In 1996, I was 7 turning 8, the oldest kid in a high councilman's young family recently settled down in Phoenix. It was the year my dad's best friend, his brother in law, and his father (my grandfather) died in very rapid succession. He was distraught, and so was my mother. She's a good soul but a bit of of neurotic woman, and he is her anchor of certainty about anything and everything. So when he buckled, she buckled, which she naturally tends to lean towards, and the emotional tone of our young household shifted into something tense and uncertain that I hated. There was spontaneous yelling, as well thumps on my head I never saw coming, as well as moody commandments from Mom which I never knew when she would hand down -- generally they were like fatwas against me enjoying myself in any way when she herself was in a bad mood. The only way to avoid her sometimes was to quietly stay out of her way.

In the years after 1996, Dad became increasingly emotional distant during from his children as he bottled up his grief to keep his work routine stable and threw himself on the church to deal with his pain. In the years which followed, the church would require more and more of him, because that's what they do when you're willing to do anything for them, and not only did we stop doing little things that we used to do as family -- like bike rides, trips to the park, fun excursions to this or that, or evening spent family star-gazing on our trampoline in our huge backyard -- but my mother had to pick up of the slack with him gone so much of the time. She pulled her hair out trying to keep 4 boys getting to seminary on time, getting decent grades at school, and making sure there was an impossibility of us getting involved with any girls or becoming menaces in any way. Our house was a miniature police state. There was no privacy. There was no conception that privacy was anything but an opportunity to sin. Closed doors were bad. Locked doors were unforgivable. And the media we could consume was highly restrictive. Our educations were monitored only for good grades and non-contradiction of the gospel on any important points.

I was a very quiet and isolated kid that sometimes caused teachers to worry about me, but my vast stores of recalled knowledge and my conviction that everything was fine deterred them from worrying too much. I just wanted to be left alone. It was better that way. I didn't much understand other people anyway, especially my peers. I gravitated more towards adults more. My grades were ok -- As and Bs -- and although I was very socially anxious, usually spending recess alone and barely talking to anyone, there didn't seem to be any particular reason for it that need cause any concern like abuse at home, it was just my constitution. In '97, a bunch of the parents in our stake decided to send their kids to a startup 'traditional' school which extracted higher standards of its students. As were 100-94, Bs were 93-87, Cs were 86-79, Ds were 78-69ish, and anything below two thirds of the correct answers was an F.

I remember an awful lot from very young ages, although making sense of it was another thing. I didn't get along with my peers. How to fit in was a mystery to me, and I often found myself alone. I wondered how this kept happening, because I experienced profound loneliness, but I had duties to maintain first. My best friend was my dad's best friend's only son. He was there at this new school for one year, but when his dad passed away they moved to be with family in the midwest, and I just had no one. There was one other boy my age in my priesthood quorum who was consistently present, but my best friend and I had tormented him at times and excluded him from our company as often as we could, so there were no warm feelings between me and him for a long time. I didn't know any of the girls, and I barely knew any nonmormons.

I loved learning things and knowing about the world, but I also felt a profound loyalty to my Dad and shrunk at the thought of disappointing him in any way. I was as kind as I could be to my mother, because he required it of me -- but also because when I got in trouble, it was with her, and if I rebelled against her discipline, she sicked him on me and he towered over any of us. Just the peripheral sight of him in the doorway in an angry tone coming to put knots on our heads stopped our hearts. He's over six feet tall, but he married a very short woman, and so none of their offspring ever got that tall. I feared my Dad in a very similar way to how I feared the Lord God. I loved both my Dad and the Lord, but oh did I fear them too. There was no calculus about how to make it at school except to keep my head down so that nothing could ever happen that ever needed to involve my parents in any negative way.

At church, it was very similar. My high councilman dad quickly became my own bishop, and anything that I had been tempted to confess to a bishop took a backseat to my fear of disappointing this man. His approval or at least the lack of hostility between us, especially for my mother's sake, singly drove me for along time. I ever had massive amounts of social anxiety, but I avoided growing socially and deprived myself to avoid disappointing him. They were judgemental of just about everybody I could possible be seen associating with, but if they never saw me associating with anybody I just kinda slipped through the cracks. So that's what I did. Were it not for my certainty that God existed and the fact that my parents were so visible at church, it would have pleased me to sink the back of the room and never receive any amount of attention. That's how I felt at school. At church, there was a different dynamic, although I tried to same maneuvers. At church my social aloofness was interpreted, I think, as holiness and reverence. I never did or said anything bad (although I hardly ever did or said anything at all in social contexts), also I always knew the right answers in sunday school, and my parents were grateful that they didn't need to worry about me. There were several times that ward members had singled me out and gotten my parents involved because everbody knew who I was, and so I decided to give in to the face value of the messaging about reverence being laid down to avoid that discomfort.

