How dare you!! Please recall that ghawd will never send you a test that you can't pass.

I remember thinking to myself as I read the Leon Uris novel, "Exodus" that those Jewish people must have been of very strong will and character to have their tests.

yup - and I was never mormon....

Mormonism did a fantastic job of encouraging me to be who everyone else wanted me to be, to the point of choosing to believe in things that made no sense, just because I felt inadequate that I didn't really believe. I gave up on that years ago, but I'm still trying to figure out who I want to be. It will likely take the rest of my life.

Life is difficult enough by itself, without adding all the layers of indoctrination and dogma to the equation.

We're born into societies we didn't really have any say in the first place, and cultures, then sub-cultures such as whether we are born Mormon, or Catholic, Baptist, Vulcan, and so forth.

It's a crap shot. So you deal with the hand you've been dealt, and make the best of what you've got for as long as you have in this life.

If it's a test or survival of the fittest, then that's the evolutionary part of the skill set we cultivate while here on this planet.

Otherwise, are we being punished for the sins of our parents, or their parents, or for something we did or didn't do in a previous lifetime? Maybe.

But life is tough enough even without church or secular indoctrination to contend with.

I don't see myself as broken beyond repair, but I do question and wonder about existence - while giving thanks for being alive and given to wonder and exploration the range of human emotion including the spectrum of joy, sorrow, suffering, and to have experienced love in this brief time we have here. I see life as a school - for me it's been one of hard knocks. But I get back up and keep moving.

I can't picture an eternity where existence is going to be any easier than this life, so I see time here as one continual round of more to come.

I was deep into the cult for decades. My whole personality was imprinted with what the cult wanted me to be...in my case a fanatic mormon. I did seminary, mission, institute, and married in the temple. I didn't put energy into my schoolwork as it was man's understanding and not god's. I hated gays. I hated polygamist mormons. I would have never married outside of my race. In short...I was a mormon asshole.

I've been out for the past 13 years and looking back I am amazed that I had any non-mormon friends at all. Many of them tell me now that they knew I would snap out of it eventually.

I did feel a tremendous sense of loss when I left the church. I found myself scrambling for a new identity. I started to question everything and that was a trip down the rabbit hole for a while. I hit every step on the "Stages of Loss". I was in denial, angry, bargaining, and sadness. While I was sad and angry I did sometimes wonder if I would ever get out of it. I met with other ex-mormons at meet-ups in the SF bay area and that helped. Seeing other people who have gone through it was very helpful for me.

I feel that mormonism short-cuts critical thinking and development of one's identity. I think that since leaving mormonism I had an incredible opportunity to re-evaluate myself and what I believed in. Really, I should have been doing this all along like the rest of the normal world.

My basic rule of thumb was to embrace pretty much everything mormons stood against. (obviously not the drugs and murder part (though I'm not sure mormons have a problem with those)).

I can be a better person everyday and everyday is a gift.

Between the abuse and the cult indoctrination, I snapped in there, somewhere. Something was lost forever. My mind is like a doughnut with nothing in the middle but emptiness.

donbagley Wrote:
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> My mind is like a doughnut with nothing
> in the middle but emptiness.

I'm dipping mine in coffee to stimulate it.

I think I am a Hobbsian in that human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short and then there is Mormonism.

It is communal, poor, nasty, brutish, and eternal. It is an eternal communal sandwiching of human nature. I was raised on that marvelous wheat and a wonder bread. Poor, nasty, and brutish was my peanut butter and jelly.

Sometimes life just gets me down and I think about when I was first broken by it. It was in the cradle with poor, nasty, brutish parents who saw me as just another feather in my father's baker's hat. Conditional love expressed with eternal promises given through experiences with human nature and indoctrinated to believe those natures are inspired in their expressions of conditioning appropriate responses trained me up in the way I should go.

Now I've departed from it. Not even coffee helps life's peanut butter and jelly go down as well as the white bread of religious conditioning through eternal fantasy when times get tough.

Now I get to choose my delusions. I can chose any bread I want to help me live. Sometimes the roughage in my new bread helps my body but lacks the mental affects of Wonder bread. Mormonism has me looking for manna from the windows of a heaven my mind knows doesn't exist.

I can't crawl back into the womb and up the fallopian tube to pre-existentland. For what I'm worth, I'm here until I'm not. I'm Saturday's Deserter.

I'm the never returning prodigal son.

I'm the expression of Adam's transgression.

I'm the black peep and the lost lemming.

I'm the one who knows - what is in those essays.

I'm the one who was supposed to die to fulfill my mother's precognition yet I live, I love, and I survive.

I don't want to give into the hate. I don't want to revel in being the thorn in her side.

But at times I do.

There was a time I felt that way and it kept getting worse. About seven years ago it got so bad I couldn't stand it anymore. So I loaded up a handcart (SUV) and left Zion, traveling east for a better place. Got past Fort Laramie and stopped. That winter in a rural place far away from Utah was when something good first happened. I was sitting on my porch drinking a cup of coffee and watching the sunrise. Countless numbers of Canadian geese were rising up from the river and filled the sky with wedges, flying over me on their way out to the harvested cornfields for a day's feeding on the spillage. At that moment, and only for a moment that first time, all became well. Simply enjoying the reality of the life that surrounded me began to repair the damage caused by a bad fantasy.

Thank you for this thread.

Now, I think about it, "something was lost forever," is a good describing it. I'm not broken. When I first resigned, I wanted to fill that (perceived) emptiness with something else. But, after 7 years out, not so much. I'm happier than I've ever been! I use that inner space for moving-room, trying things out, exploring, learning. The emptiness is peaceful, simple, and restful, like meditation, sort of. Tearing out all the roots of Mormonism, released their stranglehold on my growth.

So much of what I thought I had, was false. My parents didn't love me more than the cult. They didn't love me unconditionally. They were most concerned about how I appeared to others--pretty ribbons in my curls, nicely dressed, polite, musically talented pianist, cheerleader, pursued by the snobby Ivy League Mormon men, Geisha wife, pregnant SAHM. Nothing was real. Both of my Mormon husbands did not love me, my family was ashamed of me when I was divorced TWICE. I lost my family and all my Mormon friends, when I left the cult. It was all broken to begin with. My new life includes my children and grandchildren, business friends, Non-Mormon friends, and a few relatives who also left the cult. I no longer fear the Mormon God and His polygamous heaven. I believe in the Universe, and that we are all "made of the same star stuff" no matter what race, religion or lifestyle we are part of. As long as one don't lose the ability to love, one can keep generating life and joy.

No, I'm not broken. I'm healed.

100%

Yup, I've been walking funny ever since.