I share these stories not because I’m proud of them, but because I know I’m not the only one who was shaped this way—and maybe we can unshape it together.”
I don’t know exactly how the world began. The Big Bang, stars forming, planets aligning—it’s the best I’ve got.
I’m an atheist living in a world of believers. I wasn’t always.
I remember the yellow school bus, 5th grade, bouncing through the Y-Bar S subdivision. After dropping off the handful of kids there, I’d be last—left at the end of a dirt road, a holler away from home.
That day, God came up. Christine said she was an atheist. Alarm bells went off in my head. I looked her dead in the eye and said, “You’re going to hell.”
I had been taught to fear people like her—strangers, others, threats. Her ideas scared me. Still, something in her confidence, her talk of science and artifacts, trickled in. But the flood of what I’d been taught rushed over it and swept it away.
Thirty years later, I teach my daughter something different.
“People will believe things that are different from you,” I tell her. “Some may even hate you for it.”
I know this not just because I’ve lived it, but because I’ve studied it. As a trauma therapist, I’ve learned how the brain responds to perceived threat.
Our beliefs give us safety and identity. When a new idea challenges that, our nervous systems respond like there’s a tiger in the room. Heart rate rises. Palms sweat. Blood rushes to our fists. We freeze. Or we fight. Or we double down on what we know.
If you’ve ever felt your body react over a belief—about abortion, the afterlife, the military, climate change, race, class, the poor—you’ve felt it: that invisible earthquake slipping under the bedrock of your humanness.
In our house, we practice tolerance. Not the kind that means “I’ll put up with you,” but the kind that’s willing to sit in the discomfort of challenge, of newness, of not being right.
As a young girl, I once asked my dad a racist question. I had seen a man walking close to the side of the road and asked what would happen if someone hit him—specifically, a member of the Muckleshoot Indian Tribe. Would the consequences be the same as if someone hit me, a white girl?
My dad’s response was immediate, strong, and shaming. I knew I’d said something wrong.
But I’d also been taught, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that Native people were less than.
What I needed wasn’t just to be corrected. I needed to understand why I thought that in the first place.
I wish the conversation had continued. Maybe it could’ve traced the roots of what I’d said—how power and control have shaped attitudes for generations. How my question wasn’t born in isolation but was a ripple of something much older.
That’s what I try to do now: stay in the conversation. Not with shame, but with curiosity.
To teach my daughter, and re-teach myself, that even if the ground shakes beneath you, you don’t have to run.
You can stay. And listen.
Love always,
Jaclynn
Going On 40 