Rambling thoughts
Nov. 29th, 2010 08:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
treefrogIt's been years since I left the Mormon church. I'm not really sure how many years, since my departure was a slow process. I know there was a time when I believed everything I heard at church because I trusted the people who told it to me, and I know there was a time when I believed because I'd been raised with stories about the horrid things that happen to people who don't believe. I know there were a few agonizing years when I lived the lie because two of my brothers had left the church and it was killing my parents. I'm not sure when love became loathing and faith became angry suspicion, but it happened years ago.
And that's just what's bothering me. It happened years ago, but I can't seem to let it drop. I can't seem to stop going over and over and over my time in that church and wondering why I didn't see what was being done to me.
It seems so ridiculous now. There was "God" and "Satan" and there was nothing in between. They'll tell you in that church that God is good and Satan is evil, but that's not the case. "God" is "The Church" and Satan is "Not The Church". Sometimes they'll reference the division by saying "Of God" and "Of the World". What they really mean is that there's "Us" and "Them", and regardless of any behavior one may have observed in individuals, "Us" is good and "Them" is bad. My relationship to "Them" was complicated. I didn't get along with Mormon kids as a rule, and formed all my friendships elsewhere. But those friends didn't do anything The Church forbade, so it wasn't too hard a stretch to make. "Them" were the people who did things specifically forbidden by The Church. I feared them. I grew up feeling a thrill of fear when I saw someone drinking a caffeinated beverage, when I saw a woman show her shoulders, when people talked about having had sex before marriage. These were the things of "Them", and "Them", I was often told, was out to destroy my soul.
Y'know, it's not fair to a kid when their parents' words carry the weight of God and Satan. I was more than happy to disobey my parents when it suited me, but offending God and allying myself with Satan? It sounds absurd, but I believed that way. I took it seriously. I trembled and hid and strapped myself down when other kids rebelled. I watched with desperate, horrified envy and tried to convince myself that my obedience really was my own idea. It wasn't, of course. I made the choices I was told to make. I locked myself into that cell and threw away the key. I was "Us", and could imagine nothing more terrifying than becoming "Them". I was in the white, and to take even one step toward the black would throw me all the way in, and my soul would be destroyed.
Part of what drove me out was a desire to make my own choices, not have them dictated to me by some withered old men in Salt Lake City, after which I was browbeaten into saying, even believing, they really were my choices. Looking back, it's no wonder my self esteem sucked. I grew up believing that I wasn't worthy to make the choices that would shape my life.
I look back and I hurt, I ache, I mourn for the choices I didn't make. I wish I had chosen not to drink because I didn't want to drink, not because I was told I would be destroyed if I drank. I wish I'd let go of all the injunctions to be "good" and "nice" long enough to fight the bullies who made my life hell. I wish I had chosen my clothing with regard to what I thought was beautiful, not what someone else told me was "appropriate". I wish, I wish, I wish I hadn't bought the lie that non-Mormon-standard clothing causes men to have bad thoughts, but those thoughts were entirely the fault of the woman who dressed that way. I wish, the first few times I kissed a boy, that I had been able to do so without the spectre of damnation and, worse, rejection by my family looming over me. I look back and wish that I'd lost my virginity at seventeen, not twenty-two. I wish I'd done it for love, not rebellion. Fuck, there are so many things that other people had that I wish I'd stood up and taken.
I'm sure I shouldn't be this angry. I have my whole life ahead of me, and it's not as if I never rebelled. It's not as if I never did anything I wasn't supposed to. Of course, many of those things were mistakes, but at least I fucking made them, right? And now, now that I've learned to recognize which voices are "Church" and which impulses are "Us", I can disregard them, following them only if they align with the voice that is "Me". I'm still getting to know "Me". "Me" has been shouted down by church and depression so many times, sometimes it feels like there's no fucking point even trying to listen. And that makes me angry too.
