I went to a small, private, all-girls high school. It also happened to be Catholic, as schools like that typically are.

I took a course in religious studies every year I was there– it was the one class you couldn’t drop. I went to the school-wide masses on major religious days. Facts and values of Catholicism were drilled into my head day in and day out. When Pope Francis was elected, someone ran around the hallways to tell the school in a Paul Revere-esque manner (if Paul Revere rode around in the Pope Mobile).

I enjoyed my time in high school, but I am not Catholic. My parents grew up with differing religious beliefs, but no longer observe their respective faiths. Before high school, all I knew about Catholicism was that Jesus was a thing. I’d never been to a mass before. I was thrown into a whole new way of life with almost no direction. The overwhelming majority of the school and most of my friends were Catholic or members of some other sect of Christianity.

I never quite felt an overwhelming sense of isolation, but I often felt as though I was on the outside looking in. Every time I sat out of Communion during mass and every time I didn’t cross myself when we recited the Lord’s Prayer in class gave me the smallest pang of that feeling– the feeling like I wasn’t a part of something that everyone else found to be natural. My personal, eternal struggle to fit in occasionally manifested itself throughout high school in this religious conundrum.

That feeling left me eventually as my growing sense of my self-pushed it away. I have never longed to be a member of an organized religion, nor do I consider myself to be highly spiritual.

So, naturally, four years later, I ended up at a Catholic college.

“What’s that like?” you may ask. “You know, because you don’t really care about any of that stuff.”

I was fully expecting college to be a major transition, not only socially and academically, but spiritually as well. My class here is three times as large as my entire school, so I assumed that religion would be more evident here. There’s a prominent architectural motif of religion– crosses, statues, the like; also, the actual name of the school is “College of the Holy Cross,” so, you know.

In high school, religious knowledge was impressed on me. Not forced on me, but I certainly know as much about Catholicism as I possibly can without actually experiencing being a member of the religion. That’s a good thing, I swear. On the other hand, sometimes I felt a twinge of resentment every time I had to sit through a mass and scrunch up in my seat every time people had to walk by me during Communion because I wasn’t able to receive the Eucharist. Sometimes it was hard to be involved in conversations when it turned to a topic like Confirmation. That feeling of being left out of something went away, but it was replaced with a sense of not being fully present in everything I would have liked to be present in. I would feel a twinge of guilt every time I was bored during mass or when I couldn’t relate during class. It wasn’t a pervasive feeling, but it was enough to make me feel slightly out of place.

People weren’t lying, it turns out, when they said that college is a place where you choose your own identity. Beyond orientation weekend, I’ve been free to exercise my Catholic knowledge in any way I see fit. I have to take a religious studies course, but it serves a liberal arts purpose rather than an overview-to-our-religion purpose. I’ve never felt out of place, even though the majority of the student body is Catholic. Sure, there are always those moments of wondering whether people would look at me differently if I said I wasn’t Catholic, and, of course, I’m still confused about most aspects of the mass, but that feeling of not being fully present is no longer– well– present (sorry).

So if you’ve ever been thoroughly confused at a mass or accidentally went up during Communion (I think it happens to everyone. At least I hope it does), don’t worry. And if you “don’t care about any of that stuff,” (you, as an imaginary questioner, phrased that so eloquently, by the way) don’t feel guilty about it, but don’t disregard everything related to it, either. You never know what you might experience.

When you’re on the outside looking in, sometimes it’s fun to have a front-row seat.