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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.
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.
I liked accessing this certain part of myself, when I could feel the boundaries of myself dissolving and I could feel myself as part of this nebulous collective. And that always came with some sort of access point to mystery and some sort of access point to fear, but also love and connection. You get that in church, you get that with this backdrop of salvation and damnation and pouring out your love to God and God pouring out love back to you and supplication, all these things.
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?
Tolentino: The thing is, I don't think there was a void. And that was one thing that I was suspicious about. You know, I was like, "Jia, you really rationalized this all a little too cleanly." You know? I found sources in other things. I found sources of God in other things. Although going back and rereading my journals, it was not quite as smooth of a transition as I thought it was. I did have a year or two where I was really kind of turgid with thoughts about what it meant that I was maybe not a Christian anymore, but it felt like there had not been a void left.
I felt enough access in my life to spaces of transcendence and to submission and to, like, ethical inquiry, these things that I wanted and still want and learned through religion. I've never found a shortage of paths towards those things. My parents are still religious, and sometimes I think about the comfort that real religious faith gives people. This real trust in a divine will. I don't have that whatsoever. But I actually think maybe that was a reason that I drifted this way. I don't want that comfort. It has been better for me to have no trust in a plan or a path or anything. I think I'm better off operating as if the absence of supervision is all that we have.
Martin: Because it puts the onus on you and that is OK.
Tolentino: And I think it's bracing and enlivening and kind of scarier in a good way.
Martin: Yeah. How does that jibe with your efforts to dissolve your ego? Because I wrestled with this myself. If there is nothing and it's us, right, and we have all the agency and we create the meaning and we divine the sacred spaces, because we just decide that they are, that feels like building up the ego, not sublimating
Tolentino: I think in some aspects it does. To some extent, sure, it feels like you are constructing a sort of self-based universe. But it's never really building your own, there's always other traditions or ethics that you find. But I still feel like the actual experiences of those things, they're still cracking at the ego.
So I had my first kid in August 2020. The experiences of that ego dissolution, they've happened so often in these experiences with my child. They happened in birth itself, this incredibly shocking event where you are nothing but a vessel. And it's this shocking moment of revelation and this twinning of life and death and that felt divine in a real way, in a bloody and terrifying way. The way that transcendence is always paired with terror.
One thing that I found sad about having a kid is that my natural ecstatic inclinations, which used to spike really high all the time, don't really anymore. I feel like I've been trickled out a million times a day in tiny ways. And so I no longer have these big reserves, like when I would be walking around in New York City and just feel overcome with a sense of transcendence. Like, I don't have that anymore.
It feels like I'm meteing it out every day on my children. And that honestly feels like one of the biggest, most fundamental changes to my life since having a kid. I mean, I can still access those emotions, certainly, but they don't come as often and as intensely and it's probably just getting older and not having hours to just walk around at golden hour, you know, like those are the peak indoor chaos hours in my home now.
Martin: Right. Does that feel like a grief to you or just a change?
Tolentino: I feel a little bit of grief about it, but I also think it feels right. It also feels entirely correct to this stage of life. Which is something that I've been telling myself, that I'm deep in this right now. I have a nine-week-old and a three-year-old. And I've been reminding myself that three years from now, this will be an entirely different phase. I think that I'll have more shifts in the way these issues manifest to me as time goes on. I think death will come to play a larger part in it as time goes on, and I think my sense of independent experience certainly will shift again, hopefully shift dramatically in the next 10 years so that I'll start having more of them.
Martin: There's a short supply right now. Yeah. To just be really basic about it, you see a spiritual component of parenting?
Tolentino: Yeah. The primary way that I think about the biggest sweep of all the stuff that we're talking about, let's be real, it's still drugs. Last summer, I had finished breastfeeding and I went to Montana with one of my best friends for three days and we went hiking and then we did acid. She's like a born and bred downtown New York girl and staunch atheist. And she had this moment, it was overpoweringly beautiful and also we were on acid, and she was like, "How is it that we're alive at the same time as each other and as all this beauty." She was like, "I feel so scared and I feel so grateful."
We're both starting to cry and I said, "Girl, this is why people believe in God." I'm reminded in those moments that now what I understand as the closest analog to God is the fact that the laws of physics and biology create a world that begets life, human and non-human. And I understand the framework of the devil as the competing forces of entropy.
