#i've been doing really bad at uhhhhh actually praying recently. going to confession. etc. but that's neither here nor there

[irrealisms]

this might not be the type of question you’re looking for, but my understand is you’re a convert or at least someone who has become more devout over time. I was wondering if you were willing to talk about your faith journey? Obviously I know it’s a personal thing so I’m not looking for any prying details, just whatever you feel most comfortable with talking about!

this is a good question! prying questions are actively encouraged lol

i'm a convert! i was baptized on easter 2022, here are a couple pictures from that:

this was ... about two or three years after i started getting serious about Catholicism? uhhhh actually i should back up some more

i grew up nominally methodist but in practice my mom didn't believe in God and treated it as a convenient place for me to make friends and participate in a kids' choir and such and i picked up on this (and stopped going at some point, i don't even really know when, i think sometime in middle school). i also had my own elaborate mostly-animist theology that treated Christianity as blatantly laughable. in retrospect a lot of the theology was bc i heard voices a lot as a kid lol, both "this is what they tell me is true" and "i need a worldview that accommodates the experiences i am having". i feel a little weirder abt talking abt me-as-a-kid having delusional tendencies bc it was i think within the range of "imaginative autistic kid"? but i ... never grew out of it, and a lot of them are recognizably the same tendencies that got me labeled as delusional as a teenager-adult, so. shrug. i grew up with a familiarity with Christianity but not specifically Catholicism and it was never serious.

in high school i had, mmm... very varying theologies most of which were pretty shallow and focused on whichever girl i was currently in love with lol. but i was still drawn to Catholicism--i first observed lent in 2017 after Many years of flirting with it--and when i saw/experienced angels (2015? ish? ...arguably you could argue for 2007 but i do not think those were angels) i knew they were angels and was unsure how i saw it but definitely flirting with a Christian view of them. i did know that whatever view of them i took, they were important, they were serious, they were--the most important thing that has ever happened to me, that i have ever witnessed. they were beautiful and incredible and terrific in the sense of inspiring terror. and then i got put on antipsychotics about it within the year lol! the antipsychotics were uhhhhhh quite bad for me & then in 2019 i got off of them and embraced Catholicism more wholeheartedly. "so why the 3-year gap between that and getting baptized" uhhhh a few things going on there honestly? it took like a year or so to like. reconcile myself with Catholicism. i do/did actually struggle a lot with a lot of it--trying to figure out how i felt about hell and the problem of evil was ofc the biggest hurdle but i'm also side b and that was uhhhhhh not a painless process for me. which i can talk about any of that if you want but i talk about that less unprompted? and i prefer to talk about it in a conversation rather than just On My Blog, if that makes sense. but people should feel free to dm me if they're curious or want to talk more about any of this!

this....still gives a 1-year gap between Reconciling With Catholicism and Starting RCIA. this is because... i've been kind of eliding it with usage of "i" but at the time the body that currently uses "i" was Two People. and one of them (kit) was Catholic and one of them (sofia) wasn't. we ... talked about this with a priest a lot and he was helpful for a while but then he recommended me to a Catholic therapist who on her first session with us informed us that we were faking and she didn't believe us but even if she did then she'd just be focusing on trying to integrate us and get rid of our "doubting part". so we didnt go back to her and we (especially sofia) raged for a bit at the whole thing. as a result, for a while kit was kind of resigned to just ... not getting baptized, not getting to take the Eucharist. but in 2020-2021ish we sort of . integrated? not fully and i suspect we've been...splitting apart again more recently. idk! idk. anyway we eventually got integrated enough that we felt confident in saying yes, I believe in God, and have that be a true promise for the full body-soul. and we started RCIA in 2021 and got baptized in 2022 and now we're here! the angels aren't back. i hoped they'd come back when i got off antipsychotics, and-- they haven't. the belief has, the knowledge that they were real, but i haven't seen them again. i don't know if i'll get to see them again before i die. i hope they will, but i also know i don't need them anymore. it's a test, i think. i just have to live up to that test.