Some explanation:
First, I am not technically Catholic at all. I hold so many excommunicable positions on every facet of that faith that I decided years ago to do the gracious thing and leave before they had to generate the paperwork required to kick me out.
I have missed Holy Mother Church as much as she has missed me, which is to say not at all. Not even during Christmas Eve Mass, which is really the only time she makes an effort anyway.
But here’s the thing with being raised full-on parochial school/Holy Day of Obligation/actually wore a veil/get dressed after presents and go to Mass Christmas morning Catholic. You can no more purge yourself of that than you can overcome your destined hairline. And like the hairline you think you’ll escape when you’re a young adult, it shows up later, when you have goals that it can thwart.
The prions of this mad-cow disease of the soul manifest like this.
Do you want to express yourself, maybe write a little, make a little art? Really, you’re SO wise and clever that anyone would want to read what you think? That’s the sin of Pride on your part, the worst of the deadly sins.
Your relationship is abusive? Perhaps you suffer from a chronic illness? Jesus suffered and DIED ON THE CROSS FOR YOU. Your suffering is nothing. Offer it up to Jesus. (No one ever explained why Jesus wanted our suffering. When I got older and met non-Catholics who had a much better grasp of the Gospels than I did, I learned Jesus was a nice man and probably wasn’t interested in our gifts of misery. But by then Offer It Up was tattooed across my frontal lobe, so I cannot blame Jesus for the overlong duration of my first marriage.)
If you want to be found attractive by boys (just dealing with the traditional expressed church structure here, so it’s as heteronormative as you get from an organization with priests in dresses, altar boys, and sending girls from the school over to the convent to wash the nuns’ bras. Yes, that’s a real thing that happened.) Where was I? Attracting boys? Right. Vain slut! That’s two more deadly sins!
There’s a lot more. The quick and dirty version– being an adult is a sin.
How does a person rid herself of these diseased bits and do some writing, and maybe buy a cute skirt and some boots?