I Was Becoming the Person I Made Fun Of

“You’re as sick as your secrets.”

September 2025

The first one was loud. I said goodbye to my addiction, mourned a lifestyle, and walked away from people I could no longer be around.

That death had a name. A framework. A community of people who understood exactly what I was laying down.

The second one was quiet.

I didn’t see it coming. There was no rock-bottom moment. No intervention. No chip to mark the date. Just a slow, steady stripping of everything I thought defined me, and a God who was already waiting on the other side of it.

It was the beginning of summer when everything began to change. I still hadn’t gotten completely honest about what was happening within me.

Going from atheist to agnostic when I got clean was not anything anyone blinked at. New age, spirituality, manifesting are widely accepted in American culture. Declaring a love for Jesus that I couldn’t slow down was new ground and I was scared at how I’d be received by my friends in recovery and my family.

My husband didn’t marry a believer, and the momentum of this shift was growing. The tighter I held onto the secret, the more work I had to put into hiding the new person I was becoming, and I hadn’t even met her yet.

I was frustrated. I was tired. I was becoming the person I made fun of once.

Am I becoming the Jesus freak I once judged?

I hadn’t realized what I had signed up for in saying yes to Jesus. I knew there was no turning back. My relationship with Him was growing. I could see it. I was all in now. But no one except my sponsor and close girlfriend, both believers, really knew the intimate details of what was going on.

The first wave of loss began early summer when my sponsor announced she and her husband were moving across the country. She was my light that led me to Jesus. It was a lot to take in. She was my rock and I needed her close by.

Then, in August, my other believing friend announced she too would be moving out of state. Both friends would be gone by early December.

Devastated.

How could they leave me? I need them!

As I was trying to wrap my head around my friends moving, my hobbies and interests started to change. I didn’t understand or have a name to identify what was happening. Everything about me was changing inside and out. I didn’t know who to talk to about it because I thought I would sound crazy to my non-believing friends.

I felt alone.

My reality TV no longer satisfied the escape I once used it for. I hadn’t expected it, but I accepted it. I knew it was toxic, but it also meant losing the pop culture conversations and connection I enjoyed when getting together with my girlfriends.

Then came the hot yoga. Anytime a believer tried to warn me about yoga I plugged my ears like a five-year-old and shouted, “la la la.” I didn’t want to hear it and I made it known. I was fine. I prayed before I went in. I said amen at the end and prayed for protection while I was there.

God knew this is what was good for my back.

I have severe scoliosis with a near 80-degree curve. Yoga was my calm, it relieved my back pain, and it was the only workout that didn’t feel like a workout. It was my happy place.

I don’t recall the day. It was my usual lunch-break yoga class. I was happily moving into my yoga sequence until the instructor told us to move into a Shiva squat.

As I began to move into the pose a thought out of nowhere.

“You shouldn’t be doing this.”

Then the gut punch.

Then the voice. Stop.

I quickly looked around. Should I stop? What will people think?

I knew where the voice was coming from. It wasn’t mine. I reluctantly finished the class and knew with my head down I wouldn’t be returning.

No God. Not my yoga!

I was pissed.

Really God? The one thing I loved, the workout that wasn’t a workout, the workout that helped my back. How could you take this from me?

But my reverence was greater than my want to keep it.

I knew I couldn’t go back now. I was done, but I wasn’t happy about it. I grieved for months asking Him to show me what else I’m supposed to do if not yoga. I still miss it.

How do I explain to my non-believing friends and my husband the Holy Spirit told me to stop?

My yoga I’d been practicing for 15 years now gone, and they knew how much I loved it. They barely knew I was going to church and a Bible study. I wasn’t ready to discuss the Holy Spirit.

I used the excuse of money. It wasn’t too far of a stretch since yoga studios are expensive.

It was just a little white lie after all.

During that time the music began to change as well. I grew up on punk rock and alternative music from the ’90s. I liked Lady Gaga and current pop. Worship music was my least favorite part of Sunday service. I’d stand impatiently checking my watch wondering how many more songs were going to be played before the sermon started.

Then, what felt like whiplash, all I wanted to listen to was “Gratitude” by Brandon Lake. I began scouting music on Spotify and before I knew it, I was secretly playing it in my car.

I can’t show them how deep it’s getting.