I hit a stride and created an image for myself that flattered my family and kept them off of my ass. But I had never been lonely in all of my existence and also more afraid to reach out for connection. I, in my small way, took my parents' emotional burdens onto myself like a type of Christ, at the very least by doing all I could do to avoid being a problem child or even bringing shame to them in anybody's gaze. I did it for them, and as miserable as it made me to exist this way, I didn't see it like that. This was my duty, and I could never do enough to meet my obligations to my family and to God, for which I felt intense guilt and secret shame. Whatever I looked like to others seemed to please all the right people and my reputation wrote itself. I don't know who people imagined me to be, but no matter how much I was praised, I never felt it. It didn't feel like they were describing me. Didn't they know what a sinner I was? I wasn't perfect, although I knew I had to be.

I didn't handle puberty well. I was never taught about libido beyond, "when you receive the priesthood, the devil is going to suddenly work overtime on you." My dad told me that. I said I didn't want the priesthood then, and he said the penalty for failing to come to the priesthood was the same as receiving it and breaking the covenant, which mystified me. It seemed a cruel trap. I didn't want these temptations to think of girls in the way I was starting to notice them, and in my mind that was because I was about to receive the priesthood. These subjects always made him uncomfortable and vague. I learned later that this was because he was afraid that educating me too much would give me ideas about how to sin I would otherwise not form on my own. He learned how to wank when his own bishop articulated the process for him in detail, and it launched him into a life of guilt and shame. He thought he was doing me a favor. Then, though, I did not know much about what was normal, and I stewed in my angst and my scrupulosity over spiritual matters as well as continue in the loneliness I had ever known.

Jr. High became high school, and towards the end of high school my anxiety and my self-loathing were beginning to turn into severe depression. I knew there was a God, although this did not make me happy. The idea of God ever made me happy. He was also such a depriving, sado-masochistic influence in my psychology. The idea of God only made me happy when I was able to keep the necessary things and get the right kinds of reinforcement to assure me I was doing things alright, because it eased my anxiety temporarily. My relationship with God was poor; however, my testimony of God, or my intellectualization of the restored gospel, was an endless source of stimulation for my mind, and I needed that like bread and water.

I got a testimony of the Book of Mormon, and I took great pains to make sure it happened just like I had been promised it would. I read the book all the way through on my own. I developed habits of prayer on my volition. I prayed when I finished to know if the book was true and like clockwork a feeling of warmth and goosebumps hit me. It was like a soft cascading wave of warm water washing up towards my head from my legs, but from the inside, and when it hit my heart my heart began to burn with joyous heat and an indescribable joy smote me where I kneeled. I mean... that seemed pretty case-closed at the age of seventeen. There was a God, the Book of Mormon was true, and I needed to let down my walls and go see my bishop for the first time in a sense. I wanted my years of lonely angst to end and for a new dawn to come where I felt more worthy, could enjoy human company better, and finally figured out why I had such a damn hard time figuring people out and even feeling comfortable in my own skin. He almost immediately told me I was forgiven as I told him the years I had kept my innermost heart from the priesthood leaders, and I was relieved but also I thought it couldn't be that simple. What did he know of my heart? How much of me could he have possibly seen to pronounce such things with certainty? Is he just saying that? And that quickly led to worse thoughts: oh God, I've crossed a bridge I can never go back on. This man had dirt on me now, and that terrified me, because I had worked so hard for so many years to be the perfect son in his eyes. If I ever didn't want to be religious, even the particular ways he thought a religious man should act, he would use this against me as I had seen him do to countless others. I have a gift for afflicting myself, probably courtesy of my mother's DNA. It was hard to escape the nagging suspicion that this was evidence of the devil's hold on me; like the Spirit of God trying to take residence in my heart but not before I did a lot more tidying up first, which I had always been taught meant going to your bishop.

I became radically transparent with him, almost daily, since we lived in the same house, and he imparted as much wisdom to me as I could. I had never spent more 1-on-1 time with him since I was a kid. He made me certain promises in the name of the Lord that if I would go on my mission and do my best, a sense of security about the Lord's love and forgiveness would come. I began to try and master the scriptures as well as I assumed he had them mastered.

