How Believing in Christianity Caused Me to Start Dying Inside (Part 2)

On ripping off the Band-Aid: blurting it ALL out if you need to (even when people aren't expecting it or didn't ask for it) + the FUN of offending Christians with thought-provoking questions

I knew when I posted my last entry totally impromptu (without looking at the schedule to see when I was already emailing something I had pre-planned with the team) that I had to not care about the outcome because the outcome was the joy of expression in itself.

It wasn’t “make sure there aren’t other emails going out today first!”

It wasn’t “what if they didn’t need to hear that today?”

It wasn’t “nobody cares, Cait!”

or

“you’re SO annoying!”

It was “this is what I’m thinking right now and I’m gonna start blogging about it to people who’ve expressed interest in hearing what I have to say.”

Because I always feel way better when I write.

I hadn’t realized how much I got out of writing until a thought came to mind, as I was reading someone else’s Substack, that it didn’t have to be perfect to be good. It could still be interesting or helpful or funny, even if it was imperfect.

(And what is “imperfect” anyway?)

So I wrote and published the last article without “getting approval” or checking in with anyone first, and (GASP!!!!) without having “a second set of eyes” coughcough:aproofreader:coughcough to spot errosr and improve things.

I broke ALL of my old “rules” for how “writing” must be done.

One of those rules? “NEVER think of yourself first.”

Suuuch bad advice!

Better advice? It is by loving and taking great care of oneself that we are best equipped to improve the lives of others.

Others’ lives are improved by default when we take the best possible care of ourselves first.

The more love and care I give to myself, the happier I am and the more benefit others receive from me. It overflows. That’s true abundance.

Anyway, I explained to my two team members that it was part of the “rip off the Band-Aid” compulsion I had to dramatically re-enter the blogosphere. I have missed the blogosphere, and I am loving all of this fresh, new-ish not caring at all what people think of me (for real this time) energy.

From now on, I’ll post on Sundays.

At least one free post a month, with more goodies for contributing subscribers. You also have the option of being on two Zoom calls a month with me + being in my mentorship community on the Skool platform.

The community is called Conscious Rebels Network, and I totally think Jesus would be a member, ha!

Not the white Christian worship-me Jesus, the "follow me” Jesus.

Dude was SUCH a rebel.

Sunday posts seem the most special to me because I used to force myself to go to church. I liked it at first, because my youth group was super fun, but as I progressed into adulthood, it started to feel like suuuuuch a chore.

And there was just that constant low-hum undercurrent of shame that never goes away.

I used to talk my ex-husband into staying home and watching the church service online while I jumped on my trampoline instead. It felt more productive that way because I loved the way jumping on my trampoline made me feel. I did not love the way church made me feel. I didn’t even like it.

And I felt like something was wrong with me because I didn’t seem to feel like I belonged with a bunch of people crying and dancing because they were covered by the blood of Jesus.

Thankfully, it didn’t take much convincing for us to stay home. It got to the point where we only went to church when we were on the volunteer calendar. He helped usher in the congregation, whereas I wo-manned the “Welcome” table at the front of the auditorium at the local high school where we gathered.

When my then-husband and I left for South America for a year in 2015, we stopped going to church altogether.

A new adventure I could feel guilty about because it wasn’t Jesus-centric! YAY!

VERY IMPORTANT SIDENOTE: It wasn’t just Christianity, by the way, that made me slowly die inside. It was all forms of people-pleasing.

My former in-laws are a good example.

They did not initially like “our” decision to go live in South America for a year. My former father-in-law literally told us “if you want to go waste a year of your life down there, that’s up to you” — implying living abroad would be a waste. I will never understand that perspective. I still laugh about it because that trip is now such a MILESTONE in my life … I’ll never regret the time I “wasted” down there.

My inlaws also “knew” it was ME who had hatched such an outrageous “plan.” I was the mastermind behind the idea for their son to quit his “stable” $34,000 per year job in financial aid for a for-profit “university” in the Orlando area and go live in South America for a year instead.

I was clearly the worst influence on him.

My income could more than cover us living abroad in South America. He wanted to start his own business anyway, and I thought I’d be a “good wife” by supporting him while he built his dream.

I would’ve been fine with that too… if he’d actually built his dream. Instead, I built a new business. It became the business that supported him hopping from idea to idea with “nothing panning out”… the one that ran without the constant dependence on ME having enough freelance clients to pay the bills.

I built that. He benefited from it. These days, I find peace in knowing I made such a huge difference in his life. I’m also happy to not be part of his life anymore, ha! Both can be true at the same time, and they are.

That business grew and grew, into the millions per year, and that version of Cait also grew increasingly resentful toward my then-husband for not contributing the same as what I was contributing to the relationship (financially).

It was a LOT of pressure and pretty exhausting.

By April 2016 I had gained quite a bit of weight and was quite depressed. I was drinking a lot of wine, too.