I was losing interest in most movies and television. I went from The Sopranos to The Chosen. How do I tell my husband that I can no longer watch gangster films and TV shows because now they hurt my spirit and I’m no longer entertained?

We loved Sopranos and our shows. What will he think of me?

Then I got my answer.

“You’ve turned into a prude,” he said, one night while we were trying to decide what to watch. It stung.

Words began to have more meaning. I was becoming more sensitive to hearing the Lord’s name in vain, and the F-bombs constantly being used around me began making me wince. I grew up in 12-step meetings. There is certainly no shortage of those words flying around. I was one who had no problem speaking that way for most of my life. And then one day it stopped. I didn’t ask for it.

Suddenly I couldn’t stand the way everyone around me was talking, especially my husband. But this is who I was, and now I’m not.

Is it fair to ask him to stop?

I was working overtime now to cover up what I was becoming. I wasn’t ready to talk about something I couldn’t answer my own questions to.

What will they think of me?

Are they going to make fun of me? Leave me? I didn’t get clean to feel like this. Maybe they’ll think I’m a prude too.

“You’re as sick as your secrets,” kept repeating in my mind. I couldn’t believe at 44 years old, I was carrying a secret with 22 years of recovery behind me. I hadn’t realized how much fear of rejection was still running my life.

It all came to a head one Monday morning. I was back to work and had just gotten off the phone with my Dad. Current events had come up, the tension in Israel and the Middle East. “Christianity is the reason we have all of these wars in the first place.”

I felt pierced. I tried to defend it, but I didn’t know what to say. It felt like a slap in the face. Once the shock wore off, I grew irritated and so did my dad. We hung up.

It was all too much to bear in that moment. All of the emotion I had been suppressing could no longer contain itself. I was about to blow. I got up and stormed out of my home office into my bedroom.

The pent-up anger needed to be released. I picked up a pillow off the bed, bent down, and I screamed as loud as I could into it. My body shook and I screamed some more.

GAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

And then the tears.

I stood back up a little lightheaded and leaned back against the wall on the side of my bed. I slowly slid down until I hit the ground and I wept.

I didn’t have many words. “God, I can’t do this anymore,” was about all I had left.

And I sat.

And I bawled.

I was tired of working so hard to hide what I was changing into. Once I calmed down I got up and moved to the living room couch. It already felt different.

“An addict alone is in bad company,” was what I was used to telling myself. Normally I would already be on the phone with my sponsor or friend in recovery or I’d be heading out to a meeting.

This time I wanted to be with God. This was a first.

I didn’t feel alone. He was there.

The days that followed I began staying up late and getting up early to be with God. I was craving His presence. My Real Housewives were now replaced with prayer time. I was the one who always slept in and needed an alarm, now I was waking up at 4am.

Who am I? What is happening?

That’s the thing about this kind of dying. Nobody hands you a chip for it.

If someone had talked about this in church, I wouldn’t have had the ears to hear it then. And now that I was standing in the middle of it, I didn’t even know what to search for.

Up until this point I’d done a few Bible studies and attended Sunday services. I wasn’t actively reading my Bible, praying outside of service or Bible groups. I had only recently begun listening to some Christian podcasts.

I looked to the Bible app for key words to see if I could find what I was feeling. Verses, but what did they mean? I’d need someone to explain it to me and where would I start?

There has to be a book.

What do I call this? Surely Amazon would have the book that speaks to exactly this. If only I had a word. I don’t even know how to describe it. Transformation? Holy Spirit in me? Changing into a believer?

The books that came up just weren’t quite right.

God, show me. I don’t know how to describe this to Amazon or anyone. How do I say that, seemingly overnight without my request, my desires, hobbies, and interests now point toward Jesus?

Maybe now I understand why people get made fun of. He just takes over and it can’t be helped. All roads in my life are pointing to God now. There’s no denying it’s Him, but I need context.

How do I buy a book on something I don’t have a name for?

I just knew something was being done to me. Something was changing. And I was on the other side of whatever I used to be, with no map and no language and no one I could point to and say, “That! That’s what’s happening to me.”

But surely there were others. Somewhere. Feeling exactly this and not knowing what to call it either.

Maybe I should start journaling until I find them.

— No one is too lost to be saved.

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