Like Streams to the Ocean Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Jedidiah Jenkins

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  CONVERGENT BOOKS is a registered trademark and its C colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Jenkins, Jedidiah, author.

  Title: Like streams to the ocean: notes on ego, love, and the things that make us who we are / Jedidiah Jenkins.

  Description: New York: Convergent, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020012014 (print) | LCCN 2020012015 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593137239 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593137246 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Jenkins, Jedidiah. | Introspection. | Self. | Self (Philosophy) | Conduct of life.

  Classification: LCC BF316 .J46 2020 (print) | LCC BF316 (ebook) | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012014

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020012015

  Ebook ISBN 9780593137246

  Illustrations by Jedidiah Jenkins

  convergentbooks.com

  Cover design: Sarah Horgan

  Cover image: Kyle Meck/Stocksy

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Ego

  Family

  Home

  Friendship

  Love

  Work

  Death

  The Soul

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking and exist in the full contentment of an animal. I envy the staring of a lizard, how it sits in the sun and looks out onto the world. It is not worried about things it can imagine. It is not smiling. It is not happy at its contentment. How could it be? It doesn’t know discontent. If it is scared, it is scared for a reason, for a danger it can sense and see. It is not imagining what could happen ten years from now. Its mind is perfectly present. Free.

  But we are not like that. We are conscious. We are self-aware. We have a triad of worlds inside us: our mind in the present, our mind holding the past, and our mind guessing at the future. Our consciousness unites these things in a mysterious and muddled way. It feels things it cannot explain—urges and sadness and lusts without names. We have to sort out these many longings and instincts, or live in anxious confusion.

  For a sentient unicorn such as you or me, the unexamined life is a curse. It leaves the mind at the mercy of the gut, cluttered with confusing information coming from below. Who we are cannot be fully realized until we tidy up the room and see what’s under all those piles of clothes.

  The summer before my first book came out, I got very sick. I had a 105-degree fever. At night, I soaked the bed with so much sweat that I started sleeping on six towels, peeling them away when they became unbearably soggy. Over two months of this, I lost twenty-five pounds. I went to the hospital ten times and had enough blood drawn to deflate a whale. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

  The illness came at the worst possible time, in the ramp-up to the release of my memoir. In the book, I had written about my struggle to be a good church kid from Tennessee in a family who loved me but thought being gay was a death sentence. For weeks, I had been going back and forth with my mother about things she didn’t like in the book. Things she thought were unfair representations and caricatures. When she confronted me, it led to an exchange of no-holds-barred emails, in which I spelled out my homosexuality, the dismantling of my faith, and the new boundaries I needed to set with her. Much of it for the first time. She was willing to listen, but wounded, and she wrote with a firmness in what her faith said about me. By the end, I basically told her I was prepared to walk away from the family.

  I remember shaking as I typed those emails. I love no one more than I love my mother, which is why she can rock me and warp my spine. I knew I had a story to tell, one that I’d desperately needed to read when I was younger. But the book was about to blow up my relationship with my family, and now my body was falling apart.

  My mystery illness reminded me of a universal truth: It is good to have a doctor for a friend. Toby is that doctor for me. I met him in San Francisco through my old roommate and reveled in his stories from the hospital. He’s worked in the emergency room for years, and my god, the things he has seen. The things people stuff into their bodies’ orifices are impressively varied (ex: a dead crow, because it was “cold”). Toby’s experiences in the ER have made him calm and rational at all times.

  After my fever had kept me up for two full weeks, I texted Toby. He told me to get my blood tested. Maybe it was Lyme disease. After the third week, he said, “This is odd, most fevers are gone after two weeks.” I kept getting more blood tests, stool tests, urine tests. Negative. Nothing. I was as healthy as an athlete, except for the fact that I was too weak to walk to the bathroom. At six weeks, Toby no longer sounded calm and collected. He was worried, tired of my local doctors not taking this seriously. He told me to go to the ER. If I told them I’d been having chest pain—which was true by then—they would fast-track me to see the doctor.

  I poured myself into an Uber and hobbled into the ER. The doctor looked at my most recent test results with a furrowed brow. “You could have testicular cancer,” he said, looking up from the sheet. “Drop your pants please so I can check.”

  “Cancer?”

  “Yes. The fever could be your body’s way of trying to cook it and kill it.”

  Wow. I had thought I had a flu, maybe, or Lyme disease. Cancer never crossed my mind. I stood up and pulled down my pants and underwear. The doctor felt around while I braced to hear words that would change my life.

  “I feel nothing; that’s good. But you could still have cancer. Let me order you a CT scan.”

