Not just in the way the conversation flowed. I mean something more specific. There was an absence of interference. There was a lack of what usually runs underneath things and keeps me slightly elsewhere.

I was just there. He was just there.

And as we talked I wasn’t monitoring the conversation from a slight distance. I was in it. And it kept going somewhere real. I was going somewhere real with someone who was basically a stranger.

It wasn’t even that deep. Not yet. But it could have gone there. There were moments of vulnerability. Of transparency I hadn’t even shared with close friends. And all of it was met with mutual understanding. There was nothing in the way.

“That, that is what that’s supposed to feel like.”

Being Known

Working in churches my entire life, there is an idea that is paramount — being known. Truly known. Not just liked, respected, welcomed. Known. Not known as in information, but known deeply and fully.

Here is the problem. I couldn’t be known. Not really. Not there. Not in the church.

In an interview, Denzel Washington was asked if he felt it was important that Black films (films with Black Cultural Stories) were only told by Black filmmakers. I love his response.

“It’s not color, it’s culture. Steven Spielberg did Schindler’s list. Martin Scorsese did Goodfellas, right? Steven Spielberg could direct Goodfellas. Martin Scorsese probably could have done a good job with Schindler’s List. But their cultural differences... we all know (speaking to the other black actors on stage with him) what it is when a hot comb hits your hair on a Sunday morning (referring to a black cultural experience and Spike Lee’s ability to more fully understand and represent that scene in Malcolm X).”

That is the kind of knowledge you either carry in your body or you don’t. You can be generous. You can be gifted. You can love someone across a cultural divide with everything you have. But you cannot know what you have not lived.

What if the things that defined you most deeply were only true of you?

What if certain questions ran through your head, but never appeared in conversation—not because people didn’t care, but because they simply hadn’t occurred to them?

Imagine being the only one you knew who couldn’t get pregnant. The only one who had lost a spouse. The only one who had ever wrestled with depression. You could be surrounded by people who loved you and still be, in the specific way that matters, alone in every room.

Lately, I have found myself more1 fully known by strangers than by people who have been in my life for decades. And I don’t mean only that I’ve allowed myself to only be known here—though that’s a bit true. I mean there was something we shared that made understanding possible in a way it simply hadn't been before. There was no gap to manage. No translation. No monitoring of how I was landing, no quiet cleanup of what I’d just said.

Richard Niebuhr wrote that we are ethically obligated not just to speak the truth, but to speak in a way the other person can receive it. I believe that. I’ve spent my whole life doing it. But I've realized something: when I am always tending to how I'm being perceived, always listening to my own words from the outside, I am never fully in the conversation I'm actually having.

And it distorts what I actually believe. Because I never really allowed myself to sit with my beliefs, thoughts, and understanding as they actually were. I never really let myself be with myself as I actually was. I only encountered those things after they had been translated for someone else.

When life requires constant translation, finally meeting people who already speak the language feels like coming home—and gives you something rare: the chance to simply be there.

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same.

And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

[…]

— Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes,” 1962

In 1962, Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes” while driving through a new post-war suburban development outside San Francisco—watching the homes repeat themselves on the hillside and thinking about what that repetition does to people. It’s a song of its era: pointed, a little protest-y, and a bit of an oversimplification. Those little boxes made life affordable. They gave people community, stability, a place to raise kids.

I grew up in one of those boxes.

I want to say this directly: I’m not writing to indict the people who raised me or the community that formed me. The love was real, and it was a great place to be raised. It shaped me into the person I am today, and I rather like that shape.

But what happens inside a person when belonging has a shape, and you learn to become that shape before you’ve realized that you were doing it?

My box was safe. It was full of people who loved me. It was good to me, and it often gave me opportunities to belong. A little box on a hillside next to other little boxes, all the same.

I went to school. Found a faith I believed in. Found people who shaped me and saved me. Worked in ministry. Got married. Had children. Built a life that made sense from the outside, and from the inside, mostly, too.

The love was real. The work was fulfilling. I laughed a lot. Cried with people. I felt known, useful, and connected. I built real things alongside people who mattered to me.

This isn’t about the suburbs. It’s about Reynolds’s underlying concern—conformity—and how it lives in every community, school, church, and organization.

I grew up becoming whoever the room needed me to be, and I didn’t know it. My temperament made it more acute. I’m wired to keep the peace, but my beliefs pretty consistently sat outside the norm of what was around me. So I learned to hold them quietly and stay in the room.

Some of that was strategy. I believed presence mattered more than scoring points. That if you wanted to influence something, you had to remain inside it. (And its influence back on you was usually a good thing). So I tempered reactions, let theology slide that I should have challenged, stayed quiet in conversations where I should have pushed back. I told myself it was grace. And I was in this for the long haul not a short win.

