Hey, medication is cool

I predict not much content to this post. 

I am here to announce that I finally caved, got a diagnosis of ADHD and started stimulant medication for it. One person on the Internet described it as putting glasses on for the first time, and I find this to be totally accurate. It's like the tiny room my conscious self inhabited in my brain suddenly became a cathedral in which I could move and breathe freely. I would go so far as to say that I feel like myself for maybe the first time in my life. 

But, things are new. The afternoon crashes are not fun, and it seems like my body and mind haven't figured out quite how they want to handle this daily slam of dopamine and norepinephrine.

The other weird thing about feeling like myself for the first time ever, is that I can also feel (on the more depressed side of the crash) like no one in my life has ever really met me. I feel I have interests I have never had a chance to explore, and express, and integrate into my personality. I don't know how real this feeling is. But I can feel some anxiety at the idea that I might struggle to find enough time and quiet to develop these interests without pressures from previous role expectations. The freedom of childhood is long gone, and I squandered all that time being interested in nothing. The thought can make me pretty sad.

But anyway, overall, this is impacting me as a huge and almost unbelievable improvement in my overall prognosis of life and happiness. So let's see how this goes.

Just stream of consciousness

I suppose the initial spurt of creativity that brought this blog into being has lost its steam, and this URL will soon point to just one more member in the piles of little dead blogs that have gathered like old sea foam in the abandoned corners of the Internet. That's fine.

So I'll use it now to write something unimportant. There's something more important I want to write, but I can't seem to grow it sufficiently into the full-fledged thought it ought to be. 

Just a general update, I feel pretty different now. I'm not only definitely not Catholic, but can say the word "atheist" and feel that it's true about me. I seem to be some sort of "hopeful atheist" -- it seems there is little to no evidence that God exists, but I continue to hope I'm wrong.

Things with my family did not heal. Either we will find a way to a new relationship somehow, or we'll stay on two different planets, dealing with each other politely. I think the latter may be the case for a very long time.

Recently, I gave the eulogy for my Dad that I really wanted to give. I wish everyone could hear it, because I want everyone to know the gift my Dad gave me in the form of a concept of God that allowed me to feel almost infinitely safe in the world, and how hard he worked to give me that gift. 

After I did that, according to a certain, older version of me, I completed my reason to live and could feel it. According to the strongly-developed paradigm that had kept me behind the grate, after losing Carmel, I had felt that my only purpose left in life must be to bury my parents and die. I've already failed to accompany my mother to the grave, inasmuch as I'm dead to her and there seems to be no path toward getting her medicated. (I even abandoned my cat: Mom finally ran out of patience maintaining him and sent him to a farm.) That left Dad, who was still taking comfort in me. And having buried him -- says the old Kathleen -- there's nothing left to do but die.

Thankfully, I gave up on her assessment of things. I logged off that profile by permitting myself to consider my dismissal an obedience to go seek joy in the world despite my own preference. This gave me the option to continue to live, and even work hard to keep growing in better and richer happiness, just for the heck of it.

Religion and religious sentiments, things designed to pull me down toward a more traditionally mystical mindset, can sometimes seem like a lullaby crafted to ease me into a sleep that would never end, like Temple Grandin's invention for soothing cows on the way to slaughter. Not always, I think; I'm not sure. 

Often I can retrieve a sense of death being alright and quite natural, and not necessarily feel like I'm in a freefall toward the void when considering it. But I do feel the loss of being able to believe wholeheartedly in the Resurrection, and its effect of removing of the primal fear of death. It's back; or at least, it's something I have to battle with in a more honest way, in a way that makes me feel much less powerful. But the honesty is refreshing, and makes me hope I may actually be better prepared for facing the real thing.

I still feel weird about that last post

Like I look at the title and immediately go, "but, oh no, I'm not rejecting Catholicism; goodness no." And then right away a smaller voice pops up and says, "except that I definitely am in a fundamental way."

It's as if Catholicism were a sort of playground or game field in which I observed most of my friends running around, many of them having a genuinely great time. The game gives them fun ways to interact with each other and things to talk about. The rules of the game are, in the view of many, flexible enough to allow creative interpretations to further enrich the lived experience of the game. There is even an interpretation that allows you to participate while breaking practically all the rules. At which point, such freewheeling participants might conclude, the only thing preventing someone from joining would be if they just didn't want to play with us.

The thing is, I really, really want to play. I miss my friends. I miss having a game that helped me interact with them, and with strangers too. It was so wonderful. And I feel so happy for the ones who continue to enjoy it.

But contrary to what I had hoped for a long time, I can't just wish myself back into the game. If one of these friends were to come up to me, smiling like the old days, and throw me one of those well-worn balls -- something about a turn of events being God's will, or another thing being a sign of God's love, or another about Jesus understanding me -- it would smack me in the face. I just can't emotionally catch that ball anymore, and it's a real strain to fake it. Because my trust in the Church to speak true things has evaporated and been replaced by suspicion that it's all stories intended to keep this game going, it feels just exactly like talking about fairies. I can't undo it, I can't go back, I can't speak words given to me by the Church and mean them.

I remember several months toward the end of my being Catholic where I called up devout friends as a kind of lunge toward the clear, deep, refreshing pool of conversing about Jesus. I wanted that comfort and sense of connection so bad. But every time, I felt myself smack into the bottom of a pool that was only six inches deep, betrayed over and over by instincts that promised it would be bottomless as it always had been. I might end by feeling a little connected, but only with a strong, nagging sense that I had lied to do so.

It's deeper than that though. The reality is that I'm truly split inside. There is a part of my visceral landscape that still attends to the same living person I had identified as Jesus, someone who exists inside me, represents the power driving the whole universe, and collaborates with me. I can't turn that part off, any more than I can turn off the sense of distaste described above. But speaking about it as if it was something that could be parameterized according to Church dogma still feels like lying. It feels deeply resistant to words. So really, it's as if I'm standing eagerly outside the playground, holding a ball that I want to throw but no one would know how to catch, any more than I know how to catch theirs.

But anyway, it feels good to at least try to explain it a little.

Why I'm not practicing Catholicism, for general audiences

Or, for the 3 or so followers of this blog: "RIP, Catholic.sh".

(Originally written towards a selection of Facebook peeps)

The general "why" or "what changed":

As some of you know, my spiritual life has been in a kind of chrysalis state since I was dismissed from Carmel almost seven years ago. It's as if the many Catholic labels stuck onto my interior goods lost their stickiness, a very gradual and quiet process I've been observing since then, ending in my losing basically all conviction in and taste for the things of formalized religion. This seems to have been a pretty natural outcome psychologically, given what went down at that time. (Unpacking that is handled below.) I acknowledge broken trust in itself has nothing to do directly with whether God exists or the Church is true, but it does have a lot to do with my capacity to freely submit my intellect to the Church's say-so as if it were God's. So although I do hope Christ rose from the dead, I'm sure I can't say that he certainly did, out of obedience. Perhaps predictably, this shift also bestowed a new gravity upon how arguments for Scripture and the historical Church as coherently inspired by one God only seem to work when proceeding backwards from that conclusion. 

Insofar as some may define "Catholic" as requiring that intellectual submission, I actually haven't been that for a while. I'd kept on sincerely identifying as Catholic at first, having no particular desire to be anything else, and I greatly benefited from the cultural closeness with some of my dearer Catholic friends, whose love and understanding I really needed in those early days. But the process of healing and standing on my own two feet again came to the point where my inner attitude has had to own its role as the force carrying me forward, and so it began to shape my outer practice as well. I can't say the Apostle's Creed and mean it, so attending Sunday Mass has lost its point. This also means I can't make all the promises necessary for marrying in the Church. So I haven't considered myself a member of the Catholic faith since around the beginning of this year.

