Confession

My words rarely seem worthy of the first page of a notebook, so I've amassed a larger collection of empty notebooks than good writing. 

But I did fill a handful of notebooks: pocket-sized, cardboard-covered, dotted-grid, acid-laden notebooks in which I'd write at least in part to be seen writing. 

These notebooks housed humdrum reflections dressed up with fussy prose. My hand-writing was barely readable, but nonetheless I worried constantly that someone would flip through the pages and see me for who I am. 

Alongside the half-baked novel ideas, mundane lists, and doodles, the bulk of each notebook was composed of journalistic confessions of concupiscence: lust and desire depicted with a strange seriousness, as if I could give solid form to smoke, as if I could stoke salvation with my sentences, as if I could make my sin a salve. 

Reading the notebooks back years later, I discovered a potent paradox: I'd written not to memorialize but to forget. Though I'd aimed to capture the ardor and excitement of my life, in fact I'd created a record of loneliness so profound that I could only bear it by excising it from my mind and transposing it to the page. 

After re-reading each of the notebooks, I threw them all away. 

Still, I carried the weight of vice—the notebooks had recorded sin, but I was its vessel. Guilt propelled me toward fitful anxiety and languorous depression: Opposites that you can feel simultaneously if you point one eye toward a broken past and the other toward a hopeless future. 

I sought numerous cures after repeatedly misidentifying the disease. Exercise and diet would correct a physical deficiency and heal me, I presumed. Failing that, therapy and meditation ought to correct any number of applicable diagnoses and restore my mind to order. When all else failed, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and benzodiazepines mitigated the need for a cure by disintegrating my sense of self. 

Never did I consider the state of my soul. 

I'm sympathetic to anyone who feels that the claims of Catholicism seem far-fetched. Even as a practicing Catholic, I became skeptical when my wife described a moment of miraculous healing precipitated by prayer. Any Catholic who dismisses doubt out of hand has not seriously thought about the burden of faith and the questions it raises. 

Yet the most obvious tenet of Catholic faith is the one people tend to oppose most strongly: ‌If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

Who can deny that they often fail to be who they ought to be? Who stands free from the shame of disappointment in themselves? Who lives without succumbing to temptation and eventual regret? 

I found no peace in my life until I asked God to forgive me, until I begged for help to sin no more and avoid whatever leads me to sin. Whenever I fail, I no longer need to erase any part of myself or throw anything away—I can call upon a merciful God to acknowledge my striving to be good and pardon my tendency to be bad. 

I say my sins out loud lest they bounce around my head instead of the walls of the confessional, where I can leave them behind.