Bless me, reader, for I have sinned. It’s been ten years since my last confession.
My last real confession, that is – locked in a dingy upright coffin, talking into a screen and trying to remember the words to the Act of Contrition.
Actually, it’s been about an hour and a half since my last confession.
I started on postsecret. It’s an organization (or maybe just some guy) to which people send homemade postcards illustrating their secrets and fears. Among today’s posts are “I can’t decide if I like being married or not” and “I know it’s not possible, but I would like to have a vagina, and a penis.”
But there’s no depth to the postsecret stories. You get a catchy little tidbit of someone’s deepest darkest, but…the more I read the more I wanted. Postsecret is the in for most of us, then you hear about other online confessionals: grouphug.us, dailyconfession.com, sosecret.com, rawconfessions, confessionsjunkie, e-admit, Keyfess – the list goes on. Coming from a Catholic education, tho, my fav has always been notproud. It separates the vices into seven categories. Lol, what else? The seven deadly sins.
“I assume a paternalistic attitude with my girlfriend whenever she steps her toe slightly out of line, and spank her until she cries. I tell her it’s for her own good, but I really do it because it turns me on.” Sec Today’s lust. Aren’t people disgusting?
I know it’s sort of sadistic and weird, this obsession with other people’s cruel idiosyncrasies. It also becomes a kind of self-aggrandizing ritual. You think, ‘Ok, I may have been a heinous bitch to my best friend today but check out this bastard who beats his gf to get off.’ You spend a few weeks observing but then one day at work the perfect one-liner confession pops into your head. After that, you’re just a few doubleclicks away from being glued to the monitor every time your boss takes a piss. Crazy, I know, but look who I’m talking to…you’re reading my LJ and unless you’re my sister Meredith or my bf Tom, you’re most def an established blogspotter.
My first online confession: “I use my roommate’s toothbrush after she leaves in the morning.” Since then, I’ve gone on to admit petty theft, sexual fantasies, felonies, even how I bought most of my undergrad thesis online – always anonymous, mixed in with hundreds of other daily divulgences…tho maybe I should call them indulgences.
I read the following postsecret this afternoon –
“Two months after cheating on me, my boyfriend got an e-mail from the girl he slept with – she wrote to tell him she was pregnant. I erased the e-mail and he has NO idea.”
and I thought, ‘is this a confession at all?’
Fessing up to something online is like admitting it to the trees in your backyard, only with a few thousand megabites of decadence thrown into the mix.
Confession has always been a selfish thing. Most of the time people confess to unburden themselves and in the process burden the wronged with their wrongdoing. But the point is that you’re overcome with guilt, so you put it out there and deal with whatever consequences ensue.
But what happens when there are no consequences?
I mean, drop me a line if you think I’m wrong, but I want to say that confession has typically been one of two things: you either confessed to God’s earthly proxy and received penitence in form of prayer, or you just came out and told the person you’d screwed over and braced for the impact of whatever emotional ramifications came along with the admission.
When you have neither the social/emo shit flying back at you, nor the threat of spontaneous divine retribution, what becomes of the act of confession?
Notproud’s gluttony of the day is “Pot is more important to me than my boyfriend.” Where’s the self-reproach in that? Half the confessions are written in an unmistakably boastful tone – that’s the fun of it. That’s how I got hooked. Notproud cyber-salutes sin.
Confession comes like everything for our generation, wrapped in greasy waxed paper with fries on the side. No waiting. No relevant worldly acknowledgement. No emotional consequences. No absolution.
The confessional blog is an orgy, hundreds of people linked into one big gluttonous, masturbatory celebration of their transgressions.
My last online confession: I have blogged with my friends’ secrets. I fucked around on my last boyfriend and told thousands of strangers, but not him. I have sinned and gone unpunished. I’m getting ready to post these confessions now.
