I took a bunch of magnesium, omega 3, niacin, and vitamin C with a bunch of water and slept today. It was the best nap of my life. I was dehydrated, which I allow to happen when I’m having a tough time regulating my mood and my attention and I start to get depressed. I’m currently off my stimulants for the ADHD because I showed up to my doctor’s appointment at 3:45 pm instead of 3:15 pm. The just didn’t look that carefully at the reminder text I got, so I have to wait two whole weeks for her next opening. If I was wondering if I have ADHD, well…

I seem to have a set of other symptoms that ADHD alone does not explain properly though, but ASD does. I’m still learning about it, but it occurred to me that my physical ticks could be symptoms of an autistic nervous system. For example, I have a hard time sitting still reading a book. That’s definitely a bunch of the ADHD at play. But I also get frequent leg cramps in my thigh and calf muscles. They get worse with stress and boredom. The figured it was somehow related to the low-dopamine condition of ADHD or maybe I had RLS or something. I’m not just carelessly diagnosing myself: I’m looking for someone to talk to about this. But in the meantime, I’m going to do what I can for myself.

Turns out my supplement cocktail took away the cramping and the restlessness in my peripheral nervous system. I fell asleep on the couch reading HG Wells’ First Men in the Moon. I didn’t just fall asleep, it was… incredible. That was the most efficient rest I’ve ever had in just an hour and a half. What’s interesting is that I had music playing on my stereo nearby about as loud as it goes, and that didn’t disturb me at all. It helped. Sleep is usually tricky for me for a multitude of reasons: a racing mind thinking about everything or an obsessing mind that can’t let go of one thing, tinnitus from shooting shotguns as a wee Mormon lad without hearing protection, the restlessness in the muscles of my extremities, and the seemingly impossible feat of finding a position that doesn’t drive my brain up the wall and down the other side of the room while trying to tune out little noises that become huge noises in the absence of any other noise. Maybe I should start saying that my autism drives me up the wall and down the other side.

I’m able to read books without my adderall as long as I’m chalk full of these supplements and well hydrated. My mind is functioning well. What is this sorcery? My quack Mormon father is always telling me to consume more fish oil. I have before, but it never did this for me. This seems to be the magnesium mostly. It’s always a pleasant surprise when I found out he isn’t entirely nuts. I find it a recurring theme that I rediscover things I knew before but had discounted prematurely just because it was associated with Mormonism in my mind. My one momo friend who still hangs out with me shared my joy with me today and said that maybe I should stop being so prejudiced against the church. I retorted that the Mormons earned my prejudice after I’d given them a lifetime of the benefit of the doubt until I just couldn’t take their religious bigotry anymore, because I just don’t have the nerves to take it forever. Autistic nerves, apparently. The tiniest things can influence how well I sleep and that starts me off each morning on the right side or wrong side of my bed, and if I can’t get my mood under control, it compounds as the day progresses, especially on work days. I have been trying to make sense of this through a solo ADHD lens, which is what I was diagnosed with.

I like rules, structure, and once I have a little faith that the rules and structure of something can help me, and I conceive that the subject matter is not overwhelming, my savant talents kick in. I did Mormonism like this. I exited Mormonism like this. I did tea party conservatism like this. I tried liberalism like this too. I approach everything the same way: overly logical and with a peculiar fascination in things and concepts more than people. The abstract concepts are fun to systematize and categorize and make connections between them and other things I know. People don’t always make the most sense to me. But I can master the things they tell me they care about and work backwards from there. I don’t know if my dad ever realized or will ever let me explain it to him that my mastery of his religion was my way of trying to get close to him. But I tied myself in unique knots that were killing me, I felt like I was forced to wear masks that were killing me, and I didn’t know I could stop being Mormon until the knowledge snuck up on me by accident, but I couldn’t just leave until I mastered he subject material enough to confront my dad and explain it to him. He simply refused to have anything to do with my ideas once I said “atheist,” and I’ve been struggling to come to terms with that for seven years for a variety of reasons.

In ancient Canaan, to learn a celestial being’s name was to gain power over it. Jacob wrestled with an angel of God, or perhaps it was God himself depending on your interpretation, but he wanted the being’s name. The being would not give it to him, because to know such an one’s name is to have power over it. The verse says Jacob finally got the upper hand when he nabbed the being by his balls, or the “inner thigh” as the King James Version puts it. The being then gave him a new name, Israel. And Israel named the place “the face of God” because he reasoned thusly to himself, “I have seen the face of God and lived.” Jesus knew the devils he cast out by name and they had to obey him because he knew their names. There’s power in knowing the name of your demons. The ancients knew this. What we have forgotten today is that the last era’s literal demons and this era’s metaphorical demons were describing the exact same things. I doubt the boy possessed by devils was actually possessed by devils; I think he maybe he was on the spectrum severely, if there was any truth to these stories at all. Although it is true that the people who heard the story for the first time understood what the author was talking about and marveled that such usually-incurable things could be managed by the touch of Christ Jesus’s messianic hands.

