u/nouwa_mana444

I’ve been thinking about posting this for a while because I don’t really know who else to ask.
I left Islam after a very difficult experience. I’m not here to criticize it or debate religion I just wanted to mention it because I think it matters to why I’m struggling now. After leaving, I spent a long time researching different beliefs and eventually found myself drawn to Norse paganism. The more I learned, the more it felt like home. I love the mythology, the worldview, the values, and the way the religion approaches life and death. Learning about Heathenry has brought me a sense of peace I hadn’t felt in a long time.
The problem is one thought keeps coming back.
I want to believe the gods are real. I want to believe there is an afterlife. The idea of going to Hel after a natural death is comforting to me, not frightening. I genuinely hope the gods exist, and I want to build a relationship with them.
But there’s always a voice in the back of my mind saying, “What if there are no gods? What if death is simply the end?”
I do believe spirituality is possible. I’ve had personal experiences that make me think there is more to reality than we understand. But when it comes to gods specifically, I hesitate. Maybe it’s just doubt, or maybe it’s tied to leaving a religion that gave me such a definite picture of God and the afterlife.
Because of that, I sometimes feel guilty calling myself a Heathen. It feels almost dishonest, even though Heathenry is the religion I feel most connected to. I don’t want to reject the gods I just can’t force certainty.
Has anyone else gone through something similar, especially after leaving another religion?

I don’t really know where else to share this, but this is something that genuinely happened to me when I was 13, and I’ve never forgotten it.
When I was 13, my younger brother (around 8 at the time) and I both got chickenpox. My parents isolated us in the living room so we wouldn’t infect our younger siblings. We slept there together for a while.
The very first night, I experienced sleep paralysis twice.
The first time, I opened my eyes and saw a woman wearing a long, flowy black dress. Her face was completely covered in bandages. She was peeking at me from around the corner of the living room doorway. We just stared at each other. Then, as soon as she realized I was looking at her, she slowly backed away until she disappeared behind the wall.
I eventually managed to close my eyes, thinking it was over.
Then I opened them again.
This time there was a very tall man standing in the room. He was wearing what looked like an old-fashioned suit, maybe something from the 1980s. His head was unnaturally long and misshapen, completely wrapped in bandages, with what looked like a long horn-like extension coming from the top, also wrapped in bandages.
He wasn’t walking toward me, but he was somehow getting closer. It almost looked like he was walking, except his feet never moved. He just kept gliding closer and closer.
When he got to around three feet away from me, I finally found enough strength to try to scream for my dad. The second I managed to open my mouth, he disappeared.
I started saying a few prayers, opened the curtains to let some light into the room, and eventually fell back asleep.
Not long after, I woke up again because my younger brother was screaming.
He was crying, shouting, and thrashing around, but he was still asleep. I tried waking him, then my mom ran in with my dad right behind her. They couldn’t wake him immediately either. My mom started praying rapidly while he kept screaming.
Eventually he woke up, still crying uncontrollably. My parents comforted him until he calmed down enough to go back to sleep.
The next morning he refused to talk about it. A few days later, he finally admitted that he had seen “something” trying to get him.
After that night, I continued having frequent sleep paralysis for the next couple of years. Sometimes I would only see shadow figures, but other times I’d see much more detailed entities.
The one I remember most was a woman crouched beside my bed. She had pale skin and short hair. Either her lower jaw was completely missing or it hung open in a way that didn’t look physically possible. There was black stuff smeared around her mouth and face. She had no eyelashes, and her eyes weren’t sunken or bulging—they just looked deeply uncanny in a way that’s hard to describe.
Then, around two years later, we moved to a different house.
Since moving, I’ve never experienced sleep paralysis again. Not once. I’ve also never had any other experiences like these.
I know sleep paralysis can cause incredibly vivid hallucinations, so I’m not claiming this was definitely paranormal. But I’ve always found it strange that it all started in that house, my brother also experienced something terrifying that same night, and then everything completely stopped after we moved.
I’m curious what other people think.

Okay so my friend found out I’m a Norse pagan and that I left Islam and now she wants to add me to a group chat and talk it out claiming our conversation yesterday was solely me debunking or attacking Islam saying she wasn’t as educated as me and wanted her educated friends to talk to me after she without my knowledge told them a “simplified” version of my story I suspect she’s not trying to “defend Islam” or “emphasise her point through her more educated friends” but she’s just trying to convert me back to Islam Icl I was terrified snd was just gonna say no and I also wanted to block her but if I did I’d be throwing 3 years of friendship without closure so I agreed to do so and decided to end the conversation saying I don’t appreciate any of this and that if my beliefs are an issue then I’d like for this friendship to end on mutual understanding terms or maybe reach a mutual agreement she was a respectful throughout the whole conversation yesterday and I hope she understands and actually values me for me and not my religion I do not in the slightest care about her fear of me going to hell because I already consoled her yesterday and thats the extend of what I’ll do if she cannot accept tjat then thats on her I honestly don’t even know what to expect from this whole group chat thing I’m scared but considering I will have two of my friends with me so it’d be 3vs3 I feel more at ease but I still don’t know what to expect and I just want advice for this I know she cares about me and she only started all of this cuz she thinks I’d go to hell because I’m doing “shirk” but nonetheless I just can’t understand why she keeps pressing this issue I have horrible anxiety I would be lying if I said I was in fight or flight for hours after she asked but I really want to do this for my own sake and just for our friendship

I(16 in age idk if this is important) am fairly new to Norse paganism. Earlier today, I wanted to offer or dedicate reading a book to Odin and read it aloud. I started, made a small dedication, and then realized the website I was using only had part of the book.
I immediately started looking for other websites, but I got really anxious and ended up apologizing repeatedly and was like “I’m sorry I think you should use your precious time for something else” and kept babbling apologies because I felt like I had wasted his time. Eventually I found the full book, but I still can’t stop worrying about it.
Part of the reason I’m struggling is that I tend to have a lot of religious anxiety. I often worry that if I make a mistake during something spiritual, even an accidental one, I’ve done something wrong or been disrespectful. Sometimes I jump straight from “something went wrong” to “I’ve offended someone” or “I’m going to be punished.”
Looking back, I’m not sure if my reaction is coming from that anxiety or if this is actually something most Norse pagans would consider disrespectful.
How would you view this situation?