Growing up Catholic, the last two months of the calendar year were often a popular time in my community to visit the confessional. Not surprisingly, everyone wanted to "cleanse" their souls in preparation for the new year, much like a "do-over" you normally might only have when your character runs out of lives or dies in a video game. There was a particular year in my childhood where I cut it extremely short-- just minutes before the start of Christmas Mass. Hurried and anxious, I fumbled over the list of sins that I had committed since my last meeting, though to my credit, for the first time I did *not* forget to mention the budding carnal desires I had quietly kept, the activities I had enjoyed in discretion, or the films I watched in secret online-- details I had shared with no one up till then and certainly feared divulging most, let alone to my local priest where our mutual anonymity was supposedly promised by a screen facade.
Despite my trepidation leading up to that point, the rest of the exchange was uneventful. The priest listened to me with quiet patient understanding before giving me my assigned penance: a handful of prayer recitations and to be kinder to my parents.
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