Where the Hunger Leads

The Sun has published three short stories by Kate Osterloh: “Believers,” which focuses on faith and religious doubt, and “Maryam and Yeshua” and “The Bleeding Woman,” which both reimagine Bible stories. Her writing is warm and rich, and her characters feel real and complex. But after reading each of her pieces, I found myself increasingly curious about Kate’s life and experiences. I knew little about her, except that she is a former US foreign diplomat, which only made her seem more mythical.

I was thrilled when Kate agreed to talk with me about her essay in our July 2024 issue, “New Life,” which recounts how she created a fresh start for herself, moved west, and became a mother. In conversation she was inviting and compassionate, and we talked for an hour (the conversation below is condensed), but we could have easily continued for another.

Staci Kleinmaier: I’m fascinated by your background as a US diplomat. What did a typical day look like for you?

Kate Osterloh: My job involved telling America’s story abroad, which basically means spreading American propaganda. My first assignment was in Saudi Arabia, and we had many high-level visits from people like the president and the secretary of state. Anytime there was a crisis, the whole embassy would spring into action. It’s a very reactive career, and there is a feeling that the stakes are high and everyone working there is important. But four days out of five, I was just sitting at a desk in a foreign country typing emails.

Staci: In your essay you mention that you didn’t intend to become a diplomat. How did you end up on that path?

Kate: I studied international relations as an undergrad, but I had no direction. I’d spent some time in the Middle East, and I wanted to go back. So I applied for a Fulbright and ended up at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, where they had a dual master’s degree in international human rights law and migration and refugees studies. From 2009 to 2011 I volunteered at a refugee legal aid clinic working with women who had come out of Darfur, Sudan. We were trying to help them access resources, which were limited. Day after day I said to them, “Tell me the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”

And then the Arab Spring happened, and revolution broke out. A lot of my peers and colleagues in the program either evacuated home or fled to some nearby place. My roommate and I decided to stick it out and finish our degrees. But suddenly the Egypt that we knew was gone. With everything—finishing the master’s program, finishing my thesis, and continuing to work with refugees in the midst of a new crisis—I burned out. I totally unraveled as a person and lost my faith. When the job offer from the State Department came through, it felt like a hand had reached out to me. I’ve gone back over that decision many times, because in some ways it seems antithetical to who I am now and the way I’ve always seen myself.

Staci: How would you describe your faith growing up?

Kate: My parents worked for Campus Crusade for Christ. They worked in the United States, but they’ve always called themselves missionaries. The organization—it’s now called Cru—is intertwined with megachurch culture in the US. They taught my family a conservative evangelical Christianity with a strong political component. Part of that meant that we were suspicious of secular culture. We didn’t have a TV for much of the time that I was growing up, and my parents dictated how we could engage with secular culture based on their spiritual convictions at a given moment.

Even as a young child I had a yearning to dig to the bottom of an idea. That was at odds with the religious culture I knew, which was very much like, “Obey, don’t ask these kinds of questions.” I walked out of my childhood believing that parts of myself were unacceptable. I had to keep them a secret and present myself as a good, obedient person.

After high school I took a gap year and joined Youth with a Mission, a religious organization focused on evangelism and spreading Christianity overseas. I started to see the world, and it really shocked me. I had big questions come up in the face of extreme poverty and violence and seeing the role America played in the world. I started to reevaluate everything I knew and believed, and for a long time, I was playing Whac-a-Mole with all these different questions. After my experiences in Egypt I had to step outside of my faith to continue my search for understanding. At the time it was the biggest loss I had ever faced. I lost the idea of God that had always been central to my understanding of reality. And I lost myself: my identity, my community, my sense of grounding in the world. It was 2011 when I first spoke in words that I no longer considered myself a Christian, that I no longer belonged to the church.