At some point in college, I was like, OK, this thing that I understood as God, creation and destruction, is basically just whatever laws of physics are knitting this world together. I locate some sense of that spiritual wonder in that. There's a shimmer of the divine around just the fact of our existence. And so in that way, my understanding of spirituality has bloomed to an inhuman scale, and then it has shrunk to the labor of taking care of a brand new life and the small moments of mystery and the unknown and also fear and desperation that that experience brings you.
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Transcript :
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It is Sunday, which means it's time for another Enlighten Me with Rachel Martin. Hey, Rachel.
RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Hi, Scott. OK, so what I'm about to do, I understand, is a little bit risky. I'm going to do it anyway.
DETROW: OK.
MARTIN: I am going to say a few words, and then I want you to tell me what they all have in common.
DETROW: OK, Let's do it.
MARTIN: Psychedelics, church revivals, giving birth.
DETROW: The first and third would - I feel like drugs would be a common thing (laughter).
MARTIN: Psychedelics and giving birth. Absolutely.
DETROW: Yes.
MARTIN: Yes. For many...
DETROW: Intensity.
MARTIN: ...Many people, drugs are a part of giving birth 'cause otherwise it really hurts.
DETROW: Intensity. How about intensity?
MARTIN: Intensity. Yeah, yeah, intensity. I think that's - I mean, that is true. And it dovetails with the word that I'm going to use now, which is ecstatic.
DETROW: All right. I could see that. And that makes a lot more sense than my first answer. But in what sense of the word ecstatic are we talking about here?
MARTIN: Right. OK. So this - the root of this is ecstasy, right? But that can mean a lot of different things. But we are talking about the kind of ecstasy that Merriam-Webster defines as a sense of overwhelming emotion or even a mystic trance, is how they say it.
DETROW: Yeah.
MARTIN: And this is something that Jia Tolentino has thought a lot about. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker, and I wanted to talk to her for this series. She is a really interesting thinker and she's got a very nuanced take on her own religious upbringing. She grew up going to an evangelical megachurch outside of Houston, and she is all about ecstasy, like, in the literal and figurative ways.
DETROW: OK.
MARTIN: So she...
DETROW: As in the - like, the proper noun of it.
MARTIN: Right. Exactly. She found ecstatic experiences very readily going to church in a religious context, and then she found them in illicit drugs. And now she finds that overwhelming sense of joy and transcendence and, yes, ecstasy coming from a far more personal place.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: You just had a baby, right? How many months ago now?
JIA TOLENTINO: She's 9 weeks old.
MARTIN: Oh, not - we're not even in the months of chronicling a life.
TOLENTINO: Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's tiny.
MARTIN: We're in the weeks. Yeah.
TOLENTINO: She's tiny. But my partner is taking the whole year off to take care of her. So...
MARTIN: This is Jia Tolentino's second child. She and her partner also have a daughter who's 3. So life is as full and as messy as you'd expect. But this whole procreating thing wasn't a foregone conclusion for Jia.
TOLENTINO: I'm still, like, very theoretically ambivalent on the decision to have children, you know? But I'm so glad now. I'm really glad.
MARTIN: Why? What's good about it? I know that seems obvious. And, like, parents are hearing that and they're like, how could you ask such a thing? You know, having children is, like, this amazing experience. And it is. But, I don't know, 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 - you know, like, I wrote about in drugs and in, you know, certain experiences of music and art and - but really mostly in drugs. And...
MARTIN: Explain what that means to you - ego death.
TOLENTINO: I think I just realized at some point - so I grew up extremely religious, and I think that one of the things that I was - that kept me religious for so long was the experience of sublimating the ego to a sense of the divine. And, you know, you get it occasionally in prayer. You would get it - I would get it often in this giant, giant church that I was raised in. This 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.
MARTIN: Wow. That's saying something.
TOLENTINO: I would go on these Christian retreats every summer in high school, and there were just these mass baptisms like...
MARTIN: Like in a lake? Like the whole...
TOLENTINO: I honestly think sometimes it was in a swimming pool in this big lake resort...
MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.
TOLENTINO: ...In Gulf Shores, Ala. You know, it was this - these kind of big revivals...
MARTIN: Yeah.
