As a child, I believed in God. No one told me to. I asked to go to church at seven years old, chose to be baptized at eight. I sang in the choir, robes maroon layered under white, and later became an acolyte—white candle, rope tied at my center. I loved everything about it. Ritual, singing, the smells, the way people were so quiet as they walked up to receive communion, how we stood and sat in unison like a dance. I liked how private the space inside my mind was even as we recited the same words out loud. It felt like having a secret at the same time as a hundred other people having their own secrets—a way to be together and alone at the same time.

When I was born and through my early childhood, there was no church. My father was raised Catholic in a suburb of Chicago, hated Catholic school, then saw the mountains in Colorado and God transmuted. My mother grew up going to St. Michael’s, an Episcopal church in the center of Boise, sandstone and stained glass—the one I would later choose—and her family was deeply involved there from the early 1900s until 1975 when yet another inconceivable death stopped my grandmother from going.

I first showed an interest in religion at age three, sitting in the waiting room at the pediatrician’s office. There was a pile of donated children’s books, several of them shiny with bright blue covers, editions of an expansive series for children called The Bible Story. I loved them so much that I asked my mother to bring them home. She took a card from inside one of the books, filled it out with our name and address, and soon enough I had my own shiny set of Bible books, a handsome illustrated Jesus occupying most of their covers. Though I know my father must have been horrified by this, he didn’t express it and I went along into the stories without the weight of anyone else’s ideas, putting cartoon Jesus and his disciples in the same area of mind as Snow White and the Little Mermaid. As I entered elementary school and met people who went to church, I started to ask about it, wanted something to do on Sundays that would distract me from the dread of going back to school.

For some years, my rosy spiritual phase continued alongside similarly soft exposure to other approaches with my mother—trips to a mystical store called the Blue Unicorn for stones and treasures, occupying myself during her daily meditation practice and following her to yoga class, attempts at psychic communication after our nighttime stories. None of it felt like how I now understand religion to be; it felt like imagination. Going to church and listening to sound bounce off the vaulted ceilings, mimicking how the older people got on their knees and rested their elbows on the back of the pew after communion—these were in the same category as whatever happened in my head when I walked home and decided to snap every snapdragon seven times or else and opened in me the same sensation I had hiding objects in my secret fort in the trees or reading a novel a little beyond my maturity level. There was no force and no complication then, only curiosity and the sense of a shimmering beneath it all.

When I scan backward over the gestures of my life, I now understand encounters with death to be my first psychic experiences. They were the first moments beyond very early childhood and the shared private feeling in church that I remember feeling wholly absorbed in the present, acutely aware of everything around me—all I could see, and more notably, what I couldn’t—enrobed in a gravity I didn’t realize was possible.

C was the first person I knew who died. The first kid, at least. We were both 12. He skied alone down a run and collided with an adult skier near the bottom. I remember people saying his heart stopped immediately, but that he was taken by helicopter to the hospital and was on life support for several hours, maybe a day, before actually dying.

 I remember feeling sad and then feeling guilty for feeling sad. I told myself I didn’t know him that well, that I didn’t deserve to cry. So, instead of crying, I talked to people. I asked them questions about C, asked them how they were doing. When they cried, it felt like I had done something good for them, the days surrounding his death more lucid than any I had known.

The funeral was at the enormous Catholic church a few blocks from our school. It was so full, there were people standing in the aisles and the narthex. I watched kids I had known since first grade walk up to the pulpit and talk about C. I watched his family, surrounded by an aura of something I couldn’t name, the air in the room different from any air I’d ever been in. For the first time in my entire life, it felt like we were all telling the truth.
 
Then, when we were 16, Jones was killed by a police officer and again I occupied the space I had taken up when C died, became a sort of midwife to the grieving. This time, it felt exponentially multiplied by the brutality of his death and my relationships with those closest to him. Talking to them, being quiet with them, watching them move through the world in this new way, I felt it again—a thickness to the air, the layers beneath each gesture of mourning, the sense of seeing inside of things, time suspended in layers, infinity. I spent months being with them at all hours, listening, holding them while they cried, my body knowing exactly what to do, as though somewhere just beyond us I was metabolizing their pain. And as the days passed, another sensation I couldn’t name but that I understand better now—his presence stuck somewhere between where we were and where he was going.

