Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
(
)
Date: October 23, 2022 07:04AM
For starters, I have two diagnoses that have tinted my experience. I found out about ADHD at 26 and ASD level 1 at 32.
I like talking about them, because the church does not get to tell my story for me or even tell me what it means after they humor me.
Because the church is wrong,
dead wrong,
provably wrong,
like
the-only-reason-its-still-around-is-because-its-a-cult wrong.
And after all that has happened in my life, the church does not get to pretend none of it ever happened.
The church is a liar,
an abuser,
an accomplice to abuse,
and a zombie institution
-- one that likes to afflict the comfortable
But sometimes never get around to
Comforting the afflicted
if it would mean challenging their own comfort levels --
That just won't f'ing die.
I know Mormons are just "protecting their testimonies" from me when I talk like this, but the abuse I took in the church for years as a boy is buried in that experience. It's a difference of perception, I suppose. You, my tbm reader, perceive me as an angry apostate taking out his wounded feelings on God's true church and trying to disturb the peace of many because I don't have any. But that's not accurate in my view. I will show you what you understand about myself these days and how I took my peace from the jaws of hell all by myself. No one in the church or in my family was ever gonna give it to me unconditionally. I had to figure it out on my own.
Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder is a genetic condition where I have some 30 - 80% more "mouths" on the cell walls of my axons that re-uptake the neurotransmitter dopamine. This is system-wide, no matter what kind of neuron we're talking about. So I experience restlessness across my whole body, the "hyperactivity" in ADHD. Dopamine is a necessary food to coax neurons into "firing" when you want them too. So picture a nervous system that on a cellular level can't sustain dopamine at levels necessary to coordinate the organism, and you'll begin to understand what ADHDrs suffer every day. The "attention deficit" is how this dopamine issue affects different parts of my higher functions, especially how is screws with my basal ganglia which is responsible for many things but especially putting an emotional spin on my perceptional reality. My emotions have always been very chaotic, fast-paced, and hard to keep up with, which naturally has in itself made connecting with others hard. In my body, in my peripheral nervous system, I can't sit still even for a moment without my boredom turning into a kind of physical pain. Despite these disabling circumstances, I always -- up until I came undone at the age of 21 -- performed what was expected of me -- got good grades in school, set the example for my brothers as the oldest in a bishop's family, served a mission, and generally represent the church and my family to others.
The autism spectrum is new knowledge for me, but I'm picking up on it as fast as I used to absorb scriptures into my long-term memory. Autism is what's called a "developmental disability," which means it's hard to pin down exactly what it is and what it does. It's all-encompassing. There's still a lot of research being done about how to define it, but CD's take of Saturday evening this October 22, 2022, is as follows: I have one or multiple genetic mutations that affect how my neuron's behave, which affected how my brain grew from a germ into a soul. I'm a human being with all the necessary parts anybody else has, but my perceptual reality may be a bit off the mainstream bell curve a little. I know one common genetic mutation that causes autism-like symptoms, which has surprisingly been reversed in some experiments with lab rats, is one affecting the sodium scaffolding around the axons and dendrite connections that insulates and helps carry the signal and support how far a neuron can reach to other neurons. But before anybody gets their hopes up that autism can be cured, consider that this is only one mutation and these rodents were genetically engineered from the ground up for a cure to be administered by the scientists. Even if the mutations can be altered to something "normal", a human being would still be stuck with the brain that their natural development doled out to them, which isn't all bad, but it is hella quirky. So perhaps symptoms can be improved, but the condition itself not reversable. To reverse it we're talking about growing a brain from scratch or fundamentally altering who this person is as a whole soul.
Autistic spectrum disorders come in many varieties, but they all include common symptoms including social difficulties, rigid interests, narrow thinking, difficulty adapting to change, physical tics, and an almost alien ability to focus on one's narrow special interest seemingly without end. There are three levels, which as I understand it have more to do with how independent a person can be than how capable their minds are in an academic context. But there is some correlation. Level 3 is "classic" autism. Level 1 is what we used to called Asperger's Syndrome, and level 2 is everything in between, or something along those lines. I am level 1 ASD. I am an aspie. I am a high-functioning autistic man. And that's ok as long as I know what it is and what it does.
But what does autism FEEL like from the inside? In a word: anxiety. Anxiety is my dominant emotion, and there are a lot of reasons for that. It's the difficulty I have figuring out what other people want from me, the difficulty of living in a social world designed for a different kind of mind, and the difficulty of just processing my own senses from moment to moment. My ability to reciprocate emotions from other people with my own appropriate responses is "nerfed" -- as the gaming community would say -- because I don't understand other people the way other people understand people. But one of the ways my brain compensated for this weakness was by buffing some other circuits related to the use of my frontal lobes. There is a sharp intelligence watching the world from behind my eyes, but it doesn't have the arsenal that a more-typically-developed human mind would have, so despite my greatest strength it is restricted to certain contexts that have more to do with objective reality than social reality, and I unfortunately spend most of my intellectual capital just trying to figure people out and do the "adulting" routine every day.
