When Curiosity Cracked the Walls

There comes a point on the awakening path when questioning becomes more vital than breathing.

For the first fifty years of my life, my belief system was inherited, unquestioned, and reinforced at every turn — by my home, my church, my town, and every voice around me that echoed the same doctrine. I was shaped by a theology steeped in patriarchy, control, and fear. I didn’t know it was fear — I called it “faith.” But what I now understand is that I was never taught to know God… I was taught to obey.

The default settings of my mind — my neural pathways, my self-worth, my understanding of truth — were formed inside this container. I was the sheep, Jesus was the shepherd, and my job was to follow without question. And I did. I believed that if I dared to question what I was taught, God would punish me. Worse — He might harm my children. That was the depth of fear wired into my bones. That was how deeply I had been programmed to equate curiosity with betrayal.

And so I lived as the “good girl.” Blindly loyal. Spiritually silent. Adapted in all the ways that made me acceptable and safe within the walls I was born into.

But then came the dark night.

Alone in a cabin with no internet, no television, no reinforcement of the belief systems that had once held me in place, I began to unravel. Slowly, painfully, and for the first time — curiously.

Something inside me whispered:

What if it was all a lie?

What if the men who told me what God wanted were wrong?

What if the Bible, written and interpreted by human hands, wasn’t the infallible map I had always believed it to be?

What if… I had never truly known God at all?

This was the beginning of my deconstruction.

The moment I allowed myself to entertain the question, What if everything I was taught was bullshit? — something shifted. I had always thought curiosity would kill me… but instead, it began to resurrect me.

When I stopped defending my programming and started examining it, a new world opened. The walls didn’t crumble in an instant. But cracks began to form. Light seeped in. I began to see that the version of God I had been taught to serve was not the Divine I now felt stirring in the marrow of my being.

This wasn’t a rebellion.

It was a return.

Not to someone else’s truth — but to my knowing.

And that return began with a question.

It was pride that had kept the questions at bay for so long.

The kind of pride masked as certainty — the belief that our right is right, and that anyone who doesn’t see it the same way is simply lost. I had worn that certainty like armor, passed down through generations of inherited righteousness. It made me feel safe. Special. Chosen. But it also made me small.

Still… something within me stirred. I mustered a strange and unfamiliar courage.

Courage to question.

Courage to look.

Courage to entertain the terrifying possibility that everything I had been told was true… might not be.

And as that door creaked open, the flood came rushing in.

The deeper I went, the more horrified I became — not just by the beliefs themselves, but by how deeply I had let them shape me. I saw the lens I had been looking through, and how it had distorted everything. How it silenced me. Shamed me. Shaped my choices, my relationships, my very sense of self.

The life I had lived, the roles I had played, the sacrifices I had made — all were rooted in a worldview I never chose, but simply inherited.

This part of the journey was not soft or poetic. It was raw. Brutal. Humbling.

To see how I had aligned myself with ideas that hurt others — and hurt myself.

To realize I had been complicit in my own silencing.

But this too… was grace.

Because to awaken, I had to allow what was false to fall away.

To allow the house of cards to collapse.

To let crumble what must crumble.

And in that sacred demolition, I discovered something I had never been taught to trust:

my own inner knowing.