A madman I must be, for I'm no saint
On the road to salvation
When I was around ten years old, I went to a church camp for boys. The idea of sending a bunch of kids into the woods under the care of two priests seems now, sadly, very ill-advised, but thankfully, my only bad memory from that trip was taking part in a shooting competition and finding my aim was terrible—most likely because I kept closing the wrong eye. (Conversely, my best memory is catching a fever and having to be housed for a few days in a parishioner’s house, where I discovered a volume of Emilio Salgari’s Sandokan series that I had not yet read, and quickly devoured; the high temperatures in my brain made the jungle adventure feel all the more involving.)
The reason I bring it up now is that back then, one of the priests read us a poem by sixteenth-century Franciscan friar Pedro de los Reyes, here in its original Spanish:
¿Yo para qué nací? Para salvarme. Que tengo de morir es infalible. Dejar de ver a Dios y condenarme, Triste cosa será, pero posible. ¿Posible? ¿Y río, y duermo, y quiero holgarme? ¿Posible? ¿Y tengo amor a lo visible? ¿Qué hago?, ¿en qué me ocupo?, ¿en qué me encanto? Loco debo de ser, pues no soy santo.
I’ve attempted to translate it into English, (poorly) preserving rhymes over literal meaning:
For what was I created? To live well. The fact of my death is undeniable. To be deprived of God and damned to hell Sad as it might be, I'm cert'nly liable. Liable, and yet I riot, lust, and idly dwell? Liable, and yet I trust the unreliable? Would that I gave all of me with no restraint— A madman I must be, for I'm no saint.
Since I only heard this poem once over two decades some years ago, I of course did not remember all of it, let alone who it was written by; I found it on Google because that last line (which would more closely translate to “I must be crazy not to be a saint”) has never left my mind. For a Catholic—or at least for me—this is a recurring thought: believing as I do that what awaits me on the other side is either eternal happiness or never-ending suffering, how have I not dedicated my entire life to attaining the former? What the fuck am I doing wasting time rewatching all of How I Met Your Mother (#problematic but still hits) or setting up my Roomba to respond to voice commands? If not for love of God, then at least for fear of hell: how have I not obeyed Jesus’ call to sell all I own, give it to the poor, and follow Him? A madman I must be.
“Wow, Francisco, are you sure about this whole ‘being a Catholic’ thing? It sounds like a huge bummer,” you exclaim, and: yes. But I think this thought has an equivalent in secular life — one that I don't have to articulate myself, as I’ve heard it before from the much more talented pen of playwright Chiara Atik, whose play Poor Clare once shared a stage with Machine Learning at a new works festival. Poor Clare is a retelling of the life of Saint Clare of Assisi, who, following in my namesake’s footsteps, renounced her considerable earthly possessions to live a life of poverty dedicated to tending to those less fortunate. (And here I pause for a fun fact no one asked: much like myself, who adopted a new surname when I became a writer, St. Francis of Assisi’s given name was not Francis, it was Giovanni — but his dad called him “Francesco,” which in Italian means “little Frenchman,” because he was a Francophile. When young Giovanni became a saint, the nickname stuck, and thus made its way to me.)
Poor Clare is, for the most part, a very funny play in which characters use modern language to talk about unmodern things; when Claire judges herself for never having pilgrimaged to the Holy Land, she sounds like someone who feels guilty for not offsetting their carbon footprint (her reason not to go: that they don’t keep women sequestered there). While the play is somewhat drained of the religion that guided St. Claire’s conversion—which, the night that I saw it, upset some of the patrons—Atik seems to have done it on purpose, anticipating that religious fervor might not appeal to modern audiences as much as the simpler desire to just be a good person. In the end, after having been sworn into her order by St. Francis, the protagonist delivers a stunning time-traveling monologue that makes this point evident:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Let me bring love where there is hate, unity where there is discord.
Let me bring joy where there is pain, and hope where there is despair.
Make me love, not wish for love.
Let me be satisfied by what I have, and not consumed by what I want.
Let me feel that every meal is a boon, every shelter a gift, and to live at all is to live well.