The "what happened," the events in Carmel alluded to above:

(Please excuse the stuffy/legalese tone sprinkled below; I think it's useful to at least try to be precise in this regard.)

The Church proved itself untrustworthy when it broke a promise to me, which had been made in its official name, with all due form, and toward my specific person, when I took my vows. By "the Church", I mean the aspect of the Church I was directed to consider the conduit of God's authority and obey as binding upon my conscience: my superiors, with respect to whatever part of their will that was presented to me as an obedience. The promise that was broken was that the protection of my rights and obligations as a religious by means of due process in the event of a dismissal, which according to Canon law, requires such steps as documenting a religious' delicts, warning them, and acquiring the validation of the relevant extra-claustral authority, in my case the bishop. Although these delicts must be more serious in the case of a solemn professed, the rule also applies for one in temporary vows, as I was. An immediate superior doesn't normally have sufficient standing to dismiss an unwilling religious on their own initiative. 

The docility I had cultivated toward my immediate superior's will was, with respect to my rights as a religious, abused: I was told it was God's will that I should leave, and ordered not to tell the bishop the dismissal was against my will, with the warning that doing otherwise may make me appear obstinate and leave me unable to pursue religious life ever again. It was not revealed to me that the Prioress was unaware of this order, and I found out later that she had been misled about this being my choice.

It's easy for a reputable institution to decree with a seemingly divine level of force. The Church has issued rules in the name of God as binding upon the eternal welfare of a particular person's soul: an extreme amount of power, exerted on the scope of a single person's life. But, it seems to me, and even seems decently self-evident, that's not sufficient for authority. Authority would seem to presuppose a capacity for responsibility proportionate to the claimed force. So we should expect the Church to be able to keep its promises in that same name of God, issued in a fully valid legal process to even one person. As even one member of the Church bears the full threat of an officially-promised damnation, it seems that person should expect also to enjoy the full security of an officially-promised protection: a marriage vow, no less. I found out beyond any personal doubt that the Church is unable to maintain the latter. So it seems to me the Church's claim to a supernatural degree of institutional authority to "bind and loose" must be empty.

There's another way to explain the same event. While my trust in "the system" was well and duly broken, my trust in my superior's goodwill toward me never really was. As Carmelites, we were taught not to obey just the letter of an obedience, but our superior's intention for us, as best we could. I did as my superior told me out of a genuine belief that she must love me and be willing my good, so I should try to follow the spirit of what she was saying to me. Still to this day, I think I discerned rightly that her message to me was: "Go out and live: it's not really worth losing your whole life over this after all." That was the last command presented to me as an obedience, and I've been doing my best to follow it ever since.

I believe my superior, Sr. Teresa of Jesus, who is now the Prioress at Buffalo, mistreated my vows because she herself was suffering badly and needed to leave, but could not overcome the sunk cost and cognitive dissonance involved. When she saw I was also significantly struggling under the psychological pressure of the cloister, and because she loved me better than she loved herself, I think she deliberately tricked me out of the promise I would have never let go of on my own. Mother Teresa has since expelled two other sisters by similarly illegal means, with one canonical battle continuing til today.

I still love the sisters of Buffalo very much, and cherish the fact that they've taught me some of the greatest things I know. Only, I couldn't have predicted what the entire content or fallout of that knowledge would turn out to be.

The Tree, or why words suck

Things are better now. I seem to be on a path to repairing things with my family, and my identity freefall seems to have slowed. It feels like lot of parts that had been moving in me are aligning again around a center. Not perfect peace, but much better.

But that's hardly an interesting update, let's throw in one of those languishing draft posts:

---

I have things I want to say to rationalists. I think I currently suck at genuinely explaining rather than persuading, and exposing how I arrived at a given conclusion ahead of why I think the conclusion is right. 

But, one can dream. I hope one day I can have learned enough to write something awesome that has something to do with this:

I have a strong desire, on the level of a life's goal, to explain something I consider key to securing an understanding of the full extent of our biases. It seems to be something often, and paradoxically, and ironically missed by those who'd most want that understanding, due to their identifying strongly with their rationality. 

It's good to identify with your rationality, because then you'll love it and perfect it, and cultivate a taste for uncovering influences that could secretly hurt it. But it can be bad, inasmuch as the more you identify with your inner warrior against irrational biases, the deeper the horror implied if you should ever come to recognize your target's location within the center of your actual beating heart. I might begin to wonder how much my warriorship was motivated by avoiding the worst truth of all, myself as an irrational actor. But if this is truth, it's a really important one to update on.

I think what I perceive, if true, could make this discovery easier, by showing how it makes sense for us to be in this predicament. As it seems to me, the Moloch behind the curtain is the origin of words, which results in their unconsciously dual purpose and dual effect.

To illustrate this, please picture a tree, which is the human soul. (Or "human brain-and-heart", "human thoughts-and-emotions" -- whatever you like.) 

The tree's form consists in the trace of two motivations, two flows of energy: one goes up, one goes down. The upward energy is our motivation to absorb the light of truth, to grow (inwardly) loftier and more diverse through meaningful contact with the outside world. The downward energy is our motivation to stay alive, strengthen pathways to basic survival needs, and wax peaceful and secure among our dearest tribe: the people we most rely on to locate or orient our identity and role in the world. 

We rely on words to make progress in both realms. The tree forms branches by means of words: words implement the distinctions necessary to understand and predict the world. The tree also forms roots by means of words: they allow us to implement the connections necessary to identify with and communicate with our tribe. 

"Implementing distinctions" and "implementing connections" are opposites. That's the first problem.

Worse, the connection impetus of the roots has a certain power advantage over the distinctions impetus of the branches. The world of roots -- paths of connection, emotional experience, purpose, and desire -- are the context in which each of us came upon our most foundational words, in addition to just being the "proper" purpose of words from the perspective of human evolution. The connection impetus is both where our words' heartfelt meaning comes from, and their primary concern. The roots are necessary to the branches; the branches much less so to the roots.

The way we form our concepts and beliefs with these words reflects this. For all our conscious reaching toward the correct, objective distinctions and associations between concepts, the words we use to do this remained pinned (in proportion to their meaningfulness to us) in their subconscious origin, the emotional power that bestows their turgor. It's to this extent our words are at the mercy of those associations with which we acquired them.

It doesn't have to be hopeless. If our branches succeed in finding sunlight, that energy can be used to feed the roots, growing new ones and deepening them in a better place. Our love of real knowledge in the world can and must enlighten our emotional territory, to make it more aligned with reality and its more accurate distinctions. We should do the hard, slow work to evolve our whole root system into a structure better than the default, one that maximizes both sunlight access and water access, according to a proper understanding of the constraints bestowed by the terrain -- wherever it was our seed happened to drop. 

The way in which I think this process usually fails is through horror at recognizing the sheer level of irrationality we'd be uncovering within ourselves, particularly in those words, phrases, concepts and associations that run deep into our childhood. To succeed, we must learn to understand that this is actually a signal of the power these words contain, enough to become motivated to uncover that power so as to bring it under our conscious sway. We can also be motivated by a different fear: the quest to control that power is ignored to our peril. That's the force that will go right on controlling our path whether we like or not. It must be recognized, respected, cooperated with, and won over just as some massive wild animal would be made tame. 

