religion bad, freedom good, existential crisis bad

I've had a hard time with this even in the feedback of my own novel trilogy. Some of my beta readers were enraged by the metaphysical/philosophical themes I included, especially because I didn't provide the answers that they had expected to the questions that the narrative asked. It can be frustrating, even demoralizing, for a self-described "nonpolitical" :reddit-logo: :us-foreign-policy: reader to scold me for not writing the story they expected to read, or for that matter to provide the western absolutist-essentialist dogmatic soothing they had come to expect.

I've been raised in western culture but I don't quite fit ethnically into either the Eurocentric category or for that matter comfortably fit into POC identity, either. It took decades to "find my voice."