You Are Not Overthinking It:On God, Close Reading, and the Refusal to Live on the Surface

Every time I’m around religious people, I end up asking them about God. Not the polite icebreaker version, either. I ask what they experience. What they feel. What they actually think when they pray. I want to know what it’s like in their chest when they say “Lord” or “Father” or “Spirit.” I watch their eyes, their hands, the way their voice changes when they talk about faith.

Over time I’ve come to believe that the most genuinely devout people have an aura that transcends belief itself. They speak as though God is not an idea but an audience. As if every word they say is overheard. Conversations with them feel like there’s a third presence in the room.

And here’s the thing: my questions don’t make people uncomfortable. They almost always lean in. Their eyes light up. They say things like, “No one ever asks me this,” and then they spill. They tell me how their body feels in worship, how doubt shows up in the middle of a song, how they distinguish between their own thoughts and what they call “God’s voice.” They’re often relieved that someone cares enough to press further than “I’m blessed and highly favored.”

One night, I was in that kind of environment — soft music, low lights, that churchy mix of small talk and eternity — doing what I always do: asking too many questions. Later that evening, the woman I was seeing at the time turned to me and said, almost offhand, “You know, sometimes I think you’re being performative.”

I was genuinely confused. Performative? For who? There were no cameras. I wasn’t preaching. I wasn’t winning points with anybody. I was in my favorite position: deep in conversation with people who actually wanted to go there.

It took me a while to understand what she meant — and longer to realize she was wrong about me, but unintentionally revealing something about herself.

For her, faith wasn’t something to interrogate. It was something she had: a status, a background certainty. Like being from a particular city or liking a particular genre of music. The idea that belief should be taken apart, questioned, probed from the inside — that felt theatrical to her, not devout.

My way of engaging made her own faith feel flat by comparison, and instead of admitting that, it was easier to call my depth an act.

That’s when it clicked: a lot of people will mislabel your search for depth as performance simply because they do not relate to their own life at that depth.

And that mislabeling is exactly why I’m writing this — to tell you this as plainly as I can:

You should never feel shame for your quest for depth.

When people say “you’re overthinking it,” what they often mean is:

stop demanding meaning in a place where I’ve decided not to look too closely.

We live in a culture of surfaces. Scroll, tap, react, forget. Belief becomes a brand; personality becomes a set of filters; attention becomes a commodity someone else is already spending for you. You’re encouraged to have “takes” but not questions. To have “content” but not convictions.

Depth is the refusal to live like that.

Depth is the decision to treat your life — and the lives you brush against — as something worth close reading. It’s the instinct that says, this moment is not trivial, even if the world treats it as disposable. It’s showing up to your own existence like a scholar with a pencil in the margins.

When I ask someone, “When you say you ‘felt God,’ what does that actually mean? Is it a voice, a nudge, a mood, a presence?” I’m not auditioning as a philosopher. I’m honoring the claim. If you tell me the Maker of the universe interacts with you, that is too consequential to skate over. Depth says: this deserves more than a nod and a polite “amen.”

In that sense, depth is a form of respect. It says:

Your words matter enough to question.

Your belief matters enough to explore.

My own experience matters enough to examine honestly.

Some people will find that exhilarating. Others will feel exposed next to that level of scrutiny and call it “performative” because it protects them from having to examine themselves.

Neither reaction is a verdict on your sanity or sincerity. It’s a mirror of their relationship to their own depth.

Living with depth doesn’t end at religion. It extends outward to everything: relationships, work, habits, art, boredom.

Someone cancels on you three times in a row and laughs, “You know me, I’m terrible with plans.”

A shallow read:

they’re flaky.

A deeper read:

they’re anxious, overwhelmed, maybe conflict-avoidant.

Go deeper still:

Why am I the one absorbing the cost of this pattern?

What story about myself — “I’m low-maintenance,” “I don’t need much,” “I’m the chill one” — makes this acceptable? Who does that story serve?

Depth doesn’t mean spinning conspiracies about people. It means asking:

What is this situation teaching me about the structure of my life? About my expectations? About what I’ve been willing to tolerate?

The same applies to the roles people hand you. “You’re the strong friend.” “You’re so easygoing.” “You’re dramatic.” “You’re intimidating.”

These are not neutral adjectives; they’re casting decisions. They tell you how much of yourself you’re allowed to show.

Depth asks, Who benefits from me playing this part? What happens if I step out of it? What if I refuse to be only “strong” and allow myself to need, to weep, to falter? What if I stop performing agreeable silence and start telling the truth?

Shallow living takes these labels as facts. Deep living annotates them.

Depth shows up in how you watch a movie, too.

You sit in the dark while images and sound pour over you. On the surface, you’re “just” being entertained. But stories are never just stories. They’re training. They instruct you in what a good life looks like, in who gets forgiven, in whose pain registers and whose doesn’t, in what kinds of love are imaginable and which are unthinkable.

To live with depth is to walk out of the theater and ask, “What world did this film want me to accept? Who got complexity? Who didn’t? What kinds of people did it treat as scenery, jokes, threats, saviors?”

You can still enjoy the spectacle. Depth doesn’t cancel delight; it contextualizes it.