I wouldn't be who I am with the 'DD and the 'Tism, but it has been hard. I used to believe in some local folklore that spirits in the Great Before (I'm never calling it the preexistence again after watching that Pixar movie about the Jazz teacher) chose the afflictions that they were going to be born with. That isn't doctrinal, but I could easily see some general authority picking it up, sharing it in Conference, and Mormon culture just running with it, because it's utterly non-offensive to the doctrine and it blames people for deliberately choosing their own disabilities, so you know Mormonism gonna love a teaching like that. I didn't know what I had specifically, but I knew whatever it was, I had chosen it because of the lessons it would teach me. The thing about viewing your afflictions as teachers, though, is that you have to survive the experience for it to make you stronger, and I want to share with you what goes through a human mind as it gets close to the edge of suicide.
Trigger warning.
I am the oldest son in a bishop family of all boys. I know my parents loved me the best they knew how, but the "best they know how" just kinda sucks in light of their attitude towards learning new things from "liberal" or "woke" Gentile academia. My father was not only my bishop, he's a Chiroquackter, the worst kind who teaches people that crystals can cure cancer and vaccines cause autism. He spends the energy of his manhood warning people against evidence-based medicine. He imagines that he has the evidence on his side, but as a Mormon he never learned how to use confrontations with messengers weilding contradictory evidence to question his received opinions. You know how that goes. Imagine a young man back in the early eighties just out of high school attending a lecture at Graham Community College in east Arizona where a "Doctor" of Chiropractic laid it all out how the whole thing was a con from the beginning. What would a Mormon steeped in 80s conservative politics from the Thatcher area think? (That's where the man who wrote The Miracle of Forgiveness grew up by the way.) He would think something like "ooh, these are those evil and conspiring men in the last days that DC 89 (the Word of Wisdom) warned me about, and I want to be part of this fight for the rest of my life." And this man married my mother and I was their first little project, a plastic developing mind genetically programmed (as we all are) into downloading all of our parents' bullshit and mimic it until we figure out what's going on around us.
I had no siblings older than me to compare myself to. I had no friends at school in the early years. Home was the only place I felt loved and wanted. I didn't trust "the wisdom of the world" in many different but all-equally devastating ways. My best tools for figuring out how I felt every day at school were Mormonism and my dad's distrust of mainstream medicine and his politics generally. My mother was always on my ass like ugly on an ape trying to get me to behave the right ways, because we were always watched and evaluated from near and far. From the get-go when my dad graduated the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and we moved to Phoenix for him to begin his career, the local priesthood authorities noticed him and began to use him, like the church does to any hard-to-dislike able-bodied white dude that radiates charisma and uses it to shepherd people into the church. I had to learn how to represent and maintain my family's dignity and my own -- all despite the social difficulties of the undiagnosed autism and the ways that ADHD made it hard to read or focus on anything, really. Meanwhile the autism made it hard to know what social rules were in play and how people meant the social cues they vibed at me while they talked. I always understood their words just fine. I understand words like a living, walking thesaurus, but words can mean so many different things. I have a purely objective cognitive approach to reality that has not always benefited me or endeared me to my fellow beings.
I internalized my upbringing and any problems I had with what I was being served were on me, so I hid those parts of myself and suppressed them. Both the autistic and ADHD communities on the internet call it "masking". Masking can be very damaging when done for years and years on end since early childhood, because that soul behind the mask can lose all sense of what his or her own emotional needs are. But back then it was just necessary to please my parents and keep the church off of my back. They knew I struggled at school, but I always got good grades, so how bad could my experience be, really? I complained early on, but they did the Lehi maneuver on me -- "it is not us that requires this of thee, but the Lord who has commanded it." I had no choice but to operate within these parameters, and I had no clue how even the other Mormon children grew up, much less the nevermos. I did what I had to do to survive, and I shoved my own needs way down and just tried to hold on for the ride. I let my parents steamroll my emotional being and shape my presented personality. I held that pose for a long time, but I'm only human.
I got good grades, because school was a window into the world that my Mormon culture and my autism would have prevented me from seeing and that my ADHD would have prevented me from enjoying as a contributing member of it. I was never taught that education was evil; I was taught to obtain as much of it as possible, which is a mantra they literally made me say every Wednesday Evening during my teenage years. I didn't think there was any bona fide conflict between the truth and the church, only in how my liberal teachers presented their subjects to me. I was required to learn what was necessary to pass tests and get a good grade report, but I was also expected to hold the whole of it in skepticism pending the church's review. At some point, though, my parents had other sons to worry about and I realized that I knew more in a retention and information recall sense than they did about a great many things. There's this thing called the need for closure, which is a cognitive bias every human being has. We can't have open-ended questions nagging at us, we gotta have the answers, we gotta see how it ends, we gotta know how the universe it put together at least well enough not to think about it constantly. I have this too, turbo-charged. I knew there was more truth to academic knowledge than my father would ever admit, and he knew that the level on which I thought of such things were beyond him. He knew that for a very long time. For years, my developing mind figured there must be answers for whatever causes my anxiety and the feelings of disconnection from other human beings buried somewhere in all that knowledge, but I was careful not to accept anything that I knew contradicted something I "knew" to be true religiously. So I squared the circle the best I could. It sorta worked for a while, because my rational mind was still developing -- it doesn't finish for men until around 25 -- and my awareness of what is out there in terms of truth and knowledge was still growing. So there was room for me to believe that I could reconcile the growing number of issues I had on the shelf in the back of my mind. My social life at school was otherwise imperceptible to me. I know I had people who would say they were my friends, but I couldn't tell. There were people whose company I prefered over others, but everybody everywhere caused me anxiety all the time. I preferred thinking about things to being with people, and I figured someday I find the keys that helped me unblock whatever it was that made people such a mystery to me. Everybody kept saying I was smart.
