Empress
Eight days before my milestone birthday, I can see how scripture became part of my operating system—and how questioning indoctrination did not require me to abandon God.
I love the Lord.
That sentence feels important to say plainly, because I have spent years learning how to examine what I was taught without assuming that examination had to end in abandonment.
I can acknowledge indoctrination. I can question institutions. I can look at the history of religion, translation, culture, power, and the ways belief has been used to both shelter people and control them. I can admit that some of what I inherited arrived before I had the language—or the freedom—to choose it for myself.
And I can still love the Lord.
Eight days before a milestone birthday, I am realizing that scripture formulated more of me than I previously understood.
My last entry began with 1 Peter 3:13: “Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?” I wrote about the way I took that question literally. I wrote about goodness, harm, autism, faith, and the painful adult discovery that clean intentions do not prevent other people from choosing to hurt you.
But there is another layer underneath that reflection.
The scripture did not simply give me a sentence I remembered. It gave me a pattern for processing the world.
Looking backward, I can see how much of my mind was organized around ideas I first encountered through faith: examine the fruit; tell the truth; do not repay evil with evil; protect your heart without allowing it to harden; be accountable for what you do with what you have been given; understand that gifts create responsibility; believe that what is hidden eventually reveals itself.
I did not walk around naming every one of those thoughts as scripture.
Some of them had become instinct.
Some had become the questions I ask when something does not make sense.
Some had become the standard I use to measure my own behavior long after I stopped accepting every religious explanation I was given.
That is what I mean when I say faith formulated in me.
It became architecture.
My neurodivergent mind collects language, patterns, contradictions, repetitions, and rules. It notices when what someone says does not match what they produce. It remembers a phrase long after the room, the speaker, and the circumstances have faded. It returns to the same idea from different angles until the pattern becomes visible.
As a child, that meant I could receive a moral lesson with an intensity the adults around me may not have understood. If you told me to be eager to do good, I did not hear a loose suggestion for polite behavior. I heard an organizing principle.
Then adulthood added evidence.
Life complicated the lesson, but it did not erase it.
That distinction matters to me now.
For a while, I thought gaining perspective required me to sort everything into two piles: what was true and what was indoctrination; what was sacred and what was harmful; what belonged to God and what belonged to people.
But life is rarely that clean.
Something can be handed to you through an imperfect person and still carry wisdom. A teaching can be incomplete and still become a foundation. An institution can mishandle something sacred without owning the sacred thing itself. A child can absorb a rule too literally and still discover, years later, that the rule contained a question worth keeping.
I am no longer interested in pretending that every lesson I received through Christianity was pure simply because it was religious.
I am also no longer willing to pretend that nothing holy reached me simply because human beings carried it imperfectly.
My faith has survived my questions because my questions were never the opposite of faith.
They were part of how I learned to practice it honestly.
The context around 1 Peter 3:13 matters to me more now, too. The very next verse makes room for the possibility that a person may suffer while doing what is right. The passage is not a simplistic promise that goodness makes us untouchable. It asks what we remain oriented toward even when doing good does not protect us from every consequence, misunderstanding, institution, or malicious person.
That lands differently at this age.
I do not need scripture to promise me that nobody will harm me.
I need the wisdom to recognize harm sooner.
I need boundaries that do not require me to become cruel.
I need discernment strong enough to separate forgiveness from continued access.
I need faith spacious enough to let truth be true, even when the truth makes an inherited explanation uncomfortable.
And I need to remember that being eager to do good is still a worthy orientation, even when it is not armor.
This is one of the gifts of approaching a milestone birthday with clearer language for my mind.
I can see the child who absorbed scripture.
I can see the autistic mind that installed moral language as operating code.
I can see the adult who had to revise that code after betrayal, complexity, culture, travel, marriage, business, grief, and the discovery that people do not always move from the motives I would have assigned to them.
I can see the founder in me, too—the woman who keeps building systems because disorder is not neutral, because inaccessible information harms people, because clarity can become care, because what we create reveals what we believe about who deserves support.
Those things did not develop separately from my faith.
They grew beside it.
Sometimes through it.
Sometimes in argument with how it was presented to me.
But always in relationship with the questions it taught me to ask.
I love that I allowed myself to see beyond my initial indoctrination without treating distance from indoctrination as distance from God.
I love that my faith is not dependent on refusing history, complexity, or contradiction.
I love that I can recognize the difference between what people demanded in God’s name and what the lessons of faith actually produced in me.
They produced a hunger for truth.
They produced responsibility.
They produced a refusal to let harm become my source code.
They produced the belief that what I build should make somebody’s path more navigable.
They produced a mind that keeps looking for the pattern underneath the pattern.
Eight days before this birthday, I am not trying to return to the faith of my childhood.
I am recognizing what came forward with me.
Not every rule.
Not every fear.
Not every interpretation.
But the love.
The reverence.
The questions.
The responsibility.
The decision to remain oriented toward good—with clearer eyes, better boundaries, and a faith that no longer needs to be protected from examination.
Maybe scripture formulated in me before I understood what formulation was.
Maybe my mind was building connections long before I had language for neurodivergence, religious conditioning, discernment, or deconstruction.
And maybe this season is not asking me to decide whether the child was right or the adult is wiser.
Maybe it is allowing me to honor them both.
The child received the lesson.
The woman learned how to carry it.
And I still love the Lord.
If this reflection met you somewhere familiar, subscribe to Founder Diaries. I write about the lessons, systems, questions, and behind-the-scenes realities of building a life and body of work in public—especially when faith, neurodivergence, identity, and growth refuse to fit into separate boxes.
