The first time I saw a roasted whole pig, the pig was in an aluminum pan on an altar surrounded by long, red candles. The candles were lit, and next to them was burning incense. Four or five incense sticks were stuck in the sand filling up mini gold vases. The pig, laid there like a royal god, with its entire shape—ears, snout, hooves, and skin—still intact, although it would be more accurate to say that the pig was more of a sacrifice to God.
My mother’s side of the family was loosely Buddhist, and we performed prayer at the altar to this pig and its surrounding baskets of fruit and pastries by wearing áo dài—long flowy dresses shimmering with pastel and tropical colors—holding two incense sticks in our fingers. My cousins and I were kids, and relatives with gray hair and wrinkles patted us on our backs and guided us to the center of the room, where a crowd of family watched us as we bowed three times. It was a performance we had learned to do. My family saw this kind of spiritual ritual as a way to honor their journey from Vietnam to America, during which they sat on a boat for three days with no food or water and were possibly ransacked by pirates at one point (so I’ve heard from aunties).
Of course this pig scared me. This was one of the few events I witnessed as a child that demonstrated the bizarre antics of anyone who was spiritual or religiously affiliated. But I only had to see it once a year for about five years before we stopped having family reunions in California with our hundred-or-so member family of Vietnamese immigrants who migrated here during the war. My home environment was an entirely different story.
Mom never really made us pray. She never spoke about God. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her mention the word god in our household. But she believed in superstitions. When she eventually divorced my father, she started saying it was bad luck if she remarried before her two daughters married for the first time, so she never did. My household was largely secular, although it wasn’t primarily because of my mother. It was because of my father.
My dad grew up Catholic. He was sent to Catholic school by his parents, who were members of the Church and lived by it while they were relatively poor. He would tell me stories about how the concepts of Heaven and Hell scared him as a child. He had nightmares about Hell. He worried about the mistakes he made, fearing he wouldn’t be granted access to Heaven at the time of his death, which was a literal lifetime away. At fifteen, he read Ayn Rand and declared himself a libertarian who was against Catholicism. He denounced his membership with the Church and moved in with his aunt and uncle. He has lived as an atheist since, and now he is almost seventy.
Dad organized our outings and vacations. I spent Saturdays running my fingers through a sandbox, “excavating” plastic dinosaur bones at the science center, as volunteers explained to me what each bone was. Scientific lessons became a normal part of reality. They were nothing unusual and even somewhat underwhelming considering my father and I had more profound talks at the dinner table at home. My father also attempted to instill in me his love of nature and plants at the botanical gardens, but I met this exposure with repulsion. Walking through the climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis made me feel itchy and sweaty. Even seeing butterflies flutter before my eyes made me feel antsy. Trips to the zoo made me even more squeamish. On one visit, a parakeet left its droppings on my fingers, and I remember the disgust I felt to this day. As a child, it was fun to see the hippos swim in the water and elephants douse themselves with mud, but the zoo eventually started smelling. So I increasingly wanted to go home to watch TV or play with my Game Boy as I holed up in my room in a depressed slumber.
I favored computers and the digital world. I spent most of my time on one, since my father bought one early in my life in 1999. With one computer game, I spent a lot of time learning about different states as I moved my mouse to make a little airplane travel across the country. I learned about different countries with the game Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, with Carmen in her red hat and coat asking me to solve puzzles to reveal her location. I learned how to type on a keyboard, and I did math problems. All the intellectual challenges proved a competition that I nurtured myself with. I suppose later on in life this competition served as the beginning of what later became a competition between me and my idea of God.
Every night before bed, my father wrote original stories for me. I learned about rhetorical devices such as irony and dialogue as an accident when he took to making fun of our family life with my mother. His stories often poked fun at emotional thinking. If any one of us girls in the family had an emotional hangup, he’d write a story about it as a joke for himself—maybe. I didn’t get all of them at the age of five, but I loved his exaggerated drawings and the hyperbolic caricatures he made of me as a character. I was so happy to be the main character of my nighttime stories that I felt pleased to go to sleep as I sat tucked into bed in my princess-lined room, decorated with the normal young girl interests of stickers, stars, and teddy bears.
Books lying around in my house were either about aliens or technology. My dad went to the library each week, and there suddenly appeared a new science fiction title on the kitchen table sitting in front of him as he ate dinner. Probing him about his science readings or asking him about the nature of time was really the only way I felt I bonded with him, because his introversion was on the extreme side. He didn’t like to talk about the daily happenings of life, he never went to parties, and he really only had one good friend he actually admired and respected.
He read Isaac Asimov and indie sci-fi writers, and later he started reading the books of theoretical physicist and String Theory proponent Brian Greene. Our conversations began as elementary wonderings such as why the sky is blue and how time is a fourth dimension. We discussed the issues in academic publishing, where he educated me about the politics of scientific theories: how oftentimes some very good theories and thinking don’t make it to publication or gain popular acceptance because of the lack of political and social connections that renowned professors have, by comparison, with their prestige and credentials.
