The Futile Search for Purity

A Strong Breeze, Flying Clouds, Colonel Henry Stuart Wortley, 1863

I never thought I would relate to people who’d left fundamentalist religions. I grew up atheist, with a mother who was loyal to science and a dad who kept his spiritual beliefs to himself. I experienced a lot less pressure to conform to gendered expectations than other girls, and after watching my parents’ marriage implode, I wasn’t sure I’d ever tie the knot. My parents encouraged to pursue my interests rather than fulfil familial expectations.

Three of my four grandparents died in a short span of time when I was ten and eleven years old, and despite the lack of theology in my household, I still developed the sense that they were watching me from above. I remember feeling that I was letting them down, that I wasn’t behaving well enough in the private moments I shared with only them. I sometimes thought ill of others; I cut corners on my chores; I liked the Victoria’s Secret catalogue stashed under my bed a little too much. I felt so exposed; I didn’t have it in me to be the grandkid they deserved. I’m sure my parents would’ve nipped this in the bud if I’d confided in them, but I didn’t. I lived with this secret burden for a long time, before my mind gradually moved on to other things.

As a young adult, I threw myself into activism. I wanted to save the world and believed that such a goal was realistic. I would start volunteering for a group all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed before gradually becoming disillusioned and jumping ship. I was frustrated that all of these groups would eventually betray their values by agreeing to what seemed to me to be egregious compromises. Rather than realizing that the world was much more complicated than I thought, the cycle of hope and disappointment continued, over and over again. There were times were I felt like I was getting closer to The One True Path I was supposed to be on, and others where I felt hopelessly lost. What was most consistent was the feeling that I was always falling short, just as I had with my invisible, sky-bound grandparents.

This search for purity haunted all of my decisions. When I considered going to university, I was horrified by the morbid beginnings of psychology and the racial ignorance of early anthropology. I searched and searched for a field untainted by bad ideas, certain that it had to be out there somewhere, but coming up empty-handed. I chose not to go to school at all.

When I fell ill at 22, my suspicion of authority combined with my embrace of the naturalistic fallacy led me away from conventional treatments and toward approaches that felt holistic and rooted in ancient traditions unsullied by modernity.

I didn’t bother to learn that yoga’s claim to an unbroken lineage was a Hindu-nationalist myth, that the term Traditional Chinese Medicine was coined by party propagandists in the mid-20^th century, or that Wicca fabricated an ancient lineage, as was common of occult groups at the time.

The common thread that ran through all of this restless seeking was a search for purity. I was a germaphobe toward ideas: I feared contamination of my moral/political/spiritual sense of self. I wanted to live a life untainted by the complexity of the world, a life free of compromise where I would never have to agree to disagree. If I could just align myself with what was Right and Good, I wouldn’t have to answer to the consequences of my actions, because they would always be justified.

Putting this all together, it’s not surprising that I fell into the most fundamentalist wing of the social justice subculture. I wanted to outsource my integrity; I wanted an infallible framework I could use for all my future decisions. I’m honestly surprised I didn’t fall into a capital-c cult, because I was an excellent candidate: I thought of myself as a free thinker and yet I craved relinquishing control.

I remember when I realized that maintaining my mental health was not compatible with altered states, which included not just substance-induced ones but also spiritual trances conjured through ritual. It was crushing to stop looking for loopholes and to resign myself to living in the mundane world. But it was also a relief to give up chasing something more powerful, more real, more vivid than my actual life.

Likewise, there’s comfort in ending a search for purity. Although it’s sad to admit that no group, no course of study, no treatment, no path through life will be fully aligned with my values, knowing this frees me to try and see the world as it actually is. Opposing viewpoints are no longer to be avoided; genuine curiosity becomes an asset, not a flaw. I can get my hands dirty, knowing that no one is glaring down at me from above.