TOLENTINO: ...That were just full of hormonal teenagers, like, getting extremely swayed by one thing or another and feeling the deep need to accept Christ. And I did it all.
MARTIN: But were - you wanted to lean into those transcendental moments even as a child.
TOLENTINO: Yeah, 'cause it is an access point. I mean, I just realized I felt most like some particular version of myself that I liked accessing when I could feel the boundaries of myself dissolving and I could feel myself as part of this, like, nebulous collective. And that always came with some sort of access point to mystery and some sort of access point to fear and - but also, like, love and connection, right? And you get that in church. You get that with this backdrop of salvation and damnation and, like, pouring out your love to God and God pouring out love back to you and supplication - all these things. And as I stopped believing in God and stopped certainly believing in any sort of idea of God that was taught to me, you know, that's recognizable within a Christian framework, I started to seek that experience of the boundaries of the self dissolving in drugs and in music and just lots of dark rooms where people kind of 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.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Accessing those parts of your consciousness through drugs, through those kinds of experiences - did that fill the void that leaving religion had left?
TOLENTINO: The thing is, I don't think there was a void. And that was one thing that I was suspicious about. You know, I was like, Jia, you really rationalized this all a little too cleanly. You know, you were like, oh, I found sources in other things. I found sources of God in other things. And it struck me that - although going back and rereading my journals, it was not quite as smooth a transition as I thought it was. Like, I did have a year or two where I was really kind of turgid with thoughts about, you know, what does it mean that I, like, am maybe not a Christian anymore? But it felt like there had not been a void left. I felt enough access in my life to spaces of transcendence, into submission and to, like, ethical inquiry - you know, these things that I was - that I wanted and still want and learned through religion. I've never found a shortage of paths towards those things.
Like, sometimes I think about - my parents are still religious, and sometimes I think about the comfort that - you know, that real religious faith gives people, you know, this real trust in a divine will and the comfort of that. That I don't have whatsoever, but I actually - I think maybe that was a reason that I drifted this way. Like, I don't want that comfort.
MARTIN: Right.
TOLENTINO: I want - like, I think it has been better for me to have no trust in a plan or a path or anything. Like, I think I'm better off operating as if this and the absence of supervision is all that we have.
MARTIN: It puts the onus on you. And...
TOLENTINO: Yeah.
MARTIN: And that is OK.
TOLENTINO: Yeah.
MARTIN: More than OK.
TOLENTINO: And I think bracing and enlivening and kind of - and it feels scarier in a good way.
MARTIN: Yeah. How does that jibe with your efforts to dissolve your ego? I wrestle with this myself. So if there is nothing, and it's us - right? - and we have all the agency, and we create the meaning, and we define the sacred spaces because we just decide that they are...
TOLENTINO: Yeah.
MARTIN: That feels like building up the ego, not sublimating it.
TOLENTINO: I think - I mean, in some aspects it does. In some aspects, building your own - well, it's never really building your own - like, finding your own tradition of ethics or, you know, or action or whatever. To some extent, sure, it feels like - in that you are constructing a sort of self-based universe...
MARTIN: Right. Yeah.
TOLENTINO: ...Of all of these. But I still feel like the actual experiences of those things, they're still cracking at the ego, you know? I mean, the most - like, I'm thinking about my experiences, let's say, of the last - so I had my first kid in August 2020. So the experiences of that ego dissolution, they happened so often in these experiences with my child, you know? And they happened in birth itself, this incredibly shocking event where you are nothing but a vessel. And it's this shocking moment of revelation and this kind of - the twinning of life and death and the - like, that felt divine in, like, a - the real way, like, bloody and...
MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah.
TOLENTINO: ...Terrifying. Like, the way that transcendence is always paired with terror, you know?
MARTIN: Yeah.
TOLENTINO: And those moments - and just the - I think I've had an understanding in the last three years also - like, there are kind of ecstatic moments like that, but I think I've had an understanding of ego dissolution in steady work now. You know, the way that - if the connection between ego dissolution and, like, finding an ethical path, if that's what we're talking about here, I think I've located it...
MARTIN: Yeah.
