Guilt and forgiveness

I was born and raised catholic, and I've always had a very close, though not very public, relationship with God.

Throughout the years I've sinned a lot, and in big ways. The root of this problem has always been making promises I am unable to keep. The biggest of these has been my divorce with my husband. 

I'm going to start this by saying what a wonderful man he is. He's always been kind and noble. Yet despite my admiration of him as a person, we were ill suited as a couple. I'll leave it at that.

Still, several times leading up to, and on our wedding day, I thanked God for him and promised to love him and be with him forever. Little bargains here and there popped up as things started going south in an attempt to stay and fix what was broken about us. I never kept any of them, because ultimately I left him. It was my doing. I was the one not strong enough to push through the problems no matter how hard I tried.

I was raised with the word "sorry" to mean that "I was wrong. I knew it. I'll try to be better according to your word." 

The thing was, I couldn't be truly sorry for leaving my husband because I would rather die than go back to being that miserable, and making him that miserable. Neither of us could change enough to make the other happy either. There was no way, for both our sakes I could go back and reconcile.

Since divorce for "petty reasons" I.e. Not for the reason of abuse or infidelity is a sin by catholic standards. I am a sinner. Because I wouldn't go back to him, I couldn't be truly sorry for sinning.

I was doomed to hell, stuck in a catch-22. No amount of people telling me I did the right thing made that go away.

I finally figured out something. It's not that I'm sorry for marrying my ex husband. We had some good times. It's that I'm greviously sorry I couldn't keep that promise to God. That is something I can be sorry about and mean every word.

So, since I don't go to confession, I'm confessing my sins here. I made too many promises to God and others that I couldn't or didn't keep. This has wounded me greatly for years and caused many late nights fearing brimstone and letting my grief and inadequacy costume me.

But I promise, from this moment forward, that if I say the word promise, I'll damn well mean it. That may mean I'm going to use that word a lot less, and I may mess up sometimes, but I'm going to try my best to mean it every time.