I used to fear God. Not in a philosophical way. In a real, visceral way. Like if I had a bad thought, something would come for me.
I also couldn’t hate my dad. Even when he cheated on my mom. Even when he blew all our money and left us with almost nothing. I just accepted it. Because you don’t hate your father. That’s just how it is. Everyone said so without saying so.
But I couldn’t say any of that out loud. Not even to myself.
That’s what dogma does. It doesn’t always come from a book or a sermon. Sometimes it’s just the air you breathe. Respect your elders. Fear God. Be grateful. Don’t question. And you follow it not because you believe it, but because everyone else is following it and it feels dangerous not to.
So I held it all sacred. My parents. God. The rules. And in doing that, I made myself smaller.
Money was always tight after that. My mom worked herself to the bone just to get me halfway through high school, then college. I watched her do it every day. She took loans from banks, from friends. She even pawned her wedding ring at some point. It’s gone now.
And instead of gratitude, what built up in me was bitterness. Toward my dad. Toward the situation. Toward how hard everything was when it didn’t have to be. Every small hardship was a reminder. The anxiety just accumulated, year after year, sitting in my chest getting heavier.
There was no moment of clarity. Nothing came and saved me from it. Just years of bitterness until I finally stopped pretending it wasn’t there.
I let myself hate my dad. Really hate him. I let myself feel how unfair it was, how much damage he caused, how badly I wished things had been different.
Then I sat with it for a long time. Eventually I realized the hatred wasn’t going to change what happened. He was still a shitty father. He still failed his family. But I was an adult now, and nobody was coming to fix it for me.
So I focused on what I could control. I learned how to carry myself instead of waiting for him to become someone else.
Somewhere in that process, something changed. The hate never fully disappeared, but it stopped being the only thing there. Something else existed beside it. Love, or something like it. I don’t know if it never left or if it came back. I’m not sure it matters. What I know is I couldn’t have found it without going through the darker thing first.
Jung called that darkness the shadow. The monster inside you that you pretend isn’t there. He believed the less you face it, the more it controls you. Not from the front, where you can see it coming, but from behind.
I did the same thing with darker thoughts too. The kind people don’t talk about. Thoughts about death. About violence. About my worst impulses. Most people look away and pretend they don’t exist.
I looked at them.
Not because I wanted to act on them. But because they were there, and pretending otherwise felt like lying. The thought is just a thought. Looking at it takes the power away.
I have a college friend. Very religious. Harmless, honestly. But when he fell for someone, it became obsessive. Women around him felt unsafe. He lost his job over it eventually, and even now he doesn’t really understand, or want to understand, why.
He never saw it coming. Why would he? He was following all the rules. The faith gave him a moral identity so complete that there was no room left to ask harder questions about himself. He was too busy being good to notice what he was actually doing.
Or look at social media. How many people perform goodness online, posting about empathy, justice, religion, and turn out to be cheaters, predators, or abusers? It happens enough that it shouldn’t surprise us anymore. But it still does. Because we keep mistaking the performance for the person.
The more polished the image, the less they’ve had to look underneath it. But the shadow doesn’t disappear just because you’ve buried it under a good reputation.
And that’s the thing about the shadow. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up as obvious evil. It shows up as righteousness. As being really, really sure you’re right. The more sacred the belief, the easier it is to let it carry you somewhere you’d never consciously choose to go. You don’t notice because it feels like virtue the whole way down.
This isn’t just me talking about God or parents, by the way. Sacredness comes in many forms.
Some people make money sacred. They won’t question what they had to become to get it. Some people make science sacred and forget that science is a method, not a religion. Some people make their ideology sacred, left or right, and stop being able to think outside of it. Some people make empathy sacred, they perform it, weaponize it, build an identity around it, and somewhere along the way forget to actually feel it. Some people make their own suffering sacred and never let themselves heal.
Whatever it is you refuse to question, that’s the thing that owns you.
I’m also not saying be an anarchist and do whatever you want. That’s not the point. The point is that real values, the ones actually worth keeping, can survive being questioned.
So hold nothing sacred. Not because nothing matters. But because the things that truly matter will survive the fire. And the ones that don’t, probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place.