Lord, keep me from complaining about the vain and the insignificant.
Help me to overcome my jealousy, my laziness, and my rancor.
Jealousy, which is ingratitude.
Laziness which is ingratitude.
Rancor which is ingratitude.
Help me instead, to remember the millions dying of famine in Yemen. Help me remember one of them.
Help me remember the flaccid, stick-like arms of one of them. Help me put her in my mind and etch her there, so she is with me when I say “carnitas and a little rice” at Chipotle, so she is with me when I order toilet paper on Amazon, so she is with me when I tip my Uber driver and rate him five stars.
Lord, help me think about Desmond in Texas, who enjoys the outdoors and likes to play games and responds well to positive praise and is waiting for caring parents who are willing to dedicate time to building trust and confidence in him.
Let me work hard and be grateful for the work, because the man sitting in a folding chair in the parking lot of Home Depot with a cardboard sign is desperate for work, will do any sort of work, please let him get some work today.
Lord, make me an instrument of hope, because the migrant sitting on the step of the Burberry store has no hope, doesn’t really believe that anyone walking by will drop a coin in his cup, and it’s starting to rain now and the camp is full and far.
Lord, give me strength so I don’t retreat to the other end of the subway car, pulling my scarf up to my nose, but rather sally forth and ask, “Do you need any help?”, Or better yet, say “I can help you. I’m going to help you.”
God, help me remember the thirteen year-old girl walking up Atlantic Avenue with her belly sticking out and her too-small coat unbuttoned in a blizzard, the farmers and shepherds pouring their milk out onto the highway because they’d rather destroy it than sell it for nothing, the man in rags carefully examining the mascaras at Sephora cause it’s warm in Sephora and the shelter doesn’t open for another five hours. And I think “Poor guy...,” as I slip another serum into my basket, and I think “It’s nice that they’re letting him browse!” as if he has any less right to be in a store than I do, and I pledge to donate to a GoFundMe campaign when I get home, and that’ll be enough to assuage my guilt, and by the time I go to the check-out and select my free sample (because I have enough Insider Points for a free sample, because I’ve spent enough at Sephora to accrue lots of free samples), by the time I’ve selected my free sample (a lip exfoliant), I’ve forgotten about the man in rags who is now at perusing the Jo Malone perfumes, and by the time I head outside into the cold and down into the subway I don’t even see the six people I pass, one on the steps of the Ukranian Church, one huddled on a mattress in front of a Dunkin Donuts, one on the steps of the stairs, one asking for a swipe outside the turnstiles, and two on the bench in the subway platform. I don’t even see them, and once I’ve made it back to my apartment (one on the steps of my own subway station and one I pass digging for water bottles in the trash on the corner of my street), once I’ve made it back to my apartment I’ve completely forgotten about my pledge to donate (and to what? And does the money even go to the right people? So hard to know), which is just as well, because even the process of donating makes me too aware, and I can’t really be aware, I can’t really think about it, because once you start to think about it how can you possibly go on? Once you start to really think about it then you have to make the choice.
Lord help me. Lord help me. Lord help me be good. Don’t put me on this earth just to be selfish. Just to be shitty. Just to think it’s too bad but not do anything about it. God, help me be good. Help me be good. Help me be good. Dear Lord, help me be good.
At this moment when my eyes are inundated with images (both on the street and on my various screens) of unbearable suffering, I often wonder: who am I to be comfortable, safe, successful? Should I not put my body and my life on the line until the suffering stops? And, in not doing that, am I complicit in perpetuating it?
Do I know the answer to these questions already, and I’m just too afraid to face them?
First, of course, this whole business of “being a good person” requires a fundamental understanding: what is good?
I would like to take a trip down history lane, which also no one asked for—but this is my newsletter and I’m in charge, so if you don’t like it write your own (I will not be subscribing). We’re going back to 1869, when the Catholic Church gathered in Rome for the first time in three hundred years for the First Vatican Council, convoked by Pope Pious IX (after whom one of my favorite desserts is named). The last time the Church had come together for an ecumenical council was the more famous Council of Trent, in response to the internal revolt caused by the Protestant Reformation; this time around, however, the Pope and his cardinals sought to defend their flock not from a call coming from inside the house but from a collection of external threats that sought to undermine religion as a whole: communism, rationalism, secularism, liberalism, modernism, and many other isms.
