I would love to discuss salvation. What are some of your views on sin, like are our sins kept on record to be held against us at judgement? I don't get to go to confession so I struggle with my sins and how to best deal with my failure.
Glad to see you made it over to TAW!
For our visitors here, welcome! Please note this question is asked in the Eastern Orthodox forum.
Orthodoxy holds a less legalistic view of sin than the west. It's not as though you have x-sins and they must have weighted atonement of some sort.
Rather it's about the healing of a person, becoming what God intended and created us to be - like Jesus and in communion with Him. Sins affect us in the opposite way, making us less like Christ and drawing us away from God. The particular effect of each sin on each person is different. Our life in Christ is meant to be a healing from that.
The sacrament of confession is one way we receive the grace of God to have His help in this, and it is provided through the Church. However, God can offer His help in as many ways as He sees fit. We cannot promise anything apart from the Church, but it IS the nature of God to be loving, forgiving, and to draw people to Himself and desire to heal us. So the various ways He might choose to do this are His work.
I will say that the Church offers many tools to help us, and some of these are not sacramental and so are available to anyone, such as fasting, spiritual counsel, prayer rules, the wisdom of the Saints, and so on. It is good to be in contact with a priest or guide to avoid certain pitfalls with some of these (particularly self-directed fasting and prayer rules). But these things can all help a person who is still outside the Church.