catholicism, shame, sex, me (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.

hello!! I write to you from brooks cafe in carlow, ireland, where I, a scrambled egg connoisseur, am enjoying what may be the best scrambled eggs ever, the scrambled eggs that sing the song of my soul (creamy not wet, fluffy, salted throughout, a generous portion served in a bowl so they stay hot…mm…) in addition to this breakfast revelation this town has a university and a cathedral and not much else. every other local storefront services the bereaved, products including headstones, coffins, signs that say ‘mom’ framed in plastic florals (and this sector is demonstrably popping – I couldn’t go into the cathedral while I visited because every free moment I had there was a funeral happening). as a polish catholic by birth I feel a kinship with the irish, us all brown-haired and dour with the same shade of bag under our eyes…and it is for this reason I feel inspired to talk about my childhood experience with organized religion, my bizarre foundational philosophy which left in me silverfish I’m still finding in the bookshelves of my heart and crying to sex partners about.

it’s always too early to learn about hell. you always could have waited, like, one more day. I went to catholic kindergarten and mass weekly and between these appointments I don’t remember the day hell was explained to me, in which room or by whom or with what language, but boy did I know a thing or two about it! to me it was always a literal place; I don’t know if this was taught or my assumption. but I could never picture it, couldn’t nail the geography, charred red craters accessible by haunted boat…but I, an easily frightened and sensitive child, could certainly imagine the suffering.

I thought about this suffering often. in the bath. at recess. lying in bed. pain. panic. trapped. the inability to talk your way out of it, to change what was happening to you, the powerlessness. it made me very afraid. and even before I was exposed to the world and given some modern depravity to fear I knew these people, these catholics, weren’t joking around: everywhere there was the effigy of jesus on the cross, blood edging from his crown of thorns and pooling in his eyes, nails thrust through the soft flesh of his feet and palms, rendering him immobile. paying half-attention in sunday school I drew lazy little circles in the center of my palm with my fingernail. these violent realities were described in detail so as to make me feel grateful for jesus' sacrifice. but I wasn’t grateful – only disturbed.

and that’s what was done to him by men, on earth – hell suggested a new intensity. and that’s suffering for an eternity. eternity rattled me enough on its own. to think of it made my mind somersault over itself. how could anything happen forever? as a kid the time trudges….to wait five minutes is unreasonable….so an infinite reel of this slow thick time, not just lying in boredom but alight with pain, ‘eternal hellfire’…the thought upended me. my empathy extended most painfully to my parents who I worried might also find themselves there, a realization which when it first landed shook me so thoroughly I’d felt my blood go cold, vision blanketed in the dark pall of a nightmare...not them.

human psychology is complex. calculations sound off at incredible speeds by the computers in our skulls which are powerful enough to launch the first rocket times one quadrillion, so I don’t claim to know myself, but it’s clear that my early life fixation with hell wrote the script for so much of what I am now, my preoccupations with the dark stuff, with incomprehensibly large numbers, theories of being. it’s also clear the fixation began because I knew hell was where I was headed.

catholicism, the ocd-maker, says that we are all born sinners and demands purity of thought. god can read your mind and he knows what a sick fuck you are. to honor him you must hide this fact! delete these impulses. starve your depravity. become worse. naturally repression doesn’t make people better or purer but does make them more insane and guilt ridden, at war with their own desires, destined to become unreasonable perverts.

but I wasn’t armed with this knowledge as a child. I was aware of an oddness in my psyche, what I learned as a teenager were unusual sexual proclivities – at the time, simply sinful, pleasurable curios without a name – adjacent to being kidnapped, or bound, and I enjoyed the thoughts, found genuine peace and comfort in them, as early as five years old. despite the comfort I knew these thoughts were ‘bad’ but couldn’t stop myself from thinking them. of course now I’m certain these desires came about as a response to my profound fear of what might happen to me in hell, which my child’s brain sexualized as a coping mechanism – which then made me feel more and more certain I would go to hell – which exacerbated the desires – which – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

and so I built my tower of shame. the repression-impulse bore so deeply into my psyche that to be told as an adult that I ought not be ashamed of the way I feel, something largely out of ‘my’ control, was so other, so at odds with the way I lived my life and structured my brain that the notion at first made no sense, and then made me angry. to this day I feel overwhelming cringe when I encounter people shamelessly engaged in what I see to be shameful things.