I’m looking at scripture with new eyes. It is an ancient book—books actually. It is written by many authors in many different eras and the only possible thing that could make these works so timeless is if they captured the human condition in some way with words and spoke to it. Call that “channeling the Holy Ghost” if you want, but I call it speaking truth to the human condition. Speaking things that people realize they already knew, vocalizing it for them, gives the scriptures power over the souls of men. In as far as the Bible captures the human soul with words, I think it will remain with us for a long while to come, until evolution changes us enough that those words no longer ring true in any way, or until we destroy ourselves. Perhaps my relationship with religion and God has always been colored by my conditions. The scriptures helped me to “divine” the thoughts and intentions of other people, which didn’t always make sense to me. But I knew that people valued the scriptures and sought after their mysteries, and the day I truly figured that out was the day I glimpsed how to have a kind of general relationship with other people for the first time. It was shortly before my mission.

My mission terrified me. People terrify me. Change of surroundings and leaving the familiar terrifies me. But disappointing my father also terrified me. So I knew I was going to go. Between two hard places, I resolved to make a way for myself by shattering the weaker one through sheer savant force of will. I confided my fears in others, and I was surprised to find that underneath people’s (I would say Neurotypicals now) presented-fronts were feelings like mine, though usually not quite as intense or perhaps tapered by a natural ability to “people” (if “people” can be used as a verb to describe everything that autistics struggle to do) that I didn’t have for some reason. I didn’t know I was so different, and in a strange way I also didn’t know that underneath I was more similar to others than I thought before.

I think my mission was the first time that I realized I could socialize and that people would praise and love me, because before it was just my parents and people who my parents talked me up to that praised me and loved me. No one else was close enough because of my cultural barrier to understanding me, and even the Mormons in my life didn’t understand me very well. Then I tasted my mission, and my ability to recite hundreds of scriptures from memory and reason from the scriptures with a natural talent for logical reasoning smote people and gave me courage that I could do this. For the first time I had a mask that felt like my own personality…

And then Mormonism couldn’t do me the solid of actually being true. I awoke to its problems by degrees usually as I was confronting someone, either an investigator or a critic trying to sway an investigator. It deflated my hopes as I learned who Joseph Smith really was and the sorts of things he did. I felt terrible just for touching myself in the shower, but he sent men away on missions to bed their wives while they were gone and he coerced them in the most doctrinally disgusting ways. Someone who trusted me asked me if Joseph Smith married other men’s wives, and I said if that was true I would have heard about it. I was later at a computer lab on P-day. I was afraid to look it up. I looked it up on FAIR. They conceded it, first thing. I didn’t read anymore, because it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to move the goal posts, because I was trying to connect with human beings and I realized how that would look to my investigators.

I continued to learn things, because I had a reputation on my mission for being the guy you could call. I loved it. I studied everything I could get my hands on except known anti-Mormon smut. Did you know that the Community of Christ has a Vault? Well, it’s a restricted/rare books section at their Graceland University. I’ve been inside. There’s a wonderful member who knew the elders well who converted from the RLDS around the time that they marginalized the Book of Mormon. He pulled strings and got us into the restricted section. I think many young missionaries just realize that they’re in just another mid-west library of even older books than usual, but my autistic jaw was hitting the floor. It was like seeing the Mormon version of the Dead Sea Scrolls. First edition copies of books I’d read or heard about while reading other books about Mormon history. Iowa is rich with Mormon history. I didn’t know much about Mormon history at the time compared to what I know now, but I knew so much more then every single other elder I met out there. I had no equal, but I wasn’t trying to boast of myself — I just wanted people I could have back and forths eith on my level to resolve questions I had. All the day long I was there for others in that capacity: couldn’t someone be that for me just once? I had to go get answers on my own. The answer that kept coming back for me is that Mormonism is not true or at least not what I thought it was when I started out, but faith is to have a fierce irrational commitment to to presupposed ideas and to live for confirmation bias, no matter this tenuous. Just, the joy gets taken out of that when you learn so much that you start to realize that the antiMormons are consistently more honest with you than your own people. It dawned on me at some point that William law was the good guy in the Nauvoo Expositor story. That was a pure intellectual fascination by itself, but it was a thought I had as my hope for keeping this new me I had constructed out of Mormonism was slipping away as I was increasingly unable to fault people for assuming we were villainous or up to no good. The only other explanation that made any other sense is that my sins were blocking the access to the Holy Ghost I had had briefly. That was a suspicion I had always had: maybe that was the isolating factor that kept me apart from other people.