At church, I had many of the same social issues with my peer group, but not the adults who knew my parents. So I gravitated towards their company and their approval, whether they or I realized what I was doing at the time. So, the messaging of the church got to me from perhaps an earlier age than it does for many others. These adults keep all-but screaming at their youth every day of every week and twice as hard on Sundays that the restored gospel is all that matters and if we would just read the book and pray, we would come to understand how they know that it's true. Ok: that's a very straightforward, objective test, or as much as any subjective emotions-based test can be. I immersed myself in the scriptures every day, and it didn't help, because people don't stop and think about just how much hellfire/brimstone negative talk is in the standard works. How many people who wave off this criticism of their religion actually inform their religious paradigm with nothing but scripture to an autistic degree? But that's how I approached the scriptures, and it set me up for scrupulosity and depression on top of all the angst I already had.
Then they made my dad the bishop I had to confess my baggage to, and for how that felt, please consult any number of the posts I've made here about my life. It took me a while to muster up the courage to go tell him anything, but by the time I did I was half gone to my self-loathing in isolation. I pissed away years of my life under the impression that I would be hated for these sins and evil would be spoken of me if I couldn't get a handle on it, and, well, was I wrong? Perhaps I was wrong about the intensity with which it would occur, but I feared correctly but I feared obsessively perhaps. What makes me poignantly salty about this period of my life is that knowledge of what is normal was kept from me, curricularly speaking, and I was also shamed and admonished not to teach myself anything about it, and I obeyed, trusting that they knew things I didn't know that ignorance was preferable to knowledge somehow. My trust has never been so misplaced, but placing my trust where I did is also the most natural thing in the world given my circumstances.
In my prepubescent years, I struggled to fit in with my peers and to be interested in anything they found interesting. This was not because I didn't care; it was because I couldn't figure out how. Did everyone attend some seminar I missed? Are there secret rules written somewhere people aren't sharing with me? It's not altogether unheard of to think an entire playground of schoolchildren would conspire against the weird quiet boy. I was never overtly picked on, but that was in large part because I knew how to avoid that sort of attention, although it also cost me friendships I may have enjoyed sooner than I did. It never spared my feelings, though. I felt all of the loneliness. I'm an empathic person. Autism does not mean I'm devoid of emotion and the desire to share it; people only get that impression because a lot of people on the spectrum across the spectrum are so so good at masking their authentic emotional beings in human company...
If they can, they do, usually, because they don't have the ability to guard their hearts in real time from teasing and less-than-approving social cues from their peers like the rest of the neuro-typical population can. The only time I didn't have anxiety at school was when I was rapturously immersed in what was being taught in class, and the same goes for church. I knew there were conflicting messages being taught at home/church and at school, but school was such a cold, disconnected place to me anyway, although I loved learning. On the flip side, church was a cold, disconnected place too, but I "knew" that was because of my sins and if I had more of the holy ghost perhaps it could be different. I cultivated my testimony, and people noticed my intellectual prowess with parables and scriptural interpretations and obscure things said at various points that people knew they could look up, but they could also just ask me and I could regurgitate much of it from memory. This reputation developed over a period of time, and it got progressively adept, but this was the closest thing I had every experienced to human connection, and you can understand why I was loathe to risk losing it. So I kept the ball spinning. I kept masking, although there was private battle raging in my heart to make sense of science verses religion and figure out why I never felt connected to anybody anywhere hardly ever. In its worst expression, I came to understand the challenges I had always had as a sinful nature -- curiosity was a sin to me back in those days as it is to many mormons. I couldn't stop the critical voice in the back of my mind from picking apart everything that was being presented to me as true and necessary to believe as true. Part of me knew on some level I was being subtly and at least mildly emotionally blackmailed to encourage a Mormon development, but the thought of being emotionally alone in the world without any allies terrified me more. SO I thought-stopped as hard as it was possible for me to do and always said prayers in my heart begging forgiveness and went back to trying to make sense of my religion in light of what I knew generally.
It would have been worth it if the feeling of connection ever came. Hell, if just the anxiety stopped, I would have settled into whatever habits kept the anxiety away. But it never did. There was this subtle body language thing that happens when I talked to a bishop, even when it was my dad. I come in obviously ridden with anxiety at probably-should-see-a-professional levels, and they assume I am about to tell them where the body is buried but then all I confess to is very normal things they hear from youth all the time. Oh good grief, but where is all this angst coming from then? They assume I'm hiding something. They ask leading questions, even if it's very subtle, but 1-on-1 and with God watching and my salvation on the line, it's hard for even me to miss those social cues. I know what they're doing, and I take it as accusation, one that I'm probably guilty of. I know there must be more that I'm not confessing, because the Lord's steward in Israel would not be eyeing me like that if there wasn't more. Talk about drawing myself apart searching my soul. It's like, you get done unpleasantly vomiting the contents of your spiritual stomach for this man to peruse so he can stand in judgement of what you've been eating, and then he reads your body language, which to him cries out that there's more, and so he asks for the rest of it. It's jarring. Jesus, what does it take to repent? This process never gave me any peace. I could always think of more I hadn't told the bishop, and I didn't want to share everything -- is sharing every last detail necessary? Well, a voice in my mind said yes, and it was the voice that during the years I hadn't told anybody anything about myself accused me for keeping secrets. I don't "hear voices." By a voice, I mean myself, but my mind does have automatic thoughts like that all the time, especially as a youth. If I am hearing voices, they are very sober when analyzing objective things, just not when they're analyzing me or other people in a social-emotional way, which is how I know it's just an autistic trait I'm dealing with.
