There’s a lot of unresolved stuff rising to the surface in my mind as I do essential work and then quarantine in my home where I live alone. I just deleted Facebook, and I’m going to make sure it’s permanent. I have just myself and my thoughts and my ability sit quietly with them. I think about my family often, my parents and my brothers, about the patronizing way they see me nowadays, about my limitations to change the fact. It keeps coming back around that moment where I tried to “come out” to my father only to be immediately shot down. I didn’t get past telling him that I was an atheist now and that I’d been reading “anti-Mormon” literature before the wall went up and he forbade me from telling my mother. I was going to tell my mother though, because this development was just the last development in my mental health journey which I had been sharing every detail with them up until it veered off into apostasy territory. That was when I found you guys. I waited a year, and then the occasion of my closeted gay brother being pressured to serve a mission gave me an opportunity to come out with that last detail. I just wanted us all to let each other be who we were without the hard feelings that Mormons usually have for apostates and homosexuals. To that end did I desire to deconstruct their faith, just enough at least. My father told her before I could. So she was all walled off and distant by the time I cornered her and was not going to listen to anything I had to say either.

That man. I hate that I love him. This would all be so easy if my parents were terrible people —- discovering that the church wasn’t true would have been like Harry Potter meeting Hagrid and leaving the Durseleys for Hogwarts —- but they're not. They love me and they mean well in their own way. All the same, I can’t stand their nonsense anymore, especially with my mental health being what it is.

I’m like a crashed aviator on an island full of ooga booga people whose local religion just happens to forbid them from helping lost aviators fix their airplanes. They have the resources I need if they would just help me, but instead they turn the ire of their tribe against me and get furthermore enraged when I try to deconstruct their faith in Ju Ju who lives at the top of the island mountain. They’re human beings, dutiful husbands and wives who are fathers and mothers to wonderfully inquisitive and innocent children, but their culture is backwards in a few departments that just happen to be all the ones I needed to be amendable to reason to get airborne again. I want to soar through the skies of this world, and they want me to give up on my foolish and sinful aspirations and just settle down and worship Ju Ju with them. They keep asking me if their company is that terrible, and it kind of is... but saying that out loud makes me sound like such an asshole because none of these people have offered me offense out of ill will. When they offer me offense, they think they’re only doing it in defense.

Let’s complicate the analogy further by making the wannabe aviator a native of the island who has tasted the outside world and wants more of it. So I’m not just a heathen, I’m a traitor. I should know better. I was able to convince them that Ive been in a lot of emotional pain and I’m only on a journey to find my peace and I don’t intend evil on my birth tribe, and that disarmed the contention a little —- but not enough. They still won’t help me, and they won’t listen to my story about how I came to be certain Ju Ju wasn’t real and the outside world was not all evil.

It’d be a lot easier to find my place in the wider world if my own support network didn’t hate me. Maybe they don’t hate me, per se, just my new identity and everything I value now. I can’t fully articulate all the ways that love and hate are tangled together in this difference of faiths. Why would anybody want to leave the warmth and comfort of their little island surrounded by all their childhood friends and family where everything is known and clearly defined and anger Ju Ju by flying to strange lands? They just don’t understand what it’s like to be cursed with a racing, inquisitive mind that won’t be content with nonanswers forever, a mind that won’t forever tolerate the manipulative emotional means employed to keep tribal members from asking too many questions.

Turns out I can fix the plane and get airborne again on my own, but it’s a shoddy patch job subject to frequent break down, it took me way longer than it needed to, and I have grown resentful of the mocking tribalists who stood at afar gleefully smiling at every setback as though I were about to throw my wrench down on the beach, burn the plane, don a loincloth again and worship Ju Ju contently for the rest of my natural life. That’s not how this works. Well, sometimes that’s how it works when someone who only nominally worshipped Ju Ju but never fully committed to it gets ideas about leaving the tribe but never fully commits to that either and is at last sucked back in to the tribe’s control by the great social difficulties they imposed on defying them. That isn’t me, though. I was one of their most faithful. I tried to make sense of it all a little too hard, and it started exacting a toll on my happiness because there was ultimately no sense to be made of it. I knew the Ju Ju lore inside and out, at least the correlated version, and then I saw the mortal man behind the curtains and I want out and I don’t care where I go as long as it’s not here. I refuse to believe that this shit is as good as it gets. Ju Ju’s rules are arbitrary bullshit, and this family contention wouldn’t have happened if this silly tribe would just be content with some of their own wanting to explore other avenues. Why must I choose between seeing other lands and having a good relationship with my father and my mother? But I must. Was it a crime that I saw through Ju Ju and realized that there was a world full of people beyond our shores who had other ways of seeing and doing things and maybe the peace I sought had an answer there? Who was physically hurt by my questions? The only people hurt by it were a bunch of naive tribalists who have been conditioned by their elders, always fearful of a mass exodus from the island and thereby the death of their way of life and all the comforts of the static familiar, into perceiving certain questions from their own children as an invasion by the outside world intent on the destruction of Ju Ju worship. I was only looking for peace and truth, and I ran face first into that brick wall.

