Feeling Down

I’m beginning to think that I suffer from a lack of imagination about what my life could be, and the kind of happiness that I could have. Growing up in northern Utah, I was taught that there is really only one acceptable life plan for men. Be ordained to the priesthood, go on a mission, come back and marry a girl in the Temple, and have children, and serve serve serve in the church. I feel this deep sense of loss in my life because in ways that are very important to the Mormon community, I am not living the expected life script. In the past couple years I have abandoned any sense of communal guilt about it. However, an inescapable consequence of my path is a pervasive aloneness – a lack of companionship that has drained down my emotional batteries and left me a shell of a person in many important ways. People need people (how is that Streisand song go?) And yet I have lived so many years of my life keeping myself distant from others, afraid that they would find out my terrible secret, or worst of all, putting myself out there and discovering in horror that maybe I’m not worthy of the kinds of love that other people take for granted.

So, my heart hurts. My body hurts in ways that make me fear my best days are gone, and that I will never feel good again. For years and years the church has been the only good thing in my life. And now, the complexity about the truth of the church has left me feeling that I am grasping at a nothingness and that I will just keep falling, falling, falling, with nothing to break the fall. For the first time in my life, I am afraid of my thoughts. I know that there is a goodness that is captured in the core doctrines of Mormonism, a goodness that has spawned greatness in many many men and women over the past couple hundred years. I want to find a hope here, a hope that can sustain me in to happier days and a desire to live and to love through the remainder of my natural days on this planet.

I am doing what I can to get out of this place where I am. But I need to imagine a better life for myself, and I wish the church could be a part of that. There are many hours ahead – they seemto stretch on forever! This is one of the few places where I feel like I have meaningful support.