me prays for the IDF every week.

So, for now, my Jewish life happens at home. And that's probably how it will remain until, or unless, I can move somewhere more liberal with progressive shuls and an actual Jewish community I can participate in. And that's unlikely, considering the cost of living in blue states.

That isolation has also made me realize that I miss things about being Pagan.

No, I'm not talking about polytheism. I'm talking about experiencing the sacred in nature. I'm talking about observing the changing seasons and the full moons. I'm talking about praying with candles. I'm talking about cleansing with sage and Florida Water. I miss some of that.

As a recovering addict, I've also found myself drawn to certain aspects of Buddhism. Mindfulness and compassion have become useful tools in my recovery, as has the practice of tonglen, a form of meditation in which we breathe in the suffering of the world and breathe out compassion and peace. There's something deeply meaningful to me about a practice that asks me not to turn away from suffering, either my own or anyone else's, but to meet it with an open heart. I also chant Buddhist mantras like Nam Myoho Renge Kyo and Om Mani Padme Hum. There's something grounding about the repetition, the rhythm, and the intention behind the words, a way of quieting my mind and returning to compassion when the world feels overwhelming.

Even the Buddhist concept of reincarnation has some interesting, if messy, parallels with the Kabbalistic concept of gilgul, the transmigration of souls. I'm not trying to force these traditions into agreement or pretend their differences don't matter, but I find myself curious about the places where they touch. 

Lately, I've been describing myself as a progressive Jew with Buddhist tendencies. Sometimes I call myself a Jewish Buddhist. I don't necessarily subscribe to the whole of Buddhism, but I find wisdom in some Buddhist teachings and practices, and I'm learning that I don't have to accept an entire religious system to benefit from some of its insights.

I'm sure there are people who would look at all of this and call me an apikores. I'm sure some would say that this is exactly why Orthodox conversions are so stringent, because non-Orthodox conversion produces "people like me."

But I don't think that's a fair assessment. Most Reform and Conservative converts do find somewhere to belong after conversion.

The problem with me is that I have never belonged anywhere. That's the pattern.

Christianity wasn't quite a fit.

Paganism wasn't quite a fit.

Judaism is mostly a fit. But it still isn't quite a fit.

Nothing has ever been quite a fit.

And my political and ethical convictions make the situation more complicated. Being Jewish while being deeply opposed to the war in Gaza and to what is happening to Palestinians in our name creates a particular kind of alienation.

Still, I wear my Star of David. I still identify as Jewish. I stand against antisemitism. I still pray. I still light candles. I still sing. I still find meaning in Jewish tradition. I cover my head in public, I dress modestly, I keep kosher style, I celebrate a low-key Shabbat.

I just don't have the luxury of pretending that becoming Jewish solved every spiritual problem I have ever had.

It didn't. And maybe that's the point.

For most of my life, I thought the goal of spirituality was to finally arrive at certainty. Find the right church. Find the right gods. Find the right practices. Find the right calling. Find the right explanation for the universe. Finally know what the Divine wants from me.

I don't believe that anymore.

Maybe the goal isn't certainty. Maybe the goal is learning how to live honestly in the middle of uncertainty without making up answers just because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable. 

I spent decades trying to hear the voice of the Divine. Now I'm learning how to listen without demanding an answer.

And I'm still figuring out what that means.