Kat's Final Essay

Curiosity, Skepticism, and Happiness:

A Personal Story

            From an early age I’ve been interested in the mysteries of life. I can remember fervently exploring my backyard for hidden pockets of reality that maybe my parents or other adults didn’t know of yet. I thought there were still vast, unexplored parts of the globe, and while there are still areas that no man has been to, it’s hardly the landscape of unknown that I had imagined. I felt a severe connection, like anyone around the appropriate age reading the series, to Harry Potter. I wrote myself letters of acceptance to Hogwarts, green ink and all, wishing and hoping that the world I live in was merely a cover-up for something much more fantastic. Maybe I was a lost princess or the progeny of two explorers that left their only daughter with some random couple before setting off to discover Atlantis. I researched fairies, mermaids, ghosts, gods, magic, magick, voodoo, witchcraft, demons, trolls, gnomes, and just about anything supernatural I had heard of, but it seemed that the more curious I became, the more skeptical I was about the results, and happiness or satisfaction with reality slipped through my fingers like so-called “ghosts” that turned out to be gusts of cold air.

            Throughout childhood, I maintained faint beliefs, feeding kindling to the fires of hope that still held out for magic and wonder. I had imaginary friends, but I knew that they were only in my head. I was made fun of pretty harshly for even having these “friends,” especially so when I would explain that I made up these people just so I could pretend I was talking to someone other than myself. Often called “weird,” I knew that figures like Santa and the Tooth Fairy weren’t real at an incredibly young age. So young, that I have no recollection of ever believing—only of asking a kindergarten teacher how Santa gets in to houses without chimneys, how reindeer could fly, how he could make it around the world in one night, and so on. My parents were blunt with me growing up, refusing to use a cooing voice with me after I started speaking back. My father would practice advanced math and play learning-based computer games with me. When I would get curious about things like God’s existence or ethical dilemmas, my parents always encouraged my own searching and questioning to find subjective answers. I moved to Tennessee in the third grade and was immediately bombarded with churches, denominations, God, Jesus, and the general antics of the Bible belt south before I had had time for aforementioned religious investigation. This was particularly intriguing to me because while it was easy to dismiss the jolly Christmas-time gift-bearer and be met with acceptance and agreement, it was not at all the same for religious figures.

            Middle school was a time for shattering dreams, hope, and faith. By and throughout then, I had finally given up on mythological creatures and the existence of any proof of magic or fantasy realms, hidden but somehow reachable. There was no Atlantis with a thriving civilization, no fairies or fairy rings that I could get trapped in for what seemed like a day but was actually millennia, no gnomes or mole people, no trolls under bridges with passwords or riddles for me to guess, no mermaid society at the bottom of the ocean, and most importantly, those Hogwarts letters that I had written to myself were just that—letters to myself, from myself, for an imaginary school. My parents were my real parents and that was that, but this religious stuff had to be real, right? It seemed that everyone believed in something, and I wanted to have some of that faith stuff that they all glorified. To be fair, I never had a chance for faith when my starting position was utter doubt and want for proof.

            I went to church with my best friend Jordan in fifth grade. I was in a puppeteer group, youth group, choir, and I helped teach the youngest groups of kids for Bible study. Always asking too many questions about topics that were “too difficult for me to understand,” I was told to stay quiet during presentations and even during discussion sessions. After a mission trip, I decided that I was never going to believe in God or accept Jesus as my lord and savior. There were multiple reasons for this, but the most significant was that the girls on the mission trip bragged about kissing boys, gossiped, and talked about desired sexual experiences. It was like Cinderella’s gown and carriage—once the lights were out, all of that Christian idealistic mentality disappeared and the girls turned back in to girls. It wasn’t that I was disturbed with any of this behavior; I was actually excited to know that these normally-virtuous-yet-monotonous girls were people that I could relate to. It was that they had hid behind masks of their religious beliefs that drove me off: by day one way, by night another. They weren’t being honest with themselves, and if God required me to lie about, ignore, or secretly discuss behind the “authority’s” back what I thought and felt in order to be considered a “good” Christian, I wanted no part of it. I continued to go to church (because my only friends were there) until I got asked to leave for telling younger children that the eggs and bunnies from Easter have nothing to do with Christ, that these figures were pagan symbols for fertility, and finally, that the Church usurped dates for their holidays to “cover” the days with Christian beliefs and values instead of “heretic” traditions.

