I Have Never Heard Voices (2024)

I can’t even remember who it was. That’s how unimportant/insignificant the actor was to me, but I had the TV on in the background and when I heard their voice, I instantly recognized it. When I turned to look at the screen and confirmed it was who I thought, another piece of my deconstruction puzzle fell into place. (Or was lost forever depending on your point of view.) It hit me how easily and naturally attuned we are to voices and suddenly it just didn’t make sense that recognizing the voice of God would be such an ongoing challenge.

There are books, all kinds of conferences/courses/podcast series and entire ministries dedicated to the mission of helping people recognize the voice of God. We’ve been so conditioned to accept the difficulty of deciphering between God’s voice, the desires of our own flesh and the tricks of the enemy that we rarely think about how ridiculous the whole premise is.

If you would have called my mom’s house in the early 2000s (remember when people had house phones?) (And parents with houses? 😲) if I had answered the phone, no matter who you were calling for, you probably would have been pretty confident that you got ‘em. Due to factors influence by both nature and nurture, my mom and I sounded very similar. So anybody who took my “Hello” as enough of a verification check and launched into whatever they had called to talk about, had a 50/50 chance of me stopping them to say “Hang on, let me get my mom.” There are a lot of circ*mstances where voices sound similar on the surface and people can be forgiven for mistaking someone for someone else based on simple one word responses. But the deeper the conversation, the more difficult it becomes to be mistaken for or about who is talking. Because voice recognition is not just a matter of vocal tones and textures - it’s phrasing, it’s slang, it’s the way we pause and the fillers we use. I saw an Instagram Reel the other day about “idiolect,” while dialect is a regional thing we share with people from the times and places we live, idiolect is an individual thing. My idiolect is mine and mine alone. Your idiolect is yours and only yours. And taking it even deeper, I’d say we have different idios within our own lects - the way I talk to my best friends is not the way I talk to my mom which is not the way I talk to my boss which is not the way I talk to people I like on the internet which is not the way I talk to people I don’t like on the internet which is not the way I talk to God which is not the way I talk to myself… or is it?

A few months ago, I posted a reel about growing up evangelical in the Purpose-Driven-Life era and how believing that there was a divine plan and a purpose for my life came with big double-edged sword energy. On one hand, it gave me a sense of invincibility because if God had a plan for my life, then no weapon formed against me could prosper as long as I still had missions to complete; but on the other hand, I lived in constant anxiety about making a wrong decision and stepping out of God’s will, thereby disqualifying myself from the invincibility benefit package and leaving myself open to being devoured by the enemy. So anytime I was on a plane experiencing turbulence, I was doing mental math to figure out my chances of survival - had getting on that plane to go wherever I was going been a God idea or just a good idea? And the way my anxiety was set up, it wasn’t just big decisions that were potentially life altering - it was any decision. Practically, every decision. If I was walking home and had the thought to walk a different way - uh oh! Who put that thought there?! Was it a test from God to see whether I would stand firm against the wiles of the enemy and stay my course, or was it a test to see whether I was truly in tune with the spirit and willing to change course on a dime? Or did my body just want to do something different and if so… whose side was my body on? It was maddening. And limiting. So ridiculous. And ridiculously unfair.

I have never been a perfect person, but I have always been a good one. And the idea that God could be so capricious as to disregard all the effort I was putting in, all the earthly pleasures I was denying myself and all the sacrifices I was making to set me up for failure and/or harm for incorrectly deciphering what He could just make clear… I just couldn’t reconcile it. And then when Donald Trump decided to run for president and evangelicals hopped right onboard, it was game over for my belief in the good and perfect will of God. I was completely indignant and couldn’t understand why more evangelicals weren’t. (And still aren’t!) I spent decades overthinking everything and tying myself into all kinds of knots to be the kind of person God could trust enough to use in a significant way, but apparently, none of it ever mattered - God looked across the earth, overlooked EVERYONE who was doing ANYTHING for Him and decided an unpleasant, incurious and dishonest predator was His chosen vessel. His best representative. Looking back now, I can recognize how I had been quietly and unknowingly deconstructing for a long time, asking and stacking questions, and it makes complete sense that by the time Trump had completed his Presidential term, I had concluded my evangelical one.