  I went home buzzing with mortality. I called Toby. He told me that I’d entered into a category called FUO, Fever of Unknown Origin. This is like unlocking a secret level in a videogame. Suddenly, all kinds of bad things are on offer to explain what’s wrong with you: extrapulmonary tuberculosis, typhoid fever, malaria, chronic active hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, leukemia, lymphoma, colon cancer, testicular carcinoma, and more.

  After a horrible week of waiting and wondering, the scan came back negative. My body was frying itself, and no one could figure it out. Toby called and checked on me multiple times a day.

  Then, eleven weeks into my illness—the week my book came out—the sickness vanished. Poof. Lifted like a fog.

  I went back to the doctor to make sure it could really disappear like that. He wasn’t fazed. “Believe it or not, this happens all the time,” he said. “People get better, and we never find out what happened.” I was baffled, annoyed that modern medicine couldn’t tell me what was wrong. “We have a robot driving around on the surface of Mars right now, and you can’t tell me why I was sick?” I said.

  “We know a lot,” he said, “and if you remained sick, we would keep testing. But when people get better, they stop getting tested. And it stays a mystery.”

  Toby agreed with that doctor. In his controlled and toneless way, I could hear how relieved he was.

  Later that week, I talked with my friend Connie, who, like most of my friends, had been really worried about me. She brought up a possi
bility I hadn’t considered. “I bet it was psychological,” she said.

  “No way,” I said. My sickness had been real. Toby wouldn’t have checked on me every day if it was some made-up thing. This wasn’t mental.

  “Think about it,” Connie said. “You’re about to release a very personal memoir, one that you’re afraid might hurt your relationship with your mom and family. You’re always saying that you don’t feel emotions, but the body knows. They get stored up.”

  I didn’t believe her then, but here I am a year later, and I am convinced she was right. The book was published. My mother didn’t disown me. Somehow, it brought our family closer. At the time, however, I didn’t know that would happen. So my body took the reins from my mind. It shut me down.

  Psychologists believe that between the ages of eight and ten, we wake up into a sense of self. These are the years when our brains develop a distinct identity. We realize that we aren’t our mothers. That we are individuals with one life that ends in death. This is a frightening experience. As individuals, it is our job to stay alive. Mom won’t be there forever. So, we observe the world around us for danger. It is that world, the one we map in those opening years, that we spend the rest of our lives trying to fix. I didn’t know this when I got sick, but when I heard it later, it clicked.

  When I was eight, I lived in a home where my mom was overwhelmed by the demands of raising three children. So I learned to be independent and never bother her. At the same time, my body was betraying me, giving me strange thoughts and “bad” desires. I adapted by disassociating from my body, floating at a thousand feet and watching life unfold. I believe this defense of becoming a mind at a distance, rather than a soul in a body, turned me into a writer. I am grateful for that. But it also severed me from my emotions. From knowing my body. From the right to have needs.

  This I have come to believe: If we don’t examine ourselves—our walls and defenses and blind spots—in the daylight and out in the open, we run the risk of a shutdown. What is buried will rise up and take over.

  We must dig around under our houses and shore up the ground floor of our thinking, making it as sturdy as it can be. Not with answers, but with a way of looking actively at our world. We must invite our consciousness into full awareness of itself. To be astonished that we are alive, and aware of it, and wonder what it all means.

  We can do this by thinking about the most important things in life.

  In these pages, I have compiled eight elements that I believe form the foundation of who we are. The way we think about ourselves, the people in our lives, our relationships, and our homes affects everything else. Until we know ourselves, the language of our gut and spirit, we will continue to expect wrong things and misunderstand our motives. Misery is in direct proportion to expectation. And getting comfortable with this mystery of self, with the great unfolding of our lives, is the biggest step we can take toward existential joy. The death of anxiety. The embrace of the “why” behind all of our doing.

  Some of what you’ll read are essays I’ve written specifically for the book. Others are thoughts I’ve collected over the past five years and published in spurts elsewhere, online and in magazines. (Indeed, the idea of this book came when readers asked me to put my online writing in one physical place.) Some are snippets and thought-sparkers, meant to be read on a fifteen-minute subway ride. Others are longer and meant to be read under the covers on a slow Saturday morning. You’ll find an evolution, a bit of “working it out” over several years in these pages. I am trying to be that friend who sits with you until three A.M., talking in swirls like milk poured in coffee.

  We are not thoughtless lizards. As much as a blank mind would calm our twisted senses, it is not on offer. What we have are complex thoughts, spiritual meditations, and brains that want to hold the universe in our consciousness. This is the miracle of being human. If there is no God, and we are just atoms bouncing through a giant something, then the mystery of consciousness is all the more amazing. We are pieces of matter, perfectly organized in such a way that we are able to see ourselves. What an honor. What a commission. And if the saints and mystics are right, and we really are children of God, then wow. We are creations of the Most High, main characters in the cosmic drama of meaning. Maybe those two options aren’t as different as we think.