            Once I was done with Christianity, I rejected the other Judeo-Christian religions by association. Then, I delved in to typically-considered-rebellious belief systems for a white, teenaged, American girl. In about a year, I claimed to be a Wiccan, Pagan, Satanist, Voodoo practitioner, and Shaman in training, trying out many of the rituals while I extended my wardrobe to include mostly black clothes with chains on them (also known as my Goth stage). After it all started to feel like the same thing over and over again, I stopped trying to pick a religion. Though some Eastern practices (especially Buddhism) sounded intriguing, I couldn’t bring myself to do any more searching. I called myself an agnostic, leaving that tiny gap open for possibility almost as a joke towards certainty. My doubt and curiosity had brought me to a very low point. I had ceased to find meaning in life or myself. What was it all for? If death is just ceasing to exist, it sounded a whole lot better than continuing to be apathetic or nihilistic. Privately, I became suicidal and depressed. Even for a youngster, this kind of existential crisis is difficult and heartbreaking.

            This was until I found something that I thought was real and could be believed in—love. True love, to be exact, was the answer to everything for me. If I could find my soul mate, my better half, or whatever else you’d like to call it, I would have that real ideal to put my hope and faith in. I got used to loving and losing by having “boyfriends” from a young age, but when I saw all of the poetry, literature, movies, television shows, jewelry commercials, etc. that presented this “true love” concept, I wanted some of it for myself. Again, I approached it with skepticism and curiosity, much as I did with religious faith. As it does for anyone, this search led me through relationships, sexual encounters, and ridicule from my peers over the rest of middle school and in to high school. I was desperate for answers, for “the one,” to quiet my doubts about such a love, and because of this, I was not very appealing. I threw myself at people, hoping that one of them would love me the way I had imagined, like magic and fireworks inside my very soul. The more I pushed it, the more I questioned my relationships and doubted the validity of a “true” love, the more I found myself feeling alone and meaningless again.

            After high school, I married the first guy that had told me anything remotely similar to what I had read in those poems and had stuck around longer than anyone else. Our marriage failed miserably for a variety of reasons, most importantly that I had rushed it and doubted it every step of the way. The divorce brought anxiety, loneliness, a distrust of love, commitment issues, and another spout of depression. I can trace almost all of my deepest moments of sadness back to curiosity, skepticism, or both, but what about my happiness? Where has that come from? It has the same source. The journey I’ve been on has been laden with upsetting moments, but each time I’ve fallen, I’ve picked myself back up. In picking myself up, I’ve learned and grown and made progress. In learning, growing, and making progress, I’ve found happiness and contentment with myself.

In being skeptical, I’ve always taken the time to figure things before accepting so-called truths, to let myself fail in order to figure out what success is. In being curious, I’ve lead myself to the greatest discoveries about myself as well as about the world around me. The mysteries are still there, I just have to keep pushing my boundaries. Sure, I may have rejected soul mates, religious figures, and mythological creatures (among other topics not discussed in this essay), but I still have the universe, real love, a rich diversity of people, ethical beliefs, etc. Healthy curiosity and doubt have brought me to where I am today. Proudly, I can say that I don’t have all of the answers, I don’t know, and that certainty is something that I’m still learning to be okay without. I can declare my love for James and my hope that we’ll live happily ever after, even though I can’t be sure of it. I can assert what I think is morally right and wrong without having to justify it in an endless cycle of hypothetical situations, and I can be happily disproved if ever I find myself in such a circumstance that changes my beliefs. No part of me is permanent, and I am fine with that. Meaning and happiness come and go just as apathy and sadness do, and I’m learning to live with that. I am Kat, a curious skeptic, attempting to create my own positivity in spite of all of the hogwash.