Hello Ollie. I'm glad your still around.
I was going to tell my story. I grew up in Northern Ireland, which was a bit of a haven for religious bigotry at the time. My parents were both atheists, but my dad was a Protestant atheist, and my mum was a catholic atheist. They divorced when I was little, and my mum's subsequent partner was a woman.
So I grew up in an atheist lesbian household surrounded by religious bigots (and some really lovely people of faith, too, but there was a high proportion of batshit crazy stuff) which meant that I got to see a lot of the worst that religion has to offer. Although my family were atheists, they made sure that I had a cultural awareness of Christianity. I could identify St Agatha in a painting (ouch), visited most of the major religious sites in Europe, could recognise quotations from not only the bible but the book of common prayer and could get through an Anglican or RC service knowing when to sit, stand and kneel. But I didn't believe in God (why would anyone worship a deity who encouraged people to have frankly creepy attitudes towards women, and seemed quite keen on getting his followers to kill and torture people?).
But although my mind rejected the idea of a god, I still yearned for something. I used to sneak into churches sometimes, and I loved the atmosphere, but not the teaching.
When I was in my twenties I embraced paganism as something that satisfied my need for spirituality without having to compromise my principals. And alongside paganism, I went to a Unitarian church, where a congregation made up of Christians, pagans, non-specific theists, atheists and agnostics all joined together on Sunday mornings to express their awe and wonder and yearning and appreciation and hope. I would probably have des describef myself as a fairly agnostic pagan.
And then I started to find it a bit unsatisfying, and was curious about Christianity but it didn't really click. And then, over the course of around a month or so, my understanding of Christianity shifted dramatically, and it no longer felt remotely incompatible with the person I was. It felt as though I'd spent a lot of my life listening to other people describing Christianity in a way that drowned out God, but that finally their voices were less noticeable.
And that's where I am now. My mum is a pretty fervent atheist, so I don't ever mention religion to her, which is awkward. But there are plenty of other things I don't talk to her about for the sake of harmony, so it's just another thing to add to the list. And I still find Christianity quite excruciatingly embarrassing to admit to. But I'm getting better at it.