Introduction

I need a place to write and share. Too much has been going on in my life; I feel like I'll implode if I don't write it all in an orderly fashion. Some days I feel like if I don't have a medium to share my thoughts, they'll eat me alive. I keep a journal and jot things down, but I feel like I need to put some of these thoughts in a format that others will be able to read.

Recently I've been getting the strong feeling that it's time to make a full transition out of Mormonism. Which sucks, because I still believe the basic tenets. I still believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet and I still believe the Book of Mormon to be genuine scripture, inspired by God. I don't know why I feel like this is the time and didn't feel like it earlier: maybe it's because I have a more stable support system; maybe it's that I needed more time to grieve an entire life path lost. I don't know. I do know that I can no longer stay active to any real degree. I will dearly miss the associations I made in the Church, and hope they'll continue to some degree as I move on. Because it's not the people I have a problem with; it never has been. I think Mormons are wonderful people. I love being a part of that community. It's the institution itself, which treats people like me--principled, informed individuals who won't lie in a temple recommend interview and have too many issues to answer all the recommend questions "correctly"--as less worthy.

Mormons I know might take umbrage with that statement, but it's true: being kept out of the temple because I don't have a "testimony" of the living leaders as Prophets, Seers, and Revelators bars me from getting married in the temple. If I stayed, even if I married a good Mormon girl, we could never be sealed there. That would be a stigma that followed us wherever we went, and it would eat away at me. I won't subject myself or my future family, which I hope one day to have, to that.

Looking back, I can see how much growing up in a highly dysfunctional home and too-conservative religious community painted my view of the world. It's painful, sometimes, to look back at things I said or thought and realize that yes, I really did used to be so provincial and overzealous.

Over the past two months I tried to return again, at least a little bit, but I feel like the time has come to really move on. I need a community, and because of my relationship to the Church it can no longer be there. I talked to my counselor about it a couple weeks ago and was very worried about what would happen. I have no idea where life will take me now. Everything I believed about myself, God, and the universe--my core identity--I formed while a Mormon. My life path--what I would do, whom I would marry, how I would conduct myself, what organizations I would be active in, everything--now has to change. What will happen? Will I lose everything good about myself that I've worked so hard to cultivate? I remember being so anxious about the issue that I started crying on the way home, but I felt a still, small, peaceful voice that has never steered me wrong in the past tell me that it was time to move on.

I don't know what that's going to look like, exactly. I don't know where I'll go. I've started attending other Christian churches in the area, hoping to find one where I can be accepted and loved for who I am and not treated as a second-class citizen. I'm trying to stay open to the possibilities ahead, but I'm very jaded about everything right now. I don't want to become bitter. I don't want to lose what happiness I've found and the gains I've made in fighting a very, very serious case of clinical depression. But I can't stay where I am anymore--doing so will destroy me. And so this blog will chronicle my transition out of the dysfunction of the past and, hopefully, into greater health and happiness.