The Council lasted less than a year because the Kingdom of Italy invaded and captured Rome — an issue that, understandably, took precedence over the theological discussions at hand. But the Council did leave one powerful, if divisive, legacy: the dogma of Papal Infallibility, which states that (and I’m paraphrasing here so Church plz don’t burn me at the stake if I get anything wrong) the Pope cannot make a mistake when speaking in his condition as Pope and in matters of doctrine which are in agreement with Scripture and Apostolic Tradition (knowledge that is not in the Bible but was passed down from the original apostles to the rest of the Church). So: The Pope’s opinions on the latest Charles Dickens? Not infallible. His pronouncements on the Immaculate Conception? Infallible.
(And here I take a moment to note that I recently watched the so-bad-it’s-almost-good Immaculate and I need to remind everyone in Hollywood that the Immaculate Conception IS NOT THE CONCEPTION OF JESUS. Literally five seconds on Wikipedia would set you straight. It has nothing to do with having sex.)
Looked at it from the outside, through the lens of the forces that the First Vatican Council sought to combat, Papal Infallibility feels like the height of self-delusion: a group of people closing the loop on their collective fantasy by saying that the god they believe in has given their leader the ability to speak the absolute truth. “This Being you can’t see or hear is real, and you have to do what I say because I speak for the Being and the Being says I can’t make mistakes.” Even to some inside the Church, who believed in the being, the decision was not very popular, leading to a minor schism. And, as the world moved increasingly further away from Catholicism toward all the other isms (in part, it should be acknowledged, because so many churchmen didn’t live up to the trustworthiness that infallibility engenders), the Church itself started letting go of infallibility. The next time its members gathered, for the (very originally named) Second Vatican Council, the teachings it produced were framed as “pastoral” instead of dogmatic, avoiding the creation of hard lines. Pope Francis has gone further, casually contradicting dogma during media interviews or in footnotes to his writing — nothing official or binding, “just a thought” vibes. If the old Church treated its beliefs with the seriousness of Girl World rules, deciding if someone could or could not sit with us, the new Church treats them like the Pirate Code: more like guidelines.
And yet, in this world of “my truth” instead of “the truth,” the need for absolute infallibility seems to remain in our brains like an appendix evolution cannot rid us of. I think of this monologue from Fleabag’s second season, when she confesses to the Hot Priest:
I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to… tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.
The thing is, I think there is someone, or rather something, that currently tells us what to do in all of those situations Fleabag struggles with—and it’s not the Hot Priest.
Another trip down memory lane, though this one is fairly shorter: a few weeks ago, I had a reading of my latest play, Best Foreign, about an Argentinian filmmaker who wins an Oscar for a movie about the so-called “Dirty War” that was waged in my country from 1974-1983. The first act is set at a film festival where the protagonist is interviewed by a film critic, and the question of what to call things takes center stage (pun intended). The filmmaker, for instance, objects to the term “Dirty War” on the basis that the Argentinian military was a much superior force to the left-wing guerrillas it sought to suppress; he similarly refuses to call the central character of his film (a guerilla fighter who killed the chief of the Federal Police) a “terrorist,” because her cause was righteous: her victim was a torturer and mass murderer.
I wrote the play before October 7 (and also before Henry Kissinger died, something that makes one line in it land a little funny now), so presenting it in our current context gave me all kinds of anxiety. And yet, during the talkback, I found that the audience that had gathered to support me received it with an open heart. The staff member leading the talkback, who was probably a decade younger than me, said this curious sentence: “What I liked about the play is that it’s not prescriptive; it didn’t tell me what to think, unlike social media.” The play does not indeed steer the audience towards a definitive list of approved terms for what happened in Argentina (who the fuck am I to do that); it focuses much more on why everyone involved did what they did—including Kissinger, in a long monologue that pushed my powers of empathy to the max. But it surprised me that a Gen Z New Yorker would appreciate it, and especially that they would somewhat pit it against the powers of the internet.