As messy as our start may have been, this is the energy allotted to us -- perhaps in the form of a religion, or some other way love was conveyed to us that we may recognize as false or having false elements -- and we must respect it for what it is. 

Probably the inevitable example is the word God. If you once believed in God and are now an atheist, and you still find yourself feeling any bit of disturbed emotional reaction to that word, you should invest a decent effort to find out why. That disturbance isn't due simply to some inherent falseness in the word, unless you also feel the same disturbance at the word flurfleboopagetti. There is energy trapped behind that word that once fueled you, but now is working against you. Part of you may be assuming something like, "God once existed and was there for me; but now, he does not exist and is not there for me."  

But this is false, because whatever was true then is true now. Find a way to release any such energy and let it flow toward you again, because it's yours and belongs to you.

Atop a sad pile of post-drafts: an update

I need to tell you more things now. 

Mainly, it's because I'm in a very different state from where I was in the last post, and I want to correct the record. Incidentally, there are some mechanisms I want to try to map out about my interior life, and I find that takes place a lot better in written rather than spoken form.

Recently, three things have happened:

• my Dad died suddenly just before Thanksgiving,
• I lost my faith, and
• my immediate family and I are basically emotionally estranged. 

These are all related. In particular, the second is closely bound to the first. The third is like the icing on the bummer-cake -- not a lot to unpack there, but it makes me feel really sad and so it seems worth listing.

But anyway, starting with Dad seems like the right place. Losing him turns out to have changed my inner landscape in unexpected ways. 

Though gentle and joyful at heart, Dad, a mechanical engineer at the same oil refinery for 40 years, was in many ways the stereotypical old-school, old-church, repressed British Protestant. Long ago, as a tiny child, I once had a genuine emotional connection with him but then lost it forever one day -- a typical event in family life (cf. the demise of Goofball Island in Pixar's Inside Out) very much in keeping with his inability to acknowledge his own emotions. I'm pretty sure one major cause of my religiosity was that little girl's enormous store of pained, thwarted desire for connection with her religious Dad, since that would please him so much. (Also, good grades.) 

Although I was aware of this causality while Dad was alive, I don't think I would have predicted his death would cause me to lose my faith. But I think it's safe to say that's what happened. 

I since have begun to recognize certain key concepts like faith in Jesus Christ and Church membership as so many APIs cemented in my interface with my dad. So long as he was alive, if I budged those APIs -- if I were to bring them "to the surface" to examine them objectively -- I would see that their position in my mind was outdated, the position would move, and by the same action I would lose a connection to my dad. This I simply could not do -- I could never abandon my dad. Our mutual reliance on each other's support and spiritual-pseudo-affection was too foundational. I could hardly lift a finger to push one of those concepts up toward the light before a pang of terror that originated in a roughly two-years-old (and therefore stupidly strong) version of my emotions stopped the procedure. 

This strikes me as in keeping with the deeply relational origin of words -- words as communication -- an origin so drastically (and tragically, and infuriatingly) at odds with the nature of reality, the thing they purport to describe. When as a child I went about setting down the whole irreversible edifice of my knowledge of all things, I wasn't building a picture of the world that my dad fit into: I was building a picture of my dad. I learned about the world inasmuch as it helped me reconstruct the thing I most longed to see, the affectionate version of his face.

When he died, the experience was almost mystical. It may sound odd, but in my search for a proper "goodbye" the evening of his death, I considered myself to behold him again the way I did a few moments after I was born (I had been told we'd given each other a big long stare). And from that place, I said goodbye, with all the enormous joy and sorrow, and much longer period of loss and longing, accounted for. And I at last felt closure. The two-year-old gripping those words so tightly, so that she could catch a glimpse of her Dad, finally loosed her grip.

And so it seems to me I lost my faith and saw the stakes involved in the same stroke. 

What I actually mean by "I lost my faith" is difficult to encompass. In those first few weeks, I had thought my felt-connection to God had died with him. But I think now, that doesn't seem true; there still seems to be some sort of sense of God in my emotional landscape. 

Nonetheless, his death did cause an odd sense of relief that had very much to do with religion. The relief felt due to the end of the semi-subconscious mental process that was expending an extraordinary amount of energy stretching my identity across a version that could maximally interact with James, and one that could maximally interact with Dad. 

Of those two rivers of truth-intuition I spoke of earlier, it appears that when Dad died one's "lowest point" began to vanish,  eventually leaving one river much plainer to my heart and mind. So although I currently feel more interior peace as an agnostic, the experience of having seen those two rivers has left me in deep skepticism of the validity of any river at all. I don't feel myself to know more now that this happened; I may know even less.

But knowledge of these rivers does have a certain usefulness that I can work with. I can embrace the relational aspect of this river, and be true to its flow. After all, the presence of another human being in one's life is a sort of truth, if of a different kind, which can be respected for its own rules.

Although there remains in me a contradiction -- the emotional part of me still senses what I've called God, while the rational part acknowledges little to no evidence he really exists -- I know now for sure that "agnostic" is more true of me than "Catholic". I'm agnostic in my gut feeling because I'm with James. I'm with James because I assess his influence in my life to be deeply healing and positive. If it weren't for that, I would have likely called myself a Catholic if it meant I could have stayed in the same tribe as my mother and brother. But this is not possible -- My efforts to communicate failed in a definitive way after Dad's mediating powers no longer applied, and they've made plain they consider my current state to constitute a betrayal of God. I'm so emotionally kicked-out-of-the-nest I'm not to even mention my upcoming wedding. So I find my membership in the agnostic tribe to be an accomplished fact.

This surely comes off poorly, to admit that I'm liable to switch teams whenever it happens to suit me. But I can now clearly see the process of my self-labeling, whatever that may imply about me. 

It's freeing -- it would even have freed Carmelite-me years ago, realizing (in a moment in the library one summer evening I clearly remember) that for all my appearance of holiness, swathed in toque and veil, I was actually -- no, really actually for real -- nothing but a sinner. Even as far as my deepest convictions, I was never doing anything but looking out for myself. I even remember trying to think up a scheme for manifesting my sinfulness if I were dismissed: the leading idea was to spend all the rest of my days as a Wal-Mart cashier wearing a T-shirt that said "SINNER". Pretty brilliant, eh? 

But it seems the surfacing has happened in a much more authentic way, and I can't help but appreciate that. Can't really expect any kickback of virtue-signaling credit upon becoming an agnostic. It even nullifies that enormous pile of Carmel-credit that I was most definitely attached to. Elegant, really.

I have to add -- for whatever the above is worth -- things are still confusing. 

In which Kathleen vacillates

I have a social media post I need to write, and I don't know how to write it. So I'll blog all the thoughts flitting around that post and maybe that will help it take shape.

It's a post intended to publish the fact that James and I won't be getting married in the Church. It is something James has asked me to write, and which I think I'm still only partially on board about, although I think his reasoning makes sense. 

I'm partially not on board because I dislike kowtowing to the narrative that this is a big deal. As previously noted on this blog -- true off my chest, what matters to me is the commitment, not the religious flavor, since (in terms of a broad average of feelings) I have no particular taste or distaste for Catholicism at the moment, nor a fear that God would punish me for lacking it. But I'm also partially on board, in that my marriage is not something I particularly want to a) hide or b) have blow up in my face socially when revealed as a fait accompli.