My mother’s superstitious antics in the house were treated like jokes. After she would assert that it was bad luck to do x, y, or z, my father would make a snarky comment about it being nonsense, usually in a lighthearted way, but logically critical of this type of thinking. Eventually, I came to respect my father’s perspectives.
I became a critical thinker early in life. God really wasn’t much of an interesting question for me. Instead, I loved art, science (specifically psychology), and philosophy. Though my mother and father were both STEM professionals (a software engineer and electrical engineer, respectively) and I eventually also earned a master’s degree in behavioral neuroscience, I am now studying writing.
My father earned his PhD in two years, which is unheard of for anyone who knows anything about PhDs. But his lack of care for social connections made him vulnerable. He didn’t participate in post-docs, mentor schmoozing, or even concentrate on getting his research—aside from his thesis—into peer-reviewed journals, even though during his last year he was one of the few people in the world working on a dissertation about data signal processing, which he has explained to me numerous times over the years. I still don’t know what all that means.
A couple of times before I was in middle school, our neighbors asked me to go to Mass with them, to which my father shook his head and muttered something about not involving himself with any of that as he stuck his nose back into his science fiction story. It was around middle school that my friends also started asking me to go to church with them. I went a couple of times, but I never felt like it was part of my identity, and it certainly wasn’t important to me in the slightest. Religion, in this sense, was a curious hobby I humored in my friends. I was completely unaware of religion’s history or implications. I was never given a Bible to read. I had no idea who Jesus was, but I got the idea he was an influential historical figure who built a lot of the foundations of the society I lived in. It seemed grand that people congregated around a largely sculpted building called a church. It was like a party. I didn’t quite understand it, but I wanted to. I felt like I was missing out. I didn’t understand why my dad hated it so much, and I wanted to learn about it. But it was too much effort to do so because I was completely fine without God and church. Each night I settled back into my home life where religion wasn’t a relevant part of my existence.
Then, when I got to high school, I had a psychotic break.
Decoding the Voices
When I was a teenager, I began having religious delusions, which are a common delusion for those with schizophrenia, whether the person is religious or not. Sometimes their religious delusions lead people to religion.
I didn’t know at the time what was happening. I went to the library each day after school, searching through the bookshelves in the spirituality section, where I came across books about past lives, souls, and spirits. Alternative New Age spirituality was very appealing to me in the late aughts. Yoga was very popular, so I started going to yoga classes and meditating. But I also got into crystals, tarot cards, and books about soul clusters. I didn’t feel like they meant anything other than that they gave me some comfort about my future when I didn’t know how to comfort myself. I felt like those spiritual interests gave me some kind of hope in a time of my life when I felt very hopeless. If friendships and boyfriends weren’t going to last forever, at least these books would assure me that we would come back to each other at the end of each life to talk about our “soul groups” and rejoin the greater soul.
But I left the books after I went on medication. My interest in spirituality was a floating social hobby at that point. A friend from school invited me to her nondenominational Christian church. I went one night. As I stepped inside the lobby, only young, blonde, fedora-wearing bodies with smiling faces came to greet me. I recognized this as the mostly White suburban kids with their suburban parents who had only ever known the outskirts of St. Louis in their entire lives. It seemed funny to me, the way they gathered. I met a whole host of different races when I traveled to California on the coast. This seemed like a creepy puritan congregation, but I ignored that feeling, because they welcomed me. I felt warmed by their presence. I still didn’t identify with the underlying philosophy that was bringing us all to this church, but I loved the atmosphere. At the time, I had recently run away from home. My friends were disappearing to boys or trauma. I didn’t have people to go to anymore.
I walked into the worship room, where it was dimly lit with yellow stage lights and chairs. It was intimate. There were maybe sixty people in the room, all eager to listen to the pastor’s words. First, a Christian indie band played a song that tugged at the heartstrings of a youth lost in the wilderness of normal life. Many of these attendees dealt with addiction, the death of a loved one, or other struggles. I saw how we needed this. I could feel the passion in the words, and the youthful longing and loss were feelings I related to because I was searching for someone who could hear me, see me, and tell me things were going to be alright.
The pastor came on stage, and he only seemed a mere ten years older than us. His sermon was full of humor. We took up our Bibles, and people started singing. Again, the song was beautiful. I saw people close their eyes in tears as they threw their heads back and sang with fervor and passion about God. I felt so awkward. I opened my Bible and pretended to sing. I tried to get into it, but it felt terribly wrong. I didn’t have the belief that there was a god and that church could help me beyond social support.
At the beginning of my college years, I came across my first Secular Student Alliance group. It was at a community college, but the group was relatively large for what I thought was a fringe interest. At my first meeting, about ten of us sat in a circle in front of a board with conversational topics written on it. This was when I first learned about the words Islamophobia, secularism, and creationism.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a group of peers who were as interested in discussing intellectual issues as I was. I immediately was drawn to them, and I made friends. The familiarity of it felt so similar to my relationship with my father. I had been surrounded by religious friends all my life, so I was shocked that I could ever find this kind of intellectual culture outside of my own home, and I loved it. However, I took note of the fact that many of these atheists and nonbelievers suffered from depression and isolation. This was definitely different from my peers at school, who largely seemed to feel socially integrated with their communities. I didn’t take it to mean too much at first; after all, I too suffered from depression and mental illness. Why wouldn’t I be friends with people who were like me?