It’s been a long journey of spiritual seeking. It’s also part of my story of arriving where I am now, in Durango, Colorado, and beginning to find a sense of home and a sense of self again. I feel like I’ve been pressed up against the void for so much of my adult life, desperate to understand the mystery. Now I feel a sense of awe for the mystery. And I am trying to live it every day.

Staci: My first introduction to your work was through your short stories, which are focused on faith and religion. How do you see your nonfiction fitting in with your fiction?

Kate: Nonfiction is hard. Fiction is a game. It’s exploring and connecting and uncovering. With nonfiction I’m looking at my life, in all of its wholeness and complexity, and I’m trying to pull out different pieces and shape them into a story. It feels uncomfortable at times, and I feel a sense of impostor syndrome about my own life. It’s like, Who am I to look at this mosaic and say this is what happened?

I’ve had a really hard time writing postpartum. So much has changed. It’s like I died, and now I’m this different person. I’m trying to build some skill or some muscle that I didn’t have before, that I want in this next phase of writing, and nonfiction is one of the ways to do that.

Staci: I was drawn to your essay because I love stories where someone drops a bomb on their life and just starts over. I feel like so many times we give in to the sunk-cost fallacy, thinking, Well, I’ve invested so much time and energy to get where I am. I can’t change gears now.

Kate: I’ve always been drawn to those life-change stories too. But I didn’t have any sense that that was going to be me. There were times in my life when I felt free and connected to a thread of wildness and what it meant to be human. But I was playing my cards very conservatively. Some of the changes I made in 2020 I could have made five years earlier. I was scared. I had come up to that point of change several times and then backtracked away from it. I didn’t know how to dismantle the life I’d built, especially after the loss of my faith.

I think we all come to these moments when some sort of change is required. And we have to decide: Am I going to change all the externals? Or am I going inward, and there’s going to be something interior that really changes? Or both of those? But the change is going to happen to you whether you’re willing or not. So the question becomes: How do you want to engage with it?

Staci: I find it interesting that you use the word hunger in your essay. Many people use the word unhappiness. Do you think there’s a difference between unhappiness and hunger?

Kate: I think unhappiness can be one of the signposts of hunger. And I don’t think they’re the same experience, but they can inform each other. There have been times when I’ve been profoundly unhappy but felt a deep sense of love for my life and for whatever was happening, even the hard things. So in that sense happiness feels very ephemeral. I’m not chasing happiness, but hunger has been a lifelong experience. The more I see of the world and the more I learn about people, I realize that we all have hunger, and it shows up differently for everyone. One of the universal experiences of being human is the sense that, deep in our heart, there is yearning. It is a doorway to the true self.

This hunger is always driving me toward the mystery. And learning to be in the presence of the mystery without needing to solve it—that’s where the hunger leads.

Staci: I once heard that the end of desire is death. That sounds like what you’re saying: there is no way to be human without having desire or hunger or yearning. Babies are born immediately looking for nourishment. And as soon as that drive for something stops, people talk about losing the will to live.

Kate: There are a lot of folks here in Durango who have dialed in on the Zen path, which teaches that desire is the root of all suffering and to reach enlightenment you have to find some way out of desire. For me desire has always been the road that is guiding me toward the mystery. The hunger itself makes me feel so connected to life.

Staci: In your contributor note for us, you said that you’re pursuing your dream of racking up more student-loan debt. Are you back in school?

Kate: I am. I’ve always been interested in hospice care. So I followed that thread, and now I’m in school for clinical mental health counseling. I’m working at a grief center with people who’ve experienced loss. I can feel the stretch marks on my heart as it tries to expand quickly enough to engage with people’s biggest losses.

I read Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal a couple years ago, and it had a big impact on me, especially the way that he describes our culture around dying. One of the biggest losses in our culture is that we’re so afraid of death in all its forms: We’re afraid of dying. We’re afraid of endings. We’re afraid of change. But engaging with death is an antidote to some of the sickness in our culture, even though it’s such heavy work. Everything is so close to its opposite—if we lose our connection to death and loss, we lose our ability to fully engage with joy.