A few days before the reading, talking to a good friend who was in the city for a weekend visit, I had posited my belief that social justice remains as vulnerable as ever to the narcissistic appropriation of the youth. She fought back, saying she believed Gen Z was better than us millennials; where we had been at fault for sometimes using causes for personal gain (“give me this job/opportunity/raise/award because I am oppressed”), she had observed Gen Z putting their bodies on the line even when no one was watching and there was no way to profit from it. I conceded this point—the youths do seem to me to engage with causes more deeply. BUT, I proposed, there is something to gain, even if it’s not immediately apparent: the construction of identity.
Where my generation was raised by American sitcom stars (who gave us the desire to be white, hopelessly quirky, and just poor enough to afford incredible apartments), today’s kids were raised by social media influencers, who taught them all about self-branding. I heard someone talking the other day about how young people who grew up with the virtual world at their fingertips have more trouble than the olds in telling the two apart; for them, the internet is (or at least can be) real life. I’m not sure how much scientific backing there was to that assertion, but it reminded me of my own words in a previous essay:
[The internet is] a sort of warped mirror that takes what we give it, processes it through its recommendation algorithms, and gives it back to us only slightly changed. We get caught in this cycle of trying to adjust to better match our reflection, as our reflection adjusts to better match us — perhaps to the point that we end up becoming someone completely different.
In a (different) play workshop last year, the director made a joke about a lamp that looked like a sex toy, and the conversation veered towards kink (because that’s super appropriate for a rehearsal room). I, of course, hijacked the subject to talk about myself, expounding on how, throughout my sexual journey on the interwebs, I thought I was discovering my innermost desires—but later started to wonder (much like in the quote above): was I excavating a truth about myself, letting the internet polish the rough diamond of my subconscious, or was I lump of clay that online porn fashioned into its image? Was I being revealed, or was I being changed?
I believe the same applies to the search for what it is to be good, because the internet, despite its promise to be the world’s town square that gives everyone a voice, is ruled by algorithms that prioritize extremes. What we see on our feeds is often the product of someone (even if subconsciously) trying to get as much “engagement” as possible — and boring does not get engagement. The more radical a position, the more fiery the takedown or blind the endorsement (see: Taylor Swift’s entire fanbase), the more likely it is that it’ll reach us. So Gen Z does not need to materially benefit from defending a cause for them to get something out of engaging with it: the belief that their actions are building who they are. And who they are is a Good Person On The Right Side Of History.
This is, of course, cynical (hi have you met me), but I do believe it is at least somewhat true. And yet, the moderator’s comment during my talkback presented me with a sadder element to add to this theory: that while Gen Z’s identity-building may be trapped in algorithmic models, its constituents perhaps dream of something more human. Reading a review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness—a book that spawned so many op-eds that I feel like I’ve read it already—I paused on this passage:
Many teens are aware that smartphones disrupt their sleep, their moods, and their self-image, but they believe, as several parents told me, that giving up their phones would kill their social lives. Research has shown that, when adolescents abstain from social media for a while, their mental health improves even as their isolation from their friends who are still on the platforms increases; a smart, emotionally intelligent kid can recognize the merits of this trade-off and still choose to keep their TikTok and Snapchat accounts. (A University of Chicago working paper published last year found that fifty-seven per cent of college students who are active users of Instagram would “prefer to live in a world without the platform.”)
That parenthesis, in particular, feels like the saddest thing: kids being active in a platform they wish didn’t exist? What is this, The Matrix? Are we all trapped in our little pods being sucked dry by the machines? It reminded me of something my dad told me once when I was little, way before we were living in this ChatGPT hellscape: that he believes the antichrist will be a machine (I feel compelled to note this has no backing of dogma whatsoever). I have talked wayyyy too much about how we fetishize machines, so I’m not gonna get into it here, but I’ll just say: reading that passage makes me feel like the apocalypse is already happening. St. John tells us, about the Beast (another name for the antichrist), that “no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name [666].” Those kids may have a biblical grounding in thinking that giving up their smartphones would be the end of their social lives.