I may never find a place in that outside world where I feel like I belong in all the same ways I once felt like I belonged on this little island, but I have the right to try and I have the right to defy those sneer at me for it. I do love those people, but not that much. I just need a break, and this quarantine happened to be the perfect excuse.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2020 03:50AM by Cold-Dodger.

I'm not at all sure they love *you*. What they love is their idealized mormon version of you. They love Fake You. There's a huge difference.

It's OK to not love your parents or even to respect them. More than a few of us have had to make that leap. You may not ever reach that point, but if you do find it necessary, there's no reason to beat yourself up over it.

That seems pretty accurate. The idealized Mormon version of me. Have you ever read the Scarlet Letter? Chapter eleven: “The interior of a heart” describes what motivates the preacher who got the woman preggers. No one knows it was him. He carries that secret burden. But he can’t own up it in public because he was this young, up-and-coming star in their community. They all look up to him and he can’t own the shame of telling them that their idealized version of him is the damnedest lie there was — he’s just too much of a coward to do what knows he has to do. The only solace he gets, the only hope of redemption, is by throwing his whole soul into the religion, which ironically is why they have such a high view of him. It’s a feedback loop of hypocrisy. But he watches what the community has done to his beloved, the woman who wears her shame stitched onto her dresses in the form of a scarlet letter A for adulteress, and he just can’t do it because it means the end of his social standing. He knows God won’t forgive him unless he finally sabotages his image and makes a public confession. Chapter eleven describes what such a heart feels like with such exquisite accuracy, it must be that Hawthorne was speaking from experience, although whatever his reality was was probably nothing as grandiose and over-the-top as the story in the novel — but that’s the purpose of fiction: to tell the truth about real life by making up a story that people will interest people. I am not the only person who has ever felt like that.

But it’s wonderful in some ways to face your fear, to let the community judge you as it will, to place whatever scarlet letter on you it deems necessary, and move on with your life. The preacher in Hawthorne’s novel dies of the burning shame in his bosom while his beloved learns to live with the community’s prejudices, builds a house outside of the town, and finds new life and joy in raising her daughter. I don’t think the point of the story is to say that the priests are often the vilest sinners. I think the point is that the puritanical way that everyone lives in that community is all self-enforced misery, none of it necessary at all, even though it’s the social reality they live in nonetheless. Their taboos don’t protect them from any actual threat: it just tortures good people for no reason, sometimes their best and brightest, but when they con someone into confessing to a sin it makes people feel like there’s a point to all their nonsense so it reinforces their culture.

The good news is that sometimes people can move on from patronizing behavior, but that can take a long period of you going off and doing other things.

You are still a lovely writer. What gives you self esteem these days? In what areas would you like to build it?

Well, I got let go from a good job around the time the virus hit and everything went into lockdown. I got another job because I couldnt wait for the overburdened UI office to get back to me. I quit that one, because it was awful. I’m currently getting by as delivery driver for one of those food apps, and the last thing I need right now is my family sneering at my misfortune like it means something more than that times are bad.

I’m not doing great right now, which is why I’m posting with some frequency. Not feeling very accomplished. Had to listen to family for the last couple months argue that the virus isn’t real, that we’re all victims of a liberal plot to grab power, that if it is real it is hardly more dangerous than the flu, and it just set me off for the nth time. I’m so tired of having my head screwed on for what feels like the first time in my life only to be treated by the family like I’m insane, and furthermore to be gagged from speaking my mind around the family like I’m dangerous somehow, all while they get sucked up in the cult of a man who couldn’t be more ungodly and more dishonest.

Things are backwards, and it feels like nothing matters half the time.

I too think you write beautifully. It sounds like a very frustrating, looking-glass world where the psychiatric patiens are in charge...

Keep writing.

Ugh. Yes, I imagine that would get old. In your shoes, I'd be taking a long break from them as well.

I think it's great that you were able to find work. A lot of people can't say the same thing. You might want to use this time to think about where you want to go in life, both in your work life and in your personal life. You are still young, and you are smart and able. If you chart where you want to go, and work for it, you can get there.