Not marrying in the Church makes sense for us as a couple, because neither of us are set to accept the rights and obligations of a Catholic marriage. James is an atheist and, at the moment, I actually have no clue what will come out of my mouth when my kids ask me about God, so -- this has been a change -- I now think it would be likely dishonest to swear it will definitely be what the Church teaches. Meanwhile, seeing as we are both mentally healthy and have liked each other a whole lot for a very long time, marrying does check out.

But I've already experimented with one dear Catholic friend in trying to explain how it could make sense to choose to marry a good person I love very much, while acknowledging that it might not make sense to marry in the Church, and found it didn't really work. So I need to try to anticipate this reaction on a broader scale.

What are the reactions I need to anticipate in my audience of firmly-ensconced Catholics? Let me try to imagine myself reacting as if I were one of them, as indeed I was a relatively short while ago.

...It would feel as if something had possessed her, some primal need to be with her lover had robbed her of her better reason. She had been seduced or taken advantage of and, in her shame, turned away from the vision of Catholic teaching as the energy pulsing through and binding together the great mandala of interior and exterior harmony, the great sacramental, the equilibrium of love and obedience. I would be making guesses at what had broken her deep inside, or if she had always been broken. I would immediately be sniffing out the story that she had built to make this action excusable to her mind so as to call her out on it, to show her the worst dissonance between this story, this jagged outgrowth, and that lovely (but essentially centripetal) mandala. 

My response to this has to be something like: a) my lack of inner conformity to Catholicism is demonstrably traceable to Carmel, not James, b) I'm not playing along with the story expectation because I'm not interested in stories ahead of making life decisions that make sense and c) if I were to play along: when forced to choose, should we really see that mandala of God's will for our lives as essentially centripetal and constrictive ("don't do things that step out of bounds"), or centrifugal and expansive ("do things that increase happiness and peace")? 

Considering c), James would probably prefer I preach a bold epic of purity and freedom from stories. I do agree this is more like truth, but I still see value in tracing those old lines, for the sake of communicating the good things I've perceived in a language my friends can understand. Without bridging that gap, many would not be able to hear a bold epic at all, only something scary and cold, possibly evil.

But..it's not really just for them. I want to tell myself this story and allow myself to believe it on some level. It's part desire to feel the joy and peace of it, and part fear of the alienation and despair I feel when it's missing. I could call it my subconscious, or some other name, but it's the part of me that craves stories that justify my actions as pursuing a higher degree of communal life. When not fed, that part of me, thug-like, holds my inner peace hostage. And especially in Covid isolation, that part isn't going anywhere soon. 

By speaking in a Catholic voice about our marriage, I would enjoy the heck out of myself. But what sort of game am I really playing? It feels good because, as a Catholic, I'd become a goddamn black belt at canonizing my emotions and justifying my actions. It's hard to resist picking up that familiar old sword when facing the great yawning mass of potential-judgment that is my whole Catholic network. I'm just so good at it. The urge to flourish it just a little feels slightly crave-y.

Where is this really coming from? 

I want to downplay the implicit cult switch cemented by my marriage because I don't want this event to present to the world as a rupture between the old Kathleen and a new one. I don't like this idea that James changed me. Somehow, women should change men, but men shouldn't change women. 

This isn't entirely nonsensical. Women are the ones with an inherited instinct to keep a centered stance, all samurai-like, on the role they have ascertained would provide them the most sheltered possible position within their community because -- you know, child-bearing and all that. If I were to substantially budge from this stance due to a man, that means the flighty, male seed-spreading instinct has trumped the stable, female child-nurturing instinct, and we all figured out a few thousand years ago that the latter should generally win in order for society to develop in a positive way. But taking our breeding instincts as a guide for how almost everything should work (as we seem to do a lot) is a pernicious fallacy indeed.

The truth is James did cause change in me, and still is. Carmel drained me of affection for Catholicism. But if James hadn't persistently hacked away at some doublethinks in my underlying beliefs, they would have moldered in a deep corner of my mind, too load-bearing of my Catholic way of life to ever be touched again. 

This process of changing me wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. I haven't always felt happy about it. I often wished James could just lay off being so opposed to the Church, my main source of security, particularly at those moments when marriage wasn't on the table. Assailing my relationship to the Church at that time felt, honestly, rather ridiculously futile on my end. 

But as marriage began to emerge as a possibility, this unleashed the potential for change in me as well as a fair bit of chaos. I felt angry and scared as my instincts grew schizophrenic in their assessment of who was the better source of security, and whether I needed to suppress thoughts that contravened one, or the other, in order to be safer. My integrity proved rather sucky: I learned at least to check myself along the way as to whether I wouldn't really go back to acting and thinking a certain way if James dropped dead. (I've also lately started wondering how I'd start acting and thinking if the Catholic Church were to go extinct.)

In general, this does mean one of the nastiest-sounding versions of my story checks out: a good Catholic girl lost her grip on her faith because she fell in love with an atheist. Blugh, I hate typing that. At the risk of splitting hairs though, I feel this doesn't quite convey the right image. My love for James has not been a great wall sealing off a spiritual center I no longer enter, but the window through which grenades continuously drop into it, right on my now rather uncomfortable head. James has made me at turns furiously defensive of a right to hope God exists, and terrified of my desire to speak to Him. 

Meanwhile, I had a chance to observe something new in myself, not without disgust though. It was how my sense of what was true acted exactly like a river whose shape, location and speed depended quite simply on the path of least resistance to the lowest topographical point; in this case, the point of maximum personal safety. I began to be able to flip back and forth between my two centers of gravity and feel two different rivers, each covering their own stretch of land: their own allotment of allowed thoughts.

I like that I can now see this about myself. 

I dislike that my sense of self is now the weakest it's ever been. Although I grant this is not objectively bad, I do remain concerned about its prognosis. I always seem to be making another guess at what my points of reference ought to be, only to watch them slip out of focus shortly after. I don't feel entirely sure that my changing is actually evidence that James has helped me see the truth more, or simply that James has stronger convictions than I, and that I'll keep slowly sliding toward his worldview while he stays more or less the same. A part of this concern is that I'm not perfectly certain of James' potential to be legitimately updated by me in turn. Perhaps, as the party more lenient toward emotional semantics (sc. one of those touchy-feely types), I will always rate as a second-class source of information that a true rationalist would never really countenance. I don't know.

That's about the shape of it. There's no sense in pretending that I'm more sure of myself than I really am, though old habits are hard to break. So I'm finding it wholesome to try to embrace more fully my mother's assessment that I've gone off the rails.

In one sense, I really have gone off the rails. In another sense, I've chosen to assume the risk of using a different method to discern the existence and direction of the rails. This doesn't really work in the physical world, or in the world of fundamentalism, so I'd rather not get overly defensive about my rails being the real ones. There's no real rails: rails, too, are a story. Reality, the experience of my life, is far better than any story I could tell.

That seems a good place to end: the part where I tell you that what I'm really talking about and really invested in is something words weren't built to communicate.

The below again, but with less snark

I wanted to add an angle that's a little less snarky. What I'm saying is that accepting that love is nowhere felt like the first step to accepting that love is everywhere. 

It does seem a fair bit like detachment a la St. John of the Cross, who says we have to let go of things according to our natural way of wanting them, in order to truly taste and enjoy them for the first time. Our attachments are the stories our instincts weave like nets to rope good things in: "Her love should come to me because she is my mother," or "His love should come to me because we're compatible and I want to get married." It's a way of relating to the world more suited to a child, whereby we see good things primarily in how they relate to us. We let go of some as we get older, but the deeper stuff tends to stay. It's not that it's wrong, exactly.

