Confession

[edg]

I had a brief talk - maybe 10 minutes - with my father tonight. I'm leaving for Indiana, and thence Maryland, tomorrow, and he wanted to know if there was anything I needed to talk about. I said something like "Oh, everything's okay, I just wish I weren't so full of self-doubt", which launched a conversation whose central thesis was pretty much "you need to get rid of that self-doubt".

None of the following text has been edited from the way in which it originally appeared in this journal. It has just been cut away for various reasons.

He made two interesting observations during the conversation that seem useful to me. The first was to use the example of Rod Carew - just get up to the plate, and either get your bat on the ball, foul it off, or go down swinging. Even if you only have a .400 average, as long as you're not just watching the ball go by, or - even worse - not going to the plate at all, you're doing fine.

The second was that one of the insights of the Catholic church is that people need to confess and to be told that they're forgiven - that they need to tell someone what they've done and to be told "go and sin no more (or at least try not to)" - and I think that applies here. I have a lot of sin that's built up in me, and even though I try to tell myself that it's all behind me, it isn't; I dwell on it constantly. So this is my confession, in the hopes that after I've gotten it off my chest, I'll stop staring at the ball and start swinging.

I'm making this public, with comments screened, and no cuts. It doesn't feel like enough of a confession if I'm just telling a select group of people or if I'm hiding parts of it behind <lj-cut>, and I'm not sure whether people will be able to react to it openly if I don't screen comments. Please let me know in your comment whether or not you'd prefer to keep it screened if I reply.

Here we go.

• I have always regretted skipping kindergarten. I've always wondered if maybe I missed a key element of social interaction by going directly from preschool to first grade. (This should give you an idea of how long it's been since I've really expressed myself to anyone.)
  
• I have always regretted moving between first and second grades. Just when I was getting used to the kids around me, everything changed, and suddenly I didn't know anybody. I tried to make friends; I was largely rebuffed.
  
• It didn't help that many of the kids I had made friends with went to private schools after 5th grade; I stayed in public school, and continued to be a social outcast and a misfit.
  
• I liked playing sports when I was young, but I was rarely very good at them. My best sport was baseball; and what I was best at was batting, and even then I wasn't very good at it. I spent most of my time in the field wishing I weren't.
  
• When I was in the fourth or fifth grade, I was so desperate to make friends that I went through the "initiation" of one of the clubs at school; this involved being very cruel to one of my actual friends. I don't remember what the cruelty was, only that I hurt his feelings deeply, and never managed to make sufficient recompense. And it turned out that the "initiation" was a joke the club members were having at my expense; they had never intended to allow me in, they just wanted to get me in trouble because they knew I wouldn't fight back.
  
• In fourth grade, we were assigned fiction to read: one book a week, each student a different book, with a private quiz administered by the teacher after we'd finished. I returned one book early - The Phantom Tollbooth - and told the teacher that it was too hard for me to read. In fact, I just didn't particularly want to read it.
  
• In third grade, after my class had finished an art project that involved yarn, I took home a pair of balls of yarn so I could do my own projects at home. I had thought that the teacher had said I could have them, but I was apparently mistaken; my mother told me that I had stolen them, and drove me back to the school, where I returned the yarn and apologized to the teacher, who had been wondering where the yarn went.
  
• In fifth grade I alienated a classmate by interrupting his presentation to the class. I'd been asked by the teacher to look something up in the dictionary or encyclopedia and let the class know when I'd found it - so I took him at his word, and spoke up the moment I'd found and understood the entry. This happened to be in the middle of a student's presentation.
  
• I don't remember much of middle school (or junior high, if you like), aside from Japan Day in sixth grade, and leading a group of fifth-graders around - including one of the bullies, who rejoiced in being able to torment an older student without my being able to do anything about it.
  
• I regret not remembering much of middle school.
  
• I regret pretty much all of high school.
  
• In particular, there was a span in the eleventh grade where I simply wasn't doing my homework and was lying about it to my parents. I simply didn't care anymore; I was doing well on the tests, and I knew the material, so the homework just took away from the things that I wanted to do without providing any material benefit. I kept this up for almost a month before my parents found out. I'll never forget the sight of my mother in tears when she found out that I'd lied to her.
  
• At the risk of invalidating the exercise, I'm not going to get into the details of this one; suffice it to say that over the course of my junior year in high school I also stole about $100 in cash.
  
• Despite both of these dishonesties, I never cheated on a test, even when I had the opportunity to do so.
  
• I took a year off after I graduated from high school. At the time, I said that I wanted to get some working experience, and let the students my age catch up to me (having skipped kindergarten, I was a year younger than my classmates). In point of fact, I was taking time off because I wasn't sure I wanted to attend college and hadn't been accepted to any of the colleges I wanted to attend.
  
• I have met all of my girlfriends online; the first was through a local BBS, and not the Internet. I loved her as much as I have loved anyone since; I tried to break up with her no fewer than three times, and I never succeeded. She finally broke up with me during my freshman year of college after I was "too needy": the breaking point was asking her not to sleep around.
  
• My first kiss was with a friend of my sister's, who was a year older than she was (and about six months younger than I, but much more worldly). We maintained a friendship (with heavy sexual overtones, but no actual sexual contact) up until the point where it started becoming more serious, at which point I went too far without realizing it; she threw me out of her house and never spoke to me again.
  
• This is not the only situation in which I've gone too far (in a sexual context) without realizing it, although the other person was far more understanding.
  
• I have not only cheated but helped someone to cheat by being the other participant. (This has not happened, to my knowledge, for more than five years.)
  
• In college, I fell victim to a particularly pernicious mindset: "If they want to be around me, they'll come find me." This resulted in my getting left out of an awful lot of activities, because - I guess - people assumed that if I wasn't around them, I didn't want to be, and so they left me alone.
  
• This mindset is, unfortunately, persistent, although at least now I know about it and am trying to overcome it.
  
• I knowingly misrepresented my experience, in 2000, to get a job, although I did just fine at the job once I got it.
  
• I have only intermittently sought, and been unable to make, contact with a college friend who was in a car accident several years ago.
  
• Earlier this year, I very deeply hurt a woman I still love, and I am afraid that I can never make proper amends. She at least seems happy now, for which I am grateful.
  
• I harbor unspoken, unrequited interest in more than one person in my life. At least three of them will at least see this post. (That's not counting the ones to whom I've mentioned my unrequited interest.)

In my life, I have been a spendthrift, a liar, a thief, and a cheat; I have hurt people and neglected my responsibilities as a person and a member of society. I am truly sorry.

Comments

[edg.livejournal.com]

You're allowed to say disrespectful, improper things; that's why I'm screening comments. I'd rather people tell me the truth than be respectful. If I weren't willing to deal with the consequences of what I wrote, I wouldn't have posted it.

[edg.livejournal.com]

I think you've missed the point. Not all of these problems are of even remotely similar importance, impact, or severity, and I never implied that they were. Doing so would be absurd; of course embarrassing myself in front of my grade-school classmates isn't on a par with theft, lying, or hurting someone I cared about.

As for making amends - I can't. The "I'm afraid" wasn't an actual expression of fear; it was just an expression. I can't make amends, period, end of story. There is no possible way in which I can atone for hurting her. I can apologize, and I have done so more than once, in private and personal venues.

But to be quite honest, the person in question - who may or may not have been you, since although I log the IP addresses of all anonymous commenters, you seem to be using a proxy, so I can't tell with any certainty who you are - doesn't actually seem to want to have much of anything to do with me, and I respect that. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong on that point; there is nothing on my end that prevents me from approaching her besides the definite impression that she doesn't want me to.