This is, of course, super conspiracy-y, and sounds like it would be said by the same person in church who told me that, because I’d gotten the COVID vaccine, I would blow up once the 5G towers were turned on (happy to report I’m still in one piece). But, come on: society is not gonna back away from the combined forces of smart devices, social media, and artificial intelligence. Choosing to unplug comes at a very steep cost; the COVID shutdowns in particular made the virtual world feel so necessary that, even if the Zoom epidemic has started to abate, I really don’t see a way society ever goes back offline.
And the virtual world, by the way, is immensely more gatekept than we’d like to believe; it is basically ruled by five companies — Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Google. It’s not just their direct products: as this series on Gizmodo shows, the tentacles of these giants reach far and wide, affecting services we didn’t even know were connected to them. Their raison d’etre is simple: they wanna make money. They do not have our interest at heart not because they’re evil, but because it would conflict with their business model. And they have shown time and again that, in accordance with this mandate, they will make unilateral decisions about our presence on their platforms without giving us much recourse.
Case in point: I’ve spent the last few months trying to convince Google that I’m not a dead Spanish bishop but an alive writer, and they have only recently, and very begrudgingly, changed the corresponding information on their platform (someone got tired of my weekly emails, I imagine). I had asked them to remove my picture and links from the more important Francisco Mendoza’s panel, but they went a different way:
Ironically, the reason they refused to alter it for so long was that, as they said in their emails, “knowledge panels are created automatically by Google Search Algorithm when there is enough information available on the open web. As it is done organically, there is nothing we can or would influence to create the knowledge panels.” This sentence made me so mad, not just because of the questionable grammar, but because it seemed to treat the algorithm as some wise entity that operates on a higher plane. There is nothing you can or would do? Are you insane?? Your engine made a very stupid mistake! I am alive! I am not a bishop! Take my picture out of there!
The other day, this same company announced a big overhaul of its search product that puts AI in the driver’s seat; the de facto portal to the entire internet will let an LLM decide what the answer to your query is — in a way that, for most users, will probably discourage any further research. This was met with a lot of hesitation, and yet writer Steven Levy, writing for Wired in a story literally called “It’s Time To Believe The AI Hype,” chastised the nonbelievers:
[It’s] like the story where someone takes a friend to a comedy club to see a talking dog. The canine comic does a short set with perfect diction. But the friend isn’t impressed—“The jokes bombed!”
Folks, when dogs talk, we’re talking Biblical disruption.
Yes, the talking dog is very impressive. But if the dog can’t tell jokes, what is it doing on a stand-up stage?? Let’s find some other profession for the dog! Let’s not allow it to be in charge of answering for the whole internet when it is putting my picture next to a dead bishop and calling it a day! But good luck convincing the tech bros that the shiny toy they invented is not shiny enough. And, more importantly, good luck getting people to stop playing with the toy. In this fast-approaching dystopia, infallibility might be whatever the algorithm says.
Francisco Mendoza was the Bishop of Jaén, and he looks just like me. Case closed.
It comes as no surprise, then, that in my search to be a good person, I’ve very much taken steps away from the online world. Earlier this year, I made the inspired decision to take the triduum (Latin for “three days”) of Holy Week off, staying home for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. I wanted to focus on observing the religious demands of those days (prayer, meditation, fasting) and also rest a bit from my maddening routine — and, as a bonus, kickstart my annual spring cleaning, which often takes up to a month (it’s still not done!). It ended up being a lovely time and I fully dreaded coming back to normal life; the only thing that helped was ending my Lenten fast food fast, celebrating Easter Sunday with a Dunkin breakfast and a Popeyes dinner (two meals instead of three not for religious reasons but rather because I’ve been on a fitness regimen and I wanted to minimize damage).