But I'm convinced happiness comes from seeing even these more deeply needed and wonderful things in that detached way. Not in relation to us, but as they stand in themselves. To the degree I learned and accepted that love-coming-to-me was nowhere, I could feel for the first time that love-beautiful-in-all-hearts was everywhere, and sense the comforting warmth of it. 

To be comforted and warmed by reality! Who would have thought?

But this is damn hard, and in my case apparently required some serious trauma. So I'm not sure it's something you can really just do, to be honest. But anyway, I may be wrong in my assessment about these things. It's just how it appears to me now.

A small one on paranoia and why it's super fun

I had an acute paranoid episode in Carmel. In that mental state, I was following an expected "storyline" for the day's events that were entirely outside of reality (I would leave on a train that very day to the Carmel of Philadelphia, I would bring my Novice Mistress with me, I would explain everything to her on the way and she would weep with understanding, etc). But more importantly, I realized with firm conviction that everyone's love for me was fake.

The funny thing is, I still think everybody's love for me is fake. Sure, some people care about me, but it will never be that all-encompassing kind I used to secretly hope for. Just like how I now think of my need for stories, I've come to believe my need for total loving-acceptance is based on a lie. 

As a byproduct of our long lineage of ancestors who had great survival skills as babies, it seems we're on an eternal hunt for a mother's "unconditional" love. We all want to reignite that gut recognition that there is someone out there who can feel my own pain and needs as their own, with urgency and even despite themselves, and render me safe.

Nobody but my parents ever really came close to that. And even that didn't turn out to mean actual acceptance of my emotionally fully-fledged internal life.

So if I'm in a bad mood, that can be a bummer. 

But if I'm a good mood, that means I can relax and indulge that instinct-hit from literally anywhere. Like an affirming ASMR video on Youtube. Some random chick's benevolence toward her faceless viewers is probably, actually genuine. Why not lay claim to it and soak it in? (I didn't watch Blue's Clues, but if I had, I would have no doubt joined the happily bawling masses that accepted the curiously spiritual power of Steve's loving apology.)

Am I ashamed? Maybe a little. but honestly, not really, because dang it works.

Marriage, and why I don't seem to get it now

I have an engagement ring on my finger. This has never happened before, even though I, consciously or unconsciously, have spent the last 33 years or so hoping to see one there (I think three years old is a good start time estimate). I want to try to describe to you what this is like now, for me in particular. 

I'll start with the part I know: girls.

Little girls in stable traditional family structures know for sure they will get married. They know this as soon as they are informed that being "married" means they will be a "bride" and a bride wears a "wedding dress" and that last phrase is quickly understood to refer to the ultimate clothing, the Supreme Bling. Girls grasp by pure instinct that Supreme Bling is the expression of worthiness in an absolute sense. And of course they are worthy. Therefore, they will of course get married. [Edit: I don't really know how often this is the case. Maybe a lot of girls in these families feel differently. But there's got to be at least a significant subset that feel this way.]

The Supreme Bling concept is the diamond perfectly, lovingly crafted by eternal generations of women to fit the emotional prongs that have simultaneously evolved specifically to make space for it and hold it in a little girl's brain. 

For a long time I had a relatively strong desire for marriage. At one point I started putting some distance between my self-identification and these urges, seeing them as something cultivated by forces outside my control. But that was before I flung my deeply romantic twenty-something self into Carmel with the vigor and glee of the proverbial moth into a flame (except imagine it screaming a tiny, 'wheeeeeee<3<3<3').

I got married in Carmel. What I mean by that is, I believed with all my heart that my profession was that true Supreme Bling. From the inside view, being a nun taking three-year vows as written and one taking them with firm intention to preserve them until death, as we were instructed to do, feel universes apart. I of course considered myself to be the latter nun. I had spent the previous years as a novice in daily awe that our beloved habit was my wedding dress, our rope sandals my wedding shoes. Even today, tears can come to my eyes when I remember them. But the Profession crucifix was the wedding ring, and that was received on the day of simple vows. It wasn't just in my head by a long shot -- that day, Pentecost, was accepted by all observers as my wedding day. I was referred to by my sisters quite simply as "the bride."

When I was unceremoniously ejected a few months later, as witnesses will confirm, I had only one item on my agenda, a fully automatic response to prop up my suddenly highly compromised psyche. I came out, hugged my parents and, smiling cheerfully, asked them to please drive me from the convent straight to the nearest department store. I picked a $50 bill out of the dowry box that had come out with me to buy a sterling silver ring I immediately jammed onto my finger. It felt like abruptly disarming a nuclear bomb that had been hidden and ticking away at the center of New York City.

On top of that, some weeks after I left, the nun responsible for my removal sent our Profession crucifix to me in the mail, saying she discerned in prayer that it belonged to me. I have many things to say about that sister and her own desperate, repressed need to leave the convent. But anyway, it took a few years, and the direct intervention of the current ring's owner, for ring and crucifix to get dumped.

So I hope this illustrates to what extent my marriage piety, just like my religious piety, got heckin bamboozled. Today, I of course still sense marriage as a major commitment and a joyful event. But it no longer casts the spell of grave, from-above momentousness. I think I prefer it this way.

But I get the sense that many of the people I know, particularly those with a religious background, have not experienced this diminishment of the sway of meaning. And now this discrepancy is beginning to hurt.

On the one hand, I've learned that it can mean something to marry a Catholic, over and above the implications for Catholic marriage validity. As for that, I'm open to children and to exposing them to the teachings of the Church, whether the wedding is Catholic or not. But to have the ceremony be Catholic seems to contaminate the affair with submission, or of ownership revoked; there's a certain religious juju. I can understand how it would feel this way.

Meanwhile, most of my Catholic family and friends still hold both Catholic meaning and marriage meaning dear. Therefore, if I were to marry outside the Church, that means I'm committing a mortal sin, which means I'm rejecting God, which means I'm rejecting Love and Goodness itself, which implies I have on some key level stopped the beating heart our friendship, perhaps leaving either niceties or fervent prayer for my soul in its stead. I've been there, so I know it's possible some friends simply cannot think otherwise. It isn't a question of amount of love for me. I can understand how it would feel this way too.

I can say with all my heart that the meaning of my marriage is my own. I don't feel a need for something extra bestowed by Catholicness, or any other -ness except genuineness. If God exists, even the Catholic God, I find it impossible this would displease him, or that he would actually withhold his benevolence in such a case. Controversial, I know, but it seems impossible to me that God would be constrained by the form of a Sacrament if he didn't want to be. And He'd know how things balance out in me now: He'd know that any genuine filial impetus for conforming my marriage to the Church was bamboozled out of me, because He himself did it. 

Meanwhile, my chosen meaning for it is not that it become a watershed moment that destroys a fruitful relationship with anyone, much less half my family and a large swath of my friends. Why the heck would it?

I feel I've overdosed on capital-m-Meaning and that I'm quite done with it. But it feels like it lives on in everyone around me: its demands yanking me to fulfill and satisfy here and there and everywhere, except for in me. 

I'm not sure what to do about this. But at the moment, admittedly, it feels less than awesome.

The strong baby war

A dilemma came before me today. The details aren't interesting, but the interior state I found myself in, due to the dilemma, was interesting.

There is a difficulty embedded in our genes. Namely, that all genes worry about is propagating the species. After you've done a good job of that, you can pretty much just die and go to hell. 

