In late 2013, I found myself alone in the woods, smiling through tears that overtook me as I heard the voice of God. I hadn’t cried for over three years, in a time of my life that looked amazing on the outside but rendered me numb inside. I was close to earning my PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Yale, and in addition to garnering rave teaching reviews, I was winning sprint triathlons and patenting my thesis research on lipid nanoparticle vaccines (a surprisingly relevant endeavor). But despite my achievements, I did not feel intrinsically valuable or truly seen or loved. And the six-foot-three rock climbing champion that I envisioned myself marrying had just dumped me.
What a blessing he gave me, delivering a blow painful enough to crack my hardened exterior and release the repressed hurts and anxieties. I retreated to my childhood home and decided to do the thing I’d always done to cope with difficult emotions: overeat and go for a run. The steps were painful at first, but my familiar numbness kicked in and I felt alright, a bit high even, until I didn’t. Cramps took me down to my knees, and then years of tears burst out in the privacy of the forest. With no one else around, I ugly cried until my body started to calm down.
“I’m finally feeling!” I thought, as snot and tears ran down my face, interrupted by strange laughter: “I’m alive!”
The release was a relief, but then the habitual negative voices returned. The fears, the lies. Yes, I’m alive, but I’m alone. I’m unlovable. And then the most amazing thing happened. I heard a voice saying “NO; you are never alone. You are are good and so loved.”
Astonished, I looked around and saw that I was still alone in the woods, but this time I felt that I was not ‘a lone,’ but ‘all one.’ God was with me, and I was with God. He had always been there, trying to reach me through my inner voice and intuition (i.e. soul whispers), but I had gotten so adept at overriding my feelings that I had created layers of walls. The walls around my heart became my armor, creating the numbness that allowed me to keep going going going. In His infinite love, God went to great measures to reach me and reconnect me with my soul. Unsurprisingly, this soul restoration is not an overnight process, and the ongoing journey of reconnecting with divinity is the basis of my writings here. But I can point back to this moment in the woods, just over a decade ago, that gave me unmatched comfort and began my monotheistic spiritual awakening.