I grew up, like many others, in an Orthodox family, where religion was not a spiritual experience, but a vague setting, made up of automatic rituals and rules transmitted with an air of fatality. The church was a solemn but silent space, where my steps rarely and meaninglessly entered as a child. They had taught me that you don’t work on Sundays, that you have to worship God, light candles, and not sin. But no one had explained to me what sin is, who the suffering belongs to, or why God is silent. So, I learned, unintentionally, that religion is a matter of form, not content.
In adolescence, this form began to crack. Like any young mind that refuses empty dogma, I began to question, not only the texts, but also the wisdom of those who teach them to me. I was struck by the contradictions between what they said and how they lived, between the word “love” and the lack of love between them. I instinctively felt that an authentic God could not live in lifeless religious rituals. But I didn’t have an answer that satisfied me. I remained suspended between doubt and distrust, between a religion learned by heart and a truth that no one around me could speak. What I didn’t know then was that it was precisely this rupture that would later open an unexpected path towards a deeper, more human, and real faith.
Nothing destroys a person more easily than the absence of trust. Not only in others, but in oneself. And this absence does not appear suddenly, but silently digs, for years in a row, under the gaze of busy or indifferent parents, under the sarcasm of colleagues, under the cold grades and verdicts of teachers. When they all tell you, through words or lack thereof, that you won’t make it, you start to believe them. And something dies inside you. It’s not a metaphor. Hope dies. The child who asks for help dies. What remains is a carcass that goes to school, learns on autopilot, eats out of obligation, and breathes out of inertia.
This is depression: not a fleeting sadness, but a loss of inner direction. You don’t know what you live for anymore, you don’t think you deserve your life, and no one notices, because you don’t scream, because you carry your death in silence. This is what happens to intelligent, sensitive, lonely young people, those who do not align, who feel too much, who have no concrete support. They are told that they are weak, too complicated, and that they do not adapt. But how do you adapt to a world where no one sees you? Where is there no place to be loved unconditionally?
This is how the flame of faith is extinguished, not only in God, but also in people, in justice, in love. And finally, in you too. From that point, there are only two paths: to die or to rebuild yourself from the ashes. I chose, at the last minute, the second option.
No one saved me. Neither a spectacular revelation nor any miracle from the outside. Something changed in me only the moment I stopped asking for the truth, when I allowed myself to live in uncertainty without waiting for an answer. And I am not referring here only to a spiritual force, but also to people, to all the times when I asked for help and no one reached out to me.
Years later, I opened a religious-themed book, almost by chance, and found in it a gentle, not authoritative, voice. A voice that seemed to know what it means to fall and still want to continue. It didn’t matter if it was about God or the psyche, if it was a prayer or a therapeutic suggestion. For the first time, I felt that I was allowed to talk to God, not because I know He exists, but precisely because I don’t know.
And from this ignorance, which once paralyzed me, a new form of courage was born: that of living without certainties, of rebuilding myself without guarantees. I had begun to nourish my body with care, to cultivate my thoughts, to create order in my inner space, to watch over my soul like a sick child who needs time, patience, and love.
And with this process, I began to believe again, not in anything specific, but in the fact that meaning does not come from answers, but from the ability to live consciously with questions. I began to feel that there is a form of intelligence deeper than logic, one that accepts that some things cannot be known but can be lived. And if God is just a word for that mysterious intelligence that weaves between people threads that are invisible to meaning, then yes, I began to believe in God. With humility, but also with lucidity.
And as my heart was learning to feel again, I began to receive with openness everything that brought meaning, without asking who was right and who was wrong. I finally understood that the truth that heals is not the demonstrable one, but the lived one, and that sometimes it does not come from a sole source, but from a mosaic of languages that, together, build a map of the soul.
This is how I came to believe, without contradiction, in several forms of the sacred: in astrological signs, in the archetypes of Greek mythology, in the Norse gods as symbolic expressions of inner forces, in the silence of meditation, in spontaneous prayer dedicated to God, in the cipher of life in numerology. Not because I needed a new set of rules, but because each of them, at the right time, was an outstretched helping hand.
Why are we so afraid of plurality? Why is it so difficult for us to accept that the same soul can speak several languages, that the same person can light a candle in church, can curiously read the astrological chart, can meditate with their eyes closed under a tree, can listen to the voice of God without needing to reduce it to a single name?
We live in a culture that confuses fidelity with exclusivity and depth with rigidity, a culture that requires you to choose a faith and close yourself in it, and if you dare to fulfill your spiritual thirst from different sources, you are told that you are confused, superficial, or unfaithful. But you can’t build a soul through rules and limits, but only through experience, inner truth, and sincerity.
I have never chosen to believe in astrology instead of religion, or in the Buddha instead of Christ. I chose to believe in everything that, at a certain moment in my life, gave me a reason to stay alive. In the moments of silence when I had neither church, nor community, nor dogma, a verse from a poem, a Nordic legend, a numerology book, a breathing exercise, or an improvised prayer kept me alive.
My faith is an inner path with many gates and no prison. I am not interested in whether God “really” exists, or which system is “closer to the truth”. I am interested in living meaningfully, in cultivating hope, in being able to say, in the face of suffering, that my life is not in vain. Whoever understands this no longer asks themselves what I believe in, but how I live my faith.
People believe that salvation comes from answers. I think it comes from stories. And I don’t mean beautiful lies, but those inner narratives that shape pain and transfigure it into meaning. I survived not because I found a perfect religion, but because I started to see life as a story worth telling, even when I didn’t know how it ended.
When no one believed in me anymore, not even myself, the only things that kept me alive were the words carefully placed on a page, the small rituals done in silence, the intuition that somewhere, beyond the chaos, there is a force that sees me. I called it God. Another time, I called it art. Or love. I was never interested in the name, but in the way it transformed me into someone more alive.
Faith, in its purest form, is not about certainties, but about the joy of living in a world that is still worth feeling. You don’t have to know if God exists to pray. You don’t have to prove anything to hope. You don’t have to justify your beliefs if they make your life richer, more coherent, or more beautiful.
I want my children to one day inherit the art of living, not a dogma. To believe in what they want, but not to get lost in anything. To learn that a life full of meaning is more important than a life full of answers. And if they need stories for that, they should look for them with a wide-open heart, as I did.
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