Oh, but in order to propagate, of course you should flourish and grow happy and healthy and strong. Physical and intellectual health secure survival to full generative potential, not to mention the social clout to obtain the other half of strong genes. Important baby ingredient.

When my own genes look at me, those generators of the urges I find most meaningful and tender within me, they don't see Kathleen in all her beautiful uniqueness. They see, in potentia, one really freaking strong baby. No, not one, so many strong babies; as many as I could pop out.

This realization sometimes makes me a little put out. Why? Oh, I don't know. I guess because I was beginning to think, "Hey, I think Kathleen is kind of ok." 

I was raised by an emotionally repressed Italian Catholic stay-at-home mom, so I started out suspecting Kathleen was about as wretched and useless as all my poor mother's own unresolved baggage about her self-worth told me I was. Counterintuitively, that was what bestowed my youthful swagger: because, back then, Kathleen and her genes were tight. Sooo tight. 

What is this you exhort us to? "Self-gift?" Spend my entire life doing nothing but pouring out my love on everyone around me until I shrivel into a papery husk of a human being? Is that supposed to be hard? I'm so freaking good at that. I do it without thinking; pure instinct. Bro, I don't even think I have real human rights. I'm just that humble.

When a woman lives without a motive for self-preservation blocking the way to her own death, everything made a crazy amount of sense. I nurtured my hearty sacrificial/maternal instincts (aka traditional family values), which were in turn overwhelmingly canonized by my community as deep selflessness. I was in an infinite affirmation loop.

Then thanks to some relatively mild spiritual abuse, I had this falling out. All these canonizations, affirmations that I should give up basically all sense of my desires and rights -- or at least, the more the better -- began to feel a tiny bit fake. Then a tiny bit faker. Now they're gone.

Having lost that thread, I started trying to be happy in ways that didn't require paying a spiritual debt upfront in the coin of gratuitous suffering. This is an extremely difficult habit to unlearn. But anyway, this had the effect of gradually causing me to think that I might be someone who is worth making an effort to give good things to. Maybe I don't have to die to self just yet -- maybe I'm kind of ok after all. 

But keep in mind, it's only the canonizations are gone. The genes are not. They're here. They don't see even one single baby. 

And they're angry.

(Unfinished. Haha yep I'm never finishing this probs)

Well that was depressing

I'm back home now. I'm no longer perched above Queens Boulevard in my old apartment, gazing down upon on the (assuredly literal) bleak chaos below. 

I sometimes enter a state as if I were a small black cat crouched atop a refrigerator, observing the goings on in someone's kitchen below me. That was me when I was writing the last post. 

Now, I'm just a small black cat ... sitting at a table, typing on a computer. In a room, in a house, with nobody else in it. The greenery outside the glass doors is a more cheering and peaceful sight, a more optimistic picture of "the real world out there", than the intersection at Union Turnpike. And...yet.

I wasn't really expecting this blog to become a diary. But I'm not using it for anything else, so why not? And perhaps it will help me see clearer the ways I change, with that extra kick of awareness that others can see it as well. (Or maybe I'll delete this later, oh dear.)

I read something once about how the lead in "Spirited Away" gained spiritual sight by facing her fears. And I thought, "oh hey, I guess I could think of this as facing my fear of being alone. That feels a little better than just being alone."

But, that's fake too. I'm just existing without a clan, in a world without grand purpose or meaning, with all the antinutrients evolution-wise both of those states entail. And I chose them both. Why? I can't even be sure. 

I am trying to learn how to be this whatever-I-am, successfully. I want to discover an angle to life by which I might start traveling a sustainable avenue of growth, through a force of creative joy alone, unsupported by the instinct-drive for those other things. Yet this is difficult. I'm genuinely unsure if it's possible for me to do. Some are strong enough to relish the benefits of long, deep fasts; others are simply too weak, victims of their constitution no matter their good intentions. I fear I count as the latter.

I'm not doing great at it so far. But I haven't had a lot of practice yet. In other words, I think this is something I must feel.

I removed this post because I felt like it had missed the point, that it failed to articulate that which urged its writing in the first place. Also, it seemed to have relatively little content. 

But perhaps I should be more comfortable with open-endedness, with putting down faltering words where they can be seen. Let's see if it sticks this time.

Thinking through how to enjoy things

So, I'm back in NYC for a few days. I have missed Queens. I'd just begun to feel at home here when Covid whisked me down South. But I'm back now for a few precious days, and everything has obtained the golden aura of lost things: dollar stores crammed with hilarious content, cozy brunch spots, early sun on hidden stone walls, a downright European fresh croissant and macchiato on a quiet church corner.

I dove straight back in to those memories this morning. I found everything just as I hoped to find it, and I really did enjoy it. But what attracted my curiosity was a persistent, small, confused voice in my mind as I did so: "these things used to mean something, and now they do not."

At first, I concluded I was observing the usual cycle of having once experienced a setting while living a certain internal state, enshrining that memory as a high point, missing that setting, then at last returning to it as if to a treasure box. The second time around, the box is equally beautiful, but always empty. By nature, it holds only a present moment, so it must be filled again with whatever is at hand.

When I first remembered this, I went about filling that box again, entering in to the present moment. This had the usual good effect of relieving me of the subtle anxiety of rapidly hopping between past and future moments, comparing and analyzing and despairing, instead of really resting and taking in what lay around me. But while I expected the voice to be satisfied, it seemed to repeat itself as if with a shrug, but a slight furrow in the brow: "there is no more meaning here." 

I probed that thought. It felt as if the story that was missing was the one I once used to weave together my life and even my sensory input into one coherent whole. It amounted to a loss of savor. I realized it was something that had been constructed in order to derive joy and a kind of forward momentum from things, and now that tool was lacking. All things seemed to smile at me less.

But I also recognized this degradation as purposeful on my part. Over the past couple of years, I had made more moves to value the truth as much as it can possibly be valued, particularly with respect to what can loosely be called first principles. I was trying in good faith to dismantle the edifice of this cosmic inner story for the innocent lie that it essentially was -- in particular, the impulse to weave things together as aspects of God, or events as aspects of his love or intentions for me. Love in the abstract experienced the same degradation: the love in our hearts is not destiny, or a promise; it is only the cruft of our sex-centric evolution.

I have striven to bring to its logical conclusion something I began to believe some years ago: if God exists, he exists in darkness. The only way I can understand God to possibly make sense is if he is the God of the mystics, which means accepting that I have no special ability to feel him, above Muslim or agnostic or atheist. To the extent that I seem to do so, I must conclude I'm misleading myself. And thus with all things "spiritual": free will is an illusion, and love is not greatness of spirit, but mere hormonal thrashing.

Meanwhile, it just so happens this "meaning of life" I seek to destroy is by many accounts the foundation of lasting human happiness. That is, at least, if we accept the basic insight of Victor Frankl:"those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'." I agree with the general sentiment and have no doubt that human intelligence evolved to survive on stories as heavily as our bodies evolved to need food. 

One may seek both truth and happiness in moderation, and get along well enough. But to set your sights on the maxima of one seems to require a final goodbye to the other. Frankl would guide us to the maximum of happiness, and give up seeing all things in the precision of their bleak chaos; Buddha would guide us to the maximum of truth, and accept that bleak chaos as the final say.

It may be most appropriate to leave it at that. It's not a problem to be taken lightly. 

But to complete my current thought with honesty, and record things that happen in my life, I will note one further thing. As I completed my meandering walk in Forest Hills, it felt as if I was examining that broken present moment in my hands, like a -- like a what? Well, since I consider potatoes the universal variable -- like the saddest little potato: withered, full of eyes sprouting everywhere, and indeed, emitting a faint stink. It's inedible, impossible to derive real joy or strength from. But it's literally all I have.

