I left the LDS Church and my parents’ house as a nineteen year old college sophomore. I was full of self-loathing, but also full of enough righteous anger to shut my parents out and try to live my own life. That meant moving in with a man I had known for a week, who was 8 years older than me, and who sold lots of drugs. Maybe that wasn’t a good choice? I felt it was my only way out of the church, so I will always be happy that I did what I did. I am a little sad that I missed out on a more normal college experience, but my family didn’t see the value in encouraging me to move into a dorm with some normal college kids. There would have been too many temptations. They had been pleased when I opted to live at home my freshman year, though they were confused when I was miserable. So after my freshman year in college spent languishing in their house, contemplating suicide, and meeting with an LDS therapist who was friends with my mother, a phone call from “my missionary” and best friend finally triggered me to rescue myself and move out.

I had been “waiting for my missionary” before I moved out. I use quotes here because I was dating other people and hadn’t promised to wait. He was my best friend, but I didn’t know whether “my missionary” would be the same person when he came back. Worse, I didn’t know what I believed about the church. He hadn’t wanted to go, but he didn’t want to be shunned by his family. And he wanted the new truck that was promised to him if he completed the mission. He told me the day before he left that he wouldn’t go on the mission if I would talk him out of it and run away with him right then. I didn’t want that kind of responsibility. If I told him to stay, I felt I would be charged with his happiness or unhappiness. Besides, I wanted to stay in college and I knew his plan meant we would be broke and isolated. So he left. We wrote letters about the day when I would have enough money saved to buy a motorcycle and drive to Mexico to whisk him away.

Then he called me, breaking mission rules, with three minutes pre-paid. I took the call on the front porch to get away from my huge family. He didn’t want to make small talk: “The Church is true,” he said excitedly. “You have to start trying to believe right now. Please. I want to marry you when I come back and I want it to be in the temple. I know I haven’t had the strongest testimony. I listened to your ideas about the Church. Now you’ve got to listen to mine.” And he went through it all: Joseph Smith was a prophet, Book of Mormon is true, the Gospel has been restored, Jesus Christ atoned for our sins, etc. He begged me until we got cut off. It was a hugely emotional experience for me, but when I came inside and someone asked, “Who was that?” and I answered truthfully, the response was only, “He shouldn’t call. It’s against mission rules.”

I moved out of the house within 48 hours. I remember my younger sister crying. I wish I could have told her that it would all be okay, but I didn’t want to infect her with whatever I had.

The church taught me that if you are not perfect, you are worthless. So I set out to be as worthless of a person as I could, and have fun doing it. The church-people already thought it of me, so I might as well go for it. I was living in sin with a drug dealer! I was impressed with myself and horribly ashamed at the same time. The thing is, I discovered that parties and drugs and sex don’t necessarily make people bad. Hard as I tried, it didn’t make me bad either. I recognize that I was lucky, and I’ve learned that the way I left isn’t for everybody, but it worked for me. I did well in school; even better than I did before, because I became interested. I read books. I ran 5ks. I wrote songs. I made friends I could relate to. I got closer to my non-Mormon friends and I didn’t have to keep my new friends at bay like I’d had to when I was Mormon. It was a great time.

Yet the church set up behavior patterns that I still struggle with. Throughout my adolescence, I led separate internal and external lives. Because the habit of compartmentalizing didn’t die easily, my relationship with the church affected all my relationships. I couldn’t express myself except through song lyrics, scribbles in journals, and occasional selfish outbursts demanding what I needed but couldn’t ask for. For four years, I couldn’t follow through with leaving my boyfriend, even though I wanted to. Four years isn’t as long as I led a dual life in the church, but it was the same sense of duty and guilt that kept me there. Finally, in the same sudden way I’d left the church, I left him my first semester of graduate school.

After completing graduate school, I got a job in a rural town where I knew no one. I had just gone through another break-up. I’ve recently come to understand that the church’s grip on me played a role. The church still had a hold of me through the family I loved and who loved me, through my grief over losing my childhood church friends, and through my anger at missed opportunities. My anger turned on my partner sometimes because I was jealous that he could have such normal relationships with family and childhood friends, while I could not. So I was alone.

