lie no. 25 | 08.31.19

I’m not a religious person.

As for spirituality? I’ll take Sam and Molly for 100, Alex [cue: Unchained Melody]. 

Believe me—I tried. I tried going back to church about a decade ago after a particularly rough patch. A girlfriend and I once bought Buddhism for Dummies together (the irony!) and tried our hand at it not long after moving to DC. Nothing stuck, or at least nothing provided the quick fix I craved. I never had a spiritual foundation, so while I was able to construct the semblance of resilience for a while, it didn’t stand a chance years later when the hurricane-grade winds made landfall.

I grew up going to church most Sundays as a kid. At best, it seemed more like a social activity than anything else. There was Sunday school, vacation bible school and church camp as a kid, followed in high school by FCA, Young Life and, most questionable to this day, a co-ed, hormone-fueled church trip to Panama City, FL, one summer. 

At worst, it seemed like a socially acceptable solution for desperate people seeking solace.

After my father got sick, not that we ever called it that, I noticed, for the first time ever, him kneeling at the altar during holiday services when I returned home. I always wondered what he was begging for—forgiveness, health or happiness, or were those even mutually exclusive?

My father grew up Catholic. As a child I remember his parents, my grandparents, telling me and my little brother we couldn’t take communion at their church like we did at ours—something about it only being for people who believed. At that age it was simply a mid-service snack in my eyes, the significance of the religious and ceremonial aspects not yet registering. So to be deprived of what everyone else was getting felt cruel, like punishment. After that I remember not wanting to take communion at my own church, in case someone else was being told the same thing. I didn’t want them to feel as alone and embarrassed as I had in similar pews. Of course, that’s not how my parents ever saw it and I only ever got in trouble for resisting. Oddly, at my church where, at least back then, everyone was welcome, I didn’t have a choice but to take it and be grateful.

The only entity I’ve ever truly worshipped in my adult life is that of my career, surrendering my pain at the altar of my profession as soon as the paychecks started.

They don’t teach this in school, but journalism is a perfect path for people looking to bury the lede of their own lives. Telling other people’s stories makes it easier to forget your own. 

I have immense respect for journalists, particularly those still at it in, arguably, one of the most difficult times to be a journalist ever. As a journalist, most don’t realize or refuse to believe, you’re expected to put all of your beliefs to the side—political, religious and otherwise. Oftentimes, you’re contractually obligated to do so; doing otherwise, a fireable offense. To this day, I’ve still never signed a petition—even the seemingly innocent ones regarding neighborhood dog parks.

When I needed it most, when I desperately needed something to believe in, something to save me, something to distract me, I found my faith in a newsroom. Journalism gave me life. Workaholism nearly killed me, not that I’d have ever noticed.

When you become a full-blown workaholic, the healthiest of ‘holics, it’s considered normal. Being busy is the most normal of all. People applaud you, some even hand you awards! In other words, it’s a far cry from a cry for help.

I got busy amassing an arsenal of Weapons of Mass Distraction built to withstand anything, and numb everything. Here’s a sampling:

*I volunteered to come into the newsroom on weekends, the middle of the night, election nights, fashion weeks, Olympics, Royal weddings, for product launches and redesigns, you name it. 

*I picked up freelance gigs of all shapes and sizes to fill the hours I wasn’t doing my full-time job (chances are good you bought one of the hundreds of daily deals I wrote the copy for when those were all the rage). 

*I became a first-time homebuyer at the height of a recession.

*I put myself through grad school and got a Master’s degree I didn’t really need. On Saturdays. From 9-5. For 20 months.

*I trained for marathons. (Pro tip: taking an injury to the starting line is a great way to guarantee you’ll never cross another one—essentially the exact opposite of the numbing a WMD should do, even dull pain is a constant reminder.)

*I got promoted. 

*I got engaged. I got married. I got a dog.

I got so busy—doing anything to avoid sitting and staring my pain in the eye—it became my anti-drug, my anti-anti-depressant. My favorite part of this all-natural numbing agent I’d discovered, hell, perfected? It’s incredibly easy to hide in plain sight. The perfect potion for a perfectionist. 

Perfectionism, in my experience, is the gateway drug to workaholism. It’s the most Oscar-worthy trait of them all. It’s what makes, ahem, lying in therapy, easy.

By the time I got to Mexico, I’d read all of Brené Brown’s research on perfectionism. “Somewhere along the way,” she writes, “we adopt this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it.”

A memory shook loose as I walked back to my hotel that morning, following my unsolicited Spanish grammar lesson, likely jarred by the brutality of the berating unfolding in my head at the moment. 

“Come se dicé ‘fraud?’” my father had joked on graduation day, poking fun at my second major as he half threatened to call me out if I made him suffer through not one, but two ceremonies that day. 

The truth was, my Spanish was far from perfect and it always stressed me out. I’d had tutors in it since high school. The pit in my stomach and the headaches I’d get before tutoring sessions and classes not unlike the ones I’d complained about as a kid before ballet class, another skill set that never seemed to stick. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t just quit. No one but me would’ve cared. I think I got the degree in it primarily to justify my penchant for passport stamps and the considerable credits that came along with multiple study abroad programs—and because it was too easy not to. 

I didn’t know how to translate fraud in Spanish so it was easier to laugh the joke off and recycle it when explaining my decision not to walk in that ceremony.

Notably, in Spanish the verb perfeccionar commonly translates to improve, rather than perfect.

For a hot second, lavender latte in hand, I wondered if this was my Jesus moment. You know, that religious experience glorified in pop culture, which would herein change my life as I knew it. I mean, how many times was it going to take for a man to repeatedly say ‘I believe’ to make me, well, believe?

My mind mulled this over on the walk back as I stared at Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, the pink drippy-sand castle of a church in the town. As far as Jesus moments go, this one felt a bit... come se dicé, trite? That’s not a rhetorical question, I don’t know how to translate trite either.

I walked into the church, ready to surrender—to the moment as well as the father, the son and the Holy Ghost, or whatever this particular establishment entailed or allowed. Ready to turn myself in, for what or to whom I wasn’t really sure. I don’t know what I expected but for some reason the sight of a service in progress surprised me—arguably the most natural thing to see upon entering a place of worship—and it threw me off. 

I sat down in the closest pew and marveled at the beauty of the building. I soaked in the regal sound of the sermon spoken in Spanish. I lasted about five minutes then got up and left.

The entire experience was lovely, I’ll give it that, but that’s all it was. I didn’t feel called to sit there any longer than I already had. I didn’t feel, well, anything.

If that had been God who called my room the day before, it must’ve been a butt dial. 

I went back to my hotel and worked for a few hours from my room’s expansive patio—desperate to prove something to no one yet again and maybe wanting to stay close to the phone. Just in case.

I figured if he was as fed up with my BS as I was, enough so to skip the subtleties altogether, knowing full well I’d be the type to need a literal call, he’d try again. I just hoped he’d have a translator on hand this time, unsure if this worked like webpages did in foreign countries, automatically changing languages based on location.

My mind—like those sports channels that bounce from game to game, traveling across time and place with such unnerving ease—had already moved on to my last day in Hong Kong, to the day everything changed.