The empty chasm
“I don’t know why I feel this way,” I cried out to the stranger on the other end of the line.
It was almost precisely 10 years ago that this happened. I had rapidly spiraled into depression, and was failing school. My mother had threatened to pull all support for my schooling if I didn’t turn my grades around. Distraught by this threat and the resulting argument, I took my car and disappeared into the dark.
I drove around for a while. Aimlessly. Here and there, navigating through the snow and blustery cold. Finally I found myself in a church parking lot-- the church I had grown up in, actually, off Lincoln Road. The urges to kill myself were no longer bearable, and I knew I had exhausted all my internal resources and needed help.
“I have a good life,” I cried to the operator who had picked up the suicide hotline. “I have great friends, I have a job I love, I have great family. I don’t have anything to complain about. Why do I feel like killing myself?”
The stranger was kind and validating as I poured out my heart and my story to them. I don’t remember exact words. I appreciated their compassion even if it didn’t make me feel better. Got myself to a safe space. Put myself back together, put on the mask and soldiered on.
But this would repeat for many years. I would do seemingly well for three to six months, and then I come crashing completely down and I would end up, in best case, flat on my back for several days, or worst case, in a crisis center. All of my hard work would unravel, and I would have to start over.
And I never knew why. That was perhaps the most frustrating thing about it. I understood that most problems can be worked out if you begin with the premises. But I never knew the premises of this problem. It seemed to permeate every waking moment, some days less, some days more. And yet for its ubiquity, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It’s like getting flooded out of your house again and again when the sun is shining and you don’t live anywhere near water.
Granted, I wasn’t completely ignorant. I knew it had something to do with being gay in the church, but I also know that neither of these things seemed to completely address the anguish that I continually felt.
I also couldn’t figure out what people meant when they said “Be who you are.” Scoffed at the notion, really. I was gay, and to my credit I never attempted to run away from that truth. And yet, I also knew that it wasn’t everything-- not enough of a thing to completely explain all the horrible pain I was in all the time, anyway. “This isn’t who I am,” I would say in response to people telling me to just be who I am. I am gay, yes, and that’s a significant part of me, but it isn’t everything.
So...what is everything, exactly?
The church, obviously.
I was Mormon through and through. I had taught and believed the gospel. It was everything to me.
But there were moments, despite my faithfulness, that had me baffled. I remember looking around at my high school choir as we sang together close to the end of my sophomore year, thinking “This is my religion.” I felt shame at that thought, and I also knew that I didn’t have the resources to address the nagging feeling that represented that something was wrong with my commitment to Mormonism. So I stuffed it away. It was a very similar experience to the first time I ever “felt the Spirit:” I was in church as a 12 year old, I felt warmth, and my initial response was, “Oh no” and a feeling of dread. I was very confused by that even then-- I have always been perhaps more self-aware than I’ve known what to do with. “Isn’t this supposed to be joyful?” I asked myself. But I had no other way to engage with these questions and doubts, so I stuffed them away and did what I thought was supposed to be right. Read the scriptures. Pray. Go to Jesus. Take the sacrament. All the things good little boys did.
This was a common theme for doubts or feelings of dissonance with what the Church expected of me. I worked through those doubts or feelings of dissonance in ways that were genuinely admirable. I honed my commitment down to core principles and told myself that the rest was chaff. And that was a genuinely good thing-- but personal commitments do not erase the social pressures I discounted as chaff.
Read the scriptures. Pray. Go to Jesus. Take the sacrament. Get baptized. Get the priesthood. Go on a mission. Get an education. Find a remunerative career. Marry in the temple, raise a family in the Church, serve the Church, endure to the end faithfully. In the name of Jesus Christ, the end.
Looking back on it I can see the self-serving hubris written in these expectations. The church did not put them on us for our benefit, but for its own survival.
But I didn’t see it at the time. I had thought, because of that initial experience with “The Spirit” as a twelve year old, that this is who I was, and what I had to do. So I put it on and carried it from that moment on.
What does this have to do with that suffering 24 year old ten years ago?
It has to do with who he is-- or rather, who he is not.
I am not a stereotypically masculine man. I have many things that are masculine about me, but these expectations were built by straight, stereotypically masculine men, for straight stereotypically masculine men. In effect I was told that I had to wear size 9 slim dress shoes when my feet do best with a size 11 relaxed sneaker.
