Sometimes I reflect on my life
and wonder what it would have been like had my family never moved to Utah when
I was 11 years old. For 9 glorious years I lived in northern California in a
once small town that was in the beginning stages of evolving into a large city.
While my family was, and still is LDS, my closest friends at the time were not
LDS. Most of them weren’t even overtly religious.
During the time in which I still
considered myself to be LDS, I often wondered if I had remained in California,
would I, through the influence of these non-Mormon friends, “succumbed” to the
evils of the world when I was a teenager? Through contact on Facebook, I viewed
pictures of my friends holding beers, displaying new tattoos or piercings, and
I knew, without being told, that most of them were experienced in the world of
sex by the time they graduated. A part of me longed to have had those same
experiences, but the side of me that was still heavily influenced by Mormon
dogma, tried to convince that “less savory” side of myself, that had I remained
in California, I would end up eternally punished for following my friends
example.
While dwelling on thoughts of
what my life could have been like, I tried to envision myself as a champion of
my religion. I would maintain my good friends, but through my stellar example,
they would see that my choices to abstain from sex, drugs and alcohol were
serving me well, and they would eventually come around to see things as I do.
But a tiny part of me, the part of me that has become a much larger presence in
my life since leaving the Church, knew that this would not have happened. I’m
not sure if I would have experimented with my friends or not, having never been
given the opportunity to experience the possibility with the friends I made in Utah,
but I know that secretly, I would have wanted desperately to be like them.
I have good LDS friends in Utah,
who for the most part, married young and are now supporting families with
multiple children. They post about their children and how wonderful it is to
see them growing closer to god. They comment on articles and other posts in
regards to things like transgenders, gay marriage, and abortion, and I find
myself growing more and more incredulous as the weeks go by. I never realized
that through high school and college I had convinced myself to think exactly as
the Church wanted me to. I didn’t have an opinion on anything until the Church
came out with one. This applies to my Mormon friends today. It’s just shocking,
now that I am beginning to formulate my own opinions on these very same
subjects, to see the distance that is growing between the opinions of my
friends and I, especially those friends whom I always considered more
progressive than a lot of others of my acquaintance.
I think what gets me the most is
the fact that I used to think like them, and a part of me now just kind of
assumed that since I was broadening my horizons, they were all learning and
changing their opinions as well. That’s a ridiculous assumption, I know, but to
be fair, it wasn’t a conscious one.
It’s this disparity between
people that I was once close to that bothers me to the extent that I just want
to get out of Utah and start all over. I’m still in this state of limbo where I
find it extremely difficult to voice my own opinions but privately seething
with the religious ideologies that my friends support and raise their own
children with. I have never been one to be overly verbose and I suffer from
shyness, especially in situations where the potential for contention and argument
is almost guaranteed.
This last year has been tricky,
but the last month and a half has been worse. I’m getting married (which is
wonderful and I could not be happier) but we’ve been living together for over a
year and no one outside of my family is aware of this. Even my maid of honor
has no idea and I’m fairly certain she just assumes that I will be married in
the temple. Her step-dad certainly does. He congratulated me on my upcoming
nuptials a few weeks ago and then pointedly asked me where my reception would
be. Not my ceremony. Only the reception. I didn’t have the guts to tell him
that both would be in the same place, and not in the temple.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m
going with this. But when I start getting super anxious about the idea of
finally coming clean, I try to forget about what might happen and dwell on what
might have been had I never left California. For one thing, I would have had a lot more
friends to turn to and not be afraid to tell them the truth.
One of the biggest reasons why I
find it difficult to just come clean is because I have this oppressing fear of
disappointing people. You can learn a lot about someone through their actions,
but that shouldn’t be your sole basis for forming an opinion about them. I went
to church like I was supposed to. Didn’t drink or experiment with drugs. I
didn’t even date anyone so there was no way I was having sex. This “good” girl
persona was shared by everyone in my neighborhood. Sure, I wasn’t the typical
girl. I played sports, vocally hated having to wear dresses and skirts and
avoided singles ward activities like they were the plague, and I didn’t express
a giddy happiness about falling in love and having buckets of children. But I
was still “following the commandments”. My parents saw me the same way. I was
the more responsible child. The more reliable child and president of every
church class I was in with leaders that loved me for reasons I still cannot
conceive of.
What kills me is that as much as
I hate this perception, I am absolutely terrified of shattering it, of possibly
losing the respect of people I’ve known for more than half my life. The danger
of assuming a person is one thing based on what you see them doing is dangerous
because you never see what is going through that individuals mind. No one was
aware of the times I would lay in bed on a Sunday morning wishing I was sick
enough to stay home. No one was aware of all the times that I didn’t fast or
seethed at some preposterous idea that made women second to men. Most people didn’t
know that I wore shorts under my skirts for years just to make me feel like I
was sticking it to the man. No one saw me shirk my duties as President and pray
desperately to be released from a calling I had no desire to fulfill. All they
saw were the motions I went through at Church.
Now I think I’m just whining and
I’m not really making a point here. All of this is just to say that you think
you know someone well enough to anticipate their opinions and how they’ll
respond to controversial ideas, but it’s an angry wake-up call when you realize
that you were never actually on the same page as those people you were told
were the better friends with a more positive influence. So why didn’t I stay
the same?
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