A few weeks ago, in preparation to move, I started weeding through some of the crap that has sat in a closet since I moved last year. In doing so, I finally came across the first couple entries to another online journal that I’d started nearly five years ago — I knew I’d printed some of them up, but had almost given up finding them, thinking maybe I’d thrown them out because the site had still been up, however sporadically, when I was packing. The site is gone now, along with most of the entries that cover the better part of a year. The printouts of those first few entries are heartbreaking and painful. I’d forgotten some of the smaller details; seeing some of them typed out like that, within a month or so of them happening when things were still so fresh, was hard. But they’re important, they’re part of who I am. I might very well post them elsewhere at some point, if only so they hopefully won’t be lost again.
The last few entries that I have, when I’d quite suddenly fallen pretty hard for one of my co-workers a few months later, evoked a different sort of pain — from seeing how certain I was of some things four years ago. Various sixth-sense, pagany/new-agey type stuff. And yet I still very much considered myself Catholic; I’d held the conviction that since such things littered the Bible, that there was no reason to think they were confined to antiquity.
And then, further back in this box, I found an old spiral notebook. That was just further painful illustration of my convictions at that time. I’m not sure what the notebook’s original purpose had been, but re-reading it, I clearly remembered being up at 1, 2, 3am, writing journal entries every few months in this notebook. Or one particular afternoon during that first summer after I moved out. I was so certain — of God, of fate or destiny being at work. I was positive that I was meant to have left as I did, that it was a Sign from God that I was special, that I knew better than most of the people around me, that I was right in defying my family to move out and move on. I can see the language I used to describe what I was feeling was influenced by what I was reading at the time — L. M. Montgomery’s journals and Julian of Norwich — but the thoughts and ideas behind the language were my own. I was that certain of a lot of things, and my everyday life seemed to do nothing more than re-enforce that certainty.
How far I’ve come since then. How much it hurt to read some of this, in comparison to my current uncertainty about whether any of that was real — especially having just previously read how it all ended. And then remembering how in the years after that, other things I was certain of seemed to be taken away one by one. In the end, it’s probably no great surprise that my decision to walk away from Catholicism came after that breakup, after several painful Easters, and after my sister had brain surgery two weeks before Christmas.
I spent a few bad days after reading all this, wondering if there was even a God at all, wondering if even that one old certainty that I’d been left with after all this was also wrong. A post made a few days later by a friend helped me pull myself out of my slump, and I’m grateful for that. But this seeker path I’m on — it’s not an easy place to be. It would be easier if I didn’t believe in God at all, if I could dismiss it all as stuff-and-nonsense and let it all go. Instead, I’m sitting in the middle of a pile of multi-colored beliefs from all over, not convinced that all the ones of the same color add up to The One Truth, but believing that they all have elements of truth. It’s taking time to sort through them all, to figure out which ones ring true in my heart, which seem intellectually possible, which ones seem just plain wrong. It’s a long, difficult process, though one day I hope I can at least figure out enough to put a name to it. That’s one of the most difficult parts of all this, not having a name for what I’m coming up with. But I’m still looking, and for now, I suppose that’s the important part.
Sophia Seeker 