Later that year, we as a student group were invited to attend Gateway to Reason, which was the first freethinking conference held in St. Louis. It was held at the collegiate campus at Washington University in St. Louis. The conference took place within one lecture hall where the speakers and attendees were free to mingle. Everywhere, people greeted me and came up to talk to me—everyone from attendees my own age to the speakers themselves.
I found it rather odd that I had made so many friends. I also found it odd that I was one of the only females, and young females at that, in the entire conference. I met atheists who had famous blogs, television programs, or large followings on social media. They all loved me! I never had this much popularity with anyone in high school! Why do these people like me so much? These men all treated me very differently from my father. It all made sense when I learned that weekend that many atheists were often inclined toward polyamory—a term I had never heard before but was apparently sort of a norm in this circle.
I went home and told my dad about my experience. I felt like I had found a gold mine, and maybe he would like to go next year too. We discussed it a bit, and given the close nature of our relationship, I told him about some of the guys and how interesting and inviting everyone was in the group. “I’m sure they find you interesting; you are kind of unusual,” he said to me. I didn’t really realize how unusual I was. I didn’t feel like it. It seemed off-putting to be treated with such attention, but I kind of loved it as a young adult raised in the era of Instagram. The attention was flattering. Atheist conferences were surely a popular thing in the late 2010s, and I was very excited to meet everyone.
After a brief volunteer position with the 2017 Gateway to Reason convention as the marketing and communications director (a term loaded with exaggerated implications endowed on me way too prematurely, in my opinion), I began traveling. I actually went off the medications I had been taking for five years, and now all of a sudden, in 2017, I was manic, hot, young, and ready to take on the world. My delusions of grandeur came off as eccentric confidence, and suddenly Facebook friends from the atheist community saw my social media postings of my traveling and ambitious philosopher-scientist dreams as something worthy of attention. Like any outspoken woman on the internet, I was flooded with mostly men wanting to talk to me. I felt rather bombarded by atheist men, who rushed to get me into bed, and eventually I lost track of all my relationships. This was a challenging time for me, as I was learning how to navigate sex with boundaries, and traumas left me a little bit unable to juggle both.
Eventually I didn’t have time to worry about my interests with organized secularism. I reached a turning point in my recovery when I realized I had to get my life in order if I was going to survive and achieve these aspirational dreams that my new friends believed I could reach. This was when my freethinking background influenced my recovery path.
A Suspension of Knowledge
Instead of leaning on delusions, I became skeptical of them. Many people, even researchers, believe that people with schizophrenia are unable to exert any rational control over their delusions, but I appeared to be a rare case. Through years of experiencing images, visuals, voices, and beliefs that hit me as if they were happening to me rather than things I conjured up of my own will, I recognized them for what they were. They weren’t going anywhere whether I took 100 medications or two. They were going to be a part of my life, and I needed to be innovative in the way I handled them, or I was going to end up like the many homeless people who roam the streets without family, finances, or any bit of social standing.
In this sense, I was able to apply my skepticism to my delusions. I asked myself whether or not my delusions could be true. Even if they were, did that mean I had to live my life around them? I asked those delusions questions. I asked my voices questions. I talked back to them in the sanest way I could. I questioned them. Today, I still have them, but they’re much more manageable because I developed a way to think critically about my brain. Healthy skepticism really does seem to win out in the end.
But because I never had any negative associations with religion, I began to develop a sense of spirituality that I felt other atheists hadn’t. This was when I realized I diverged from my atheist peers. I actually wanted to include a sense of God. I looked at it as a suspension of knowledge. Atheists celebrate science, but (briefly) being a scientist myself, I knew its limitations. I came to believe that science simply doesn’t know everything due to its slow and imperfect nature.
Life became too much to keep up with. I couldn’t wait on science to give me answers. I found a power in philosophy for guiding scientific studies. I started reading about consciousness and Christian atheism. My college boyfriend referred me to the works of mystics such as Simone Weil, over whom we bonded throughout our time together. It was this deep spiritual connection that fostered my ability to have deeply intimate relationships, more so than I ever had with atheists.
Now I’m somewhere in the middle, and I want to bridge the worlds of religion, spirituality, and secularism. I wouldn’t call myself religious. I fit into the category of atheist because I don’t believe in a god or gods, and neither do I believe that any god could be held to a perfect standard that is any better than the human race. I believe in unknowable laws of matter, that some things exist beyond our comprehension, facets of existence we have yet to be able to put into words. My aim with my life is to give those phenomena secular words. I live with a sense of mystery, beauty, and awe for the natural world, so perhaps it’s time for a new worldview and set of morality that can encompass both the past and present of timeless human experiences and struggles. Things like love, loss, security, and aspiration.
The first time I saw a roasted whole pig, the pig was in an aluminum pan on an altar surrounded by long, red candles. The candles were lit, and next to them was burning incense. Four or five incense sticks were stuck in the sand filling up mini gold vases. The pig, laid there like …