TOLENTINO: ...Much more in the last few years in, let's say, the labor of caregiving or just, like, certain forms of community labor. And I would say, actually, overarchingly, the labor of caregiving and just - I've been trying to learn how I want to apply that in more areas of my life and to borrow the abilities that child rearing teaches you just of kind of a daily quiet submission to these acts of care and to the well-being of another person. I think I found those two things connecting in those acts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
TOLENTINO: One thing that I found sad about having a kid is that my natural ecstatic inclinations - I used to spike really high all the time.
MARTIN: Yeah.
TOLENTINO: And I don't really anymore. It's more like - it's like that impulse gets trickled out a million times a day in tiny ways. And so I no longer have these big reserves that I'll just be, like, walking around in New York City and just feel, like, overcome with a sense of transcendence. Like, I don't have that anymore. It feels like I'm meting it out every day on my children. And that honestly feels like one of the biggest, most fundamental changes to my life since having kid - I mean, I can still access those emotions, certainly, but they don't come as often and as intensely. You know, it's probably just getting older and, like, not having hours to just walk around at golden hour, you know? Like, you're just - that's like - that's - those are the peak indoor chaos hours in my home now.
MARTIN: Does that feel like a grief to you or just a change?
TOLENTINO: I feel, like, a little bit of grief about it, but I also think it's - it feels right. Like, it also feels entirely correct to this stage of life, which - I think I have something that I've been telling myself in this - you know, I'm, like, deep in it right now. I have an 8 - 9-week-old and a 3-year-old, and I've been reminding myself that three years from now, this will be an entirely different phase. Like, I think that I have more shifts in the way these issues manifest to me as time goes on. And I think, like, death will come to play a larger part in it as time goes on. And I think, you know, my sense of independent experience certainly will shift again, hopefully - shift dramatically in the next 10 years, so that I'll start having more of them (laughter). Right now, it's like there's...
MARTIN: Short supply. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
TOLENTINO: Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Just to be really basic about it, you see a spiritual component of parenting.
TOLENTINO: Yeah. The primary way that I think about, you know, these - the biggest sweep of all the stuff that we're talking about - let's be real. Like, it's still drugs. It's still like - you know, like, last summer, I was done breastfeeding. You know, I went to Montana with one of my best friends for three days, and we went hiking. And then we did acid. And she's a, like, born-and-bred downtown New York girl and, you know, staunch atheist, and she had this moment, you know, and it was just - it was overpoweringly beautiful. And also, we were on acid. And she was like, how is it that we're alive at the same time as each other and as all this beauty? And, like, she was like, I feel so scared and I feel so grateful. And I feel - we're both starting to cry. And I was like, girl, this is why people believe in God, you know? like...
MARTIN: Totally.
TOLENTINO: ...this is - like, I'm reminded in those moments that now what I understand as the closest analogue to God is the fact that the laws of physics and biology create a world that begets life.
MARTIN: Yeah.
TOLENTINO: You know, human and nonhuman. And then I understand the framework of the devil as the - you know, as the competing forces of entropy. Like, I basically - like, at some point in college, I was like, OK, this thing that I understood as God, creation and destruction is basically just whatever laws of physics are knitting this world together. And I locate some sense of that spiritual wonder and the fact that, you know, I'm really into Fermi's paradox - like, us - you know, the fact that we - there's definitely extraterrestrial life mathematically, but how come we haven't found it yet? I mean, like, if I were to try to make an argument for myself that God exists, like, that probably would be one of them, that we are the only known consciousness in the universe to us.
MARTIN: And how could that be so?
TOLENTINO: How could that be so? If I still believed in God, I would just say, well, 'cause God made us, and that is what makes this world - but - and, you know, there's, like a - there's a shimmer of the divine around, you know, just the fact of our existence to me. And so in that way, my understanding of spirituality has, you know, like, bloomed to an inhuman scale, and then it has shrunk to - yeah, there's the labor of taking care of a brand-new life and the small moments of mystery and the unknown and also fear and also desperation that that experience brings you.
MARTIN: I have so enjoyed our conversation. I really, really appreciate you doing it.
TOLENTINO: Me too.
MARTIN: Yeah. Thank you so much.
TOLENTINO: Yeah. Thank you. I mean, I think this series is so lovely. It's like, these are the things that, like, you never just sit down and talk about.
MARTIN: Jia Tolentino is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: You can hear more of Rachel Martin's Enlighten Me series same time next week. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.