If depth is more than a vibe, if it really is a way of reading, then it helps to see it in miniature — on the scale of a single sentence.

Take this line from Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

On the surface, it’s a motivational quote: believe in yourself. But if you sit with it, word by word, it opens.

“Trust” is already different from “know.” Emerson doesn’t promise that you’ll fully know yourself — like a fixed object you can catalog once and for all. He says trust, a word we usually reserve for relationships. Trust is something you extend despite uncertainty. Built into that first word is the admission that the self is not fully transparent, that you may wobble, doubt, contradict yourself, and yet you are still commanded to lean in.

“Thyself” is doing work too. He could have said “yourself,” but he reaches for the biblical register. “Thyself” sounds like a commandment. The sentence borrows spiritual weight from scripture; trusting your own interior life is framed as sacred duty, not lifestyle preference.

The colon is a hinge: trust thyself — and then what? On the other side, he offers not a reward but a consequence: “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Live from your deepest note, and other people’s hearts won’t just observe; they’ll resonate. The goal is not universal agreement but recognition. Maybe they don’t share your melody, but something in them knows the sound of someone refusing to play counterfeit.

“Iron string” holds its own quiet threat. Iron is strong, but it’s not soft. A string has to be tightened to ring. There’s tension implied, discipline implied, the ache of being tuned. Trusting yourself is not floppy feel-good affirmation. It might mean stretching yourself, holding to a pitch that other people find uncomfortable. And iron, left neglected, rusts. Your inner chord needs care, or it corrodes.

That’s close reading: taking a sentence and refusing to let it stay flat. Asking what each word assumes, what each image invites, what each speck of punctuation is doing. In a handful of words, Emerson has smuggled in a theology of the self, an ethics of courage, a metaphor of music, and a warning about neglect.

Why does this matter? Because life is built like that sentence.

Dense. Layered. Overdetermined.

When someone says, “God told me…,” or “I’m just not good at relationships,” or “I’m fine,” they are offering you a surface text. Depth is what happens when you treat those sentences the way we just treated Emerson’s — not to trap people in your interpretation, but to honor the fact that there is always more happening than the laziest possible reading.

Of course, depth has a shadow side. You can go too far. You can start treating every text, every conversation, every silence as a secret code about you. You can slide from curiosity into paranoia, from interpretation into accusation. That’s not depth; that’s fear, dressed up as analysis.

The difference, I think, is whether your attention opens the world up or closes it down.

Depth, at its healthiest, is expansive. You look at a situation and say, “Here are three possible readings,” and hold them with humility. You don’t confuse your first story with the final truth. You can say, “Maybe they’re careless, maybe they’re overwhelmed, maybe they’re terrified,” without immediately choosing whichever option makes you the biggest victim.

Fear wants verdicts. Depth wants better questions.

You can ask a believer what they mean by “hearing God” without needing to prove them wrong. You can interrogate your own longing for transcendence without deciding today whether you’re a believer or a heretic. You can watch yourself repeat a relational pattern and say, “What is this trying to teach me?” instead of, “I’m doomed.”

A lot of shame around depth comes from our worship of “relatability.”

Relatability says: don’t be too serious, don’t be too curious, don’t care more than the room. Be digestible. Be light. Be easy to nod along with.

Depth refuses that. Depth says:

I would rather be honest than easy.

I would rather be true than smooth.

I would rather ask the real question than be admired for staying quiet.

You will lose some audiences that way. You will confuse people whose lives are built on not looking too closely. You will unsettle folks who prefer faith as décor rather than demand, love as feeling rather than practice, art as noise rather than narrative.

But you will also find your people: the ones who exhale when you go there. The ones who have been secretly thinking the same thoughts and needed permission. The ones who hear you press on God, or on grief, or on desire and think, “Finally, someone is taking this as seriously as it feels in my chest.”

Your depth is not a performance. It’s a beacon.

So this is my reminder, to you and to myself:

If you are the person who asks “why” one more time than everyone else…

If you’re the one who wants to talk about what faith actually feels like, not just what the brochure says…

If you’re the one who walks out of movies needing to unpack what was just smuggled into your imagination…

If you replay conversations and ask what was really said beneath the jokes…

Do not apologize.

Do not shrink because someone who doesn’t live at that depth calls your attention “extra” or “performative.” Do not sand down your questions to make your complexity more marketable.

You are allowed to live as if your soul is not cheap. You are allowed to act as if your time, your love, your faith, your mind are worth more than autopilot. You are allowed to treat your life like something that deserves close reading.

The world will always have people who are content to skate by on the surface. Some of them will be devout, some cynical, some successful, some deeply charming. That’s their path.

But if you are called to the deep end — of God, of art, of love, of your own consciousness — do not feel shame about it. Don’t mistake your seriousness for a flaw. Don’t let someone else’s fear of scrutiny camouflage itself as a critique of your sincerity.

Ask the real questions. Read your life like Emerson’s sentence. Read other people’s words with respect, not laziness. Treat every room, every belief, every relationship as something dense enough to deserve thought.

If anyone calls that performative, smile.

You know how much of it is real.