This Easter weekend, my social media feeds were full of it.
Families at Mass. Easter Sunday tables. The smell of candles and lilies practically coming through the screen. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I kept seeing the other posts too – the quieter ones. The women noting, without quite saying it, that they didn’t know what to do with themselves. That something felt off. That the day had a shape they no longer inhabited, and nothing had grown in its place yet.
For me personally, Easter these days is a lovely three-day weekend. Some time to slow down, to reconnect with myself, to remember what I actually think and feel when I’m not just moving through the week. And honestly, there’s never a bad time for a free day off work. But I’m aware that I have structures in place – practices, rhythms, ways of checking in with my inner life – that give me the kind of grounding that Easter provides for practising Christians. I’m not adrift during that weekend because I’ve built something to stand on. A lot of women haven’t had the chance to do that yet. And Easter, with all its weight and visibility, can make that absence feel very loud.
If that was you this weekend, this post is for you.
The vacuum nobody tells you about
Leaving a high-control religion (Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, any tradition that told you exactly what to believe and what happened if you didn’t) is often framed as a liberation. And in many ways, it is. You step away from the guilt, the authority, the rules that never quite fit. That part is real. (Also, rarely a bad time for REM!)
What doesn’t get talked about as much is what comes after.
The liturgical calendar that still lives in your body, even when you’re no longer observing it. The way Christmas and Easter arrive with a weight that has nothing to do with chocolate eggs or family dinners. The strange grief of sitting outside something that was, for a long time, the whole shape of the year.
Easter is a particularly pointed example. It’s not a minor feast. It’s the pivot of the entire Christian year: the death, the waiting, the rising. If you grew up inside that, it’s in you in a way that’s hard to articulate. And when you’re no longer inside it, the weekend can feel oddly hollow, even if you know, intellectually, that you left for good reasons.
And it’s not just Christianity. Nearly every religious tradition I’ve encountered has its equivalent: a moment in the year that carries the full weight of the community’s belief, that marks time in a way that’s impossible to ignore. Passover. Eid. Diwali. Vesak. These are not decorative occasions. They are the hinge points of the year for the people inside them, the moments when the community gathers, when something larger than the individual is acknowledged. When you’re no longer inside that community, those hinge points don’t disappear. They just become visible from the outside, which is a different and sometimes lonelier experience.
That hollowness is not a sign you made the wrong choice. It’s a sign that spirituality was never nothing to you, even inside a framework that may have done you harm.
You left the institution. You didn’t leave the hunger.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with women navigating this particular terrain: the thing that draws people into religion in the first place is rarely the doctrine. It’s the ritual, the community, the sense of being held inside something larger than yourself. The marking of time. The acknowledgement that life is not just a series of tasks to be completed.
When you leave, you take the doctrine off. But you often don’t take the hunger off. The desire to mark the turning of the year. To tend to something. To have a practice that feels like it means something.
And that’s where a lot of women get stuck. Because what’s on offer, in the broad spiritual marketplace, on social media, in the wellness space, doesn’t quite fit either. It can feel too vague, too performative, too much like swapping one unexamined set of beliefs for another. Or it asks you to stop taking spiritual life seriously altogether, which also isn’t right.
Neither of those is the only option.
The neither/nor of it
I’m not here to sell you a replacement religion. I’m not here to tell you that Brigid, or paganism, or Irish mythology, or any other tradition is what you’ve been missing and you just didn’t know it yet. That’s not how this works, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.
What I am here to say is that the vacuum you felt this weekend, if you felt it, is worth paying attention to. Not because it means you should go back. But because it tells you something real about yourself: that your inner life matters to you, that you’re not quite ready to let it wither, and that you’re looking for something that takes you seriously.
That is a reasonable thing to be looking for. It exists. And it doesn’t require you to step into any ready-made container that someone else has built for you.
Where this goes
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing about exactly this: what it looks like to build a spiritual life after religion, how you work out what you actually believe (as opposed to what you were told to believe), and what figures like Brigid – who has survived and adapted across more than a thousand years of Irish history – might have to offer women who are doing this work.
If any of that is landing for you, the best thing to do is make sure you don’t miss what comes next.
And if you want to share this with someone who had a quiet Easter weekend and couldn’t quite explain why, please do. Sometimes the most useful thing is knowing someone else has noticed the same thing.
Or drop me a line or comment on the post!