Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Where to begin.
The Sunday before I left for the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah to learn the lessons I’d be teaching in Spanish over the next two years of a proselyting mission to Uruguay, my local congregation in Florida themed its sacrament meeting services as a farewell. After the deacons administered the bread and water to members sitting in the pews, most of whom had become like extended family over the last six years since we’d moved there, my parents took to the pulpit to share scriptures, talk about how wonderful a son I’d been, and declare the importance of the gospel in their lives and in the lives of those I’d be be teaching in far off lands. My mom glowed telling the ward about occasionally meet high school classmates of mine while she was running errands and being treated like royalty once they found out who she was. My dad dusted off a story from my childhood when at age six or seven I’d decided to climb a large snowbank at the edge of a plowed parking lot during a trip to our local ski resort— we lived in Idaho at the time— and how I bullishly climbed, slipped, and slid back down, then started over again and again until finally reaching the top, an anecdote meant to applaud a supposedly inherent trait of grit and stick-to-it-iveness. My older sister sang “Oh, that I Were an Angel,” while my younger brothers, ages eleven and seven, nervously giggled out the Mormon primary hit, “I Hope they Call Me on a Mission.” At some point the congregation all stood to sing rousing renditions of the hymns, “Called to Serve” and “I Will Go Where You Want Me To Go (Dear Lord).” Pretty standard treatment for a missionary farewell. That evening, a family friend hosted an open house where I received well-wishers amid a spread of southern-style hors-d’oeuvres. Ward members turned up with words and cards of encouragement. Friends from school stopped in to say goodbye and tell me how brave I was and how much they admired me. Former high school teachers paid their respects. My mom set out a bound notebook with a picture of Jesus on the cover in which visitors could leave messages and advice for me, and in it my bishop wrote to tell me that having known me he finally understood how Joseph Smith, despite being so young, had been able to see God. On another page, my best friend’s dad reminded me to have fun.
Within a week, I was in the MTC and already failing my mission.
There was no explanation for it— I hadn’t done or left undone anything in particular that could justify the judgment— but the knowledge rooted itself somewhere beyond intellectual belief, somewhere deeper within, from a place of ultimate authority, and by that voice, the one that mattered, I had been condemned. I was, it had been decided, not capable, not enough, not worthy, and on one particularly rough night of emotional self-flagellation during my second week there, I stared into the mirror with loathing eyes, red-rimmed from needing to cry but refusing to, and dully wondered how I’d become the mistake I’d turned out to be while grimly appreciating the impossibility of appealing the verdict. I was afraid, guilty, and doomed to remain this way.
Over the next two years, that understanding usually slipped into the background as the rigors of missionary life and living in a foreign country distracted me, but the unending inner evaluation and presumption of failure droned on beneath the surface and any time I balked, or hesitated, or didn’t stop someone in the street or knock on their door to tell them about our message from Heavenly Father, or if just didn’t want to, any time I was simply afraid, it was more evidence in support of the conclusion. Every fear, every rule and commandment, every door, every person in the street became a test of my faith and worthiness. My salvation, or something more vital than even that, constantly hung in the balance. The stakes and relentlessness of it sometimes incapacitated me, although over time I became numb to it.
About a year after arriving in Uruguay, while sitting on a mostly empty bus on the way to a new area and missionary companion, I read a passage from the Book of Mormon, one I’d turned to in earlier days for inspiration, in which missionary hero Ammon bursts with joy reminding his fellow brethren of their successful efforts to convert thousands of the once-wicked Lamanites:
My brothers and my brethren, behold I say unto you, how great reason have we to rejoice; for could we have supposed when we started from the land of Zarahemla that God would have granted unto us such great blessings? And now, I ask, what great blessings has he bestowed upon us? Can ye tell? Behold, I answer for you; for our brethren, the Lamanites, were in darkness, yea, even in the darkest abyss, but behold, how many of them are brought to behold the marvelous light of God! And this is the blessing which hath been bestowed upon us, that we have been made instruments in the hands of God to bring about this great work. Behold, thousands of them do rejoice, and have been brought into the fold of God. Behold, the field was ripe, and blessed are ye, for ye did thrust in the sickle, and did reap with your might, yea, all the day long did ye labor; and behold the number of your sheaves!”
Alma 26:1-5, Book of Mormon
This time, Ammon’s triumphant words tore away the callouses and in the sting of an acute understanding that I would never rejoice like he had in a job well done, I cried alone on the bus, grief-stricken, for the first and last time as a missionary. A year remained for me to labor in the Lord’s vineyard, but enough evidence had been accrued against me that the question of my worthiness of God’s love, my own, the respect and affection of my peers, had been all but settled. I would never change. I was incapable of it. I would always be afraid and cowardly. I would always hesitate to stop that family in the street, if I stopped them at all— a far and whimpering cry from the Ammon-like missionary I was supposed to have been. This knowledge had repercussions with how I treated myself and how I allowed myself to be treated.
I’m painting this sad picture with an admittedly broad brush. From the outside looking in, none of this turmoil may have been apparent. I was well-liked among the missionaries who knew me, outwardly laid back, dutiful, an (usually) accepting friend and missionary companion, thoughtful, sometimes funny, and known in certain missionary circles for having most of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” committed to memory and occasionally asked to prove it, which I happily did. I still had a slim hope that somehow I could be different than I was. I felt more comfortable, if not exactly confident, in interacting with others than I might give the impression of here, and even enjoyed moments of purpose as well as of diversion and relief. My family loved me and my friends cared for and admired me— there were hand-written letters and packages of home-made cookies to prove it— but I was ultimately too far away for their words to have any effect. It wasn’t non-stop hard times, but a thread of unhappiness wove itself in various shades throughout the fabric of my time there and thoroughly dominated the pattern.