This social dynamic I have described was rehashed on my mission with my mission president in between very stressful social encounters where I was legitimately trying to share what I thought to be the necessary truth for people to know to be saved and exalted only to have them crap all over it and tell me things I never wanted to know but couldn't protest once I was acquainted with what they were talking about. The MTC was the most agonizing social change of my life, and in like manner as I had done before there was nothing to be done but to lean into it, because out of the blue right before I left my mom had threatened to turn me out of house if I came back early. It would have been just a silly vote of no-confidence in me if I had found a way to prove that she was wrong about my intentions. My procrastination of my mission papers were the same sort of thing that kept me up late many nights doing homework, it had nothing to do with my desire to apostatize. But she vocalized her interpretation of my body language and behavior to my face and showed me that whatever I had assumed her thoughts about were, I was completely wrong. I didn't know what to make of that, and it scared me to push boundaries. Suffice it to say that I poured my everything into my mission to make at least one convert and secure my own testimony.
I did find one convert, but I quickly lost him to anti-mormon literature that his Catholic mother had googled. This and some other fights that ensued with people over my integrity and the honesty of the institution I represented forced me to spend many long hours in the quad and sometimes on FAIR's website during P-Day thinking about things that wouldn't be officially addressed by the church until the gospel topics essays were quietly published on their website. There were no resources for me back then or anybody, and as far as that went, I was the closest thing to "the answers" that many people had access to. I did not resent this role that was put upon me to be the living encylopedia/ reference sheet for people troubled by anti-mormon literature, but I didn't feel worthy of it either. But no matter how hard I blamed my doubts on my desire to sin, I could not make facts that I knew were facts go away, the sorts of factoids that shock people when even FAIR begins articulating a counter-hypothesis without bothering to question.
Once one is aquainted with their weasel language, it's not hard to see that even they see what the facts are, only they want to beg you to give the church a second chance while the church stands there with a cat of ninetails ready to drive you out of their temple if they even get a whiff of apostasy from you. So it ends up feeling like they're asking you to believe so much bullshit because we all, as Mormons, know what's coming if we don't go through the motions at least superficially, and in that sense perhaps trying to spinmeister the issues the way they do is -- for the strictly social -- purposes the only sane self-preserving thing a person can do. But it offends a very sacred, very strong, and often self-betraying sense of truth and honesty that we have all been raised to feel. How do you reconcile those two feelings? How do get angry at the people who feel like your brothers and sisters or get mad a bishop or mission president that has at other times felt like he was channeling the Holy Ghost and reading your mind? You know none of them meant to hurt you, but they're going to hurt to you, because they will never understand why you betrayed them like that, but it's not your fault, but they're never gonna hear you out that far. God, were the thoughts in my heart in those days, could I at least get some minimal acknowledgement of this reality from the Q15? Anything. But there was nothing back then, and in the grief of losing my convert, I began to surrender to a view of what seemed like the probable truth, and it wasn't one that allowed me to have very many kind feelings for Joseph Smith anymore or anybody who hides the truth to cover for him.
But, simultaneously, my sins resurged on my mission, namely "self-abuse," and another part of me which was desperate to keep the ball spinning at any cost minus outright intellectual dishonesty thought that I would not be having these thoughts if I wasn't and hadn't always been such a decrepit, vile, hedonistic little creature born to rebel against God because perhaps I was just one of the Third who even back then could tell expressing my actual emotional being openly would only get me cast out. But thinking this way while also thinking about all the souls I couldn't save from the clever wiles of the devil made me think that God had so devised the test of life to cause me and so many others to fail. It was like He commanded Joseph Smith to act like an evil man he was not just so the Marvelous Work would reach 99% less people than it otherwise might have, which didn't make any goddamned sense. It is much easier to believe that Joseph, who hid many of his marriages from his own first wife and re-enacted the ceremonies again after her knowledge of plural marriage but without her knowledge that he was already sealed to these women, was just a liar and fraud from the beginning. But that thought unraveled my whole world in profound ways, more ways than just my testimony.
I wasn't just "losing my testimony", I was losing ways and means of feeling connected to my brethren, especially my father, which I hadn't felt on his account for a very long time, not since before he became a bishop. I think he started emotionally withdrawing from the family and masking in his own right after he lost his best friend and his dad (my grandpa) in the same year when I was seven. His "mask" is the persona he projects at church and in his Chiropractic office, which is the same personna because so many of his patients are Mormons who at other times of the week he hears confessions from and counsels. My dad is the guy who knows it all, or so the people in his orbit come to believe, and he honestly feels like it too, because he's surrounded by yes-men and he never learned how to be self-critical. I have no choice because of the way my neural pathways are constructed and I am far more critical of myself than anybody ever asked me to be. I am literally so made that I cannot believe, and it cost me the relationship with that man that I was trying to get back for so many years. I think it's not uncommon for children to internalize their parents' emotional withdrawal as something they did or deserve for some reason. One of the mysteries of my existence is how a guy can be nothing but honest with people, more honest than many are anyway or care to try to be, and lose everyone for it anyway. That man in particular: being impelled by the church's messaging and my own guilt-addled emotional being to everything about myself to the man has not made me feel closer to him. It has left me feeling violated and traumatized and mugged.
