Trautism

Last week I attended a networking happy hour hosted by a faith-based organization for investors and entrepreneurs who are dedicated to carrying out God’s mission in their work. I described it to my husband as something like “the constructive disaster you’d expect,” meaning I considered it an overall positive experience in spite of some understandable challenges, which I’m using to learn and improve as I get my life and career back on track. So, cheers to cultivating a growth mindset despite possibly showing up as a babbling idiot!

I’d managed to achieve a calm and confident state as I got ready, wearing an older yet pretty enough summer business dress paired with my new white Allbirds ballet flats, but I quickly got overwhelmed once I arrived at the crowded bar. First off, I’ve never been a huge fan of bars and bar culture, not even in my partying days, so some of my processing power immediately got diverted to tamping down that general uneasiness and keeping it in check. Second, the RSVP list had jumped from ~30 to ~50 people, so while I had done my best to prepare my energetically sensitive self for mingling with such a large crowd, it seemed like all the guests plus an extra 50% had squeezed into the reserved area. I didn’t know anyone there either, and this was my first in-person business networking since before the pandemic started over five years before. Yikes.

Not only was I rusty from a lack of networking outside of my jobs, but for reasons beyond the normal autism hurdles, my recent coworkers and I had barely talked. I’d been employed at underfunded startups where I spent most of my time frantically responding to constantly changing needs that ranged from operations and marketing to web development and sales. These chaotic, resource-constrained environments of relentlessly “drinking from fire hoses” and tiptoeing around oversized, overburdened egos afforded very little capacity for having authentic, meaningful business conversations. They did, however, create the perfect conditions for burnout, which of course makes socializing more difficult and less desirable for anyone… and especially for those of us who struggle with mutually satisfying social interactions anyway!

Compounding my discomfort amid all the A-game professionals at the event was the fact that at present I’m between opportunities and unsure of what specifically to do next. I haven’t yet found the right fit that is reasonably challenging, aligns with my values and skills, and pays appropriately, so I’m looking for a job but also seriously considering going into business for myself. I have a few ideas I’ve been turning over in my head – and I’ve been quietly working on this blog and some personal matters, so it’s not like I’ve been doing nothing since I got laid off – but none of that felt ready to be discussed in any serious way with strangers that might be future business partners or employers. Meanwhile every other person there seemed to know exactly what they wanted and how they wanted to present themselves. They reminded me of what I used to be, and what I’m diligently working to reclaim (and surpass), but encountering those memories at that stage of my journey just further eroded my threadbare composure. 

I quickly exited soon after the event ended, grateful for the excuse that my parking had expired, and then shedding 7-9 tears in the privacy of my car before driving off to the grocery store. Final tally: I met seven new people, one with an offer to keep talking. Not an ideal performance, but I appreciated the opportunity to better understand my position and where to go from here. And I comforted myself with the faith that next time will be better, whether with these people or another group.

Still feeling a bit sheepish the next day but hopeful to stay in the loop of this particular organization, I went to their website and began filling out the form to join. But when I got to the last question, I discovered another subtle factor that frayed my nerves the night before: which church do I attend? As my fingers hovered aimlessly over the keyboard, the fourth networking conversation I had echoed in my mind, and I realized it had spawned the threat of imposter syndrome deep in my subconscious. A small business owner had casually told me the name of his church, which happens to be right near where my in-laws live, and I excitedly pointed out the commonality. 

My enthusiasm was overblown, though, and I had difficulty staying grounded for the rest of the event – my metaphorical kite flying me instead of the other way around. But with time and space to reflect, I can better understand what happened. I see that a buried part of me had started spooling up some guilty panic because it had been so long since I had gone to church, and another part began fretting over what seemed like a significant oversight in my preparation by not thinking through such a likely conversation topic. I knew the strength of my relationship with God, but like most aspects of my life, I hadn’t yet figured out how to properly articulate it or why it currently looked the way that it did. Ugh, would I still be welcome there? Would they consider me a Christian? I’ve still generally thought of myself as Catholic, just one who got disillusioned with the church… but as I think this through now, what is a Catholic who isn’t practicing and has lost faith in the Catholic Church and many of its perspectives? Clearly some of my insecurity that night stemmed from this unresolved aspect of my identity, and I’d been oblivious to the deficit. 

I was born and raised Catholic, and my parents gave me the name “Christine” because my birth was expected around the celebration of Christ’s birthday, better known as Christmas. Throughout my childhood, our family consistently participated in church life and observed Lent by collectively giving up beloved treats like ice cream or candy. I remember finding the simplicity of a Good Friday dinner – fruit, bread, and cheese on one big plate – to be curiously delightful. 

But our religious practices slipped as my parents faced financial trouble with their small business, ultimately leading to their bankruptcy and the foreclosure on our family home. My dad thought the church should have done more to help us. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus and a man of great moral conviction, having contemplated the priesthood before settling down with my sweet mom, and he seemed to interpret the church’s lack of financial support as fundamental rejection. Or maybe he rejected them because they were not the Godly, generous, and forgiving community he thought they were. 

Either way, between not adequately processing that pain/confusion and my dad living apart from us most of the time for his new job, our family lost the habit of regular worship. Sure, going to church and Sunday school as a kid could be annoying at times, but the lack of it left a big hole in my life. I knew I cherished the loving teachings of Jesus; they resonated with me deeply, and I took the direction of the church very seriously, seemingly more so than anyone else in my family. With the knowledge I have now, I can see that I also missed the religious community because I felt so secure within Catholicism’s constructs: the sacred rules themselves, the consistent nature of the church and its rituals, the predictability of the parishioners and their behavior. On the surface, it’s a clean and nicely organized order for someone with autism. 