What do I do with this potato? To exaggerate: Frankl says eat it, and with each bite believe with all your heart it's giving you strength; Buddha says let it go, and into the trash where it belongs. 

Out of sheer habit, though, a third option popped up: give the sad potato to the God in darkness, in a gesture of gratitude, without knowing if it was ever received.

When I thought of this, immediately the inner voice perked up. "Aha! I almost forgot that solution. That is the only one that has ever worked."

The experience happened separately from an explicit belief in God; the word emerged to my conscious mind basically after the fact. "God" is a label, but the concept was "the appropriate target of gratitude for life," something I found at least in my case to be uniquely positioned to provide a certain concrete emotional utility.

As is my wont, and as previously noted, I don't consider this experience something we should try to draw information from about God or reality. But it seems like a worthwhile piece of data nonetheless.

Part 5: seriously what the fuck, Kathleen

I think a lot of what I wrote below is fated to get deeply rewritten or just canned. Armchair psychology must be among the worst kinds of armchair thought. In any event, if these opinions of mine are going to be remotely shareable, first I have to open myself up to outside information and research about what I myself mean by "overly black-and-white thinking." 

At this moment, I don't have a precise idea of it. I only know that anxiety makes me feel like "all or nothing" are the only two options at times when there have proven later to be many more. "All or nothing" takes on the same felt-sense of inescapability as an if/else statement in code, but falsely. If I don't provide some precise means of discerning anxiety-driven versus logic-driven application of the if/else sense, and demonstrate how this differentiates traditionalist thinking, then honestly, I need to just go back to keeping a lid on it on these topics.

Part 4: the point being

So if these tests are such a problem, why don't most advanced Catholics figure it out and drop them? 

First of all, of course, the situation often just doesn't happen to demand a refactor. Usually we can expect a Catholic.sh with a strong Catholic.test.sh or whatever to chug along just fine. 

I sense a problem of implementation only to the extent that the engineer considers a test suite to be actually critical to Catholic.sh being able to run at all. Even worse is if they insist that the testing library be on a specific version first released around, say, 1870. This would be all well and good coming from a beginner on their first naive implementation, following some step-by-step guide also published in 1870. But not from someone we expect to actually know what they're doing.

As we've seen, It's plain to me these tests don't actually serve Catholic.sh. If an even remotely attentive engineer treats it like important code, it's because of what it does serve. If it was gone, he knows something would break.

And indeed there is, so to speak, another program in us that quietly consumes Catholic test output for its own purposes. If this program is big enough, the demand it imposes can force those tests to be run ragged, triggering refactoring for increased output, growing them like a cancer. 

What is this program? What would need a steady diet of answers to the question, "am I ok"?

Well, to those of a certain bent of mind -- that being Catholic means keeping within the bounds of the fold while lax Catholics and nonbelievers slide slowly toward Hell -- I, the lax Catholic from South Jersey, say unto you:

(ok, "maybe undiagnosed" would be more fair, but I don't feel like drawing it again)

The hardest part of this is that if this anxiety disorder is in fact, undiagnosed, it's very likely the person will deny have an anxiety disorder. Much less, that it could be affecting their reasoning in a profound way.

Ok, ok. Back up. I expect there must be a percentage of people in the group I just addressed who literally do not have an anxiety disorder, and have not had their religious beliefs systemically skewed by the habits of mind typical therein. Honestly, I think that percentage is small, and if I were right, that would be an important fact.

But to keep from losing all my friends in one blog post, I will say this: the point is not the disorder, but the mindset of anxiety. The mindset easily teleports through time and people when it is handed down as a co-tradition or hermeneutic. It's at least as much about the lens through which it's taught, as the lens through which it's lived. 

The religious anxiety mindset accumulates credence from making us sound like humans did in the olden days, when we had not yet outgrown our need for herd instinct: when we were more anxious as a species, but we kinda actually had to be. It really wasn't that long ago. But I'm arguing that we should deduce this credence is a misapplication. All of the patriarchs were members of the more-anxious species, not because this is the right way to think about religion, but because no alternative species could uniformly exist yet. 

Here's another way of putting it:

This one I did redraw to be less hyper-offensive than the first version. Sorry.

I might at some point add to this. I probably should. But yeah, guys, that's basically it. Please stop thinking the need to feed this maybe-inherited-from-our-religious-mentor mindset must be included in any legitimate definition of religiosity or Catholicism. 

It's not. Religion outside of an anxiety mindset is both possible and rational. It's just like many other parts of life which those of us who've lived almost our entire lives under the sway of anxiety, have maybe never before had a chance to experience or evaluate outside of it. Myself included!

So if we're going to discuss God or Catholicism, please let's first of all

a) talk about how anxiety causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to try to control or predict things we can't actually control or predict (eg. our place among the righteous, or how many people are going to hell; ultimately, our distance from death),

b) how this is distinct from how logic causes us to draw black and white distinctions as a way to conform to how things really exist; and 

c) how this means we can predict that anxiety is likely still skewing our way of thinking toward overreaching distinctions, and work toward a robust understanding of how we can correct for this.

Then we can move past this and talk about the fun stuff. Ugh, and I really want to.

Final thought: I would ask that you glance at this one more time. But that's it.

Part 3: I began learning about load-bearing structures

First, a brief note on how I hold the convictions I'm about to recklessly pontificate upon. 

I hold my ideas about how to actually live Catholicism well, rather strongly. This is because the memory of my trials in Carmel provides me with the same kind of conviction I experienced when I presented to my engineering teammates the tests I had run on my brand new algorithm before sending it to production: "You have no reason to trust that my idea is good on its own, but there's proof it can withstand some rigor." 

Unfortunately, I think it's pointless to try to detail the level of dedication under suffering my faith had to withstand to stay in Carmel, and stay Catholic since then. I'll have to leave it to your imagination. Nonetheless, if I could convey those validations in a meaningful way, I happily would.

But anyway, speaking of tests.

One reason I'm skeptical that gradient Catholicism is the only real kind is how that gradient is manifested: the Catholic test suite, if you like. 

My problem with the Catholic test suite hinges on this Biblical concept: "Thus sayeth the Lord God: 'Stop acting like your shitty tests are helping with or really telling you anything about how well the code is running.'" 

In non-Kathleen translations of these and similar verses, "your shitty tests" are visible signifiers of faithfulness (sc. "sacrifices and burnt offerings" or "the law" in "the power of sin is the law"), while the code is a man's mind and heart. 

Basically, there exists an emphasis among gradient-Catholics that we should have not only good code, but test coverage: very often, all the test coverage. 

In this view, to the degree a virtue can't be exposed to the evidence-based process we learned to love so well in Logic 101 -- to the degree it isn't externally verifiable -- it risks irrelevance. If its unit test is failing, then it's for all intents and purposes nonexistent. This method prioritizes the surface-ability of virtue, the provision of a strong logical interface. According to this view, unless there is a clear and rational excuse not to, code should be provable by means of an agreed-upon interface: ✓ : success, ✗ : fail.

Anyone who has written a program even a few files big knows that having tests is good and important for sustainable future development. They also know that to aim for 100% coverage, and craft code to optimize for this ahead of flexibility and performance, would actually be totally horrible and ruin the program. 