Some of this continued anger is the result of having learned things about the Mormon church that they either downplay in church or don't teach you at all. Worse, I learned the things I would have learned if I'd decided to make myself worthy of taking the Temple ceremony. The casual misogyny I encountered all the time growing up (though never directly from my immediate family) is magnified in there. Did you know that, had I been very good in this life and been a proper Mormon woman, that not only would God not divorce me from my husband in the next life, but would make me a sister wife to a bunch of other women who would also marry my husband? And if my husband wasn't a good boy, well, I'd be taken away and given to a man who deserved more wives. That's how it works in the Mormon afterlife. Men are people. Women are rewards, used as breeding stock. It had always been hinted to me, but to see it spelled out like that...
...some of it is that I know my parents believe this stuff. They believe that God will separate me from my husband after I die, because our marriage was only "earthly". Had I had a Mormon marriage, they would believe I was going to be a brood sow in the next life. How the hell can they believe this stuff about me? I can only figure that really, they don't. They love me. That, I have never doubted. And you can't believe something like that about the people you love. You can't raise a daughter and love her and believe that she will be nothing more than a body given as a reward someday. You can't twist her into aspiring to that, you just can't, right? Most ex-Mormon women I've talked to say that people who've been taught that just brush it off and say that God is smarter than us all and someday we'll "understand" that teaching. NOT FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH.
And I guess some of it is that I have my own ideas about what a good wife should be, but getting married brought to the surface a lot of the old, horrifying ideas I was raised with. That gets awfully personal so I won't discuss it here, but it makes me so, so angry. I left the stupid Church. I married outside of it. It shouldn't be able to mess with my head and my marriage. Dave understands some of it, but some of it can't be understood by people who haven't been through it. I love my husband, and if maintaining my marriage means going another few rounds with the demons and the voices, well, when have I ever not been up for that sort of fight?
It's hard, though. The language I grew up speaking is loaded. Any literature on Mormonism not published by the Mormon church is "anti-Mormon", and evil. People don't leave the church, they "go astray" or "are deceived by Satan". People don't make mistakes, they "become unworthy". People who do things specifically forbidden by the church are "immoral". Oh, that word, "worthy". It becomes a club to beat people into line. The Church has a language all its own, and that language makes unbiased thinking damn near impossible. Even when you do manage unbiased thinking, it takes effort. It's like... y'know how when a limb is asleep, you can move it but it feels heavy and awkward and it hurts, and you really have to concentrate on it? That's what thinking for myself was like, at first. That's how it still feels sometimes. My mind is full of pitfalls, full of poison needles traps waiting to paralyze my thoughts. Or it was, anyway. Most of them have been disarmed, but there are landmines still. And every time I encounter one, I have to pause, breathe deep, brace myself, and examine those thoughts... and when I see the ugliness, the logical fallacies, the buzzwords, the traps... it makes me so angry. People say I should trust my gut. Trouble is, I was taught that a mass of indoctrination was my "gut", and what was actually my "gut" was called "the natural man, which is an enemy to God". Is it any fucking wonder that I'm easily confused sometimes?
I don't suppose it helps that I've never been that great at critical thinking. I'm more intuitive. I make shit up, I guess, but it usually works and in a crisis, I go with what I know. At least I know I'm not good at critical thinking. But, while it seems like good sense to question absolutely everything that goes through my head, it can be exhausting, not to mention paralyzing. And that's before I start wondering whether I'm asking the right questions. I'm faced with the fact that I must trust myself and am terrified to do so. I need to learn to question myself intelligently rather than conducting these frantic interrogations that leave me drained. And even though that can't all be blamed on the church I grew up in, it still makes me angry.
What I want right now is difficult to define. I want to be free of the Mormon church, but as long as I love my family (and the extended non-blood family that church brought into my life), I can't ever be totally free of it. As I've said before, I refuse to stop loving the people I love over a difference of beliefs. I want to stop being angry, have a feeling I should stop being angry, but am not sure I trust that "should". I want to know for sure that my thoughts belong to me... but if I ever think my thoughts really belong to me, does that just mean that I can't see the control? I want to stop questioning myself. I want to start questioning myself.
