Rachel Martin, NPR, 9/17/23; Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
She chased 'ego death' — first by religion then psychedelics then parenthood
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| Enlighten Me host Rachel Martin |
Jia Tolentino talks about God and psychedelics and finding comfort in chaos.
Don't tell my children this, but I wasn't always sold on the idea of having kids. I grew up in a really religious, conservative town in Idaho. A lot of kids from my high school went to a local college where people half-joked that most of the girls were pursuing their "M-R-S" degree.
Where I was from, college was where you met your husband — and if you got an education along the way, well, hey, that's a great example to set for all the kids you're going to have!
That wasn't me.
I wanted out of that place. I wanted to see the world and be uncomfortable and get lost and find my way again and fall in and out of love. And I did all those things. And it was intoxicating.
For the most part, I did whatever I wanted. I moved from city to city — sometimes from country to country. I called my own shots. I made my own mistakes and owned up to them and didn't ask a lot from other people.
I was the center of my own life and by the time I was in my early thirties, I was sick of myself. I felt this deep, almost primal need to take myself out of the spotlight of my own making.
I didn't want to kill my ego (an expression that will come up a little later) but I did want to give it the kind of flesh wound that would force it onto the bench for a while so I could suss out a different way of living.
I wanted all the things I had never prioritized. I didn't just want a stable, intimate relationship – I wanted a spouse – a person I was spiritually and legally bound to. And I wanted kids and all the joy and wonder, chaos and heartbreak that raising children can bring.
I no longer saw marriage and parenting as social expectations set up to annihilate my identity. Instead, I saw them as opportunities to sink deeply into a less selfish, more ethical version of myself and to push the outer bounds of what it means to love.
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| Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker |
Where am I going with all this? This is my way of telling you why I connected so much with the conversation I had recently with
Jia Tolentino.
She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and I've followed her writing for a long time. She's the daughter of Filipino immigrants who ended up in Houston, Texas as devout members of an evangelical megachurch.
I wanted to talk with Tolentino for this series because she has such a nuanced perspective on her religious upbringing and her subsequent rejection of that belief system.
And even though she just had her second child, she has also felt ambivalent about parenting in earlier chapters of her life.
But wait, you say, I don't want to listen to a story about having kids! I don't blame you – I don't either! Trust me, this is anything but.
It's about the power of ego. It's about the ecstasy of transcendence. It's about God and psychedelics and finding comfort in chaos. See for yourself. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jia Tolentino: I'm still theoretically ambivalent on the decision to have children, but I'm so glad now. I'm really glad.
Rachel Martin: Why? What's good about it? I know that seems obvious, but what specifically?
Tolentino: I think I was hungry for ego death in general and I have sought experiences of ego death in various capacities in my life. In psychedelic drugs, in music, in art, but mostly in drugs.
Martin: Explain what that means to you, ego death.
Tolentino: I grew up extremely religious, And I think that was one of the things that kept me religious for so long was the experience of sublimating the ego to a sense of the divine. You would get it occasionally in prayer. I would get it often in this giant church that I was raised in.
It was the kind of church where the pastor's face is on billboards throughout the highway and the sermons are broadcast on TV every Sunday and the worship center, as it was called, was three stories high and sat, I think, five to six thousand people. I think it had the largest pipe organ in the state of Texas....
As I stopped believing in God, and stopped certainly believing in any sort of idea of God that was taught to me within a Christian framework, I started to seek that experience of the boundaries of the self-dissolving in drugs and in music and lots of dark rooms where people felt the boundaries of the self go away.
It felt good for me whenever I would have those experiences of ego death or ego dissolution.
Martin: Accessing those parts of your consciousness through
psychedelics, through those kinds of experiences, did that
fill that void that leaving religion had left?
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