Since consciously and fully walking away from evangelicalism in 2019, I have been progressively loosening my grip and letting go of the fear of being out of God’s will. And there’s a lot more I could say about the stages and phases that led me where I currently reside (tell your friend to offer me a book deal 👀) but the TL;DW conclusion is that I believe if there is a God and if He does have a divine plan for my life it is impossible for me to inadvertently to wander out of it. If God is and all the propaganda about Him having knit me together and knowing me better than I know myself is true, then if I am not “saved” right now, it has to be His will and part of His plan. Because I don’t know what it would take to get me back onboard, but He should. And everyday that He is actively choosing not to do that thing (whatever it is), is another day that He is not clearly not worried about my eternal soul. Now, whether that's because, as far as God is concerned, I am actually saved or because He ultimately doesn’t care about my soul, makes no difference to me, I’m not a fan either way. So… here we are. And I’m not worried about it.

So then why did I have such a hard time deciding whether or not to move back to California?

“My nervous system is still evangelical.”
- Ashlee’ Watkins

I can’t remember when the idea of moving back to California first wandered across my mind, but I’m pretty sure it was sometime last summer. And I know I definitely had a conversation about it with my friend, Kristina, when she visited NYC in September, and then I think it was in November when I was doing a tarot pull and everything was about big changes and big moves and I was crying big tears because I knew what it meant. So when we settled with our landlord in March and agreed to a May 15th move-out date, starting to plan my next steps should have been easy, but just in case, I said I would give myself until April 15th to make a final decision. And then proceeded to put myself through three weeks of anxious agony weighing up all the options. Because living in New York isn’t easy, but dammit - it’s the devil I know. And my core friends are here. And moving within a city is discombobulating enough, moving cross-country is downright daunting. And honestly, I’m too poor to stay or go, but if I stayed I could keep more of my stuff. And what if I was wrong?

What if the thoughts about leaving New York and the conversations and confirmations and signs were all just tricks of the enemy to get me to make a huge mistake?

So at the beginning of April, I made the decision to stay in New York and started looking into my options - pricing one bedroom apartments and looking at full-time job listings and trying to pump myself up into believing I could be happy making it work. But the idea of California just wouldn’t leave me alone. So I decided to try on that decision and on April 13th, I texted my dad to float the idea of moving back and when his response was supportive, nothing in me felt combative or sad about that. So if it was the enemy trying to trick me, my flesh was definitely onboard as well, so then I had a brief moment of panic that maybe the two “bad” voices were teaming up to drown out the good one with the good decision, but then I remembered something:

I don’t even believe in the enemy anymore.

Does evil exist in the world? Yes. Clearly. But is that evil generated by a devil? The Devil? Who has a team of minions, some of which are tasked with following humans around, with one specifically assigned to me to trick me into doing things? I don’t think so. So who has been putting ideas into my head? Whose voice have I been hearing? For better and worse? I think… Mine.

In the spiritual battle between God, my flesh and the enemy; the reason it’s so hard to tell their voices apart is not because they sound the same, it’s because they are the same. The only real participant has always been me, with certain messages being beaten in/out, boosted and belittled by the people and structures around me. And as nice and easy as it would be to abdicate my decision making to a supernatural power and to feel like being in God’s will is a guarantee of good outcomes and success, that’s just not how the world works. (And to believe otherwise, to believe that God is individually speaking to people and granting them blessing and protection based on their obedience to His voice, is to believe that people who have horrible things happen to them are ultimately at fault. It is an insidious branch of prosperity gospel that leads to callousness and dehumanization. And there’s a lot more to say about that, but we don’t have time today - again, tell your friend to offer me a book deal 👀)

So I made the decision to move back to California. And I felt nothing. No excitement. No anticipation. No anxiety. No fear. For the first time in weeks, I just felt calm. And I knew that I had heard right and that I can trust that voice. I can trust my voice. Because I am not “the enemy” and I have to no reason to try and trick me. I can think and believe big things about myself and for myself, I can want a better world and want better for others, I can challenge the status quo and change my life, not because the evangelical god specifically said so, but because I was created with the desire to do all of the above. With no guarantees of ease or success or anything except the peace of knowing that I am learning to recognize my own voice, to trust it and to love it. Because the voice in my head is the voice of someone who is good, who wants good and who loves me.