Part 1: confessions of a trashy Italian Catholic

Ok, here we go.

I am born-and-bred Philadelphia-area Italian Catholic trash. This is important; please let me help you understand what this means.

I was told about God. From the time I first formed memories, and surely before that, my Catholic mother and grandmother were continuously pumping into me how wonderful and awesome and loving and [literally any superlative that makes you feel happy] God is. Also of course, that Jesus is God, and the Eucharist is Jesus. When I wrote my magnum opus at the age of 6 ("Mothers", hardback, first edition ©1992) I would draw little flowers around the word "God" every time it appeared in the text, because just those three letters alone clearly failed to convey the level of fabulousness that should be associated with the concept of God.

I went to church. The people who showed up to Mass at St. Joan of Arc Parish in South Jersey were just like the people I met outside of church in South Jersey. Notably, this meant they were what some would call "bad" in Mass. They were so noisy. They dressed exactly as they pleased: booty shorts, halter tops and all.

I went to the church's grammar school. The nuns had poofy hair and wore slacks and were pretty worried about saving the rainforests. My classmates were Catholic, sure, but probably on average less invested in the faith than in how their tamagotchis were doing.

Therein lies my foundational religious identity. But unlike my classmates and fellow parishioners, I began to follow a different religious path. 

The nuns were the first flashpoint I remember. My mother's lament was continuous: what sort of nun abandons the habit? She doubted their faithfulness, and together we grew suspicious of the information I received there, in school and the liturgy alike. When the protocol changed to standing at the elevation of the host, I knelt in protest, pushing down the embarrassed feelings of doing something so different from those next to me.

Things escalated. I eventually took vows as a cloistered Carmelite nun in the strictest papal enclosure in the United States. I was dismissed after experiencing an acute paranoid episode.

As it turns out, I came to recognize a link between this path and another mom-grandmom hand-me-down: their anxiety disorder. 

After being diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and taking medication, I have experienced far more joy and freedom than I once thought was even possible to attain without some deep counterweight of sinful guilt. My mother, who tried to secretly disable the vehicle of her 35-year-old daughter to keep her at home during Covid -- bless her heart -- continues to deny she herself could be experiencing anxiety.

I want to return to that link later, but for now, there is me in a nutshell. Next, I want to talk about my friends. But work beckons, so it will have to wait a bit.