1999 Called, She Wants Her Spiritual Weirdo Back

Last week I found journals from 1999. Seventeen-year-old me was writing poetry, asking questions about art and meaning, reaching for what she called “the underlying love of some Divine Being.” Trying to understand faith as something alive, not something performed.
Reading those pages felt strange. She was asking the same questions I’m asking now, twenty-seven years later. The same seeking, the same hunger for something real beyond performance and doctrine.
And at some point, I had forgotten her.
In my twenties, I think I made a quiet trade. I put down the paintbrush and the poetry and the questions about God because I thought other things mattered more. How I looked, being chosen, the social performance. It wasn’t that I lost my depth. It just got crowded out by a shallow version of happy that never quite made me whole.
Then life shifted in ways I couldn’t control. Infertility that no love could fix. Losses that performance couldn’t prevent. A body that broke down until I had no choice but to slow down and pay attention.
Somewhere in that slowing, something began to feel familiar again.
I picked up a journal. I started painting with my son. I found myself circling the same questions that younger version of me had once asked without hesitation.
The art didn’t come back as a hobby. It felt more like breath, like something my nervous system needed in order to feel steady and real. And I’ve started to wonder if the creativity and the spiritual longing were never separate. Maybe they were always part of the same thread, the same movement back toward wholeness.
I’m not that 1999 girl anymore. I’ve lived too much for that. But I can recognize her now. The seeker, the dreamer, the artist, the spiritual weirdo who likes to go real deep. Just with wisdom earned through forgetting.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how easy it is to drift from ourselves. Not dramatically. Just slowly. Through distraction, through survival, through trying to be what seems to matter.
And sometimes, just as quietly, something in us remembers.
I don’t know if that’s a universal pattern. I only know I’ve felt it in my own life. A sense of wholeness, then distance, then a gradual return.
What parts of yourself did you set aside along the way? What did you know once that you’re only now learning how to trust again?