Growing up I went to Catholic school, and for context my family wasn’t really religious. And I say really cause sure my mom and I were baptized but other than me going to a Catholic school and my parents coming to any church events and assemblies that was pretty much it.I’m also not even really sure why I attended Catholic school. I did go to public school in kindergarten but after that I just swapped over. 

Growing up I was never too active in my school’s sports teams, I did a couple volleyball seasons and my mom did volunteer to coach track for a bit so I kinda got forced into that but that was the extent of it. I did all my sports on North Shore club teams outside of school. All I knew was that the kids on my teams who went to normal school were a lotttt more normal than the kids at school. I guess you could describe the school kids as extremely cliquey and just weird. I had a couple good friends but in elementary school it was an excessive amount of drama. And the thing with Catholic school drama is that it always kinda about how good a person was. “Omg, did you see so and so skipped church” like really? This was just not the group of kids I needed. 

Everything just seemed normal and even if I thought something wasn’t normal, everyone else was just going along with it so I did too. Some of the weirdest memories I have from elementary school is when we had to do our first holy communion, teachers described this as “eating the body of Christ” and you know what’s even weirder. No one even thought twice about it. I mean except for me. I remember vividly looking around the room at all my classmates ready to boycott this whole thing that seemed like cannibalism. And what a way to entice second graders am I right? Common guys! Let’s eat Jesus!! How about no thanks! But nonetheless I kinda just went through the motions of Catholic school. Another thing that only recently really clicked as weird for me was the whole confession thing. Going into the room one on one with a priest to “confess your sins”. This is baffling now that I think about it. How was it even allowed? And what “sins” do elementary school kids have to confess, I think the worst I got was confessing I gave my dog the vegetables at the dinner table. 

Looking back, I don’t know what’s crazier—that we all just went along with this stuff without question, or that it took me this long to realize how weird it actually was. I mean it was all still a good experience, any knowledge is good knowledge I say, but kinda funny to look back on.