Another thing I did for those days was to turn off the internet on my phone, which could only text and make calls (in case of an emergency), and it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made: taking a break from the endless stream of notifications provided me with a peace of mind I had imagined but could not really anticipate. Come Sunday, I was looking into ways of keeping that going without impacting my work; I took a deep dive into my phone’s settings and tried to make it a little quieter, but nothing has been as powerful—and the question remains of whether I’d eventually want to stop carrying all of the internet in my pocket. It’s not the first time I’ve taken a break from the internet during Lent; alongside fast food, another thing I used to give up was social media—and I eventually permanently deleted my Facebook and Twitter, now over a year ago now (I’ve kept only Instagram, in which I don’t scroll and just post pictures of Chester, whose beauty the world cannot be so cruelly deprived of).
So who knows? I might eventually trade my Pixel for a flip phone and bid the portable internet adieu (if I can figure out how to order in restaurants that use fucking QR codes). I don’t mean this article to come off as super Luddite; this newsletter, for example, lives online, so obviously I’m not doing a wholesale condemnation. But (and I’m stealing this from a priest I heard it from) while the internet may be a tool like any other and, in theory, neutral until it’s used, we must consider its power in relation to ours. A hammer is a tool, for example, which can be used to build and to kill—but its power is directly proportionate to my effort: if I wanna drive that nail in (or break that skull), I have to swing it hard. The internet, on the other hand, is more like a car or a gun, in which a small movement of my foot on the gas, or my finger on the trigger, produces an effect whose speed and strength far outweigh my own. The things I can do with my smartphone… as the often-repeated comparison goes, it’s a device far more advanced than the one that took humans to the moon! I had to take a written test and a practical exam to get my driver’s license; I had to take nothing to access the internet (unfortunately, the same would be true if I wanted to get a gun—get your shit together America). I’m not sure we were prepared for it, and I’ve started to wonder if the control we imagine we have over our digital lives is an illusion.
In fact, I’ve been reflecting a lot on how the modern world, not just the internet, has in some ways taken away my ability to consent. A few paragraphs ago I mentioned that I’ve been on a fitness regimen; though, as I’ve shared previously, it’s a journey that started from a fatphobic comment, the main point of it has been to reestablish a connection with my body. I seldom eat because I’m hungry — usually, it’s because it’s time to, or something looks good, or someone else is eating, or… because I don’t feel good and I want to. The opposite usually happens, of course: I down that Popeyes or Dunkin, and instead of feeling happy, I end up nauseous and without any energy. Some of the discoveries I’ve made have been physical; cutting sugar from my breakfast, for example, did wonders for my appetite throughout the rest of the day, and now I get to other meals legitimately hungry. But a lot of it has been behavioral, relearning to treat food as both fuel and something to be enjoyed and be grateful for — not something that can solve problems that are unrelated to it. While, of course, this last way of approaching it is informed by my own experience and upbringing, I do think there’s an external aspect to it as well: I’ve been learning a lot about how much processed food is engineered to be addictive, by stimulating our pleasure centers way beyond what a regular meal would.
It’s like the algorithms with their extreme content, hijacking reward systems in our brains that allowed our ancestors to survive and instead abusing them to the point that, eventually, being in the present moment becomes unbearable without some sort of distraction or enhancement. Is it any wonder Ozempic has caused such a stir? We like to think that willpower is what guides our decisions, but GLP-1 drugs have shone a light on how much our free will is compromised on a regular basis. How we eat and what we look like is, of course, something each of us has to decide for ourselves (a journey that in itself is fraught with societally-inflicted pain) — but it’s so sad to think that, in some cases, we are physically unable to align our behavior to our ideals. How did I end up in a place where I am so disconnected not only from my ideals but from needs as basic as hunger and human interaction?
Being a good person, perhaps, starts with reasserting some modicum of control over my actions.