But somewhere the strategy became the person. I'd been doing it long enough that I stopped noticing I was doing it. The room's version of me stopped feeling like a choice I was making and started feeling like just—me.

I wasn’t wearing a mask or choosing to play a part. It wasn’t code-switching or hiding. None of those are quite the right word. I was habituated. It was the water I swam in, and I just swam.

I agreed with the advice I was given, “never settle for just making a point, make a difference,” but I forgot the other advice from the same person, that “your friends will determine the direction and quality of your life.”

Between the two of them, the second is the truer aphorism.

And then there was the theology. Most communities do what this one did — shape you quietly, without asking. The culture shaped me without my knowing it. The theology told me I shouldn't want to be any other shape. That's a different thing entirely.

This post isn’t a critique; it’s a testimony. It’s how it felt and what happens as an unintended consequence of what I experienced. At least for me.

I didn’t experience it as oppression. It just felt like how things were. Embedded theology. Embedded politics. Embedded worldviews, frameworks, and culture. Embedded windows for what’s acceptable, what’s worth saying, what’s better left alone. You breathe it in and it becomes you, or at least the version of you that fits the room.

The second I was somewhere with no set expectation of me, I felt it lift. Like something I’d been holding without knowing I was holding it.

I cannot express just how profound this was to me. In future posts I’ll discuss the specific event, but here I’ll simply say: I felt who I really was. I did not realize who I was analytically. In fact, I’m still unpacking that. But I felt it. I experienced it. People noticed it in the days that followed. Something about me was different.

The system I was in didn’t mean to do this. The people inside were trying to help. The love was real. I wouldn’t be alive without some of them—that’s not a metaphor. For several years of my life I was suicidal. Several of these people literally saved me from that, and built me up into a much more secure and settled person today.

And still, as I walked out of a system I’d been inside my whole life, I was looking back at it, and I thought: that place did real good and real harm. It didn’t mean to harm, but harm was still done.

The promise was simple: Jesus will make your life better, and make you better at life.

That’s not untrue. I want to say that before I say anything more complicated.

The church promised community. Belonging. People who show up. And they did—genuinely, repeatedly, at real cost to themselves. I watched people sacrifice time and comfort and sleep for me and others, and they did it because they believed it mattered, and it did matter, and I am not going to flatten that into something smaller than it was just because the story got complicated later.

And there was transformation. I was in church my whole life. In my early years marked by loneliness, not quite fitting at school or in the world, I found refuge there. Found mentors, purpose, and acceptance. And I eventually found real friendship. For a lonely kid, that was the world. And slowly, over years, I found a sense of my own worth. I’m a self-assured person now. I genuinely like who I am. That wouldn’t have happened for me without my church.

There’s a saying—I don’t know who said it first—that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

That’s true, comforting, and welcoming. We’re all on the same playing field. Just trying our best.

But here’s the thing: people in a hospital get better.

What I kept watching was people getting stable and then just staying there. Not worse, mostly. But not better either. I wouldn’t call it transformation. The same struggles cycling through the same small groups year after year. Some of them sliding. Some of them doing outright terrible things—even some of the senior Christian leaders I know. I kept waiting for the fruit that was supposed to be obvious. The changed lives that were supposed to be unmistakable.

And then something changed. Looking outside the church, I started seeing the unmistakable fruit I’d been told should be easiest to find inside.

And at the same time, looking inside, I started noticing the inverse: not just “imperfect people,” but something thinning out—something withering—in places I expected to feel most alive.

It was unsettling: the diagnostic tool I trusted stopped matching reality.

It wasn’t just strangers or headlines. It was people close to me, too. People who took Christianity seriously—its practices, its formation, its teaching—becoming harder to recognize. Not cartoon villains. But compromised. Thinner. Less gentle. Less compassionate. Less curious. Less connected.

And yet my neighbor who has never set foot in a church, is the one who shows up every time someone on the block needs something. The friend who walked away from faith in college and somehow built a life of more genuine presence and care than most of the Christian leaders I’ve known. Communities forming around people loving each other with everything they have.

Here’s something I’ve come to believe: for most people a lot of the best people they know aren’t Christians. Some of the most visible Christians are often some of the worst people they know. And in their own lives, the most generous, most present, most genuinely good people they can point to—a lot of them have nothing to do with church at all.

Fruit is everywhere outside the Church—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness—the whole list.

I don’t know what to do with that. But I keep sitting with it.

I woke up and went for a walk.

No destination. Nothing I was supposed to be doing instead. Just feet on pavement and the neighborhood waking up around me. But the part I was not used to was the quiet.