I took everything he had ever taught me on my mission and tried to do the things I thought he would do as I argued the restored gospel with all those midwestern protestants. I did not have a good time. I wanted my mission to be perfect. I wanted forgiveness of sins. I wanted to share the glimpses of joy I had had on my religious journey with others and more securely obtain that joy for myself on a more regular basis. I think my heart was pure then in any and all Christian senses, but it was to no avail. I was not making relationships with people so much as I was maximizing my intellectual awareness of my surroundings and figuring out for myself how things worked. Relationships are nothing to me. I didn't know why. I don't think about people that way. I want to love people and enjoy people the way other people seem to enjoy people, but I'm just never on the same social frequency. I do feel connections when people describe particular experiences I have also had, and I love it when they will converse with me about those things for as long as they will, but they inevitably lose interest in that hyperfocused topic sooner than I do, and once the conversation turns elsewhere I just... idk... I have nothing to contribute and revert to my socially anxious state. On our missions, we're supposed to be hyperfocused on the gospel, and so if I read the scriptures for days on end like it was the best book I had ever read, that just made me look leaps and bounds ahead of the other missionaries. I enjoyed it when my reputation became such that other elders started coming to me for verses to use on tricky subjects. I found a golden investigator and baptized him, and everything seemed like it would work out according to my father's promise. This is the human connection I always wanted, I thought, and I felt worthy for a moment in time.

And then it all went sideways. The man I baptised got anti'd by his Catholic mother-in-law. He learned things about the church we had not told him. What really threw him for a loop was the concept of many gods. I felt my guilt returning. God... I knew about these things and studied them more than my colleagues and more than the mission president was comfortable with, but they counseled us not to bring them up unless we had to. There were no resources in Preach my Gospel for how to have these deep doctrinal discussions. There were no gospel topics essays yet. There was nothing. I only had myself to try and fix this, and I rolled up my sleeves and got to writing this man a letter that would convince him of the truth of Exaltation. In the process, I transformed my own testimony. For a while I was daily immersed in the King Follett Discourse and the Bible trying to prove that our views about God made sense and were consistent with scripture.

We're only supposed to use the quad and the approved missionary library. I read Jesus the Christ before I left my first area, and I found references to God having once been a man tucked away in the notes of one of the chapters. Page 158, I think. It's a quote from one of the versions of the King Follett Discourse. I could tell Smith was paraphrasing some verses from the Bible as he talked about the son doing nothing but what he has seen the father do and as the father has power so does the son have power. I went and found them: John 5:9 & 14 and 10:17-18. Just for good measure, I added Roman 6:9 to this scripture proof to prove that Jesus could not die again, which in James 2:26 was defined as the body without the spirit. So logically, Jesus was overtly being accused in the book of John, "thou, being a man, makest thyself God," which he responded to by quoting Psalms 82. At other times, he explained that the son had power even as the father had power and that the son does nothing but what he sees the father do, and clarified five chapters later that specifically the Son had power to lay down his life and take it again, so that he has a body, and he does nothing but what he has seen the father do, which means the Father at some point laid down his life and took it again, so that he has a body of his own. Everybody in their own tangible, immortal body of flesh and bone. These ideas and their evident presence in scripture riveted me and I thought about them endlessly.

My letter became an epistle and slowly turned into a book, which I continued working on even after I was transferred away. We eventually did meet up, and he told me he didn't care to even look at it, which was devastating. So he was just done, and I had failed. Along with some failures that I blamed on myself for not being as worthy as I could have been, and sank into a deep depression which doubled as my former sins returned. The last quarter of my mission, I put on over thirty pounds from eating comfort food. Not only was a failure of a missionary, but real life was about to take me back into its expectations. I would need to find employment or perhaps go to college first, and I was still suffering the same social cluelessness and general anxiety about independence I had ever suffered on top of new griefs. I drew myself apart searching my soul, just like the hymn says. According to all I had ever been taught, I was failing to measure up, and I knew in my heart of hearts there was no forgiveness from the Lord.

I was home all of three days before I had fullblown nervous breakdown. It was bad. I didn't want to live anymore. Nothing made sense. I had worked quietly my whole life to either avoid attention or only garner the prescribed kinds of attention, and all of a sudden I needed attention and care in the worst possible ways, and my parents did not know how to give it or why I was being this way. I was being a burden, and I was also losing my reputation. Dad, who was in the stake presidency now, said he knew a guy who could help, and that was the first time I ever saw a shrink or a counselor for any reason. Just the fact that I had to see one was a sign that I was broken. Two chains of thought were forming parallel to each other in my mind at this point: my testimony sense of things, which was often too depressing to contemplate, and a strangely sober logical and present mind which said my dad was a quack, God was not real, and I deserved better than this shit. As I went through the motions of LDS counseling and Addiction Recovery (for porn, oh brother), I could tell I knew more than these men about an awful lot in general and also that they didn't care about anything except keeping me Mormon. Sure, if I was a danger to myself, they cared, but beyond that all that mattered was how Mormon I stayed. It was a strange social dynamic to be able to spit self-condemning scripture faster than my counselor could counter it. My head was swimming with things I had learned out there from Bible-thumpers about the church that had me, and in my crisis people left me alone and I got space and had time to think. The counelor asked me why I was so relentless in my self-condemnation. Because, we're supposed to be honest, I told him. He said honesty means making honest assessments about how things are, no more and no less, and being any harsher on myself than I actually deserved was dishonest. He got me there. I tried retorting with scripture again, and he stopped me and said I had to make a consicous decision to be kinder to myself and to filter my religion through a lens of unconditional self-esteem. I had never thought that way before and did not know such thinking was allowed. It seemed to go against everything I had been taught, but then again here I was at the direction priesthood leaders to receive this guy's instruction, and what I took from it in summary was that I deserved to be happy and I would have to think for myself to get there. So, in classic me-fashion I thought this new logic all the way to its logical conclusion over the next several years and became an atheist while I was seeking life-answers at BYU-Idaho.

