consider this your sign

I was raised on original sin, though I was supposedly wiped clean already. 

I was raised on red wine from the goblet, red wine from the glass, red wine purpling teeth. 

My dad took me to see The Passion of the Christ in seventh grade, and I can remember the hitch in my breath each time the back of Jesus the Savior was flogged before taking up the cross.

He would do this just for you, my father said reassuringly as I shook and cried in the seat next to him. 

Doesn’t that make it worse? I wanted to ask him. 

I found God in a Jesus Calling book that had gathered dust in the back of a drawer when I was thirteen. 

I went to Jesus camp. I raised my shaky hand when the white pastor at the front asked the group of teenagers in front of him if they identified with Barabbas. A released prisoner who Jesus took the place of, an insurrectionist, a murderer. I was a pre-teen, and I felt just as guilty. Of what, I’m not exactly sure. 

The incense scratched my throat at mass, and the music sucked. The baptists had slightly better music and the sermons had a few more joking quips, but they spoke of too many dark forces trying to infiltrate the walls, like the rest of the world had succumbed to a plague that only they had an anecdote to treat. The Lutherans felt too similar to the Catholics for my liking, though I appreciated that the pastor was a woman. The Non-Denom crowd was phony, loud, and overbearing. 

I prayed at the foot of my bed anyways, hoped away cancer diagnoses’ and grief and teenage woes. 

I got a cross tattooed on my wrist because, ‘if not, God was still good.’ The ‘if not’ settled like a stone in my belly. 

I found The Secret on a shelf at a used book store as a teeanger, and I turned my mind to manifestation. Mostly, I used the book to visualize a flat stomach. It was as creative and important as I could think to ask. I’d write over and over again the depth of my dreams in journals that now line the inside of my closets, pleading desperation. 

I am joyful. I am grateful. I am wanted. I can do this. 

My friends and I tried a Ouija board in high school despite all of our parent’s warnings. We put the backseat down in my mom’s car and squealed with horrified excitement when the planchette moved along, told us stories of our dead grandparents and aunts and cousins. We started to smell sulfur in the air, googled what this meant, and were horrified to learn that this meant the presence of a demonic spirit. We set the board ablaze in lighter fluid. We all slept in the same bed that night, resting in shifts to ensure no forces of evil entered the room. 

I read ‘The Four Agreements’, Rumi, and Ram Daas. I read Brene Brown and Joe Dispenza. I read books on stoicism, quantum fields, and epigenetics. I have no more file folders left in my brain to store it all, and yet I can’t stop trying to ingest it like I’m running out of time. 

I went to a Christian college that I didn’t realize I had no business going to. I wasn’t a pastor’s kid. My family was–shock and awe– Catholic. 

Or, as my mom would say, ‘Recovering Catholic’. 

They spoke in tongues during chapel services sometimes, and this frightened me so much that I typically escaped from the sanctuary, sitting on the brick wall outside to wait until it was over. They spoke of healings and miracles. I opened my palms during worship and wondered what version of God everyone else was hearing from who didn’t appear to have equal access to me. I tried to be more open. I tried different churches, different forms of worship, different books and reverence practices. I did prayer challenges, fasts, and took up a leadership position to earn my keep here. To prove my value. I wrote prophetically of things in my prayer journal, things that failed and fell through my fingers. I tried and tried and tried. My Christian friends continued praying for me, sure I had lost my way. But I didn’t feel lost or lonely. I felt vacant, like a wide expanse opened up in my mind and allowed me an inch of freedom. What if I was alone in my head?

I tried out a healthy dose of nothing. Of science. Of ‘the great blue dot’. I liked the certainty of it, the lines that it drew for me. But it never felt the most true to me. Feelings aren’t facts, of course, but I don’t want a life of fact with no feeling, do I? Would I be willing to be wrong about everything for that? Maybe?

A palm reader and an energy healer told me that I was royal in a past life, which of course makes logical sense to me so it must be unequivocally true, and I should be treated as such. 

When my cousin was dying of cancer, I drove out to a park in my hometown and sat down at a picnic table pavilion facing the woods. I stared off into the distance and prayed aloud for a sign that Luke’s terminal cancer would magically become non-terminal. I looked at the roof of the pavilion and saw the word, ‘YES’ carved into it with what looked to be a key or an acrylic fingernail. Luke died two weeks later, and I couldn’t possibly find a reason why God would allow me to read the word ‘yes’ if the answer, so clearly, was a no. 

I read the book ‘Signs’, and I try to find signals that the Universe is on my side. I write in a gratitude journal, tape affirmations to my bedroom mirror, and enforce a strict bedtime into clean sheets. I wear an eye mask and mouth tape. I drink water with electrolytes and put collagen in my coffee. I download a dating app and delete it before I even make a profile. I meditate in front of red light, stretch before bed, and moisturize so religiously that I have to sleep on my back to keep my pillow cases from growing slimy. I worry that I’m in a manic episode, but in the same breath as that worry is the fear that I will lose grip on my manic episode and sink instead. What if the meaning that I find in caring for myself is fleeting chemicals wreaking havoc in my brain?

My sister is a witch of sorts. She attends mystic fairs, wears long flowing skirts, talks of energy centers and chakras. She pulls me tarot cards, some that fill me with hope and some that settle a stone in the pit of my belly. Do I believe these cards? Do I believe what she says about my third eye, my sacral chakra, my heart center? I send her the Tiktok tarot readers that litter my for you page, the mantras I can repeat during my long meditation walks. She recommends breathwork. She recommends clearing the mind.  I suddenly don’t have any idea what this means. She asks for from dead relatives, and she receives them in abundance. She even uses that word a lot— abundance. She asks for ridiculous things: she asks to see a pink golf ball within the next week and opens up a hidden grocery bag in our parents basement with almost 100 of them.

I ask for birds– any bird will do. I don’t recall seeing one, but maybe I forgot to look for it. 

My sister recommends detachment, radical acceptance, boundaries. I look up quotes for reiki practitioners. Insurance won’t cover acupuncture even if it swears it will fix everything from migraines to insomnia to poor attachment styles.

On Monday, I share this with my therapist. My therapist who, newly, has been spending much of the session letting me sob until my shirt creates its own bib of tears and snot. The pragmatic side of me wants to scream SAY SOMETHING. FIX THIS. I AM PAYING YOU TO FIX THIS. But the part of me that is also a therapist knows that heartache cannot be fixed as much as it can be felt through. We talk of grief, of taking each day moment-by-moment, about living in other people’s heads instead of our own. 

A bluebird distacts our session when it perches on the windowsill behind her. This has never happened before, she says. He must have come for you.