The hardest part about losing my religion wasn’t unlearning the teachings. Doing study and research enough to replace the baseless fantasies I had believed in with reality-based information was intense, sure, but I love learning and I enjoyed the thrill of discovery. Who doesn’t get a kick out of the mental buzz you get when you graduate from the childish simplicity of seeing the sky as a sort blue bowl over your head to understanding how light is being refracted and diffused through the atmosphere to create the illusion?

No, the hard part was losing a sense of meaning and purpose. To be a believer was to belong somewhere and to know, really firmly and truly know, where you fit in, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I think I knew that this would be a problem long before I ever lost my faith because I had seen other people who had lost their faith who seemed to struggle with being happy. The sense of belonging to a higher calling, doing something universally important with one’s life, that’s something you can’t just casually replace. In the world of my particular faith tradition, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, it is perhaps one of the more extreme experiences of loss in Western Christian culture. It is possible to leave as I did, because you no longer believe the teachings, and you will experience the complete loss of family, community, and purpose in life and it is also possible to be expelled from the community via disfellowshipping, in which case you experience the complete loss of family and community but if you still believe, and many do, you get to at least retain the idea that you have a higher purpose. You just suffer with feelings of shame and guilt and anxiety until they let you back in.

In either case, the sense of having a direction in life on a daily basis, of knowing where you fit, is disrupted, brutally and violently.

The first three years after my loss of faith were the most transformative. There was a lot of study and learning and writing and change. I grew a beard and started doing meditation and wrote a lot of music and centered my life on the one thing that I knew mattered more than anything, the one true north… my son. Maybe I didn’t know the meaning of life anymore, but I knew that my boy and I were family and that I was responsible for being the best dad to him that I could be. This anchored me in a way that nothing else did. Then I met and married my wife and the three of us became my purpose in life. I may not have been clear on whether or not the universe was intentionally created by an invisible person who wants to talk to me in my head but I was very very crystal clear about the child and the woman who lived in my house, who shared their welfare with my own, and who I loved.

But purpose is a tricky thing. Life changes, times go by, and purpose sometimes changes shape. My son grew up, he moved out of the house, my core purpose in life, my core identity of Dad, was no longer the obvious reason for getting up in the morning, going to work, brushing my teeth, and bringing home the bacon. I found that my interest in creativity waned, which surprised me because it was such a huge part of my self-identity and I had thought that being creative was it’s own purpose in life. I had thought it was my core purpose, but I learned that it was actually something else and that the lose of a sense of purpose had a detrimental effect on my creative output.

When I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and making music in The Lavone with my brother Rhett, organizing and promoting various bands and albums via the Nuclear Gopher, building websites and making movies, the activities served at least three purposes. First, I had a personal creative outlet for my thoughts and feelings. Second, I had a sense that my creative/entrepreneurial activities were allowing people I loved to do things that they loved while staying faithful to Jehovah. Third, I found that my Nuclear Gopher activities were a testbed of learning that had the practical benefit of advancing my technical skills and advancing my more mundane (but financially stable) career as a software developer and therefore helped me take care of my kid and myself.

Take the religion and the child-rearing out of the equation and I was left with far less “cosmic purpose”. I didn’t need to run a record label to try to help support random musicians, there were already thousands of those. I was well enough established in my career that I wasn’t going to learn anything earth shattering by building another website, so no purpose there. I honestly couldn’t think of any sort of reason to create anymore, or at the least, when I did create something I could no longer see any particular reason to share it with the world. That was how I came to realize that being a creative person had never actually been my core motivation. A need to be heard, to have my barbaric yawp echo throughout the world, had not been my driving motivation and once it came down to writing to be heard, singing to be heard, or creating art to be seen I found that I just didn’t care.

It wasn’t just that. I didn’t care about, well, anything really. Creativity was just the most (to me) surprising example. After losing my faith, my belief in God, my family, my friends, the record label I had been working on for over half of my life, my wife, all of that, I still had a kid to raise. I had a new wife. I starting making my own music, without Nuclear Gopher and The Lavone. I had a lot of learning to do. That wave of purpose got me through most of a decade but when I became an empty-nester I was confronted again with “WHY?” and I didn’t have an answer.