  This is my attempt to lean into the duty of consciousness. What we have are complex feelings, spiritual naggings, and brains that want to hold the universe in our consciousness.

  Ego

  When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

  —JOHN MUIR

  My friend Lauren cofounded a nonprofit called Kind Campaign. She travels to schools around the country and speaks with young girls about bullying, unhealthy friendships, and identity. She looks younger than she is, she is stylish, and she is beautiful. This piques the girls’ attention, that she is some strange creature who is adult and cool, yet young and definitely not a teacher. At these talks, Lauren shares her story of being bullied in seventh grade and how it spiraled her into a severe depression and suicidal state. She teaches the girls that sometimes it’s hard to see outside their school hallways. How, even though it feels like school is their entire world, it’s important to realize it’s one chapter of their story. That there’s beauty, friendship, adventure, and so much life lying ahead of them. And to know that when they are struggling with things that feel big and scary, they can reach out for help. That no one has to suffer alone.

  She once told me a story of a high schooler who was kicked out of her friend group and forced to get something like one hundred likes on each Instagram post and some ghastly number of new followers each day before she could sit with the other girls at lunch. This girl was so distraught, she told Lauren that she spent all her free time after school making fake accounts so that she could like her own posts and follow herself. “I have to do it,” she said. “I’m miserable, but I have no choice.”

  Lauren hears endless stories like this—stories of brokenness, of girls confused and lost and trapped and scared.

  Recently, a twelve-year-old came up to Lauren after the assembly. The girl was tiny, holding her hands down in front of her, making herself as small as possible as she gathered the strength to speak. “Can I ask you a question?” she mumbled.

  Lauren leaned down. “I’m sorry—what, my darling?”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” Lauren said, now squatting to make herself smaller than the girl.

  “Is it okay if I don’t know who I am?”

  Lauren gave her a look of understanding. Her heart broke at the baldness of the girl’s honesty. She gave herself a second to think of an answer.

  “It’s perfectly fine to feel like you don’t know yourself,” she said finally. “One of the most beautiful parts of life is getting to know yourself over time, and that can change during different chapters of your life, too. I am still getting to know myself.”

  “You are?” the young girl said.

  “Yes, I am. I know a lot about myself at this age. I like myself. But there is so much more to know. You are on a wonderful journey. You’re exactly where you should be.”

  “Okay. Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  The girl gave Lauren a half smile and stiffly hugged her. “Okay, thank you,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  What if I don’t know “who” I am? There are layers in that girl’s question. So much of life is lived in magnetic attraction to undefined concepts. Love. Meaning. Fulfillment. We all want to be somebody. But what is a somebody?

  When I look back at my nervous journal entries, old photos, and confessions from high school and college, I see a through line. Every time I’ve been in a state of flux, of change, I fear that I will be trapped there. “Will this confusion last forever?” I wonder. But it ne
ver does, and I haven’t grown weary yet in this business of uncovering, unmasking, and constructing who I am. It is both discovery and intention. And it is endless. And it’s okay.

  Yes, I’m sure.

  “Who” you are is the braided marriage of circumstance, ego, and soul, in that order. First you have circumstance, the “what” of your life. Where you were born. Your sex and gender. Your parents and your hair and your skin and bones. The ego knits this all together into a whole, a concept. It is what most of us would consider “who” we are. The container in which you build an identity and then defend it. The ego acts as your agent, manager, and lawyer, all while believing it is the thing itself. Its worst fear is to be belittled or unnoticed. It takes everything personally.

  Your body walks into a party where you don’t know anyone. You feel anxious. That “you” is your ego. But another part of you is watching you get anxious. Something separate, but still you, is observing your ego, some higher part of you that says, “Why do I feel like this? Everyone seems so nice.” This is your soul. We’ve all done something mad or wild and said, “Who am I right now?” This is the division between the ego and the soul. The ego’s desires are based on the body, on scarcity and fear and lust and hunger. The soul’s desires are based on…well, what does the soul want? Completion? Balance? Understanding? Acceptance? It’s hard to know.

  How strange is it that we’re all walking around with this crowd in our head: our body; our ego, which is the mind of the body; and our soul, which is the watcher, the cosmic something else. Maybe it’s nothing but a side effect of consciousness. But I am writing this right now, and I am also watching myself write it. Some part of me is above it, eternal, and cannot be hurt by failure or disgrace. What a nice part of me to seek out and cultivate.

  We are three things. The car, the driver, and the awareness of it all.