I think after all these years I’m just on the spectrum. It makes sense of so many difficult feelings that have haunted my memories. It names the demon and gives me power over it. My little breakdown and new addiction to porn two days off the plane after a lifetime of staving off those two things was an ASD meltdown, I think. A burnout. A bad one. I almost took my life. It’s also why, given the factors I’ve described about my family and my historical dependence on them, it’s been so hard to get over these things. I don’t let bad things go easily. I ruminate on them forever. I am a strong person, turns out, dealing with an invisible struggle or set of struggles that no one ever saw and that no one was in a position to recognize because of both Mormonism’s and my father’s hostility to science and academia. I used to think that my tribe’s common aversion to too much education from outside sources was just a bad hangover from how we were treated in Missouri and Illinois, and in a sense it is. I was gonna be the one solved it all, though, because I believed. I would show my people what Nephi knew: “whoso seeketh shall find, and mysteries of God will be unfolded unto them by the power of the Holy Ghost, as well as in these times as in times of old and as well in times of old as in times to come, for the course of the Lord is one eternal round.”

I really really believed with everything that I had to give that I would discover how to prove to others that it was all true, that my strugglings had not been vain. And I found out what hundreds of thousands of one-time faithfuls have discovered since shortly after the beginning in 1830: this is not what I thought and I’ve been had and now I’m going lose everything and everyone because of my faith I’ve left myself wide open to a knife in the back and everyone will stab and no one will understand and no one will feel remorse and no one will care. I will live and die being misunderstood fighting battles with all my strength and talent that no one ever saw or appreciated.

Oh, if only some tbms could have seen me in that restricted library, felt what I felt, seen the history of those books as I understood them, or looked at a first edition copy of the Book of Mormon and appreciated it the way that I did. I even knew which parts of it to ask the Masonic lodge employee to turn to to see with my own eyes that the copy I had purchased in Nauvoo and the old 1830 book in front of me were the same in every particular. I just had to know such things so I could speak truly and authentically. But the tbms in my life don’t care, which is why I burned my mission journals. Now I’m just on my own journey to figure out the human condition and make that my new set of scriptures that I can quote chapter and verse. I’m getting good at it. Maybe someday it’ll help me stop brooding and go make some friends. Lol.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/18/2021 08:22AM by Cold-Dodger.

I had this album on my mission. It counted as gospel music as far as the mission President was concerned. The locations mentioned in this album were in my mission areas sometimes. I’ve seen the prints of the cabins in the dirt at Garden Grove. I took the one man I baptized to Winter Quarters before he apostatized. A temple worker explained to us elders that we had a map of the graves, but we don’t know which one is the point of origin. On the other side of Iowa, I’ve seen the temple that Hinkley rebuilt almost exactly as the OG saints built it, the plans of which miraculously resurfaced in my lifetime. They took us elders up to the top and showed us the western view across the mighty Mississippi River.

How do I describe the feelings I had with the scenes I saw? I can describe the scenes to you and hope you know enough of the history that it incites the same feelings that swelled in my bosom at that time. I’ve seen where they killed my prophet. I stood on the spot while I was ser apart as a missionary, which I viewed equal to the callings of Paul and Silas, two by two going out and telling people what they never imagined could be true happened here in North America.

But, despite all these feelings I had, I realized that Nauvoo polygamy was a secret from the saints at the time and that William Law was the good guy in that story who was just trying to tell them about it. How do you reconcile such feelings?

I’ve since come to love Christopher Hitchens as much as used to listen to Elder Holland. He said something in God in Not Great — I can’t find it at present — that although the Mormon story is one about so many people being bamboozled, there’s a human dignity in their story. The saints did not trek west for Joseph’s polygamy, as my sixth grade history book tried to claim. They didn’t know about it until they got to Utah except for an inner circle around Brigham young made of mostly people who Joseph had initiated himself. The marched west for the Book of Mormon and the rest of it before polygamy. William Law swore allegiance to that Mormonism before he said that polygamy was not his Mormonism, and if most of the Mormons had realized in that moment who their true friends were, they would not have been taken all the way to Utah before they realized that, apparently, they’d done all that so that the men could shag multiple women and the women could pass one man and his resources around in dozens are a time. Many of them accepted it anyway, but their leaders didn’t trust them enough to tell them sooner than they did, and that same feeling haunted me throughout my tenure as a tbm.

The feelings I had for the gospel were real, and I was always true to them, but the leadership was not honest with me like the saints who thought Mormonism was one thing and got to Utah after much trevail just to find out that Mormonism was something else. I’ve also felt very much like Law must have felt when he tried to blow the whistle on the leadership’s abuse of innocent people and blanket, no-questions-asked trust and was run out of town for it. That complicates this music album, but it remains a fact that I had such good feelings for Mormonism once — I dare not deny it, because I want people to challenge my honesty and real intent and burn their fingers trying to disprove my narrative. I loved it all like few ever do. I lived for it. But not all of it was shared with me, and that’s not my problem anymore no matter what covenants I thought I made — I wasn’t the one that broke them first.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6fuFRQa6nGbg5zXTRbVXIS?si=Lb223QraSra0YYHsVtFu7A