Conversion was not an instantaneous event, but a journey that began years before, when I first began to wonder why we fast on Yom Kippur - and it was one that would continue long after I emerged from the mikveh.

Although you might think that Lisa, my Jewish-by-birth partner, asked me to take a URJ the Introduction to Judaism course with her, quite the contrary is true: I asked her.

For many years, I felt inhibited to knock on the door of a synagogue. Simultaneously, my heart and gut knew where I belonged. There is in fact Jewish ancestry on my father’s side – contested by some relatives; strong enough to reinforce my feelings of visceral kinship.

I hired an ancestral DNA expert to analyze my Jewish blood but, frustrated with my demands for details, he sent a curt email I will never forget: “You’re either Jewish or you’re not,” he wrote. Maybe this search was as much about my faith as it was about my heritage. Maybe I really was a Jew at heart, too.

Walking into that first Introduction to Judaism class, I was nervous. For the last five years, I’d become increasingly immersed in Jewish culture, attending High Holiday services with my girlfriend's family, exchanging Hanukkah gifts, reading books on Judaism, and consulting “Rabbi Google.” Still, I felt like an outsider – self-conscious and keenly aware of my “other-ness.”

During this journey, I’ve been asked: “Why?” In Judaism, I found meaningful rituals and a history of peoplehood that I have taken on as my own. From the time I left the Christian church, I sought a spiritual home – a place of tolerance and acceptance. In Judaism, I’ve found exactly that.

Next week at this time, I’ll be stepping into the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath. It’s been a yearlong journey that will lead me to that holy space, one I’ll enter as a former Catholic/not-quite-Jew and exit as a Jewish woman – no longer an outsider.

I was raised in a small farming town in Tennessee where nearly everyone was a Southern Baptist. Though I’ve always been a spiritual person, pieces of the Christian doctrine just didn't fit together for me, and the values that surrounded me in the community...