So close, yet no closer. Relationships are tricky for people on the spectrum and also for ADHD people who don't have a handle on their rejection sensitivity dysphoria enough to realize that they didn't do anything wrong. Relationships are not objective things like objects are. People are... dynamic, changing, complex, conflicted, shy, unreliable, defensive and so many other things. One of the greatest revelations of my life was when it sank in that people are not the same thing they show in public. Everyone has a presented self, and it's not always as honest as I thought it had to be. In other words, people can use their body language and their tone of voice to misdirect people even when their words are technically the truth. It blew my mind. Attempting such deception has only ever filled me the grossest self-contempt, which is why I have at times hated myself as much as I did. I have had to hone my ability to tell the truth and articulate my subjective emotional reality because I thought I had to. There came a day when I realized I didn't have to anymore, but I'm still starved to figure out y'all and how you think. That hasn't changed, and relentlessly leaning into bishop-style interrogations of my own soul was the only way I've ever figured out how to triangulate my dimensions in the eyes of others in any way that was actually useful to my self-betterment, which I thought from many years of religious indoctrination was the whole point of anything.
I came home from my mission feeling as though I had failed, and I let myself go for the first time since I was a small boy. I came undone. I unfastened the knots and let it all roll out. I didn't care anymore. I didn't have the energy to care. I knew what was coming. I agreed with my punishment. Hell, I'd off myself right here right now if that gave me some peace in the afterlife. But I didn't harm myself, and earth to my amazement kept spinning. For the first time, people were prepared to pay me no attention as the spotlight moved to the next brother in line and people shooed me aside to go to college or get a job or get married or whatever returned missionaries do. For the first time, there was no script to follow, no "right way" that things were to be done, nobody there doing it for me, options, freedom, and I didn't know what to do with it. My whole life is just masking to comply with social expectations in circumstances I don't feel like I have any control over, and suddenly they just leave you alone like you know know what to do.
No. No, I never knew what to do. I was just imitating others mostly, and sometimes it made sense to me, although most of the time it didn't. There was this last brief fit I threw where I did look at porn for the first time, and I had no idea what I'd been missing but also I outed myself to my dad within 72 hours, since he lived in that house I was still staying in. He was my bishop at one point, and now he was in the stake presidency, and his priesthood buddies would badger him to get me to give them scriptures or unique takes to use in problematic cases. He was also the man I took medical advice from primarily. He was also my social compass besides my moral one. Why wouldn't I tell him? Life had never made less sense to me, and yet I knew the position I occupied was precarious and even he was not to be trusted fully.
He recommended me to a professional counselor for the first time I'd ever heard him speak positively of anybody who was a doctor or a shrink. I scared him to death after I confessed to my desires to harm myself too. For a brief moment, his need for ideological perceptual consistency from the universe broke, shattered to pieces, by the need to help his son. I'd never seen anything like that from him before and I haven't seen it since. My dad is rattling around in the man somewhere, and I wish he'd come out more often and have real talk with me, especially since I don't believe there is any afterlife anymore for do-overs. This is all the time we get as far I know, and he chooses his testimony in the church over whatever relationship we would have built if he didn't do that.
From that LDS counselor, I learned some good things, although he was there to keep me Mormon as equally as he was there to help me, and to some extent there were things he would not say except with the uttermost disclaimer put on it if what the best-practices advice he could give me and how the church wanted these talks to go conflicted with each other. He taught me a different Mormonism than the one my Dad had given me, which was confusing because my Dad had blessed these interviews. But he also taught me what cognitive behavioral therapy was, and I am indebted to him for that. But I have many complaints about the Mormon mental health cottage industry regardless. There shouldn't be one. The only reason there is one is because Mormons are afraid the Gentile shrinks will take their testimonies away, which gets back the science verses religion theme that is also central to my life. Whenever I perceived the counselor butchering a scripture that couldn't possibly mean X, I corrected him. I had nothing but toxic views to articulate, but my case was helped out by my ability to quote scripture chapter and verse and verbatim to his face from memory. At a critical point of our first interviews, he leveled with me and said in so many words, "look, I'm trying to help you, but you have to let me do it." So I did. In the name of following priesthood authority, I let him teach me to question priesthood authority -- just enough to make room for my me to privately address my own mental health needs. But that was all I needed, and my all-or-nothing, black-and-white, absolutest, narrow-viewed, endlessly-ruminating mind took it from there.