During my middle school years, while our troubled family typically reserved church for special occasions like Easter and Christmas, I explored religion on my own. I ended up forging a good relationship with the local Methodist church where they were cultivating a thriving population of teenagers. Their inclusivity created like-minded and ready-made friends, and I loved the fun and intimacy of lock-ins and the two big road trips I took with them: one to the Ichthus Music Festival in Kentucky, where I would become briefly enamored with the Christian rock band Hoi Polloi, and another for a retreat to Camp Kulaqua with a day trip to Disney World. I got so involved with this new church that my parents surprised me with my own copy of the King James Bible, one of the Precious Moments versions, and I loved reading its pretty, poetic language. 

After moving to Virginia and finding a large Catholic church near my high school, I occasionally participated in its youth group and other activities. As my atheist boyfriend and I got closer, though, my involvement with the church reduced to nearly nothing. He and I planned to get married, but we hadn’t sorted out the critical detail that I was Christian and he was not. Or that I needed to be wed in a Catholic church for me to consider my marriage truly valid, and he didn’t see that as an option. Throughout the last three years of high school, I’d periodically have autistic meltdowns about him dying and going to hell because he didn’t believe. That idea bothered me so much more than squaring with the conundrum of how to share the holy sacrament of marriage with someone who didn’t share my religion. And in the end, our different values divided us.

I took the breakup very hard and was quite excited when mutual Catholic faith bonded me with my next boyfriend. He would go on to become my husband when I was 21, and the father of my child when I was 23. But shortly after my 26th birthday, and regardless of both of us firmly believing in marriage for life, our union suddenly vaporized in a fiery cataclysm of our own stupid doing. Despite making major life decisions according to Catholic doctrine, we had partied way too much and fought constantly, and it finally destroyed us.

The priest who conducted our pre-marital counseling had seen the warning signs, and he insisted that we see a counselor with Catholic Charities to work on our dysfunction (and for the record, we did go for at least a couple of years, but it was not impactful). However, my husband assured me that the priest at our destination wedding was a close family friend and would have married us regardless. While certainly convenient, I found the disclosure rather disturbing.

As I started to understand that connections within the church could bend or break the rules, and that many allegedly faithful people were simply engaging in lip service – just like in dirty politics and unethical businesses – my faith in organized religion started to crack. It wasn’t just personal experiences either. Right around the time I got married in 2003, the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal was coming to light. Thousands of victims had been abused in churches all across the world over a long period of time, and even more horribly, the heinous crimes had been regularly covered up by authorities within the church – passed off as merely sins that needed to be forgiven and behavior that needed to be adjusted – which in many cases, allowed the predators to continue their rampages. How could this happen in the house of God, by the people ordained to carry out his word and deed? The cascading damage from all that depraved behavior is staggering. I grappled with confusion, shock, and revulsion… and I began to see other concerns and hypocrisies in the way humans had been interpreting and allegedly fulfilling the word of God. Maybe my mom could’ve reassured me if she’d still been alive, but without her thoughtful words to add to the echoes of my autistic mind, all that toxicity became quite the cacophony. 

When it came time for my second marriage, 12 years after the first, neither of us had any interest in a church wedding. I’d already done it and been terribly burned by it, plus my first marriage was a Catholic union that had not been annulled – and I still saw Catholicism as the ultimate Christian authority, so if the Catholic Church said I couldn’t remarry, then no other Christian church would suffice either. Besides, my fiance wasn’t a Christian. Like my first serious boyfriend, he had been a lifelong atheist when we initially got involved… but this time, our discussions and contemplations inspired him to at least acknowledge the truth of spirituality and begin working with spiritual constructs. 

Partly because of my new husband’s influence, but also due to my trauma, autism, and various difficult life circumstances, our family stayed away from organized religion as my daughter grew up. She had been baptized, we had various religious paraphernalia in our home, and I’d talk to her about God, Jesus, prayer, and Christian values… but it was inconsistent and mostly high level. It definitely bothered me that she didn’t have as much of the religious scaffolding that had meant so much to me as a young person, but I didn’t know how to fix it given the state of my own practice and perspective, especially not with everything else we had going on. We didn’t know of a church where we felt welcome, but that’s partly because our autistic selves had started to feel rejected by just about everyone, everywhere. We also didn’t have religious people in our lives to help me make sense of the conflicts and distress I’d experienced. And while my daughter briefly attended an evangelical megachurch with a friend in elementary school, she too experienced disingenuous behavior there that discouraged her from going back. 

I thought I’d found a solution by joining a Christian-based mutual assistance group (MAG) in recent years, seeing it as the right mix of shared values and practical interaction, but no luck. When news of monkeypox broke, our group chat erupted in fierce vitriol against gay people, and none of the leaders or more established members spoke up to stop it or question it. What happened to WWJD – what would Jesus do? Where are the truly thoughtful and peaceful Jesus-like Christians? Is this an autism thing – am I being too rigid and too sensitive with unrealistic expectations? I really don’t think so. Faith and religion are deeply intimate, and while I know that to err is to be human, I don’t know how to share such ongoing intimacy with seriously hypocritical people who deliberately pick and choose who is deserving of their kindness while parading under the welcoming flag of Christianity. 

So where does all this leave me? For now I’d describe myself as a former Catholic looking forward to being part of an honest, kind, and reasonable community of similarly loving and open-minded faithful Christian people. We just haven’t found each other yet.