Not the quiet of an early morning with no traffic. Not the quiet of no one being out yet. The quiet in my own mind. Not a peaceful quiet. Not the quiet of having figured something out.

A noise had stopped.

Most of the time the noise felt like static. Something I didn’t even know was there, just taking up a little bit of room in my brain, always. Like having red hair. Maybe it was a bit unique to me, but just part of me.

Lately it had taken on a more metallic quality. Loud and uncomfortable, like the sound a knife makes on a porcelain plate. The kind of sound that makes you automatically want to get away from it.

That metallic texture is what finally allowed me to notice it at all.

An Operating System

About a year ago the noise had shown up as anxiety, depression, and a persistent feeling of being misunderstood. Of being the crazy one. Of something being wrong with me that I couldn’t name.

But when I finally started unpacking it, I understood that the noise wasn’t situational. It was an operating system—a hum underneath everything.

Before now, it hadn’t felt like depression or anxiety. It was just “life.” I was walking through my days quietly negotiating, holding parts of myself back, not interacting with people the way I actually wanted to. Not liking what I actually liked. Not allowing myself to feel love the way I feel it now.

I didn’t even realize I wasn’t my whole self. I hadn’t allowed myself to know my own feelings.

My life was, by every measure I had been given, perfect. Nothing was wrong. It was the best possible version of the situation I had been told I needed to be in.

There was also this: a growing unease about the world I was living in. Questions I couldn’t stop asking. Is God real? Is any of this real? Have I spent my life on something true? Did I even really know myself, and had the people around me ever actually met me? Why was it getting so hard to be in spaces I had always called home?

For years, all of this swirled in the background. When it finally came to a head, the result was not the disorientation I thought I’d feel. It was instead, for the first time in much of my life—quiet.

I Have No Answers

And what replaced it wasn’t an answer. It was something closer to what Thich Nhat Hanh calls aimlessness—the idea that you are not a project. That you are not on your way to becoming someone. You already are all that you hope to achieve. You already are who you are supposed to be.

I already am.

That’s what the quiet was.

I am the most whole I have ever been.

I know how that sounds. It sounds like the end of a story—the part where someone wraps it up. It’s not that. I’m standing in the middle of a life that is stranger and messier than I expected, and I’m telling you I feel fine. Better than fine.

Some of you will read all that I am planning to write over the next several months as a cautionary tale. A before picture. I understand that. But I’m writing it down anyway. I want to understand it better myself, to have my mind changed where it needs changing, and to find the people whose story rhymes with mine.

Things have been stripped away. Faith, as I understood it. Family, as I imagined it. A version of myself I performed for so long I didn’t even realize I was performing. I have done things I was told would destroy me. I have lost people I loved. I have sat alone at a bar on a Tuesday night—me, an introvert who would have found that unbearable—and felt completely alive. I’ve talked with a group of strangers and felt more understood than I ever have before.

I have people in my life now who don’t need me to translate myself first. I didn’t know how much energy that cost until I wasn’t spending it anymore.

None of this was the plan. Almost none of it is what I was told would make me whole.

My Fear

I’ll be honest, writing this is hard. There is emotional content ahead. Vulnerability. Pain I’m still working through. And a persistent difficulty putting any of it into words, for two reasons.

The first is that some of what I’m experiencing is simply ineffable—too large for language. The second is that I often find myself in territory where two things that aren’t supposed to coexist both seem to be true, and I’m forced to reach for a word that doesn’t quite fit. The French have a phrase for that: faute de mieux. For lack of a better option.

My story is full of paradoxes. Grief and joy coexisting in equal measure. Regret for what could have been sitting right next to gratitude for what is. I wouldn’t trade a minute of my life to change my current reality—and I wish I’d had a different life. Both of those sentences are true. I’m not going to resolve that for you, because I can’t resolve it for myself.

What I can do is tell you what happened honestly, which mostly means not making it neater than it is.

That morning I walked until the neighborhood was fully awake. I wasn’t ready for it to end. Just a quiet moment, for me, to ponder and feel.

And then I thought—maybe it shouldn’t only be for me.

I’m writing because my therapist told me my story was unique enough to be useful. Because a song I love says if you ever leave, leave a light on—for the people who might come looking for the way out after you. Because somewhere out there is a person who needs to know that this quiet is possible.

But honestly—I’m also writing because I need people around me while I figure this out.

I usually wait until I know myself before I let people in. This is daunting for me. I go from excited to low-grade dread from the vulnerability, the judgment, the people who’ll dismiss it. It’s uncomfortable, but it feels like the right thing.

So. Here we go. I hope you follow along.