I understand that convert retention is appalling because people find out that the church is really weird, the church is not true, or they don't manage to integrate socially into the ward... and I can testify to all three of those factors.

I'm a not married (but now not single) woman in my mid thirties, a convert of six years, and I've never really felt at home in the church although I thought I had a pretty strong testimony, at least initially. I really have tried over a long period of time to make it work and make my spiritual home in the church. I'm now at the point where I can admit that this is never going to work.

At first, Mormons fall over themselves to be all "I love you!" (ugh, I hate the FAKENESS of that! No you don't! We don't know each other!) and make you feel at home, but then that tapers off after you've been in the church a while and you realise that when you're a single woman in your late twenties/early thirties, it really sucks being a Mormon.

I was kind of okay with my outsider status until one night when the YW (I was a leader at the time) did an activity where people wrote compliments for people on paper hearts and they were hung up for all to see. How many everyone got and exactly what they said was clearly visible.

The other leaders (who are regular F&T criers who overuse the word "blessed", you all know the type) got told by the YW they were wonderful and such an inspiration. I got a few generic things from girls who were clearly trying to be nice. It felt horrible that everyone could see this clear comparison.

I couldn't believe someone thought such an activity, essentially a public popularity contest, was in any way a good idea. When I told my family and friends, they thought this was strange behaviour. Stupid and petty as it may sound, I found this activity alienating and it made me start to resent the church and the lack of boundaries it has.

Meanwhile, more and more of the stuff in church was starting to make me feel uneasy: the homophobia of Prop 8, the gross patriarchal emphasis on teaching the YW to be a wife and a mother in Zion, the lack of Jesus in any service. I went to an EASTER service where there was hardly any mention of Jesus! I didn't mention any of this, but it seethed under the surface.

When I went to the temple a few people from the ward cared about that and went but I got the feeling it was more because it was a free trip to the temple (it's a while away from us) than because they cared about me personally. When the temple guy asked my escort if we were mother and daughter or friends, she replied neither, that we do a calling together. That felt crappy.

Constantly being reminded I was single and not married felt crappy. When I got a boyfriend, being reminded he wasn't LDS and we couldn't be together for eternity made me feel crappy. Not being included in anything made me feel crappy. I tried being friendly, and showing an interest in others, but things did not improve for me.

(Meanwhile, a lady from Utah with a massive family and who can't get past saying "Joseph Smith" on a podium without crying joins our ward and gets an instant circle of friends, as do a young couple expecting a baby. I began definitively at that point to realise there's a type of person that gets on in Mormonism, and it's not a person like me.)

Still, I wasn't in the church as a popularity contest... what matters is it's true, right? Well, yes -- but that only holds water if it's *actually* true. The temple freaked me out. I scratched myself to bits in my itchy garments and shuddered at the memory of veiling my face for weeks after.

I started reading stuff online then. I read about the origins of the BoM and the BoA and Egyptology, the wives of JS and BY, the racism, the face in a hat, baptising Holocaust victims, the ERA, all that stuff and more. I felt, and still feel, sick about all that. That I unknowingly supported all this for years!

Yet still I was frightened to leave. I had spikes of panic that it would have major eternal consequences for me. I got depressed about the church. I still am. It's made me feel like a massive failure and it's based on lies! I started out in the church with healthy self-esteem and six years later, that's all messed up. I wondered why I couldn't make friends there. I still wonder that.

I wondered why I was still getting dressed up to go to a charade every week. In addition to feeling the loneliest I have ever felt in my entire life I felt depressed by the doctrine, depressed by the conformity, haunted by the temple, and depressed by my garments. Yet still, niggling away against all reason... what if it were true and I'd be throwing eternity away?

Recently it all came to a head. I woke up two Sundays ago and immediately started crying because I just couldn't face going to another Sunday at the ward, sitting alone in a pew, and listening to what I know in my heart is nonsense.

I should mention that it's only at church I feel excluded. I have good friends, my family love me, and I'm well liked at work.

I suffer from a mental health issue (which has never manifested itself at church) which is medication controlled but recently I have been experiencing pretty severe depression. I told a cross section of people in my life I was becoming depressed -- friends, family, work.

I decided at the same time to use this as an opportunity to buy myself some time away from the church by contacting some folk from church and saying my mental health has been very bad (they know I have a condition), that I am depressed, that I'm not coping and and I may not be at church for a while.

I haven't heard much back, except from two people: one lovely lady who is nice to everyone and asked if she could help me at all. The second person is on the verge of leaving the church, and she also said if I needed anything I could count on her. Everybody else has not replied. I should say at this point that friends, family and health professionals actually are helping me with my depression.

Last Sunday, I went to a service at the church I grew up in. My mum and my friends took me. I was not harassed into going back, I wanted to go. In this church, which is fairly liberal and is the biggest denomination in my country, all the kids come onto the stage at the end and take the microphone to tell us what they learned in Sunday School, then they sing a children's song which the congregation join in with.

This week, the children's song was one I sang a lot in church when I was growing up. Each verse talks about a good attribute that Jesus has (hey, who is this Jesus guy this entire worship service has been about? Shouldn't it be about tithing or coffee? What is this madness?!), and ends with "and His banner over me is love".

As I looked over at my mum, friends and a congregation of people wearing jeans and t-shirts who were genuinely happy to be in a church that clearly wasn't using fear and rules and bigotry and patriarchy to hold them there, I felt true fellowship and love in a worship service for the first time in years.

I don't know how I got so lost. I have no idea how I got from the pure "His banner over me is love" of my childhood to putting a weird green apron on in a creepy building thirty years later. I can't even explain it. What was I thinking?!

I'm researching leaving the church now. I'm afraid. I'm also exhilarated. Thank you for reading.