That’s when I found this Recovery Board, in whatever form it was six years ago. I lurked and found it interesting and helpful, but I didn’t register. I stopped lurking after a couple months. Sometimes I felt alienated by the discussion on the board, particularly in discussions about porn, or when I felt feminist viewpoints were belittled. I’d had enough of that at church. Also, maybe I wasn’t ready to dive into the sordid details of the church’s past and present. Because my family was completely immersed in it, I still wanted to believe that Mormonism was a legitimate life-style choice, at least as much as any other.

I found other sources to help me make sense of the world and my life in it. Women’s role in the church had plagued me as long as I could remember. Science-denying in the church had pissed me off since I’d been in high school. So I started lurking and even commenting on feminist blogs. I read Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women and Susan Faludi’s Backlash (which I tried to get my younger sister to read before she plunged into Mormon marriage and motherhood, but she was “trying to stop reading things that made [her] angry.”). I also devoured Richard Dawkins’s books. I continued reading fiction, as I always had, because it helps me remember that there are billions of perspectives and ways to live, despite the church’s myopia. I struggled with suicidal thoughts, but all the reading I did during that time period made it possible for me to go on living.

Meanwhile, my relationship with my family was better than ever. Sure, I had to protect myself and them by putting a guard up, and they had to bite their tongues about “the one and only true church.” But they let me be, I let them be. I had shown them that pressuring me would make me disappear from their lives. They’d decided they didn’t want that. Yes, I saw my younger sister slipping away from her authentic self; I saw my older brother and his wife (also one of my childhood friends) deal with depression that I suspected was linked to the church. But my oldest brother and his wife seemed – and still seem – truly happy. And in good news, my youngest brother, who was discovering he was an atheist too, had turned eighteen. My parents finally seemed to approve of him coming to visit me, rather than warning me or him about my “influence.” I felt that my parents not only loved me, they seemed to like me and accept me.

I got married during this time period. I tried to plan a party, but realized I would not be able to bear having anyone from my family there, despite what I thought was our healthy relationship. I had traveled to sit outside the temple during two siblings’ weddings, and didn’t even fly to Utah for the third. Since I couldn’t bear to have my family at my wedding, I decided no one could be there except the two of us and one of my oldest (never-mo) friends. Although my wedding was how I wanted it to be in the context of my life, it was not me. Though I denied it even to myself at the time, my authentic self would want a party. I would want all the people who love me to be around me, but that idea was completely destroyed by the thought of how uncomfortable my family would be. It would have been impossible for me to put my own enjoyment before the worry I would have felt about their discomfort. It would have been impossible not to have a breakdown; worse than the ones I regularly have when the whole family gets together. I couldn’t put my own needs before theirs.

Still, I convinced myself everything was fine, as fine as it would ever be. I believed I had figured out a way to make my life work.

Then, this summer, my older brother and his wife sent an email to our family and hers, stating that they no longer believe and will not be going to church anymore. I knew the email was coming because they had asked for my advice and support in advance. I was so excited for them, but terrified. I knew it would change their world for the better and encouraged them to do it as fast as they could. I didn’t know that it would shake my world this much, though.

I was on a week-long business trip when they sent the email and I spent every night sleepless and a little drunk in my hotel room. I was fortunate that my meetings concluded early, on Thursday, because by Friday I was a wreck and couldn’t think at all. My mind crashed and I was the self-loathing kid I was at twenty. I ran the numbers from the meetings earlier in the week and had myself convinced that I had messed them up and was a complete failure. (As it turns out: I had not, and I am not.)

Emails and phone calls were going back and forth among family members. Everyone was a mess. The worst for me was an email from my father asking me if I would forward an email he had written (basically bearing his testimony in the face of science) to my cousin. He said he was asking me because he had heard that I had some kind of “support group.” My cousin had contacted me about a year earlier to ask for advice on getting out of the church. Of course I had talked with him. But I didn’t have a “support group” and I told my dad that. His relief was so huge that it got me wondering why he wouldn’t want me to have support if I needed one. I didn’t ask him that question, but my dad offered on his own that the family, extended and immediate, thought I’d been sending “anti-mormon literature” to my cousin. They probably suspected I’d done the same to my brother and his wife. I hadn’t. I’d been so careful, and overly respectful, of my family’s beliefs and feelings. Soon after my dad’s email, I learned through reading some “anti-mormon literature” (or, verifiable facts about the church) that the priesthood manual tells members in good standing not to associate with persons, even family members, who are involved in “apostate” groups. No wonder he was so relieved that I didn’t have a support group: He didn’t want to consider whether he would have to choose between me and the church. Since then, I’ve realized that the compromises I’ve made throughout the years since I’ve been out were still hurting me and hurting other people who might want out.

