There’s a kind of cost to being truly devout that people don’t always name out loud, because it isn’t the dramatic kind. It’s the daily kind. It’s the cost of living in a world that wants your spirituality to be either invisible, decorative, or politely irrelevant. If you are disabled, and you can’t keep up with most in-person relationships, that cost can compound quickly, because you don’t have a wide, casual net of social access. You have what you can build from home. You have the internet. And for many, that isn’t just where we talk to friends. It’s where we find work, where we feed our families, and where we keep the lights on.
That’s where the tension starts to build. Because the internet rewards uniformity, and it rewards palatability, and it rewards whatever can be sold without anyone feeling challenged. It rewards identities that can be compressed into a brand without asking anyone to rethink their assumptions. But devout polytheism is not a neutral aesthetic. A lived relationship with Apollon is not a quirky hobby that politely stays in its own lane. It touches your calendar, your attention, your interior life, and the choices you make when nobody is looking. It can shape what you endorse, what you refuse, what you won’t pretend for money. It can also shape how you speak, how you write, and the things you center, which means it inevitably shapes how the world receives you.
And if you’re disabled, your time and energy are already being rationed. Your day is not an endless field. It’s cut up in measured portions, by pain, fatigue, appointments, responsibilities, sensory strain– all the calculations of what your health will allow. That means devotion has a literal cost, because prayer takes time and energy, offerings take time and energy, ritual takes time and energy, and recovery takes time and energy. Even when your practice is simple, when it’s not thunderous, when it’s only a candle and a few words spoken, it still takes. It tells you to show up. It asks you to be present. And when you’re already stretching yourself to work online and to care for your family, that can feel like a hard bargain, even when it’s the only bargain that keeps your spirit intact.
The part that outsiders don’t get, is that genuine devotion is not an accessory you can put down because it’s inconvenient. Apollon isn’t a “topic” you rotate out to make your content more marketable or your social life less complicated. He is a God, and a relationship with a God has consequences. In the old stories, He isn’t portrayed as a soft, background ornament. He is luminous and strict, generous and uncompromising, and He changes people. He asks for truthfulness, for consistency, and the kind of discipline that doesn’t exist to impress an audience. That sort of relationship doesn’t disappear because your social metrics take a dip, or because someone made a face, or because a relative thinks your religion is nonsensical or satanic. If anything, those are the moments that reveal whether you were playing, or whether you actually meant what you said.
Still, it is hard. It’s hard because social belonging is a resource, and disabled people are often punished for not being conveniently available, not being easily portable, or not being able to show up on demand. Then you add a religion that many people don’t understand or want to understand, and the social cost stacks. Some people will treat your religion as a phase or a performance, or a problem that has to be intervened upon and corrected. Others will tolerate it only if you keep it invisible, which is another way of saying, “You can stay, but not the real you.” And when your community is mostly online, pressures can be even weirder, because online cultures can turn any small difference into an insurmountable obstacle, or they can demand that you make yourself legible in ways that distort the sacredness of your devotion. You can end up feeling like you have to choose between being understood and being truthful.
Work gets tangled in this, too. Many people can separate their livelihood from their inner world. They can sell one thing and love another, and they can keep those doors in their life politely closed off from one another. But when your natural interests are polytheism, a polytheist God like Apollon, and the upkeep of a real Divine relationship (often more than one), the obvious path isn’t always the practical one others would choose for you. You might be excellent at what you love, and still feel friction from a market that doesn’t know where to place you. You might know that you can earn money online, and still feel that the easiest route requires a kind of self-editing that would slowly hollow you out. You can absolutely learn new skills and widen what you offer, but your center of gravity stays the same: you’re not willing to lie about your affiliations or what matters to you, and you’re not willing to live as a diluted version of yourself for anybody else’s comfort.
That’s where the real cost of being devout shows up, at least for me. It isn’t only the time I spend in prayer. It’s the opportunities I don’t take because they would require me to play pretend. It’s the conversations I don’t cushion with acceptable half-truths. It’s the way I will sometimes have to watch a social door close in real time the moment I mention my God’s Name, or the moment I decline to treat my religion like some irrelevant aberration. It is the loneliness that can follow when you refuse to perform “normalcy,” especially when you don’t have a thriving in-person network to help support that refusal. There’s grief in that, and pretending there’s not is a lie.
And yet, I won’t “just stop.” I won’t drop what is sacred to me so any other person can keep their worldview placid. Who would I be if I did that? I’d be someone who survives by shrinking themself, and I’ve already paid enough in my life for the privilege of being tolerated. I’m not interested in buying acceptance with self-erasure, and if my devotion makes certain people uncomfortable, that discomfort is not automatically my responsibility. People are allowed to be unfamiliar with, or unaccepting of my religion. But what they’re not entitled to is my silence about it, especially if silence is just another form of compliance.
There’s also the reality that only other devoted people tend to understand: sometimes the Gods aren’t loud. Sometimes you show up and feel very little. Sometimes your practice is like a one-sided offering, and you wonder if you’re being foolish for continuing. But relationships that only exist when they are immediately rewarding aren’t really relationships. Polytheism, and Hellenic polytheism in particular, is built on the foundation of reciprocity. We do for the Gods and the Gods do for us, because we’re in relationship, not because we expect to get something transactional. There is integrity in continuing our devotion when we can’t perceive a reward, in keeping our commitments even when we’re tired, when life is hectic, when our nervous systems are frayed, even when the world demands proof that we’re living by our vows instead of bending to the endless pressures of its judgment. Staying firm through all that and the Gods’ silence isn’t glamorous, but it is real. And silence, like everything else, doesn’t last forever.
So yes, the cost is real. The cost is social friction, narrower professional lanes, and the ongoing work of translating your life into forms other people can attempt to understand, if not relate to, without betraying yourself in the process. The cost is that some people will never understand, and you won’t be able to make them. So you’ll have to build anyway. But for me, there is also a return. I get to live with my devotion integrated into my days in ways that are seamless, rather than quarantined within a private corner like a guilty secret. My return is that I don’t have to wonder who I am when nobody is looking. My work, my relationships, and my inner life belong to me, instead of being split into separate masks.
I’m trying to make a living and have friends while being myself, and that’s no small thing. It’s a skill and a practice, and sometimes it’s lonely. But I’d rather do the hard work of building a life that fits me than spend my one life sanding myself down into something the world finds easier to hold. Apollon doesn’t ask His people to be convenient. He asks us to be true, to be disciplined, and to be brave enough to live in the light of what we actually serve. I can live with that cost, because the alternative is losing myself in exchange for comfort that was never truly mine.
– S.M. Leanne Johnson a.k.a Laurel-Olympias Columbine
The Oracular Ethicist 