If I'm being strictly honest in my assessment of my perception of reality: there is no God. What had I experienced when I prayed about the Book of Mormon? Well, powerful emotions, to be sure, but was that God? Did that trump evidences I could see with my own eyes that contradicted the church? What about Smith's devilish polygamous behavior and his dishonesty with Emma? Was I to receive religion from this man or be lectured by people who derive their authority to dictate religion from his authority? And what other religion would I even bother with having such a strong preference for the Mormon theology? What other church wants my heretical ass? I had no desire. I knew for a long time other churches were incorrect and I just added Mormonism to that pile. There were the essays coming out in 2014 which meant I hadn't been crazy to notice such things on my mission. The part of me that poked holes in things and thought with a sober objectivity had always been right, and I had abused myself trying to shoehorn my soul into my father's mold. The overpowering feeling I had while in LDS counseling was that I was not there because I had wrested the scriptures or not tried hard enough. I was trying too hard, and it was sapping all my energy just to survive my constant self-indictment in my mind. The Book of Mormon was supposed to bring healing, because it's supposed to bring a man nearer to God than any other book. I had put that to the test, and it didn't work for me. That's all there is to it, and I'm too Mormon in my axiomatic persuasions to care for another theology and too socially anxious and increasingly socially indifferent to care about church just socially. I think I'm mostly just happy knowing stuff and having my perspective to ruminate on in my silent aloofness, but I do like to share my mind with people that wanna hear it.

I'm happy most of the time these days though with occasional mood swings but that's just life. I found out at the age of 32 that I am on the autistic spectrum. huh. That would have been nice to know a lot sooner, and it has been the capstone on the very long chapter of my life full of inexplicable angst and social difficulty. Through all of this, I have risen above the shit the Mormons have thrown at me for leaving by taking the high standards of honesty they taught me and using that to my own advantage. As long as I am honest with myself, no more and no less than is true, in all nuances, I can deal with my anxiety enough. I have a very articulated sense of what is true, and it is consistent and well-reasoned and it is mine. No one can take it from me unless they have arguments and evidence, and if they have wherewith to back it up, I'm not even mad if they change my mind. But the days of working backwards from received positions are over. I do not offload the burden for knowing things to other people. I don't trust other people. People lie. People take advantage. Also, people are stupid. My mind is unique, and I am the only one who ever should have been deciding what I need and what a human mind is allowed to think. I'm a bit of a loner and a loser, but aren't we all these days. Society has a mass epidemic of interconnected loneliness.

I think what happened is that my undiagnosed autism got the better of me and got worse after I fell into the trap of a gifted child trying to be an emotional sponge and crutch for religious parents going through a hard time who used it without thinking and expected it without appreciating what I was going through to give them this version of my self and gave back too little unconditionally when I needed it the most. I like seeing things for what they are, and this is the best and shortest description of my pscyh profile I can give. It's interesting. I can place myself in a larger objective context, which is how I like to see the world. I don't see things in terms of a hierarchy of relationships... when it's up to me. I see things apparently, objectively, as they appear to be and as I know logically they are. It thrills me endlessly just to think: to know truth, to form connections between ideas, and to realize new things. That was always how I worshiped God and meditated on the gospel, and now it's how I enjoy thinking about the universe. It's the aha moments I loved when I was Mormon; revelation was when I felt pure intelligence flowing into me, just like Smith said in the King Follett discourse. If Mormonism is the truth and nothing but the truth from whichever source it may come down, no matter what the truth may be and as long as you can discern it for what it is with certainty, then I guess I'm still Mormon in the only sense I ever cared for the faith nix a sense of duty and obligation. I am an honest man, whatever else I am, and I'm proud of that ability. With it, I'm able to get a certainty and an awareness of my environment, especially my social environment, I never could have had any other way and use my powers of articulation to climb out of mental quagmires I could not otherwise surmount. I have a unique perspective on the universe that I love to meditate on. I love the clarity I have these days.