I certainly wasn’t having fun.
A year later I returned home and in a loose-fitting and moldy gray suit with a black name-tag attached to the breast pocket announcing me as Elder Jensen of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I was ‘honorably released’ from my calling as a missionary by a Stake President who didn’t know what kind of missionary I’d actually been. It wasn’t supposed to have ended like this. I hadn’t come anywhere near being the missionary I and others assumed I would be. Their confidence and mine had been astonishingly misplaced. I knew this, but the words to describe it could never form, so it remained a voiceless comprehension of failure beneath the surface, pointing to something immutable and unforgivable within me. I was no longer the enthusiastic and idealistic person who left in applause and ambition two years earlier. To be clear, this wasn’t self-pity or wallowing for attention; it went too deep for that and I rarely spoke of it. I didn’t know I could speak about it, let alone how, to myself or anyone else, other than a brief, “the mission was hard, man,” in rare moments of candor which often received nods of solidarity if my conversational confessor had also served a mission. Beyond that, words failed me. I was dazed by something I neither understood nor knew what to do with, so I reflexively walled it in and tried to live my life around it. Mostly I tried to ignore it.
Not long after arriving home, my sister returned from her own mission to Tampa, Florida and we were asked to give homecoming talks in sacrament meeting together and share inspiring stories from our time in the mission field along with our presumably deepened testimonies of the truth of the restoration of God’s church on earth and His love for His children. I don’t recall what I said other than describing how a convert I’d taught in a tiny town in Middle-of-Nowhere, Uruguay, had told me that after hearing our message the world seemed brighter than before. I remember trying to come across from the pulpit as having the unassuming air of a wise returned missionary and not as a lost and defeated kid who used just enough right words to throw his audience off the truth. I hid in plain sight as ‘the good kind’ of humble. I showed my face, said enough to give let them believe what they wanted, then slipped away hoping no one would notice, and from what I could tell no one did.
They say in the realm of romantic love, we’re often drawn to partners who will help us recreate a similar dynamic we had with our primary caretaker/s from childhood in the hopes that by doing so we can resolve that which was left unresolved, heal emotional wounds and address the beliefs we’ve carried with us all these years about our roles in and the nature of relationships, deeply held beliefs we may not even be aware of, beliefs which may have helped us survive as children but no longer serve us now. Once resolved, which usually takes willingness and work, we can at last, hopefully, be happy and healthy in intimacy.
It’s possible, I think, that feeling drawn to recreate certain kinds of experiences or environments so we can heal or write a new ending for ourselves could apply to more than just interpersonal relationships. Perhaps it could apply to this walkabout I currently find myself on, which has in many ways summoned the same existential storms I weathered on my mission twenty years ago, and more generally throughout my life. In the first post on this blog, I noted how going out on the road felt necessary, but couldn’t say exactly why, although I did offer a couple hunches:
I’m still pulled to do more, though, like it’s not quite time to go home. There’s something left to do and learn that’s part of all this. Maybe it’s to say one final goodbye to the spiritual wilderness I’d found myself in for much of my adult life. Maybe it’s to learn how to follow my intuition and understand what I want and need in the absence of responsibilities, to reinforce recent lessons that insist, “Just do what you want!” or “You do you, Boo Boo.”
That I felt drawn, compelled, to leave home and travel in the way that I have— alone, with no guarantee of returning to Utah, and with few supports— is a fact. Leaving was inevitable it seemed, and not out of a desperate need to escape my life, a motivation I know far too well, and although there have been times since then when I have avoided, run away, or otherwise distracted myself from discomfort and truth, it wasn’t until I knew extended solo-traveling would not be fleeing from life that I finally allowed myself to close up shop and start the trip I’d impotently talked about taking for thirteen years.
It’s very possible the reason this walkabout seemed so necessary was because something in me recognized it as an opportunity to encounter and resolve a historically and consistently unhealthy relationship with expectations and outcomes, and to recreate, at least in the important ways, a similar internal climate I’d had on my mission. I hoped this trip would be a grand adventure in which I ‘spread my wings and fly, little bird!’, and to a degree it has been, but a lot of it, more than I expected and certainly more than I wanted, has entailed confronting demons and seeing more and more clearly the pattern of expecting myself to do certain kinds of things and be a certain kind of person because as currently constituted I am not enough and so must become something else, fearing that how I respond to those expectations will and probably already does mean something final about me, leading to paralysis because the stakes are now far too high, and finally, after thrashing about in the impossible bind of ‘You must do this thing and are therefore incapable of it’, realizing that the only way out is not in fact to white-knuckle my way into doing or being something, whatever it may be, but something else entirely: The answer is to let go.
Let go.
This last part of the pattern is new. It breaks the loop. It didn’t exist in my psychological toolset a year and ten months ago and is the reason I could finally leave home and make an attempt at another kind of mission, one that, like my two years as a missionary, would come with its own set of impossible expectations and implications. This time, though, the story could have a different ending because now I had something I needed that I didn’t have before. I had learned how to let go.
My giant goes with me…
I’d counted on it.