i love to tell you all how i am bigger and better than telling you i will be successful, that i will have it, gauge my audience’s eyes out and make them feel my crystal ball; make them say things like, “when i look into your future, i see love”. that turns me on. your affection, your praise, your enormous vulnerable hesitation to tell me i’ll be anything but good is mouth-watering.

i am in the very same position i catch myself in every year. the ‘how to gift wrap a candle’ search still open on the previous tab, and ‘hopes and dreams for the new year’ note on the next. it feels so very delightful to lay myself down on the floor and assign my twelve tea-light candles a month of the year, pull a tarot card for them and write an entry for each; a vow of gratitude, a meditation which always screams i was alive hereat this time and do not forget i happened to you.

there is something equally beautiful as averse about the structure of discerning evil from good; of knowing where you must avoid human error. as an agnostic, this is the beauty of the concept of sin. yet always, the messy how will follow; just how can you avoid what is essentially nature’s design? there is something to take away from an assessment of a handful of ancient religious sins from a modern agnostic lens. there are many ‘sins’ considered so throughout all religious history, but this article will be solely focusing on the catholic and orthodox christian idea of the seven deadly sins, more specifically the three of them listed in the title: pride, greed, and envy. it’s these three that were chosen from the seven as they seem to hold a much more intimate and applicable relevance to our current society.

there is much to gain from this waiting, this ‘whatever there is’, this aloneness, i know, i know, and i will come back grateful to have ever felt so sub-human, for i already feel taught. i feel greatly resentful already for expectation and delusion, and i stave off madness like it is my calling. i feel exceeding loss for the self i leave behind with each day that passes, and i embrace my new body as the time moves with me; i know this grief is worthy. i say it in the quiet night hoping to raise the dead, hoping she will come back and tell me, “you are doing the right thing,” but there is none of that, so i must move on anyway. i must keep moving at least to forget, and wait to remember at the moment it begins to hurt less. is this the reality of loneliness? is this the reality of living without love? i am not sure. but it is the reality now, and so it is in front of me like a creature at the bed-head, waiting for me to decide, to breathe, run to turn the light on only to see there is nothing there—thank god—or to stay squeezing my thighs together tightly under the sheet, shuddering; back to absence. it is an impossible decision. i am the idiot after all.