I did not equate my increasing sense of the unseen with God; the opposite, in fact. As I hit puberty, I started to ask questions. Specifically of the youth group leaders. I wanted to know why this religion did different things from that religion, why language didn’t adjust with time, why a human person was standing at the pulpit translating what I felt should come from God directly into my body.

Dissatisfied by their insufficient answers to my increasingly urgent queries, soon after C died, I stopped going to church. Then, when J was killed, I read Camus’Myth of Sisyphus and then The Stranger and then The Plague. It didn’t make me feel better exactly—any glimmer I held inside that there might be some protective power out there had disappeared with him—but it was a way to make sense. A way to make my own sense, free from authority physical and metaphysical, that didn’t try to convince me of anything outside of my own experience. Curtain flung open, I could be just as alone as I was.

I kept reading, started standing up to my teachers when I disagreed with them, got in trouble a few times. Not big trouble, but enough for me to not be afraid of it anymore. I got a B in AP chemistry. I drank beer. I drank whiskey. I lost my virginity, started throwing up food instead of not eating it. I did some lying. My beautiful face and history of obedience made this confusing for people. So much so that mostly no one noticed.

Filling out college applications, the University of Oregon asked me to choose a major. I selected philosophy from the drop-down menu thinking it didn’t matter and that I wouldn’t go to that school anyway. A few months later, they offered me a scholarship because of my good grades and because of the drop-down menu. Philosophy had become an uncommon course of study for students entering college in the early aughts and they wanted to give me money to study it, so I decided to go there, didn’t think much about it.

The University of Oregon has a continental philosophy program; its coursework focuses primarily on the names many people in the U.S. think of when they think of philosophy—white, male Western Europeans who explored the big questions of existence with esoteric language and made-up systems. People like Plato and Socrates, Marx and Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard and Sartre. I read a lot. And as I got deeper into the program, I began to understand that reading, for me, was not simply looking at words on a page, gathering information from them, then moving on. It was invasive, somatic.

If I cared about what I was reading, I read one word at a time until I understood all of them. I couldn’t just familiarize myself with a system of thought and file it away then casually parade it out at a party when some dude asked my favorite philosopher not because he was interested but so that he could tell me his, I took ideas into my body until they became me. When presented with a new mode of thinking, I had to understand its potential wholly—the consequences that taking it as truth might render on my life, others’ lives, the world. All of them—ethical, physical, spiritual, intellectual, emotional. In the same way a very vivid dream is sometimes recalled as reality, in the same way a dream can become a sort of knowledge, I could not separate myself from what I was reading. I could not compartmentalize.

The fall of my second year in Eugene, my brain didn’t feel like my own anymore. My control had been relinquished and a hole I hadn’t identified as a hole was filled in by some other acting being. Like I had fallen from my body somewhere along the way and now the dead thinkers were driving. I was exhausted, outside myself. From elsewhere, I watched my body wake up at 5:30 each morning and go to the gym, take a shower, go to class, read, write papers, go to the gym again. Every day it rained.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me. Didn’t make a connection between what I was thinking about and what my body was doing. Didn’t have any concept that what I was feeling might be a glimmer of something much louder to come. Like any good child of a therapist, I went to the counseling center on campus and started taking an anti-depressant. When I was home for fall break, I went to the doctor and it was determined that I was anemic, very. Almost no iron at all left in my blood. Years of not eating meat, years of not eating, years of throwing up the food I ate, years of compulsive exercise had translated into a ferritin level of 0. I started taking iron supplements and stopped the anti-depressant.

At Christmas, my iron levels were not adjusting. After a few hours in a bed in the ER, during which cancer was problematized, it was determined that my body was still making red blood cells and they sent me home. I was told to start eating meat and taking stronger iron supplements. I took a quarter off from school. Plucked by geography from the weather I’d been under, I realized how unhappy I’d been—how out of my own mind—and made plans to transfer. I spent one last quarter in Eugene, had a panic attack one afternoon after watching a documentary on sweat shops in my sociology class. I started at Boise State in the fall, finished my philosophy degree in an analytic program—fewer familiar names, more logic and language. My heart sank, I learned to skim, tried to keep myself occupied with an. After graduating, I stopped reading for a while, and when I started again it was poems.