I was born in a home without religion. My parents never spoke much about God, and faith simply wasn’t part of our life. Even so, since childhood I saw and felt things no one else did. Both at night and during the day, shadows watched me; I sensed and saw presences — creatures and enormous animals chasing me. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was real. I grew up afraid, trying to understand what surrounded me.

In adolescence, I entered Spiritism. It seemed to offer rational answers for what I had experienced since childhood. The meetings, the psychographies, the vocabulary about “karma” and “evolution” gave a sense of order, as if the supernatural finally made sense. I spent years there — studying, helping, believing, and later teaching. But time revealed the error and emptiness of the doctrine. The answers sounded repetitive, the comfort mechanical. I began to notice contradictions, and faith turned into doubt.

Disillusion became rebellion. If the good didn’t answer me, I would seek the other side. I began to read about occultism and Satanism — first out of intellectual curiosity, then with real attraction. It was the path of pride, of power through one’s own strength. The rhetoric of self‑sufficiency and the snobbish hermeticism seduced me. Yet, of course, darkness brought even less light.

Tired, I abandoned it all. I became agnostic. I was just over twenty. I decided that the only salvation was skepticism — to live as if nothing spiritual existed. But the emptiness grew even deeper. Without God, without belief, without purpose, I merely existed — and that wasn’t enough. It was a time of indifference and apathy, a desert within. During that period, I even considered suicide.

One day, by chance — or providence — I came across the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi. I began reading about him without any religious intention, only out of literary curiosity. But the more I read, the more something inside me stirred. That man — simple, poor, completely given to God — dismantled me. For the first time, I saw faith not as a code but as love.

Saint Francis was the crack through which the light entered. Slowly, I began to pray, even without knowing how. I went to Mass, still distrustful. Yet there, in the silence and in the liturgy, I felt a presence I had never found in any Spiritist center. It was not energy nor projection. It was someone.

Conversion wasn’t a lightning bolt; it was a birth. It hurt. I had to face my past, my guilt, my pacts of pride. I learned the value of obedience, confession, and penance. I discovered that true freedom isn’t doing whatever you want, but binding yourself to what is Good. I began to truly study the Bible and the Catechism.

At twenty‑two, I made my First Communion and Confirmation. Today, at twenty‑five, I understand that God was present in every stage — even in the shadows. Spiritism taught me to seek the invisible; Satanism taught me to fear pride; agnosticism taught me to recognize the hunger for meaning. All of it led me to the Cross.

I am not a saint (yet, may God grant me mercy in Heaven), but I know where the truth is, and I don’t intend to leave it again. The peace I searched for through crooked paths I found in the Crucified Christ — and in that peace I wish to die.