To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret

by Jedidiah Jenkins

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. It forces your childlike self back into action.

Time became visible. Each choice I made began to feel more and more final, as if every choice was the death of all the others.

The mark of adulthood is when we happen to life. Thirty years old. I was now an adult, with or without my consent, and adults are responsible for their lives. I wasn’t going to become someone I didn’t choose to be.

“I thought you didn’t believe in money?” I smiled as I said it. “It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I want to dethrone it. Money is a currency, like a current, it should flow through me. Savings is stagnant. Feels wrong.”

With the Internet connecting us all, the rest of the world feels closer, less alien. But I think that’s only true in our minds. The Internet does not bring Argentina one inch closer to me than before. That’s part of why I craved this trip. Knowledge alone is like an unearned memory, mostly forgotten. Just facts and two-dimensional images. I wanted to physically discover the world, the old-fashioned way.

I felt a spinning sense of loss when I realized I wouldn’t be a director, but it was the first time in my life where I learned the difference between dreams and goals. Each of us has a mash-up of talents and experiences and potential that plants something in us, and becomes a dream. A dream of being a creative, or an executive, or a father. A dream is the myriad ways we could be fulfilled in life using our talents to make beautiful things. But then there are goals. Goals are specific guesses at what we could do or become to fulfill our dream. Dreams are like a compass that points in a general direction, and goals are the islands in the ocean along the way. Goals are just guesses at where to make a home, and when they aren’t right, we try another. It isn’t a death, and it doesn’t negate the dream.

This revelation was different. I hadn’t done something bad. I was something bad. The only you that you know—everything you’re becoming—is bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a horrible and complicated headspace to grow up in. (This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don’t need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don’t have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)

As high school came, my weirdness faded. I discovered that I could turn the dial on my comedy just a little and make the cool kids laugh. If I was clever instead of weird, if I was smart instead of crazy, I was interesting to them. And slowly but surely, they invited me to things.

Fear is like a thorn in your foot. It may be proportionally small in relation to the body, but it hurts and demands attention and everything halts until the thorn gets pulled.

Humanity fixates on violence. We’re fascinated by its abnormality; we want to understand it and learn how to avoid it. But the truth lies somewhere in between blood and peace. Most of us will move through life without experiencing the abnormalities of violence, but that doesn’t mean those abnormalities don’t exist.

“I am twenty-four years old and I have still done nothing…I am sure it’s not for nothing that I have been struggling with all my doubts and passions for the past eight years. But what am I destined for? Only time will tell.”

Maybe God wants you to be that person in your community. Be the godly Christian gay man you wished you’d seen.” I was shaken. I’d expected to be told and shown, not commissioned.

“There are so many different ways to be human.”

Even after all this time, The Sun never says to the Earth, you owe me, look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole world.

About November 16, 1532, the Inca king first heard the name of Jesus. On that same day, the conquistadors put his kingdom to the sword. Jesus saves. But you gotta accept Him real quick or He kills.

“Like, talking openly about faith and belief without already knowing what the right answer is. No one I know talks like this.”

In my version of Christianity, certainty seemed propped up by a scaffolding of fear. Jesus doesn’t want you lukewarm, preachers said. Be all in or all out. Stay away from the middle place, the gray. “The heart is deceitful above all else.” A.k.a., don’t trust your feelings. The heart will trick you to get what it wants. “Lean not on your own understanding.” Don’t think for yourself. The scripture says, “Come let us reason together,” but this is code for “yes, you can share your thoughts with us, by all means, but if they don’t fit what we believe Scripture says, then those thoughts will have to go.” If you don’t believe, sadly, you’ll spend eternity in hell. So you’d better believe that Jesus loves you. He loves you so much, or else.

“Yeah, mysticism is when you don’t have intellectual certainty about stuff, but experientially you do believe in things, like beauty and mystery and the universe as a force for good. You move beyond the dualism of good and evil to a more unified whole, a sense that everything belongs.”

But then, I wasn’t rejecting Jesus, was I? I wasn’t walking away. I was just wondering if God was bigger than what I had been told in church. If perhaps He wasn’t so jealous, so frightened by the rest of His creation. Backsliding felt a lot like walking forward. Like expanding into love and wonder. I had dared to crash with my old beliefs into the ditch, and I stood up fine.