Religion

Church, Crowds, and the Grief That Made Me Search in the Wrong Places

Religion can save you. Religion can also break you. I’ve lived both.

I’ve always been someone who loved being alone over being in crowds. Silence is where I hear God. Crowds are where I lose myself. But when my mother died, silence felt like a grave. So I ran into crowds. Church crowds.

That’s where the real problem started.

I wasn’t looking for Jesus. I already knew I loved Christ. My mother made sure of that. As a child, she was there for me. She sheltered me, drove me to Global Teen Club years, helped me become my own person. She introduced me to different religions and cultures, not to confuse me, but to show me how big God is. Jesus was the Son of God, she taught me, and the world was wider than one pew.

Losing her was difficult. It got worse when she moved to Las Vegas. It was like I lost touch with the mother who raised me before I lost her for good. I wanted family. I missed family. So I went searching for things that were not for me. I tried to fit in with church people. I thought if I could just belong somewhere, the hole would close.

It didn’t. It got deeper.

Churches can be beautiful. They can also be dangerous to your mental health and well being when they stop being about God and start being about fitting in. I watched people use the Bible to argue, not to heal. I watched them call anxiety “a lack of faith.” I watched them call medication “unbelief.” And the hardest thing I deal with to this day is that others said my mother had a mental illness. She never did. She was sensitive. She was grieving. She was tired of the world and the world’s thought process. But because she didn’t smile on cue, because she didn’t perform “fine,” people labeled her.

That labeling follows you. After I lost her, I let other people’s theology become my diagnosis. If I was depressed, I wasn’t praying hard enough. If I was manic, I needed deliverance, not a doctor. If I took meds, I was told I didn’t trust God. I started to believe that my brain was a spiritual failure. That’s what religion gone bad does. It takes a wound and calls it sin.

I ended up in a shelter in 2023. Then a jail cell. Then a hospital where reaching for a call button got written up as harassment. I was stable on meds, aware, present, but the church voices in my head were louder than the doctor’s. “Just have faith.” “Just pray.” As if I hadn’t been praying since I was a girl in Global Teen Club.

The truth is, I didn’t need more church. I needed to grieve. I needed to be alone without being told loneliness was a demon. I needed to remember what my mother actually taught me: that I loved Christ, and that Christ never asked me to perform for people to be loved back

Religion didn’t wreck my mental health. People did. People who used God to explain away pain instead of sitting with it. People who needed me to fit their version of saved instead of letting me be saved as I am.

My mother gave me Christ without chains. Grief made me pick up chains looking for her. I’m putting them down now.

God is still here. In the quiet. In the meds. In the choice to walk away from people who argue with scripture instead of living it. In the daughter who finally knows she doesn’t have to belong to a crowd to belong to God.

That’s the well-being I was searching for. It was in me the whole time.