He tried to convince me, but I did not believe it, that I had internalized Mormonism in a stupid way born of cognitive distortions and the emotional need to blame myself for all the crappy ways I felt all the time. He tried to convince me that his version of Mormonism which allowed for more grace than Mormons usually allow for had been there the whole time, but I was just an idiot who loved lashing his own back. That's what I heard him saying at least, and I didn't care for it, but he did get me with this radical new idea that I had unmet emotional needs and a right to fulfill them -- as long as I'm not hurting other people to do it, of course. Learning this axiom was probably the biggest factor in my later turn to political liberalism, but I digress. We'd all be happier if we were honest with each other and allowed people room to exist in whatever ways God intended as long as it doesn't offend the social compact too hard. Or something. Taking a certain view of something he said about "radical transparency" resolving the nagging self-doubt that I was being dishonest with somebody by omitting certain details, I brought my mother into my blasted drama that up to that point had only been between myself and my dad. I regret that in hindsight, and I also don't think that's what he meant, but I couldn't tell. You see how people have to be excruciatingly particular with me, or I tend to garble their message. Hell, maybe there was a lot more grace on those bishop's tables than I perceived at the time. I wouldn't know. But this fact about my nature still leaves me pissed that I was shamed and discouraged from knowing things which could have helped me sooner. Even granting that I've often garbled the message does not change the toxic elements that do verily exist within the message and the possibility of sensitive souls hyper-focusing on the wrong parts even where it isn't deserved. Jacob in the book of Mormon acknowledges this danger in the first chapter of the Book of Jacob. Go read that. It's amazing in light of my experiences. Doing literally that is the bane of my existence, but I also need to say in my own defense that literally every vocalized and written part of the messaging I received for what has to amount to thousands of hours of indoctrination time spent gave me the impressions that I was under. I especially of my peers in the tiny little corner of the church that I'm from informed my religious views with the texts, and I was exquisitely watchful for disapproval when I was articulating the texts wrongly, because underneath that I was afraid of disclosing too much about myself in ways that could not be undone, which was a very sober and rational fear considering my age at the time that I've since gotten over in my never-ending quest to be rid of this damned anxiety. I disclose way too much information now. Screw it. I need to know what the story of my life means in a broader context so I can put it to bed or else use it to fix or at least shed light on the permanently malformed social functionality of my brain.
*shrugs*
Of course the instant there's an explanation that leaves a Mormon with an excuse not to introspect in front of a gentile, especially an apostate, that's the thing that becomes the gospel truth until some other gospel-devising bullshit is thought up and makes the rounds on the grapevine. Mormons do this; FAIR wouldn't be a thing if they didn't do this. Nothing FAIR publishes has any academic merit; it's just so much begging the question that the Mormons aren't guilty of any truth-bending that no other religion hasn't committed too. You place the church on equal footing with other religions by endlessly distorting the facts in self-justifying ways, and once you've done this sufficiently, the cultural momentum of your received religion takes over your mind from there. Something to that effect is the only reason FAIR or the gospel topics essays have any power whatsoever, because merit on purely intellectual grounds they have none. The church is aware of that fact that a significant portion of their tithe-payers would just stop if it they weren't wound up in a particular way all the time, but we're being faced with the reality these days that it can go too far, that Mormons can reject the prophet's counsel because on one issue he does espouse science-based medicine rather openly.
I tried to keep a low profile after my meltdown in my early twenties because I knew what people would say if I ever stopped being Mormon. I had shot myself in the foot so hard it got lodged in my mouth, and that continued to give me some anxiety even if I was making progress in other departments. I went to BYUI hoping the secrets to science verses religion would be there, but they weren't. That curriculum is about as white-washed as a curriculum can be while still containing the academic material that an accredited school must teach to be legit. And I know which parts they're just saying because the church signs their paychecks. In fact, I met a great woman up there after my turn to atheism who heads the Idaho Falls exmormon FB group. She used to teach there, and in her words she "got tired of teaching kids not to think". People who leave the church sometimes talk about how they reluctantly chased the rabbit, but by this time I chased it gleefully, because it contained the promise of resolving my feelings of apartness from other people. I never wanted to feel "other than." Nobody does, I don't think, and yet fitting in has been more of a mystery to me than it is to most Homo Sapiens. I can simulate certain niceties and make small talk up to a point, but if we don't shift the topic to something in which I have a particular special interest, I run out of things to say and all I can do to avoid betraying my cluelessness and my differentness is to shut up. I had this problem even with exmormon groups until I gave up on trying to fit in with them too.
The gospel topics essays were a truly bizarre moment of my life. Everything the skeptical voice in my head had ever said about the church in light of the parts that I knew about was vindicated and then some. For a guy particularly vulnerable to gaslighting who never knows which shade of grey to hang his social hat on, this was... something. It was like the heavens parting only to be rebuked with silence when you assumed God would finally make an appearance and explain some plot holes. In a word, it sucked. All that I've been through trying to be that guy in my little corner of the church who can channel a combination of FAIR's and his own wisdom to people seeking answers about existential questions concerning their testimonies but won't turn the most obvious sources in the world to get their answers because they know what would happen because it always happens to everyone who gets "anti'd" even though they don't know what the things are... and this is all I get. This self-conscious shame that doesn't think anybody notices that that's why the essays were hidden in the back where only people looking for them would realize what it was. Other than, just the same old gaslighting every six months that my apostasy is all my fault and I'm a bad person for hurting my mama with my doubts.
My emotions run very deep. It can be quantified, scientifically, in theory. I've never had a brain scan or even had my blood tested (son of a quack, remember), but I've read that autistic emotions, especially when you've got an ADHDr's emotional cacophony of emotions at the same time, can run 2x, 3x, or 4x stronger than other people's. Which means that's why my reactions to the same cues that other people responded to much more mildly were because of what I am. Illuminating. Let me say that most of you don't know what rage is, and if I could express mine with all the expert cadence of the best thespians, you would melt in your chairs as though the anger of the gods was upon you. I don't have this gift with my body language, though, and words fail me under painfully obviously skeptical gaze of other humans who see the anxiety in my every movement and my uncoordinated body and don't know what they're looking at. But behind a computer screen... with enough time to gather my thoughts, I can write sentences that do it justice.