God, I look at my life and I see all these holes and more than anything I want to mend them, fill them, make them not hurt anymore. I want to feel complete, not lopsided and awkward and half-finished. I want to be whole. I think I must be on the right track, because whenever I look back I see a time when I had made less progress, but it all feels like a big towering wall. I can almost see the other side. But not quite.
No way out but through, I guess. Nothing to do but keep walking.
And that's just what's bothering me. It happened years ago, but I can't seem to let it drop. I can't seem to stop going over and over and over my time in that church and wondering why I didn't see what was being done to me.
It seems so ridiculous now. There was "God" and "Satan" and there was nothing in between. They'll tell you in that church that God is good and Satan is evil, but that's not the case. "God" is "The Church" and Satan is "Not The Church". Sometimes they'll reference the division by saying "Of God" and "Of the World". What they really mean is that there's "Us" and "Them", and regardless of any behavior one may have observed in individuals, "Us" is good and "Them" is bad. My relationship to "Them" was complicated. I didn't get along with Mormon kids as a rule, and formed all my friendships elsewhere. But those friends didn't do anything The Church forbade, so it wasn't too hard a stretch to make. "Them" were the people who did things specifically forbidden by The Church. I feared them. I grew up feeling a thrill of fear when I saw someone drinking a caffeinated beverage, when I saw a woman show her shoulders, when people talked about having had sex before marriage. These were the things of "Them", and "Them", I was often told, was out to destroy my soul.
Y'know, it's not fair to a kid when their parents' words carry the weight of God and Satan. I was more than happy to disobey my parents when it suited me, but offending God and allying myself with Satan? It sounds absurd, but I believed that way. I took it seriously. I trembled and hid and strapped myself down when other kids rebelled. I watched with desperate, horrified envy and tried to convince myself that my obedience really was my own idea. It wasn't, of course. I made the choices I was told to make. I locked myself into that cell and threw away the key. I was "Us", and could imagine nothing more terrifying than becoming "Them". I was in the white, and to take even one step toward the black would throw me all the way in, and my soul would be destroyed.
Part of what drove me out was a desire to make my own choices, not have them dictated to me by some withered old men in Salt Lake City, after which I was browbeaten into saying, even believing, they really were my choices. Looking back, it's no wonder my self esteem sucked. I grew up believing that I wasn't worthy to make the choices that would shape my life.
I look back and I hurt, I ache, I mourn for the choices I didn't make. I wish I had chosen not to drink because I didn't want to drink, not because I was told I would be destroyed if I drank. I wish I'd let go of all the injunctions to be "good" and "nice" long enough to fight the bullies who made my life hell. I wish I had chosen my clothing with regard to what I thought was beautiful, not what someone else told me was "appropriate". I wish, I wish, I wish I hadn't bought the lie that non-Mormon-standard clothing causes men to have bad thoughts, but those thoughts were entirely the fault of the woman who dressed that way. I wish, the first few times I kissed a boy, that I had been able to do so without the spectre of damnation and, worse, rejection by my family looming over me. I look back and wish that I'd lost my virginity at seventeen, not twenty-two. I wish I'd done it for love, not rebellion. Fuck, there are so many things that other people had that I wish I'd stood up and taken.
I'm sure I shouldn't be this angry. I have my whole life ahead of me, and it's not as if I never rebelled. It's not as if I never did anything I wasn't supposed to. Of course, many of those things were mistakes, but at least I fucking made them, right? And now, now that I've learned to recognize which voices are "Church" and which impulses are "Us", I can disregard them, following them only if they align with the voice that is "Me". I'm still getting to know "Me". "Me" has been shouted down by church and depression so many times, sometimes it feels like there's no fucking point even trying to listen. And that makes me angry too.
Some of this continued anger is the result of having learned things about the Mormon church that they either downplay in church or don't teach you at all. Worse, I learned the things I would have learned if I'd decided to make myself worthy of taking the Temple ceremony. The casual misogyny I encountered all the time growing up (though never directly from my immediate family) is magnified in there. Did you know that, had I been very good in this life and been a proper Mormon woman, that not only would God not divorce me from my husband in the next life, but would make me a sister wife to a bunch of other women who would also marry my husband? And if my husband wasn't a good boy, well, I'd be taken away and given to a man who deserved more wives. That's how it works in the Mormon afterlife. Men are people. Women are rewards, used as breeding stock. It had always been hinted to me, but to see it spelled out like that...