I am not a career person. I have never wanted to climb a corporate ladder, I don’t talk about work at parties. I have a relatively successful career that has lasted nearly 30 years but the part of me that does my job and the rest of me are barely on speaking terms. I put on a hat and I go to an office (or login to remote things) and I do a thing that I get compensated for but in terms of personal identity? I am not my job, I have no sense of self tied up in my career. I am good at it, but there is no purpose for me in the world of software engineering. That’s just a thing I know how to do that pays better than most of the other things I know how to do.

I am not expecting to become a rich and famous artist or celebrity. Pursuing music, writing, or (another passion) filmmaking as an alternate career to the software one, trying to make myself known as a creator and deriving an income from that, feels like a dream that passed me by a long time ago. I’m pushing 50. I’m balding. I’m not some basement hero, some Nuclear Gopher dreaming of Armageddon and trying to make a dent in the universe before 30, I’m a middle aged guy with a well earned dad bod and a long track record of putting out records and making videos and stuff that (until recently) very few people have paid any goddamn attention to. Tilting at that particular windmill without some additional motivation feels ridiculous, like buying a Ferrari or getting hair plugs.

If I lack cosmic purpose of the religious kind, if I am no longer actively parenting, if I do not realistically expect to “make it” in the creative world, if I am not really interested in corporate or financial pursuits, why put out a new record? Why write this blog post? Why do anything at all? OK, yes, I have people who depend on me; my wife, the people I work with, even my son. I have animals who depend on me too. Four dogs and two cats at current count. If I were suddenly taken away tomorrow, to paraphrase the great Keanu Reeves, the people who love me would miss me. Which is great, I don’t intend to devalue that, being accountable to and spending time with people that matter to you is insanely important but it doesn’t really help me know what I want to actually do with my time. I mean, I can completely stop being creative and still be with loved ones. Most people, it turns out, are fine with just BEING. I’m terrible at it. After the first three decades of my life spent thinking I was part of a cosmic melodrama I just get antsy when I don’t know why any one choice or direction is of more interest than any other. Purpose provides this. Where do I want to expend my efforts, my time, my money? This is the purpose of purpose. Having a purpose clarifies your decision making, gives you a sense of direction for your actions, helps you decide what you want to do next. Living without a purpose feels more aimless, directionless, rudderless, and ultimately a bit pointless.

Ultimately, my struggle to have a sense of purpose in my life has been the central struggle of the last decade for me, the long-haul XJW symptom I have found to be the stickiest, the most persistent. I know, intellectually, that people who were never in a cult also struggle with the ultimate meaninglessness of existence, it is not unique to me or to people like me, but if I had never had the sense that I was part of some universal plan maybe I wouldn’t feel it to be such a loss, such a gaping hole in my heart. In my private journaling I often wrestle with what has happened to me creatively. After all, barring a little 6-song EP that I recorded in a day in 2014 I haven’t fundamentally been able to even make a record since 2012, something I used to do at least once a year. My public facing writing is minimal, my private writing is mostly a lot of navel gazing. My days are packed with activities but very few are social. I wake up, write, do the Wordle and Spelling Bee, start my work day, 9-10 hours later I log off, maybe feed the dogs, help make dinner, run to the store, or take care of some sort of errands. I don’t call, don’t text, don’t go on social media much, don’t see friends, I keep my head down. I feel like I’m waiting for something to change. Waiting for an internal levee to break. Waiting to have a sense of “this is the way” and, in the meantime, I’m just taking care of business.

This, my friends, has been, for me, the true legacy of losing my faith. I have found myself in a state where I don’t believe in ambition, don’t believe in myself, don’t believe in much beyond survival most days. A state where it’s a good day if I just wake up, experience something, and go to sleep. But it’s also a state I am profoundly dissatisfied with. I want my purpose back. I want to have a reason to believe in myself, a reason to do things, a reason to put myself back out there. I’m taking some steps. I’m planning to put myself back out in the world (even if I am not sure exactly why) and I feel that it’s worth sharing these feelings with whoever might read this. I’ve been out of the Witnesses for 19 years. I’ve built a good life for myself. I have everything to be proud of and happy about. I have a wonderful son, a long-lasting marriage, a respectable and stable career, a home, pets who love me, friends, some cool old sports cars, guitars, amazing memories, but it’s still a struggle. I still feel like the point is elusive. Maybe this is just how it is for everybody. I don’t know. I am just going to have to stop waiting to feel purpose and start doing. Maybe I can at least find some satisfaction that way. Time will tell.