I have been taken for a ride. I have been mugged. I have been violated. I placed my trust in people who from the getgo were committed to using anything against me that they could to shape who I was or at least make me afraid to hold any other pose. And worst of it all, I couldn't tell. I thought we were in the business of truth. I didn't know what else was normal. I didn't know there were other options. I didn't look. They had my undying loyalty from the start. They said things were so, and I believed it. It wasn't my fault they couldn't make any consistent sense of reality to me, and it's not my fault that I am so made that I can't let these little things go. I gotta know things for myself. I gotta understand things all the way through to have any clue what I'm doing socially, and yet they told me that on particular subjects, but subjects which I found myself engrossed in every single day for years and years and years this curiosity was a sin. I trusted there was some point to it all. But they threatened me anyway, and when push came to shove, they took it all away just I knew they were gonna. They don't get any credit because they did it more softly in my case compared to some others where they slammed the door on his or her ass pretty hard. The same people who pretend not to have any idea what my deal is are also the same people who, after I explain my deal in excruciating detail, ask me what I expected.
I'll tell you what I expected: a chance to be heard, at least once, all the way through, and not in some corner where most of the church can just ignore me. I've earned that right, but I will never get it. My first thoughts even as an atheist were not to leave the church. This church was up until about the age of 27 my home, the only place where I had any idea what the unspoken social rules were. Yes, the rules are restrictive and at times very poorly thought out or perhaps poorly executed in practice even when they're good in theory, but I at least knew what the rules were. I never stood a chance in the outside world, and I knew it, which perhaps can shed some light on why I stuck around for such abuse as long as I did. I was only asking for permission to be comfortable exactly where I was and think about whatever my mind wanted to think about. If leaving costs a man everything he has built socially, no matter how many criticisms he may have of it, then... hell, I'll stay, but the church shall not have mind anymore because it never really did except as I felt obliged to give it under certain views of what truth is and what truth means.
I resigned as a last resort after it became clear at the eleventh hour as I downed the bitter-most dregs of my bitter cup that the church could talk out of both sides of its mouth, not realize the hypocrisy, and sic the membership against me anyway, despite publishing ex-pose-aiys they wrote themselves that admit with some academic citations to "the critics" who they've been winding us up to distrust for decades that their curriculum from yesteryear is full of bullshit. I had laid it all on the line in a moment of vulnerability in front of my parents to absorb some of the heat they were giving my baby brother who they didn't know was gay because he didn't wanna go on his mission and I wasn't going to help them make him go, and I got rejected. I got stonewalled. I was bidden to gag myself eternally, because they suddenly realized who had been feeding some cousins and some people in our stake the anti- talking points they were getting. Never mind I was using the essays to do it. We never got that far. My parents thought they saw through me in exactly all the ways I figured they would.
I should have felt joy that I helped my brother make decisions that spared him a lot of pain and keep touch with a lot of people he would have lost touch with on a mission. I did, but it was drowned out by the grief of what I had lost with my folks, what may have never really existed in the first place except on my end. Oh, the futility of all I've been through, and for what?! Elder Holland's talk in 2016 wherein he blamed apostates for hurting their moms' hearts with their decisions.
I practically worshiped Holland at one point. I became an English major, in part because in "Christ and the New Covenant," a book he wrote, he said he became an English major because he wanted to know if teaching was for him before he committed his entire academic career to the Church Education System. I had thought I might do this once, or maybe go write for FAIR or however that worked. There was a low on my mission where I was mulling over what the book of mormon meant in the context that it contained almost none of the deeper doctrines that we believe and because of those doctrines people say we aren't Christian or that we're being dishonest by only presenting the Book of Mormon like that it will give anybody accurate ideas about what we believe. That was when Holland gave his two talks attempting to refute that Mormons aren't Christians. The first talk was in late 2009, I believe, and I can quote parts of it from memory to this day, I read it so much. The second talk was spring of 2010, unless they were both given in 2009. Suffice it to say, I was much more progressed into my faith crisis by the second talk, and what counsel did he have to give me? He made me guilty of the blood of Joseph Smith if I could not account for how the book of Mormon exists.
I swear this is from memory: "If anybody is foolish enough or misled enough to reject over 500 pages of a heretofore unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly trying to account for the origin of those pages somehow, especially... then such persons have been deceived, and if they leave this church, they must crawl over, around, or under the book of mormon to make their exit." I forget the clause where I put dots. Why do I remember these words verbatim? Because I seared them into my memory, trusting there was a reason that in my darkest hour, this was the counsel I got. Oh, it was very motivating to find a way to square the circle, I'll give it that, but it did not solve any substantial criticism of the Book of Mormon that I had heard. Ok, apparently we still have the Book of Mormon that Hyrum marked with a dog ear, but I've since realized that that wasn't the copy a previous publication of the church displayed. Bathseba Smith's name is imprinted on the authentic artifact. The one that Holland used was a prop that had no such named imprinted on it. This is such a small thing, but if he can be dishonest even about that. We teach our people from the time that they're knee-high that dishonesty begins with small things and then we lose all sense of the truth. Yet I watch Mormon after Mormon shrug this off when I bring it up. So he used a prop, probably to avoid damaging the real thing, so what? But he turned down the corner of the page himself while pretending this very book, the one he had in his hands, which are words he used to describe it not me, was the same artifact of which John Taylor wrote in his obituary mourning the prophet and the patriarch which was eventually immortalized as scripture near the back of the Doctrine and Covenants. But that's not the artifact. It's such a small lie, but it is a lie, and I can't forgive him, especially when I drew my soul apart over it cuz I realized this victim-blaming was all I was gonna get from the church and the man turns my own mother against me to this day.
