There's a trend right now that keeps showing up in my TikTok search, "finally being at peace with yourself," and I've been watching people talk about what that actually looks like for them. Therapy breakthroughs. Ending a toxic relationship. Leaving a job. Making a thing they're proud of. It's sincere content and I find it genuinely moving, because peace is hard and most people are actively fighting for it every day.
I've been thinking about what my version of that looks like. Because I have it, not perfectly, not every day, but I've found something that feels like ground under my feet after years of freefall. And the strange part is: I found it by losing what I was told was the only foundation that mattered.
I lost heaven. I mean that literally. I grew up evangelical, front-row-every-Sunday, Bible verses memorized and underlined and taken seriously. The theological promises were specific: your life matters because God has a plan for it, your suffering has meaning because it's sanctified, and death isn't the end because paradise is waiting. That's not nothing. That's an enormous amount of scaffolding and it holds up a whole architecture of meaning. When I stopped believing it, when the reading and the questioning and the slow hard intellectual honesty finally took me all the way through, what collapsed wasn't just the religion. It was the entire structure of meaning I'd built on top of it.
What I found on the other side took a long time to name. but it turns out there's a word for it: peace. Not the same peace I had before. A different kind. One I had to build myself, out of different materials, without the promise of eternity underneath it.
the grief nobody warned me about
Look, I wish someone had told me when I was in the middle of it: deconstructing faith is grief. Real, heavy, textbook grief. It goes through stages. It doesn't resolve on a schedule. You're not just losing a set of beliefs, you're losing a community, a language, a whole way of understanding who you are and what you're here for. You're losing the relationship with God you thought you had. Whatever your intellectual stance on whether that relationship was real, the experience of it was real, and the loss of it is real loss.
Nobody in my church warned me about this because nobody in my church had been through it. The concept of deconstruction was treated as a failure of faith, a seduction by the world, a temporary weakness to pray through. The grief model wasn't available. So I had to find it on my own, in books and on late-night internet deep-dives and eventually in conversations with other ex-evangelicals who had made it to the other side and were willing to describe the terrain.
The grief is real but it is survivable. I need to say that clearly because I know some of you are in the middle of it right now. The freefall has an end. Not because you find replacement certainties, I'm not going to promise you that, but because you develop the muscles to stand without them.
what "finite" actually does to a life
One of the things I genuinely feared when I was losing my faith: if there's no afterlife, does this life matter? Doesn't finitude make everything meaningless? If it all just ends, why does any of it count?
I have thought about this a lot. Here's what I actually found: finitude made everything matter more, not less.
When I believed in eternal life, this particular Wednesday, this particular cup of coffee going cold on my desk, this particular conversation with a stranger who said something that hit me exactly right, these things mattered, yes, but they mattered in a context of infinite time. They were moments in an eternal story. Lovely moments, but ultimately small ones in a narrative that stretched to forever.
Without eternity: this Wednesday is the only Wednesday I will ever be exactly here in exactly this way. That cold coffee is a small sensory experience that will not recur. The stranger's words might be the only time I hear those specific words in that specific combination. Everything is irreplaceable. Everything is unrepeatable. That's not a horror story, that's a reason to show up.
This is not a new idea. Philosophers have been making versions of this argument for centuries. But knowing an argument intellectually and actually living inside it as a felt experience are very different things. The moment when finitude stopped being a threat and started being a frame, that was a shift. Not dramatic. just one day I was walking home from somewhere with Biscuit and I noticed the specific afternoon light on the east side of my block, and it hit me: this exact configuration of light and air and city noise and dog on leash will never happen again, and instead of that being sad it was suddenly the most compelling thing in the world.
Building peace out of new materials
The evangelical peace I grew up with was architectural. Built on a foundation of doctrinal certainty, held up by community, decorated with the specific emotional experience of worship. It felt solid because so many other people were inside it with me. Shared belief is load-bearing in a way that individual belief isn't.
The peace I have now is more like a practice than a structure. It's not somewhere I live permanently. It's something I do. Show up to the work. Tell the truth in the songs. Actually look at the people I love instead of looking through them. Take the walks. Sit with the hard questions without needing to resolve them immediately. Let the things that are beautiful be beautiful without requiring them to point toward something greater.
HEATHEN HYMNS is, in a lot of ways, a document of the building process. The album is the thing I made while I was figuring out how to stand without the old scaffolding. People have been telling me since it came out that they hear themselves in it, not just the doubt and the anger, but also the relief. The exhale at the end of a long fight with certainty. I wrote those songs not knowing if that feeling was transferable, not knowing if the peace I was building was specific to me or if it could hold other people's weight too. Apparently it can, and that is the thing I'm most grateful for, professionally and personally.
what I mean when I say I'm at peace
I want to be precise about this because "I'm at peace with not having God" can sound dismissive of what faith is and does for people, and that's not what I mean. My problem is not with the person in the pew. It never was. My problem was with what was done in my name and in God's name by institutions more interested in compliance than in the actual, complicated, gorgeous mess of human spiritual life.
The peace I've found does not include certainty about what happens when I die. I'm not going to pretend I have that. It doesn't include a neat explanation for suffering or evil. It doesn't include a community ready-made and waiting for me on Sunday mornings, which is a real loss that I grieve sometimes still. What I have instead: the conviction that the life I can directly observe and affect is worth treating as sacred. The people in it are worth treating as sacred. The music is worth treating as sacred. This moment, this one, is worth showing up for.
That's what "finally being at peace with yourself" looks like from here. Not resolved. Not free of doubt or grief or the occasional 3am spiral. just standing on ground I actually built, with hands that actually built it, holding things I actually chose.
If you're somewhere in the freefall right now, I see you. I've been in that specific dark. It has an end. Not a resolution, but an end to the falling. What comes after is harder to describe, but it's real, and it's yours to shape, and that is, somehow, improbably, enough.
There is a particular freedom in this that I didn't anticipate and that I want to name for people who are still on the other side of it, still in the grief: you stop having to defend the unanswerable. For years I watched smart, sincere believers tie themselves in knots trying to explain things the text cannot explain cleanly. Why does God command genocide in one chapter and demand justice for the vulnerable in the next? Why does the all-knowing God need to test people to find out what they'll do? I used to participate in those knot-tying exercises myself because the alternative felt like the first step off a cliff I couldn't see the bottom of. Once you step off, you discover the landing, while hard, is survivable. After that you are no longer obligated to explain the unanswerable. You can just say: I don't know. That's honest. weirdly, it's also peaceful.
I get letters sometimes from people who are where I was, starting to ask the questions, scared of where they lead. The most common thing they say: I'm afraid that if I let myself think this through, I'll lose everything. And I want to say, because I mean it and because it's true: you might lose the specific everything you have now. That's real. But there's a different everything on the other side, one that's also yours, and it holds weight in its own way. The things I've built since, the music, the honesty, the relationships that can hold real questions, these are worth what they cost me. I believe that. HEATHEN HYMNS is the proof I can point to.
The record knows what I mean. If you've listened, you probably know too.