Next week, I’ll marry Maxi in a church.
This is hilarious to me. I hold two degrees in religion. I’ve spent over a decade obsessing over the intersections of trauma, race, culture, and faith. And here I am: about to have an intercultural, interfaith wedding in a historic Christian building. And the thing is, I’m ok with it.
What I mean is, I don’t care anymore about the philosophical, existential questions that once plagued me: Is it right to participate in a tradition that has historically harmed my people? Am I betraying my ancestors by standing in a church? Am I a walking contradiction?
These questions don’t plague my psyche. And that’s the result of a decade of healing.
I grew up with a complex religious landscape.
I was raised Sikh, and I still identify with Sikhi today. I grew up learning about the Sikh Gurus, martyrs, and the tenets of our profoundly tolerant, radically justice-oriented tradition. Even now, I believe Sikhi offers some of the most philosophically robust tools for modern life.
But there was one glaring contradiction: the progressive ideals I read about didn’t match the lived experience I saw around me.
In Sikh history, women led legions into battle. In my daily life, women were mostly tasked with domestic work—managing households, carrying the invisible labor of our communities, and raising little shits like me! I couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t add up.
Baby Jiwani questioning the meaning of life
Still, I stayed connected to the faith. But around age 12, something unexpected entered the picture.
Christianity. Yup, I was one of those…
I was sitting at home, waiting for the Punjabi TV show Des Pardes, when a kind-looking white man came on the screen. It was Joel Osteen. He smiled and said something I had never heard before:
“God loves you.” I froze. God loves me? Just like that?
It was a revolutionary idea for young me. I was a deeply isolated, awkward, too-loud brown kid who didn’t quite belong anywhere. I wasn’t exactly bullied. I was quietly neglected. I was the weird one, and everyone, including the teachers, seemed to treat me that way. Like a social leper we needed to ignore at all costs.
So to hear that someone, anyone, loved me as I was? It blew my mind. I dove headfirst into all things Christian. Books, sermons, VeggieTales—you name it. It was my way to cope with a confusing world that didn’t really get weird-brown-jiwani.
Eventually, things got bad enough at school that we had to leave. I got in trouble for having a grass play-fight with some classmates, nothing serious, but I was the only one punished for “vandalism.” Five white girls, one brown kid. The principal came down hard on me, and my mom wasn’t having it.
We transferred to a private Christian school nearby. I was ecstatic: new start, new people, a God who loves me!
This was also the beginning of my academic career. Because, not long after I got there, I realized something: this Christian God was not the same as Joel Osteen’s God. This one loved you if you converted. If you left behind your “false” religion. If you fit neatly into whiteness.
It should’ve raised some red flags. But it didn’t.
That was the kind of love I already understood– conditional. Performance-based. You get love if you behave. If you fit in. If you suppress the parts of yourself that are too loud, too brown, too much. And I spent all my time and energy proving that I wasn’t.
God Loved this Uniform
I spent years trying to make myself palatable to the white Christian world, thinking it might open the door to belonging for other brown folks too. I didn’t yet understand colonialism. I thought I was doing good work. And in some ways, I was.
My presence forced people to challenge their assumptions, and be open to my people. But in some ways, I was just burning myself out, spending all my energy trying to please people who did not get me.
I had been using religion to intellectualize my trauma. I was studying God, theology, philosophy, not to find peace, but to try to explain why I felt so alone. It gave me language for my experience, even community, but not healing.
Healing only started when I “gave it all up” in 2016. I left everything I knew and just traveled the world in search of myself. Very Eat, Pray, Love, I know. But I needed to find me. And I needed to be the one to love that me before I let anyone else into my world.
So now, here I am—getting married in a church, with zero existential drama.
JK, I always have existential drama 😀
But I have a healed sense of belonging. I know that I don’t need to hide behind religion anymore. Or use it to justify my existence, my beliefs, or my thoughts.
I’m done trying to belong to places that need me to shrink. And I consider that my greatest accomplishment—and my greatest grief.
Young n’ Hot Jiwani in Portugal
Because what I’ve come to realize is this:
Belonging has always been conditional in the communities that harmed me. And that’s the kind of love I was trained to chase.
These communities bring a pain of their own. It’s the pain of knowing you were never truly seen, loved, or protected by the figures in your life who were supposed to see, love, and protect you. And that’s heavy. If you carry it from childhood, you know just how deeply it weighs.
But breaking free from those worlds offer different opportunities than the ones you were “destined for.” You can build a future shaped by your own imagination.
We can imagine new worlds. We can question the rules. We can dream and build communities that don’t yet exist. And that makes us vulnerable. Because once you imagine another way, you can never go back.
Sometimes we lose connection to our inherited communities. Sometimes we’re called rebellious, difficult, heretical. Often we’re shamed for it.
But we gain something far greater in the process: freedom, clarity, autonomy. And that’s ok.
We need people who question what they were given—people willing to imagine something better. And we need to be those people, especially when it’s hard.
Because ultimately, our views of God, faith, and belonging aren’t just reflections of doctrine. They’re mirrors of our healing.
My goal now is to be the kind of mirror I never had, to reflect more hope, more joy, more unconditional love than what was often reflected to me.
Because honestly, I don’t know what God thinks. But I do believe that whatever spirit (if any) animates this messy, beautiful life constantly calls us toward new depths of liberation.
And I want to answer that call—not with the “right” religion or perfect doctrine, but by becoming the most-at-peace, most-at-home version of me.
I’m not there yet. But that’s the healing I try to embody.
In my life, in my marriage, in my friendships, in my business.
So help me God.