I just don’t know what to do with myself

For more than a week I experienced one of the most intense (and lingering) insomnia attacks I’ve had in recent years. I would go to bed at my normal hours (11PM) but manage to sleep at around 3 or 4 in the morning, then would wake up at around 6 or 7. My normal sleeping pattern is this: I usually sleep for 6 hours, waking up about twice in the night to pee but managing to go back to sleep right away. But the past 12 days had been really troublesome, to put it mildly. Lacking sleep, I spent the days in a daze, grumpy, unable to do anything but laze around the house, with no appetite for food or any social interaction.

I am no stranger to insomnia; I’d been having bouts of it since I was 12 but this particular episode was strange because there was no perceptible trigger, at least in my view. I had finished working on 2 projects so I was in kind of a break from work because my new project hasn’t started yet. So no stress or deadline to think of. Aside from an old argument with my mother, there also wasn’t anything tumultuous going on with my personal life. So no stress on the front either. One more thing that bothered me was the length of this episode. These bouts usually lasted 3 or 4 days. If anything, this was the longest episode of insomnia that I’ve had in recent years.

I tried everything to deal with it: warm milk, hot bath before bed time, I stopped drinking coffee, tea, and soda, meditation, visualization… all things that have worked for me before. All of them failed me. Not wanting to take any narcotics but needing some pharmacological help, one night I drank a couple of spoons of Benadryl. I was able to initiate sleep quickly that night but on the second night, it didn’t work anymore.

A friend advised eating bananas, one fruit that I didn’t really like. I ate some but I couldn’t really say that my condition improved because of it. One night after dining out with friends, I drank a glass of vodka tonic, which made me drowsy. However, when I got home and showered, I was wide awake again. 

Last night, while I was talking with friends who visited me at home, I found myself yawning at around 10PM. When my friends left at 10.30PM, I was really feeling sleepy! So i just washed my face and brushed my teeth then went to bed and I fell asleep. To my dismay, however, I found myself again awake and alert at 1AM. But then, I was also able to go back to sleep about half an hour later and then I finally woke up at around 8.30 this morning. My longest sleep so far, yey!

I would like to analyze what happened but I wouldn’t want to spoil it so I won’t (at least, at a later time when I could gladly refer to it in the past tense). I just hope to God that this is the end of my current episode of sleeplessness. 

Losing my religion

It was around 1996-1997 when I finally came to terms with my sexual preference. Fortunately, it wasn’t a protracted process that destroyed me. But it was not completely painless. One of the significant casualties of this internal war, I believe, was the practice of my religion. For a Catholic-born, raised, and educated man who once aspired to be a priest, giving up the rites and the feelings they evoked was a big loss–one that haunted me for a long time thereafter. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t practice my religion until the church changes its stance on homosexuality. I firmly believed, still do, that God’s love does not discriminate.

I think my mother was more dismayed by this decision than learning that her only son was a homosexual. She couldn’t comprehend how someone like me, with my Catholic education, can turn away from the church just like that. I neglected to tell her that in the first place, my decision was thought of and deliberated upon for a long time. Second, I think that my Catholic education has been very effective, if not responsible for, helping me to come up with that decision. I have lost faith only in the human aspect of the church, not for the spirituality it represents.

But my mother is an uncomplicated woman. She uses her heart to deal with things that she finds difficult to understand and her heart told her to keep on loving me in spite of my revelation. Her efforts to do so have been commendable, and I love her more for that. My maternal grandmother, who was quicker to accept my homosexuality (I think she even welcomed it), was also more respectful of my decision. This did not come as a surprise to me because from a young age I knew that she was very ‘liberal’ about her Catholicism. She had no qualms to listening to teachings of other religions and to participating in their rituals.

And so my decision on my religion stood. At first my church attendance was restricted to 3 occasions: my birthday, Christmas, and Easter. This soon dwindled to going to church only on my birthday before I completely stopped. This happened around 1999. Working in the secular development sector allowed me to flourish without the guilt that I thought I’d feel about losing my religion. Instead of guilt, what I felt was a bit of longing. Longing for that sense of community I felt whenever I was in mass, which was basically a re-enactment of a social gathering, namely Jesus’ last supper with his disciples. This sense of community I found in my new set of friends: my gay and lesbian friends, my colleagues in the AIDS field, and my fellow advocates. I did not want.

When I arrived here in Cambodia in 2004, one of the first Filipinos I met advised to me to attend the Catholic mass held every Saturday if I wanted to be apprised of job opportunities. I smiled at this pleasant woman while suppressing my urge to say something that reflected how appalled I was of her suggestion. My Cambodian friend, who introduced us, did not express surprise at my reaction afterwards. He understood the gravity of my years-old decision to stay away from the church. As a Buddhist, he seemed more than tolerant of my views on religion. I felt his genuine respect.

Just because I lost my religion does not mean that I take it lightly. I’m not saying that I was never immune to the distractions that attending masses bring: the urge to chat, to doze off during the homily, to react to a cloying perfume or offending odor, to comment on another parishioner’s ill-fitting (or simply ill-looking) clothes, and some other things. I have felt them but I tried my best not to be too distracted by these things.

One thing I never did was to use the mass as a marketing and networking tool. And I was not about to start doing so.

Luckily I found other opportunities to work, and three years and a lot of hard work later, I like to think that I have established a thriving career here in Cambodia. Sure, there’s a lot of uncertainty in doing consulting work. But my combined faith and skepticism has helped in minimizing these missteps. I have made real friends that have been my small support system in times of need. These friends share my respect for spirituality and my wariness for the slightest hint of religiosity.

Lately, however, I found myself attending mass again. Yes, the very mass where I was told I can expand my professional network. To tell the truth, I have actually been going to the mass sporadically for the last months. The desire to do it on a more regular basis, however, only came to me around the time of my birthday. But what attracted me to attend again, after so many years of absence? Clearly the church has not changed its stance on homosexuality. If anything, with an Evangelical pope, the church has never been more conservative.

Thinking on it, I realize that the main attraction to me now is enjoying that sense of community that attending the mass brings. I am friends with the two ladies who actively organize and manage the choir that sings during mass. These two ladies, who’ve been here in Cambodia for more than 10 years, opens their home every Saturday afternoon for choir practice, serving an abundant lunch in the process. And after the mass, they and a group of friends go out for dinner in a restaurant of their choosing. I am somehow included in this circle. Both of them had expressed pleasant surprise at seeing me during mass, and I don’t really know why but I feel good about it. During mass, I say the right words, try to sing in spite of my lack of ability to sing well, and do what people do, except for one thing. And I am thankful to my friends for not pressuring me to do so.

I find that I am compromising nothing about my decision. Attending mass is but a small portion of the Catholic rites. In respect of the church doctrine, I never take communion during the mass because I have not gone to confession in more than 10 years, therefore I am not in ‘a state of grace’. And I do not intend to confess if I would confess my ’sin’ of being a sexually active homosexual knowing fully that I would remain as such and doing it after. Nor would I confess and skip that particular part because doing that is a ’sin’ in itself also. A ‘menial sin’, but a ’sin’ nonetheless.

See how effective my Catholic education has been? Even after years of non-practice, I still know my catechism.

Now, many years later, with the anger that came with youth mellowing into a distilled sense of recognition of certain realities, I find that I haven’t (cannot) completely lost my religion. Because when you reduce religion to its simplest elements, isn’t it really just about communities that exist under a common, basic belief that transcends, or at least tries to transcend, individual diversities?