My Mormon Pain

What are my core beliefs? What guides my decisions?

I am struggling. I feel empty. I feel like typing each letter feels heavy. Hard to do.

This is why I’ve always struggled to write when I am going through something. During my darkest moments, my journal goes empty. 

No energy left to explain how I feel. Only survival is left. 

Right now, a person isn’t causing this pain, unlike in the past. Now, I feel the death of the last bit of fairytale I held onto.

The world is not looking out for me. When I was little, I thought, at least I have a heavenly father who is watching out for me, even if my own earthly father won’t.

When that fairytale died, a huge part of me died with it. But in the ashes, there was still a kind of hope that now I could truly live. Now I could know who I was without the teachings that restrained me. That held me in place. That capped my empathy and told me I loved too much. 

I can feel that last bit of hope dying. Or maybe it was just delusion after all, that the world was ever safe. That anyone was taking care of things. I wanted to trust that someone in charge knew what they were doing. Can’t someone know what they’re doing?! 

I just want to feel like I can trust in something. I feel broken and left behind. I feel alone. But I choose this because I cannot feel belonging with the world I was given. 

I’ve lost everything, my family, my religion, my home, and then lost it again.

The pain goes deeper than I can understand I think. Lately, big, fat tears come out of nowhere. I know these tears are different. Heavier and letting me know that I am still deep in mourning, even if it doesn’t look like it. 

I’m so afraid. Fear permeates everything I do. I’m scared of losing anything else, but must live with the knowledge that everything will be lost, including myself. 

I will not become a god. I will not live forever with my love. He will die. I will die. My dog will die. 

I understand why people run from this reality. The pain makes me wonder if it’s worth it to be alive at all. 

Do I enjoy being alive? Sometimes. I’m scared of enjoyment. I’m scared that that might be all there is to live for. 

That feels… too small somehow? But maybe that’s the true cost of being born in a cult, nothing is ever going to feel as important as God’s Cause. 

I will never have such a purpose again. I will never wake up in the morning and know exactly who I am, what I believe in, or feel like I am loved for who I am by those around me. 

There is so much pain in being misunderstood. 

I hate it. Every time I try to change their minds, to help them understand who I am, I am ultimately reminded that I am not a full person to them. 

I am a sinner, someone to be pitied, poor thing. If only she could figure out her mental health. If only she were less angry. She’d have more support, more family around her. 

She’s alone because she chose that.

If only they could see how hard I’ve tried to belong. How much pain it has caused me. The tears and screams and moments of panic, wondering if I can keep going. 

I pushed myself beyond my own limits to fit in with them. I dedicated 18 months of my body and life to a religious organization because I believed in The Cause. 

I built my whole life, personality, meaning, behind it. 

I truly believed.

Leaving the church was the single most painful event of my life. And I feel like I’m reliving it now.

The pain resurfacing to remind me that Mormonism has more to take from me. 

As if it hasn’t taken enough. My whole family, my home country, some of my closest friends, my youth, my time, and most importantly, my body and mind. 

I spend most of my time these days trying to heal. Massaging my body endlessly because it feels like there are balls of pain everywhere, reminding me how far I pushed myself in those 18 months. 

How little rest I was allowed to have. But for some sick reason I am grateful for the physical scars that Mormonism left me, because it makes me feel less crazy. Less like I made it all up. Like I’m overexaggerating what happened to me. 

Because that’s what they tell me. As if I didn’t spend 18 months of my one precious FUCKING life serving Their Cause. 

I didn’t nap, or read books, or listen to music, or hang out with friends. 

My mind dipped right into religious psychosis like it was a warm bath waiting for me, in a world where I had been stripped of all creature comforts. 

The comfort, opium of the mind, that told me that God Himself had chosen me. I would be one of the greatest missionaries this mission had ever seen. My dreams had more meaning, my body was nothing more than a vessel to receive revelations.

As a woman, this wasn’t an entirely novel idea. I knew I had to give up my body one day, why not now? So I did, I stopped caring about what I wore, about makeup, the water was too cold for me to shower so I didn’t.

They said no water, I drank no water. They said no dinner, I looked down on those who would eat dinner when we would get home from a long day of work. 

I never slept in. I never took a day off for illness, even when I was sick. I took pride in that. 

When I came home and told people my mission was hard on me, they pointed the finger back at me. Well, of course! You followed the rules too strictly. 

It was always my fault for doing what they told me to do. Even though they told us EXACT OBEDIENCE BROUGHT MIRACLES.

Since I was exact, they told me nobody thought that way. How was I supposed to know you were all lying when you said you followed the gospel? 

How was I supposed to know none of this was meant to be taken literally? Or is it only when your exact ideals drive people to madness that you gaslight them into thinking their madness was self-inflicted?

I didn’t preach these words to myself. As a child, Mormonism taught me songs and made me memorize scripture, all with the goal of conditioning me to be the greatest Soldier for the Cause. 

Yet, when I did that and it ruined me, you say it was all my fault to begin with.

If only I had that kind of power. The power the Mormon church has. How can you point your finger at me? I haven’t organized indoctrination classes for children. I never told the bishop that he should ask me if I was masturbating. 

I never said that I didn’t deserve to get married in the Lord’s Temple because I was in love and things went “too far.” YOU told me that. Take some GODDAMN responsibility for your own FUCKING TEACHINGS.

Mormonism is NOT safe for children. It is not a harmless gospel that gives everyone a good base, a good foundation for life. 

Instead, it teaches them to hate others, to see poverty as self-inflicted, to pity those who don’t follow our lifestyle, and then, worst of all, to inflict our lifestyle on others because it was “the only right way.”

The conversation going around lately, whether mormonism is good or bad, feels like a slap in the face to me. Mormonism ruined my mind and my body and I only hope that I can live long enough that its shadow no longer reaches me. 

FUCK MORMONISM.