The series of emails was the start of a manic episode for me which lasted over a month. When I got home from my business trip, I started digging through old papers and journals, looking for evidence of what happened, trying to retrace my trajectory, talking rapidly, wearing my husband and a couple of close friends out on the topic, avoiding social functions where talking about it would be inappropriate, and itching to talk about it and read about it when I couldn’t. I read compulsively: An American Fraud; Elders; Tell it All; Daymon Smith’s dissertation on polygamy and correlation; ex-mormon blog after ex-mormon blog. I watched tons of youtube videos, including videos made inside the temple. I even went to a Community of Christ meeting, when in my constant googling I discovered there’s a branch in my town, just to see what the hell was up with that (spoiler: no revelations). I couldn’t learn enough about the horrible organization. I began checking the RfM board daily and finally registered so I could post comments. The things that bugged me about the board before are dwarfed by how much I now need some of the discussions here.

I realized while digging through my old papers, and during the process of writing this “Exit Story,” that while I haven’t fully escaped the church, I’ve come a long way. I used to feel guilt and shame. Over time, my self-loathing turned into loathing for my family, as a defense mechanism. I picked out two short excerpts from my journals which show that progression.

I had moved back to my parents’ house after less than a year, the summer before my third year in college, because I’d realized that my choice of living situation and boyfriend weren’t ideal. My parents soon sent me packing because I couldn’t follow their rules (going to church, in before midnight, word of wisdom, etc). I moved back in with him and wrote this on June 24, 2001:

"Why does it have to be like this? They asked, I asked. I love them so much. Hurting them kills me. But they say, don’t feel guilty for hurting us. Indicating that I should feel guilty for offending God. But how come I only feel bad in their eyes?"

(That was a real question – I wondered why I didn’t feel bad for offending god, and I concluded I must be evil.)

By April 23, 2002, I had moved into my parents’ house again briefly, while I looked for an apartment with some friends. I followed the rules because I thought that was the grown up thing to do and I knew it would only be a short time. I appreciated their help, but I was angry. I wrote this:

"I’ve got to leave this house. I’ve got to never see these people again. I don’t need them except for money. It is so sad and not completely true . . . I know I’m not as fucked up as I used to be. I know that because I used to dream about killing myself. That seemed the only response appropriate for someone like me, to a bunch of people like them. And I didn’t blame them at all. They were good, I was bad. I should die. Now, I don’t want to kill myself. I think I have every right to live. But to think that I’m worthwhile, I’ve had to grow so much resentment towards my family."

At this point in the original version of my “Exit Story,” I described for the next page or so what the church has done/is doing to my family and how I wish they could get out. My older brother’s exit with his family, when they used to seem so devout, got me focused on wishful thinking for the rest of my family. But I’ve omitted what I wrote about them – maybe it’s for another post, maybe not – because I’ve decided that the next step in my recovery is to let go. I’ve learned that I don’t have to hate myself; I’ve learned that I don’t have to hate them. (I won’t say I never relapse into hating myself or them, but generally speaking, I’ve gotten past all that.) Now I need to stop worrying about them, and truly be myself. I need to learn to leave the coffee pot on the counter and stop hiding books when my parents visit; I need to learn to stop trying to avoid offending them by editing my online presence; I need to learn to say, “Yes, I participate in a support group or whatever you want to call it, and yes I’ll talk to anyone who is still in the church who has questions, because it shouldn’t be so hard for people who want out to find each other.” These sound like small things, but Exmo’s know what I mean: I’ve got to stop protecting other peoples’ fantasy world at my own expense, and I need stop worrying about what their choices are doing to them. It’s going to be a life-long process, probably. In tribute to my recent realizations about what it will take to live my life authentically, I got a tattoo: A bird flying away from – or towards – something.