Which brings me naturally to the main change in my life in the past few years: joining a twelve-step group. Don’t worry, I’m not about to quote the Big Book at you and talk about the miracle of recovery; I’m only bringing it up because, during meditation the other day, I realized the program had given me the ability to put a lot of my beliefs into action. I had struggled with feeling like an unsaint madman all my life and yet, while I tried my best, I hadn’t really done much to correct it. I mean, I tried to be nice to those around me (though my character defects usually got the best of me); at one point, after having moved to the U.S. and felt the particular sting of its oppressive systems, I started doing volunteer work, but even that was inconsistent. It was the pandemic shutdown—with its double curses of physical isolation and online polarization—that both exploded my addictive behaviors and brought me to my knees in deciding that enough was enough. When my life seemed to be at stake, I finally surrendered and (timidly, at first) found the program; now, it’s an integral part of life, forcing me, for the sake of my sanity, to live in service of my fellow addicts (and people in general) every day. And I feel incredibly lucky! “Belief,” said Octavia Butler, “initiates and guides action—or it does nothing.” God, with infinite patience and wisdom, kept me around until I was ready to let my belief finally initiate action.
Still, as I said in the beginning: there is so much suffering in the world. I am humble enough to know that it’s not in my power to change it—but I know I could be doing so much more. Maybe I am crazy for not doing more. But I’ve also been blessed with the humility to recognize that, maybe, God will keep guiding my actions, and I just don’t know what’s up ahead.
Another big change in my life has been smoking; I love doing it socially a few times a week at most, but I’m doing it alone several times a day. So recently I started taking medication for it, in the understanding that nicotine is powerful enough that my desire to cut back or outright quit is not completely under my control; the medication has helped (and also made me very nauseous, which I’m not thrilled about), and yet, almost two weeks into it, I’m still puffing. But, if I count, it’s way less than it was when I started (and as of today, I’ve gone two days without smoking!). Even if imperfectly, the trend curve points down. Progress doesn’t happen all at once, or without its setbacks. But as I look back, there’s so much I’ve let go of that I previously thought I couldn’t live without, and that thought excites me—what could come next?
Two things I know for sure. One is that the line of my progress toward sanctity throughout my life has steadily trended upwards, despite all the setbacks. And what’s more: I’ll never get there in this life, and that’s okay! There’s a little coda at the end of the twelve steps that I love:
Many of us exclaimed, “What an order! I can't go through with it.” Do not be discouraged. No one among us has been able to maintain anything like perfect adherence to these principles. We are not saints. The point is, that we are willing to grow along spiritual lines. The principles we have set down are guides to progress. We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.
Two is that whatever the answer is each day to the question of what I must do to be good, that answer will come to me, as it has thus far, in a gentle, steady call (even if what it asks of me seems daunting or scary) and not in the extreme yell of an algorithmic manifesto that vanishes as soon as it appears.
Or, to put it more simply: uncomfortable as it may be, I’m okay with questioning myself (or being questioned by others) over whether I’m doing enough. God has blessed me now with the ability to not obsess over it and take immediate (often shallow) actions to achieve validation that could quell it, but instead to allow it to fuel a lifelong search. After all, I’d rather be a good person than feel like one.
Special thanks to
Hope Chavez, a.k.a. Esperanza, who very generously donated her time and editor/sensitivity reader skills to make this edition a bit shorter, less ridden with typos, and more human.
Shameless self-promotion:
If this article was not long enough for you, I’ve published two others recently: “Immigrant Artists Deserve to be Free” for The Dramatists Quarterly, in which (as the title suggests) I got back in my soapbox to yell at this country and industry; and “Should I write that?” for The Plawrights Realm’s Aspiring Playwrights program, in which I used the hot topic of who-can-write-what to, of course, talk about myself.
Machine Learning was nominated for three Elliot Norton Awards (or as my director and I call them, “The Bonys”), for Outstanding Scenic Design, Outstanding Sound Design, and Outstanding New Script. We won zero (what’s the opposite of a sweep? A dust? We dusted that ceremony), but it was not without its legacy: now, the custom of nicknaming a city’s theater awards after the Tonys has taken off in my friend group. My friend Nikki Massoud, who’s currently starring in English at the Goodman and Guthrie, is a shoo-in for a Chony; my friend Noelle Viñas, whose play Derecho opens at La Jolla Playhouse soon, will surely get a SanDiony.