Why? I mean, I think you can probably imagine it. All I'm saying is, in Carmel I felt viscerally how the cost of building and correcting the output of perfect (or sometimes any) tests just isn't worth it under some conditions. This sense matched beautifully with the one I found again years later among a good engineering team under pressure.

After all, tests can show all sorts of results whose significance is permanently in doubt. Meanwhile, being the entirely separate concern that it is, the code runs. And it can run flawlessly. I'm certain this insight is broadly known among those who have stressed their Catholicism under demand for a certain type of extraordinary, constant loving action: I'm thinking primarily of single mothers or fathers, or parents of disabled children.

In Catholicism, we were taught to optimize for test coverage -- external signifiers of virtue -- by high, ancient authorities, and by our mothers and fathers. I now firmly consider this to signify a good effort tarnished by one other hidden, essentially animal, and effectively ruinous motivation: to be able to communicate among ourselves the passing state of our code: to reveal the vital ✓.

✓ and ✗ is survival. ✓ and ✗ is acceptance and inclusion in the herd, or not. It's old, it's ancient of days; it's an instinct without which the human race could never have persevered through countless winter starvations. Our subconscious minds apply it to non-faith communities and faith communities with the same primal simplicity and force. My mother greeted the friend-pattern of one nun's habit, and guarded me from the no-pattern of another nun's beige pants, by literal instinct.

But this instinct is outdated. We no longer need to stay accepted in our tribe to survive. In the past 100 years or so, sanitation and technology have lifted us a whole new distance away from the terror and heartbreak of death that once defined our lives on earth so much more uniformly.

Once, we had no choice but to weave the imperative ✓ and ✗ into our Catholic design. Today, we have a choice. And that's why it's just plain wrong to insist upon keeping it as much of a design priority as it ever was. It ruins Catholicism in exactly the same way this mindset would be expected to ruin a computer program.

If it's so obvious that this design pattern is flawed, why don't most gradient Catholics figure that out?

That's my next post.

Part 2: then I went to Christendom

Now, rewind almost 20 years to my college days (hard oof).

At Christendom College, I plunged into a faith community that took their religion very seriously and, for the first time, I joined, enjoyed, and continue to enjoy the special bond that exists amongst those who feel they have recognized together a secret and important fact. 

I quickly discovered that for most of my new friends, this special bond was nothing new. This was their normal experience of being Catholic in their families or parishes. 

More importantly though, it was also part of their definition of Catholicism. Whereas my old community would have called both us and themselves "Catholic", in this new view, some Catholics were not true Catholics, and slid away from the definition in the degree that they did not assent in their hearts to what we all knew we had to do, to be Catholic.

What is this thing we were doing? I think a definition my friends would agree on might be something like, "live out Catholic teaching in the ways that are uncomfortable but necessary when logic is brought to bear on the tenets of the Faith, in addition to the ways that are comfortable." I learned a new concept: something or someone is not just Catholic in a binary, but to a degree.

In its gradient form, "Catholic" (sc. something like "rational-and-Catholic", "intentionally-Catholic", "faithful") represents a ratio between assent to the teaching of the Magisterium and what rationalists would call inner alignment: grit, lack of akrasia, with respect to adhering to the conclusions of reason. I will call this gradient-Catholicism.

(Gradient-Catholicism exists on a gradient too. I'm not really addressing moderate amounts of this mindset. I'm referring for the most part to Catholicism with strong traditionalist tendencies.)

Gradient-Catholicism struck the same chord plucked by my mother long ago, the first time she looked at a nun in pants and whispered to me of betrayal. It was a precise, clear, sharp chord, like a taut violin string suspended in my soul, separating either side of it in an echo of the angelic Battle depicted in a painting prominently displayed in my home: the side of Light, and the side of Darkness. And indeed, that chord also defined the limen I felt I mustn't cross, whenever I considered the morality of an action. The goal, in a sense, was to sharpen this line ever more clearly.

It was with a feeling of enormous rightness that this aligned with another kind of precision and sharpness I was learning at the same time: Logic 101. This sensation cannot be emphasized enough.

Gradient-Catholicism provided the inner language whereby my religious identity and self-improvement could interface with this wonderful tool: the ability to make correctly reasoned distinctions, bidding the entire universe open up and deposit the jewels of reality and agency at our feet. 

Non-gradient-Catholicism was just that: Catholicism, but without this interface. It atrophied into irrelevance.

All us younglings graduated and gripped our firebrands -- one edge Reason, the other Faith -- as we toddled into the dark outside world.

Then what happened? Well, some "fell," you see. Some "lost the faith." Alas, they must have been led astray or grown weary, and are now languishing in darkness. Yes, I'm kidding. Many who say the same aren't.

Nearly all of my dearest friends are atheists. With those who fell away after Christendom, I enjoy our continued shared love of truth, rationality and the power of logic. It's no coincidence many of us are programmers. It is to these friends I am mainly speaking now. 

Meanwhile, I count myself lucky that my best friend, also an atheist, I have kept since sixth grade at St. Joan of Arc. I enjoy discussing spiritual things with Jamie too, and others of a more worldly stripe.

But there is an enormous difference in such talks with Jamie and her ilk, and with my post-Christendom, post-traditionalist atheists. The communication hurdle I face with the latter almost always makes less enjoyable, fruitful, and insight-rich the very conversations I would wish and expect were more so than normal.

The difficulty is that to their minds, and unlike the rest of the world, there is still no such thing as non-gradient Catholicism. It's not only erroneous, but nonexistent. Especially when compared to gradient-Catholicism, it is treated as essentially worthless in rational conversation.

Sure, I mean, they'd agree non-traditionalist Catholics are obviously out there. But they are definitionally on the "fringe." When seen from the inside, the reality is clear: if you embrace the teaching of the Catholic Church, you are taking the first step toward something that terminates in an unhealthy state of mind: a certain blocking-out of reality. 

One friend tells me that a Catholic "could not" write a book about sound rational practices, because being Catholic de facto means being slightly irrational (later amended to "probably would not"). A second habitually refers to Catholicism as a cult, and voices concern that someone thinking of leaving Catholicism might be in danger because "a life inside the church doesn't prepare you very well for a life outside." This sentiment is difficult to mesh with the St. Joan's Catholicism of my youth -- to say the least.

Telling from my own habits of mind, the argument for only-gradient-Catholicism-counts would go like this: the only kind of Catholicism is the kind to which you could apply tests of logic regarding tenets of the Faith and the resulting way of life. Because those other Catholics are failing obvious tests, much like writing code while ignoring big red errors in the unit tests, they are obviously not really using Catholicism as a load-bearing program in their lives. Sure, they have a file called Catholic.sh in their heads, but that's all it is: a bunch of text, dead code. When the reckoning comes, what do you suppose the odds are this code will run?

In principle, it's difficult to disagree. I become skeptical, however, for a few reasons, which will go in another post.

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.

Intro

Hello, I did another blog restart on a whim because I suddenly had things to say (feels I was feeling) and wanted to write them down before I lost them.

In this blog, I'll be allowing myself to propose very sweeping theories about the nature of both my and others' internal experiences. That's a big liberty, so I'm hoping to counterbalance it by emphasizing the need for correction. Maybe by this process, both I and my readers can have a shot at adjusting hidden assumptions.

So if I write something that outrages you, please respond to it in the comments section. I'm even open to ad-hominems, e.g. "you probably think this because of your childhood experience of...etc", if you feel inclined. 

If I only hear from people who agree with me, I won't be able to see where I might be going wrong. So, if you feel inclined, I hope you help me out. :3