The truth about my 2023

And where truth is leading me in 2024

Jan 07, 2024

Happy new year! 🥂

I hope your holidays were wonderful, and if they weren’t, I hope you’re loving the fact that they’re over and that January is here.

If you’re new to After Faith newsletters, here’s what you can expect 👋.

I’m Joy Vetterlein, a former pastor and evangelical Christian who has thoughtfully walked away from Christianity and is seeking a soulful, expansive spirituality that doesn’t throw away my past but welcomes it into my reimagined future.

In addition to supporting deconstructors one-on-one through coaching, I also write this After Faith newsletter every Sunday that reimagines some aspect of life or faith. The goal is always to make peace with our collective and individual past and move forward with expanding wholeness! On the first of every month, like today, After Faith is free to read for everyone, and the remaining issues require a low-cost subscription (stay tuned for additions and updates coming to After Faith in 2024!)

I love a good year-end reflection, so I want to talk about what I learned in 2023 and what I want to become in 2024, but I feel like before I can do that, I have to address the elephant in the room:

It feels really weird to talk about personal growth when I’m so keenly aware of how much suffering people around the world are in.

Being a writer online is really weird right because it feels like there’s no right thing to say. But aside from doing my small part to pitch in… what’s the alternative? To stop growing? To pretend I don’t have the privilege of living a semi-regular life? That doesn’t feel right either.

I have to believe that telling the whole truth about life—that tragedy and beauty coexist—is the only course of action that could possibly get us somewhere meaningful.

So, with that being said, here’s the truth about my 2023:

It was an absolute gift of a year.

Partially, I just got lucky: no traumatic curveballs, wonderful memories with my family, and mostly uneventful routines throughout. Not every year gets lucky like that, but mine did, and I’m choosing to feel grateful about it instead of guilty.

But the biggest gift of 2023 was that for the first time, I told myself the truth about what I want in my life and took action to make it a reality.

Here are few highlights from my 2023 to show you what I mean:

My parents are getting older, and I wanted to see them this year.

They live out of state, and I was fresh out of dollars for plane fare. Old me would have just lamented not having the money, or put in on a credit card to worry about later, but this year’s me took ownership of my need and tried to do something about it. I offered writing services to a few people, got hired by a client, and made the money I needed to buy the plane tickets. I took my kids and we had an epic time hanging out with my parents, enjoying Pacific Northwest summer vibes and eating berries off the side of the road.

This picture is of me and my dad, who has a degenerative illness, who continues to be a Christian, and who has been nothing but supportive and encouraging of me in my own spiritual wanderings away from the faith he holds precious. Time is short, our visits are rare, and this picture represents a great gift I was able to give myself… and him.

Maybe it’s the whole “let go and let God” thing, but I have a long history of wanting achievable things, and then not putting in the work to achieve them.

This year, I decided to not be that person anymore: I wanted to make goals that matter to me and actually bring them to life.

I knew a traditional vision board wouldn’t work for me, so I created a goofy, weird, colorful, digital vision board for myself and made it my lock screen on my phone. Every time I turned on my phone for the last 12 months, I saw a deeply personal reminder of what I want and who I want to be. By 12/31, I had achieved all but one of the goals represented on my lock screen (and that’s because I tried on that one and hit a dead end!)

It felt so satisfying to show up for myself and daily see how I was prioritizing my deepest desires.

When my husband asked what I wanted for my 40th birthday, I almost didn’t tell him the truth.

It seemed too wild, too selfish, too extravagant. But, I told him the truth anyway: I’ve never been to New York City, and I wanted to go.

But inside of blowing it off, he said, “I want that for you. Let’s see if we can find a way to make that happen.” And so, together, with some creativity, we did.

I spent a few glorious days walking around the city with only my whims as an agenda. I ate what I wanted to eat when I wanted to eat it, I walked where I wanted to walk and toured only what interested me. I took naps as needed and flew home feeling totally filled up with self-love.

If 2023 was my first foray into telling the truth about what I want for my life and then backing it up with action, here’s what I’m thinking so far for 2024.

OUT:

being overly judgmental and self-righteous toward anyone who expresses a belief or a worldview I don’t agree with.
listening to "expert" advice for my work over my own intuition.
staying small as a person because I'm afraid of being rejected.
making unrealistic goals and feeling ashamed when I don’t attain them.
getting overly rigid with the daily routines I created to stay grounded.
eating food I don’t want to eat so it “doesn’t go to waste.”
letting the pain of being financially manipulated in the past silence my innate, beautiful impulses toward generosity.

IN:

saying yes to myself… both when I want a fun treat or break from a routine, and also when my body asks me to make healthier choices.
more nature.
more music.
under-scheduling my kids’ extracurricular activities.
filling the little moments of daily life with lushness and joy.
telling the truth about what I miss from Christian spirituality, and exploring alternatives.
believing in my dreams and becoming the person who achieves them.

While I’m telling the truth, here’s the inside scoop of what you can expect this year from me:

Everything works better when my words reflect my evolution. This year is no different. Here’s where I am energized to lean in reimagining life after faith, and where I’m feeling drained and will let go of more and more.

Leaning in:

Exploring spiritual practices that aren’t specifically Christian, but that feel accessible to people whose souls were formed in Christian spaces.
Learning more about developing spirituality in kids without indoctrinating them into a particular belief system.
Making peace with my religious past and how it led me here.

Letting wane:

Constant venting about the evils of evangelicalism (not because it’s not still bad, but because I’ve finished that part of my processing… please keep venting if you’re still there!)
Deep dives into theology or anything overly intellectual that “proves” evangelical Christianity is wrong. I just don’t see the world in that kind of binary anymore and don’t feel obligated to prove my experiences to anyone. Unless, of course, I find something interesting and decide to share 😌.
The hamster wheel of Instagram content creation. I’ll still show up there regularly, but lately everything I do has lost me followers instead of gaining them and I’m tired of wondering if it’s me or the algorithm. I just want to dial it back a bit in order to invest better into all of you already here.

So, that’s my truth about the past year and the coming year.

What’s your true story of 2023, and what do you truly want for your life in 2024, despite all the hard things happening all around?

I hope you can find it and live into it, without apology.

See you next week,

Joy