Here's One Piece Of Advice For Everybody Who Is, Was, Or Considering Deconstructing

It seems as though so many people in the world are journeying through deconstructing. Many of us are unpacking our faiths, our politics, our orientations, our understandings of racism, white supremacy, and privilege, our ideas about our bodies, about aging, about disabilities, about gender. And I know many people are deconstructing several of these things all at the same time.

What compels us to begin these journeys vary in so many ways. And yet, many of us, in the process of engaging these journeys, find common ground with one other. And as we know, community is beautiful and community is messy.

For many, the first steps of deconstruction begin with our faiths, the core beliefs that we have held sacred for as long as we can remember, the very fibers of our beings that we've used as filters and lenses for almost everything.

At some point, whether we recognize this or not in the moment, every aspect of our stories became connected to how we engaged our faith. Our family dynamics. Our sexualities. Our relationships. Our careers. Our parenting. Our ideas about being a good spouse. Our politics and our engagement of culture. And so much more. It all interconnected, attached, weaved to a varying degree with the whats and whys and wheres of our faiths.

For many of us, that fact is what sustained us.

And then, at some point in our stories, we discover that one loose thread in the narratives of our faiths that we start pulling at. We pull. We pick. We pat it down and pretend it’s not there. And then yank it. And it's from there that an unraveling begins. For some of us it's slow and sometimes terrible. For others it's quicker and sometimes terrible. Our experiences in deconstruction are different and a bit similar all at once.

I could offer a long list of advice for those who are deconstructing. But I'd never do that, of course. Because as we learn in the process, advice is not what you want to hear as you're going through the unraveling. I mean, some of us might be open to accepting wisdom or a good story or two... but advice? Well, if you're like me, I'd say no thank you at least 95 percent of the time.

But I do have 1 piece of advice...