I didn’t want to be doing what I was doing, but I kept doing it anyway, and I used substances like wine to make it more bearable.

I’d dreamed of more adventure than sitting in a hot downtown Santiago apartment with no air conditioning, writing a blog post about proofreading when I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.

Where was the space for that conversation?

It was a conversation I wasn’t quite ready to have with myself.

In my world, I’d made a decision to get married… to be someone’s wife… and I had to figure out a way to make peace with that decision because I’d told this guy in my wedding vows that I’d never leave him.

I NEEDED life to be interesting. Adventure was the way to do that. I was spending all my time trying to make money to support him building his dream, when what I really wanted was to spend my time doing what made me feel great.

The masculine/feminine balance was nonexistent.

I was very much “in my masculine” in my first marriage.

We had a very exciting life, though. Lots of adventures that would never have happened had I not insisted on them.

(For example, we cruised to St. Petersburg, Russia in 2017!)

All that fun was an attempt to drown out the emotional monotony I felt in my inner world. Relationally, too. I hardly knew myself! How could I know someone else enough to want to partner with them for life? I didn’t know what that meant.

Doing it all for myself sucked the life right out of me. Forcing myself to stay when I would’ve been happier alone… was exhausting.

But there was the version of me I felt I needed to be so God would accept and love me.

And there was the version of me who made me feel the most alive.

The truly authentic, unwatered-down version of me.

I genuinely thought I was doing the “right” thing by honoring my wedding vows, but I was actually self-abandoning in a most spectacular way.

I felt my lack of authenticity in my first marriage. I couldn’t articulate that that’s what it was, but I always knew something wasn’t quite right. I’d often blame myself instead of understanding the true causes.

Christian doctrine and purity culture installed in me the belief that serving a man is a role of such high honor. Being someone’s wife was the highest aspiration

In stark contrast, my husband now is obsessed with me, and I with him. He’s the best. I get to “me” all day, whatever that entails — a podcast, a CRN meetup, making videos, Instagram live, playing Dreamlight Valley, a spa day — and he is working to make sure I will always be able to do that. Soon, he’ll be able to do it too. He has such an incredible work ethic.

But I digress :)

Back to blurting it out and not caring what anybody thinks — and since it’s Sunday!! — something that feels really good to say out loud (because I genuinely believe it with all my heart and when I started saying it out loud I connected with a lot of others who needed to hear it and it helped them find more freedom):

Jesus “dying for us” is a LIE.

…and most of what I say after such a bold statement isn’t a direct defense of the assertion I made, it’s a bunch of questions instead.

Questions that the average Bible-believing Christian has likely never asked themselves.

Questions like... who/what decided someone had to die for us to be forgiven? That BLOOD was the currency necessary?

And why was there a price or a transaction necessary first? It makes no sense.

God is love and love keeps NO RECORDS of wrong, yet Jesus is paying for my sin, which God remembers until blood erases it?

Also, who sent the bill? Jesus paid it but Jesus IS God so God paid himself to protect us/save us from himself?

Seriously though. The more comfortable you get asking questions like these (and not getting attached to needing a right answer), the better.

Often, just the thinking about it is enough to indirectly help someone start a new leg of their faith journey because Christians have been taught they need to be able to defend their faith. So the way I see it, they need to know the answers to these questions.

I’m literally helping them grow in their faith by asking them. That’s why it’s so interesting when Christians find my videos offensive.

The offended ones feel uncomfortable and blame me for their discomfort… instead of listening and thinking about what I’m saying. It’s more important to defend one’s long-held beliefs than to know why you believe them in the first place.

The exciting part, the “Trojan Horse,” hidden benefit aspect of it is this: it’s in asking new questions — seeking — that these people (who are already totally convinced that “Jesus” is the answer to every question and have stopped asking questions) may just stumble upon a truth that actually sets them free.

Seek and you shall find. But you won’t find anything you’re not looking for.

Questions from people like me (in my videos, articles, etc.) give Christians a reason to start thinking in a new way.

I left the Christian religion because there were no answers for the questions like “Who’s demanding a payment for sin?” No one was even asking the questions.

But because Christians do feel the need to defend their faith. Let them “defend it” from people like me. I am not scared of their hurt feelings.

It’s not my job to protect their religion. It’s my job to scrutinize it and guide people to a more fulfilling, connected way of living that is free of unnecessary guilt, shame, and fear.

My goal isn’t to destroy anyone’s faith, but to expand it. To show Christians (deconstructing or not) more of who Jesus actually is/was… and challenge them to see more of what’s happening around them. I want to help people see that their “faith” is actually a well-designed trap that keeps them oblivious to the truth… a trap that lulls them to sleep and deprives them of the Heaven (freedom) they could be experiencing instead.

That’s all for today <3

C

PS — I launched a free 10-day Deconstruction Crash Course. Access it here.