...some of it is that I know my parents believe this stuff. They believe that God will separate me from my husband after I die, because our marriage was only "earthly". Had I had a Mormon marriage, they would believe I was going to be a brood sow in the next life. How the hell can they believe this stuff about me? I can only figure that really, they don't. They love me. That, I have never doubted. And you can't believe something like that about the people you love. You can't raise a daughter and love her and believe that she will be nothing more than a body given as a reward someday. You can't twist her into aspiring to that, you just can't, right? Most ex-Mormon women I've talked to say that people who've been taught that just brush it off and say that God is smarter than us all and someday we'll "understand" that teaching. NOT FUCKING GOOD ENOUGH.
And I guess some of it is that I have my own ideas about what a good wife should be, but getting married brought to the surface a lot of the old, horrifying ideas I was raised with. That gets awfully personal so I won't discuss it here, but it makes me so, so angry. I left the stupid Church. I married outside of it. It shouldn't be able to mess with my head and my marriage. Dave understands some of it, but some of it can't be understood by people who haven't been through it. I love my husband, and if maintaining my marriage means going another few rounds with the demons and the voices, well, when have I ever not been up for that sort of fight?
It's hard, though. The language I grew up speaking is loaded. Any literature on Mormonism not published by the Mormon church is "anti-Mormon", and evil. People don't leave the church, they "go astray" or "are deceived by Satan". People don't make mistakes, they "become unworthy". People who do things specifically forbidden by the church are "immoral". Oh, that word, "worthy". It becomes a club to beat people into line. The Church has a language all its own, and that language makes unbiased thinking damn near impossible. Even when you do manage unbiased thinking, it takes effort. It's like... y'know how when a limb is asleep, you can move it but it feels heavy and awkward and it hurts, and you really have to concentrate on it? That's what thinking for myself was like, at first. That's how it still feels sometimes. My mind is full of pitfalls, full of poison needles traps waiting to paralyze my thoughts. Or it was, anyway. Most of them have been disarmed, but there are landmines still. And every time I encounter one, I have to pause, breathe deep, brace myself, and examine those thoughts... and when I see the ugliness, the logical fallacies, the buzzwords, the traps... it makes me so angry. People say I should trust my gut. Trouble is, I was taught that a mass of indoctrination was my "gut", and what was actually my "gut" was called "the natural man, which is an enemy to God". Is it any fucking wonder that I'm easily confused sometimes?
I don't suppose it helps that I've never been that great at critical thinking. I'm more intuitive. I make shit up, I guess, but it usually works and in a crisis, I go with what I know. At least I know I'm not good at critical thinking. But, while it seems like good sense to question absolutely everything that goes through my head, it can be exhausting, not to mention paralyzing. And that's before I start wondering whether I'm asking the right questions. I'm faced with the fact that I must trust myself and am terrified to do so. I need to learn to question myself intelligently rather than conducting these frantic interrogations that leave me drained. And even though that can't all be blamed on the church I grew up in, it still makes me angry.
What I want right now is difficult to define. I want to be free of the Mormon church, but as long as I love my family (and the extended non-blood family that church brought into my life), I can't ever be totally free of it. As I've said before, I refuse to stop loving the people I love over a difference of beliefs. I want to stop being angry, have a feeling I should stop being angry, but am not sure I trust that "should". I want to know for sure that my thoughts belong to me... but if I ever think my thoughts really belong to me, does that just mean that I can't see the control? I want to stop questioning myself. I want to start questioning myself.
God, I look at my life and I see all these holes and more than anything I want to mend them, fill them, make them not hurt anymore. I want to feel complete, not lopsided and awkward and half-finished. I want to be whole. I think I must be on the right track, because whenever I look back I see a time when I had made less progress, but it all feels like a big towering wall. I can almost see the other side. But not quite.
No way out but through, I guess. Nothing to do but keep walking.