still I sat in sunday school, said my lord’s prayers and hail marys, counted rosaries, pulled the smooth watery beads back and forth across my neck to give myself shivers. but it never felt like it was for anything. I believed in hell more than I believed in god. I almost didn't even associate them with one another. the logistics of god were muddy: it didn’t make sense to me that he was once a man, or that he had died and come back to life, that god and jesus were the same guy but that jesus was also god’s son. in english class symbolism and metaphor came fine to me, because those were stories – but this was supposed to be true, so why couldn't anyone just give it to me straight?

but hell stayed real, and the teachings about the way of people always seemed to be directed straight at me.

a windowless classroom, fifteen children, a carafe half-full of clean clear water. the teacher says this is our soul. then she drops beads of ink into the water and silently we watch them bloom and mangle until the whole thing goes pitch. she calls the blackness sin. she hands us all little plastic cups with shots of new water and has us pour them into the carafe one-by-one, a solemn parade of obedience. in doing this the water lightens little by little. the teacher says this is what happens when you go to confession, the lightening. but you’ll notice, she says, once all our cups had been emptied, that the water never becomes as clear as it was before. it’s true, it didn’t. I thought of that murky grey backwash swirling around inside me, the reason for all my worry. but indeed confession offered salvation.

I spent the entirety of my time in confession lying. it was my first communion. I had just eaten the body of christ and drank his blood, dizzy with confusion, as clearly what I’d consumed were not blood and flesh but red wine and a shitty nilla wafer. nothing in this beautiful room made any sense. and then it was me, a seven year old in her girl’s wedding dress, in that dark claustrophobic booth with a priest, the bug screen of anonymity between us. I was so nervous – not unlike the nervousness I later felt on my first date – and I didn’t know what to say. fair given a seven year old ought have no sins to confess to. ‘forgive me father for I have sinned. this is my first confession,’ I begun by script, and then made up a list of transgressions comprised mostly of things  I’d seen on full house: I fought with my friend, I broke a plate and blamed it on my sister, I cheated on a test…which was actually true, but was also in its own way a lie, because I didn’t just cheat a single time but constantly, once on a test about the ten commandments. I listed off so many fake sins that the priest cut me off. ‘and another thing!’ ‘the lord has freed you from your sins; go in peace.’ peace! what a laugher.

I was released from sunday school aged ten. and before long I was in the grips of combative teenage atheism, desperate to differentiate myself from my peers and the pain born from the holy part of my life. I wonder also if the atheism came so naturally to me as a result of the pain, my not-believing brought about by terror, fear turning me into a non-believer just as it turns others into believers.

though the logician’s mind had won, hell stayed with me. when I later learned the actual mechanics of sex, what went where, what I’d be expected to allow to happen to me, I’d leapt from my computer and literally vomited. this same impulse persisted as vaginismus. I carried, like, a ludicrous amount of stress in my shoulders. even if my mind was over these teachings, my body was not. what’s left of my catholicism now is the ruts worn by shame, the muscle memory of self-hatred, the series of fear reactions that became what I now know as my mind. and that scene in fleabag super turned me on. otherwise I’m fine.

I’m working on the shame. it’s what most of my dark nights of the soul are spent trying to unspool. time helps. sharing absurdly intimate details with strangers helps. genuinely. but it’s funny – I quite like who I am now as a result of things (it’s complicated to think about my hypothetical kids, people I want to be exactly like me but without ever having been in pain). I can also see myself eventually getting to grips with some form of spirituality (I keep finding myself around spiritual people which means I must have at least some kind of subconscious hankering for it). the neotrad stuff kind of gives me the heebie jeebies –  though I can completely recognize that for some religion fulfills all their spiritual needs with very little downside, assuages fear rather than causes it – but I guess we’ll see what happens. I certainly don’t mind the thought of someone always being with me, of knowing every divot of my nonsense soul and saving me for it. but it’s not some guy, probably. something else. and it’s something I don’t think seeks to punish me, or seeks at all.

sav xo