I felt like an alien in my own world. No one at church was like me. I heard members of my ward speak, and I could only stare dumbly at the things they were saying. I couldn't imagine how it was possible to be a human being and also think and speak the way they were thinking and speaking. How can these smart people... be the way they are. It didn't make any sense.
But how can I be feeling this right now? I know exactly what it's like to be a believing Mormon. I was one, for my entire childhood. Every person I know is a true blue Mormon. This is the only way of thinking I've EVER been exposed to. How is it possible that I feel like such a fish out of water? This is my world. My only world.
And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I was surrounded by an entirely different species, and the language they were all speaking was foreign to me. Perhaps it's because I can't imagine being an adult and still believing the things I believed as a child. I believed in Santa Clause. But I grew up. I started using my brain and I figured out it was a bunch of hooie. Same with the church. I was solid in the church until about thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that's why church is so incomprehensibly strange to me. All these educated, intelligent adults getting excited about the presents that Santa Clause brings them.
The children I can understand, but the adults? They're either incredibly stupid, or too afraid to exist in a world where everything they've been taught isn't entirely correct. Am I the only person who isn't scared shitless to think about things?
But how am I thinking this right now? I know the adults in my family aren't stupid. They're not mental cowards either. Then why do they still believe in Santa Clause? No one makes sense, they're all aliens, they're all from a different planet.
When did I become disconnected from every human being I've ever met? If I'm not connected to Mormons for heavens sake, then what on earth am I connected to? Maybe if I had a group of non-Mormon friends, maybe if I'd ever witnessed life outside of Utah, it would make sense that I was rejecting this so that I could cling to something or someone else. But there's no one. There's nowhere. I'm an alien to everyone on earth. When did this happen to me?
I thought backward. It was the worst part. I could remember believing in everything, and also not being stupid. I could remember it but I couldn't figure out how it was possible. I remembered sitting in church and suddenly thinking, 'right now, anyone could say anything to me, and I'd still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet.' I remember going to girl's camp and feeling so lucky to have the truth of the gospel in my life that I bore my testimony around the campfire and told everyone firmly, “If any of you have any doubts, just don't.” Just don't, I said. Like it was so simple. Like the truth of the church was blatantly obvious.
I remember watching tv or hearing stories about people and always asking, "Well, are they Mormon?" Because if they weren't it was like they weren't real people. If someone wasn't Mormon then they almost... didn't count. It was hard for me to swallow that the founding father's weren't Mormon because then how could they have possibly been led by God? But then I heard that their work had been done in the temple and that they'd accepted it in the afterlife, so whew, now the founding fathers counted as real people. I remember listening to my favorite artists, Maynard Keenan and Tori Amos and fantasizing that they would become Mormon someday because then they'd be real, despairing that all of these people I admired had pointless lives because they weren't Mormon. I could only understand the minds of Mormons, I could only relate to those also in my exclusive club.
Then things started to happen. I got sick of Joseph Smith because of the infamous “Joseph Smith Year”. The Joseph Smith year in church was designed to strengthen everyone's love and testimony and appreciation for Joseph Smith by literally never speaking of anything else. Forget Jesus. Forget repentance and forgiveness. By the end of that year I was so bored of continuous Joseph Smith bludgeoning, that I lost my testimony of him. I missed talking about Jesus. And I never wanted to hear the words, “Joseph Smith is a prophet” again, for the rest of my life.
Things that I heard in church started feeling wrong, like when someone said the purpose of women on earth was to help men. The fact that my role and destiny as a female was completely mapped out for me made me feel rebellious. And I finally let myself ask the question, "why the hell don't women have the priesthood?" without putting it out of my mind and telling myself, whatever, it doesn't matter, god has a reason. When I finally let the question in, I felt a kind of heartbroken rage I'd never felt before. With my mind finally unafraid to open up, I also stopped pretending that polygamy never happened. I mean, I always knew somewhere inside myself that polygamy had happened, but I was like the people in 1984, using doublethink, making it disappear from the past, refusing to think about it. But when I finally had the courage to ponder it, I had a clear and horrifying sense that it was putrescent and horrid and evil and wrong, a mistake a mistake a mistake... I tried to ignore my intuition and explain it away as something harmless, but I got sick of denying my own truth sensor. And more and more things started tripping off my truth alarm. Like in my Doctrine and Covenants class at BYU, when my professor brought up the subject of Heavenly Mother and questioned aloud whether or not she was even divine. I've never felt so black inside, hearing him question her divinity. I've never felt so much negativity and falseness in one room. I started blacking out during the lecture. I struggled to breathe and held in frantic tears on the way to my next class.
And worst of all, or best of all, I read Orson Scott Card's Xenocide. His character called Gloriously Bright believed that her own disturbed and genius mind was the Gods speaking to her. She had an unshakable testimony in something completely false. I remember reading Xenocide during seminary once. Gloriously Bright was knelt over, in a ridiculous religious ritual caused by severe obsessive compulsive disorder, speaking to the “Gods” in her mind. I looked up from my book and looked at the TV screen. They were showing a seminary video on prayer and revelation. A young women was kneeling, closing her eyes and folding her arms... speaking to God in her mind. I couldn't breathe. Mormons were Gloriously Bright. We do all of these rituals and believe we're Godspoken and we know it's true, just like Gloriously Bright knew. She was too faithful to see that what she KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt was false. I could never look at myself or anyone the same after witnessing such close parallels between her and the entirety of Mormondom.
I started out feeling unbelievably blessed. I believed. Then I became cynical of the culture, sick of it. Then I thought maybe it was possible it was false. Then I wanted to believe, but feared that it was false. Then I couldn't see much truth in it, but I wished and hoped and dreamed that it was true. Then I wanted more for myself as a woman and secretly wished it wasn't true. Then if I were to have found out it was true I would have been very surprised. Now, I realized, when I meet someone who is Mormon I automatically feel like I can't relate to or understand them. Now if I were to find out it were all true, if I found out that there was a big scary monster called Satan, if I found out that all main Gods were male, that God's wife did and said nothing, that Joseph's polygamy experiment wasn't the blunder of the century, that I was being judged for saying swear words in my head, that my brother wasn't going to make it to the celestial kingdom because he's a “sinner!!!”, I would be heartbroken. Devastated. Now I wouldn't want to live in a world where it was true.
What has happened to me?
