lapsed irish catholic and on the scene, the childhood guilt ghost still shows up at 2am after a good night, anyone else
right so im a galway lass in my late 30s, husband is from cork, mid 40s, weve been on the scene maybe 4 yrs now mostly dublin and a few weekends in belfast. ive not been to mass in over a decade and i genuinely consider myself culturally catholic at best, intellectually im somewhere between agnostic and "lapsed and fine with it". and yet. heres the thing. we'll have a properly lovely night with another couple, everyone behaved like adults, my husband and i drive home holding hands talking about it, all good. and then i wake up at 2am sometime in the next 3 days with this... ghost. not guilt exactly, more like a small nun in the back of my head doing a slow shake of the head. its not from a god i believe in anymore, its from sister bernadette in 4th class telling us what we were and werent. i havent thought about her in 20 yrs and shes there at 2am after a takeover in kildare. what gets me is i can argue myself out of it intellectually in about 30 seconds — im an adult, consenting, my marriage is stronger not weaker, nobody got hurt. and yet the small dread is still there at 2am like its sitting on my chest. its faded a lot over the yrs in the LS but it never fully goes. my husband doesnt get it bc he was raised the same and somehow shed it cleaner. anyone else carrying the childhood church ghost into the LS years later. does it fade fully or do you just learn to nod at it and roll over and go back to sleep...