People want me to believe in God in a universe where this happens? No. I get so angry sometimes, but the anger burns itself out very quickly and is replaced with sadness followed by tiredness following by apathy even while my logical, ruminating mind is still going. It never stops, even when my emotions underneath rage and burn themselves out like prairie fires in the dry windy hills. I can't stay permanently mad at people. It's not in my nature, only when I'm being perpetually abused or mistreated despite me putting my honest foot forward to establish the truth of an important issue, which is what happened when I threatened to report my father's business to the Board over his nonstop anti-vaccine messaging at the height of a pandemic. After being blown off for the umpteenth time, and after watching him post yet another video of his "fireside" talks at his office to my Facebook wall where he claims the vaccines are what killed a million people, not the virus, and after hearing him claim that vaccines are what causes all neurological issues, including ADHD and autism, I'd fucking had it and I threatened his ass with a complaint and it felt so good and he hasn't posted a damned thing about vaccines to his cursed FB page since then. And after I accomplished that, which cost me some of the respect even my gay brother who had left the church with me had for me, I deleted my facebook account finally.
Ironically, I would be diagnosed with ASD level 1 ten months later. Lol. Why? Because a friend of mine, the last Mormon friend I have who still gives a shit, insisted on getting an accurate diagnosis. He has a cousin on the spectrum who he cares for every day, and he smelled many of those traits on me. I couldn't just live and let live with my father, and I couldn't not go get a diagnosis of ASD, because I just have to know things. I just have to know, and once I know, I wonder sincerely why everybody isn't on the same page. I worship at the alter of truth in perhaps the highest form possible: I am willing to change my mind when confronted with something I didn't know before. My father is still wrong about vaccines. We understand from excessive scientific study that vaccines don't cause autism. We have more data proving this than we understand how gravity works. We have no idea how gravity works. Einstein has had the best ideas to date, but we know that vaccines don't cause autism. They can't if you will take the time to try and understand what it is. Vaccines don't genetically mutate every cell in your body. They don't. That tech doesn't exist, and even if you could do that, that doesn't erase how your brain developed beginning in the womb. I was the only child my mother had vaccinated before my Dad went full alarmist on the subject, and it was only partially. They didn't vaccinate any of my other brothers, and my dad once apologized to my face for my anxiety because he thinks having me vaccinated as a baby screwed me up for life.
This was the hand I was dealt, and I've done the best I know how with it. I beg forgiveness for the parts that were, um, "extra" as the kids say these days. But I still stand where I stood before on intellectual issues that have not been refuted with facts and logic. What, you made me show the emotion of frustration? What does that prove? It proves I'm frustrated, and maybe that's because you don't as much sense as you like to think. I'm all ears if it's just me, and when it is just me and everybody knows it, that's when they engage me in conversation. Nobody ever spares my feelings when they think I'm wrong, especially when they think they can prove it, but I'm expected to bend over backwards for their feelings and their religion when their leaders are hate-mongering me and people I care about.
There's this programming term: IF THEN ELSE. It forms the backbone of a lot of programming languages. The code can get very complex, but it's always logical in a self-contained sort of way. The code works or you or somebody coded something wrong. This is how I think about social interactions with people, but come to find out that's not how people work. I wish they did. Figuring them out would be like scanning so many lines of code for the minor error that screwed everything up, and then I could blame myself quietly and fix the error and get the results I want. I would happily do for hundreds of thousands of lines of boring ass code for years if that's what it took if I thought the payoff was that I figured out how to talk to people and have a life the way other people do. I wish. That's all I ever wanted from people, but it's not something anybody has the power to give and it's not something my parents deliberately withheld from me, although I still regard those two as a couple of ass clowns. But knowing what ASD is has helped me forgive them and avoid crusading against them for the rest of life for lack of anything else better to do with my time.
Bishop's offices are no replacement for science-based psychology. Vaccines don't cause autism: how can they when you understand what autism is? People have the right to access all the knowledge they need for their happiness. People have the right to be comfortable in their own skins to the extent that anybody ever is. There are so many things about human nature that nobody who penned the Bible or the Restoration scriptures thought to account for in satisfactory ways, although I know religion can be a powerful ally in the quest for self-mastery. My life is a cautionary tale about how it can cause scrupulous regression where a soul was otherwise doing ok if he had had the ability to read his peers or if anybody had told him what thoughts and behaviors other people found to be normal male development. Spilled milk or something. None of this crap was necessary and it all could have been avoided if I had felt at liberty to question the church to any degree, and having my father mingle his alternative medicine with scripture was devastating. I tell him to his face what I think he does to souls like mine whenever it comes up, but free speech laws in the united states are very much on his side as long as he drops the right weasel language in all the right spots. As far as I understand, anyway. He's a drop in the bucket either way, but I wish the half of my country where I first understood anything about people and their ways weren't backsliding into such anti-intellecual, unfalsifiable political beliefs to match their religious ones and even surpass them. That was an insult to my intelligence and the dignity of the many years I spent trying to think thoughts that justified their subculture's existence that I didn't need on top of everything else.