I was raised in a Protestant household, but never really took to religious belief. Slowly I drifted toward agnosticism.

During my teens I had a spontaneous cognitive event that could fall under the umbrella term of "religious experience". Unlike other such experiences, it was indescribably frightening and disturbing, and left me requiring months of counseling for PTSD, and even spurred me to get my brain checked out for a tumor or some type of frontal-lobe epilepsy (I was diagnosed with neither). Paradoxically, this experience pushed me even further away from the possibility of religion, and I tried my best to forget about it. Eventually I became one of those unprovoked atheists who delights in pointing out the intellectual failures of the faithful, and at one point I even identified as a LaVeyan (secular) Satanist.

One day I met my fiancee (non-religious), and our intense love softened my spite and vindictiveness, and opened me up to being more accepting. During lockdown my obsession with my old mystical experience re-emerged, and I began to study (and find parallels) between mystical sects of major religions, which echoed my own experience. The Buddhist concepts of satori, the Zen notion of kensho, the neoplatonist idea of "the one", the catholic and orthodox concept of theosis - they all seemed identical, albeit colored by the historical and cultural languages of their origins.

Catholicism is the one I had most direct access to, so I began to attend mass, read up on the literature, etc., and it began to cultivate a sense of comfort in me, which accompanies my ongoing journey today. I don't agree with those who aggressively, and self-righteously, proselytize or who use religion to spread division and hate, but this is true of many religions and, ultimately, has no bearing on the veracity of the faith itself, which is all I care about.

It's a private thing for me, and I just pay no mind to others, instead opting to "go into my closet and pray". Even just typing this is weird, but it's anonymous enough that I don't feel I'm betraying the privacy that has come to circumscribe my burgeoning faith.