But there was no way I could’ve known that, because discovering and owning one’s shoe size is not a part of the covenant path as the church constructs it.
For all its talk of honoring agency, the Church compresses and diminishes it at every turn it can, not for the good of those it impinges, but because its own institutional survival depends on it. The theopractic axis, the engine of the church-- the making and keeping of so-called sacred covenants-- it does not tolerate real individuality. The church knows that those who go on a path of genuine self-discovery are unlikely to turn out large, faithful families who can then carry on the Church’s legacy, and so it uses fear and shame to pressure people into “The Path.”
“The Path,” for men, is outlined for them from birth. Deviance from this path is met with resistance on all sides.
Now many people, men and women and in between in the Church, can at least survive on size 9 slim dress shoes. But my feet were just too big. I put on the shoes, knowing that doing so would please those around me. I put them on because I genuinely thought doing so was what was best.
But….it wasn’t.
“I have a good life. Why do I feel like killing myself?”
I did have a good life
but
It wasn’t mine.
It was a life others had told me to live, and because I trusted them, I put away my own thoughts, feelings and desires and followed.
I sacrificed many things in order to be faithful the way the Church had taught me to be. 10% of my income, years of wearing uncomfortable underwear, being kept busy with all sorts of empty callings and activities, two years of young adulthood. All of that I can forgive. None of that I regret, at least by themselves.
But underneath all that activity was a deeper sacrifice, one as fundamental as it was meaningless. It was a sacrifice of the thing that ultimately is the foundation of a meaningful life-- my identity. Or, at least, the chance to discover what that is for myself, at the time when it is developmentally appropriate to do so.
The past few years since I’ve left have seen me going through growing pains that I should’ve undergone as a teenager. I am having developmental experiences that would be more appropriate at age 15, not 34. Who am I? What do I like? What am I good at? What makes me tick? What do I desire? What am I feeling, and why am I so mad? What matters most to me? Who am I in this world? All these questions, except that I am trying to formulate answers while also juggling adult responsibilities. I can’t turn back the clock. I am no longer a youth even as I’m doing the kind of growing that youth is for to begin with. Juggling this kind of basic identity formation while being a fully grown adult is extremely challenging by itself, and even more so as a sexual minority where I have no scripts and basically have to invent that identity out of whole cloth. It is this process of (re)discovery that many gay men who leave the Church call their second puberty.
It is this loss, most of all, that I hate the church for. It stole my youth, and with it the chance to discover who I am on my own terms at a time when I had the space and opportunity to do so. Instead of investing in my own God-given gifts, it sought to appropriate the energy of that time in my life for its own ends. I do not know if I will ever have the ability to forgive the church for this theft of something so fundamental and basic.
Now I know why I was feeling that way, so many years ago. I was living a life that was not mine, on terms that others had set, for purposes that were not fully explained to me and which I did not agree to. I almost lost my life for it. The extreme damage the church did will take a long time to recover from-- and perhaps it is not fully resolvable in the time I have left.
And yet. Life is still beautiful. The sun shines, the rain cleanses the earth. I breathe it in. Beauty abounds in the stars, the mountains, the rivers, the deserts. I appreciate these things even as I slowly empty one wheelbarrow of dirt after another into the empty chasm where my identity should be.
Not what I’d prefer to be doing at this stage of life.
But I can’t deny the view.
It was almost precisely 10 years ago that this happened. I had rapidly spiraled into depression, and was failing school. My mother had threatened to pull all support for my schooling if I didn’t turn my grades around. Distraught by this threat and the resulting argument, I took my car and disappeared into the dark.
I drove around for a while. Aimlessly. Here and there, navigating through the snow and blustery cold. Finally I found myself in a church parking lot-- the church I had grown up in, actually, off Lincoln Road. The urges to kill myself were no longer bearable, and I knew I had exhausted all my internal resources and needed help.
“I have a good life,” I cried to the operator who had picked up the suicide hotline. “I have great friends, I have a job I love, I have great family. I don’t have anything to complain about. Why do I feel like killing myself?”
The stranger was kind and validating as I poured out my heart and my story to them. I don’t remember exact words. I appreciated their compassion even if it didn’t make me feel better. Got myself to a safe space. Put myself back together, put on the mask and soldiered on.
But this would repeat for many years. I would do seemingly well for three to six months, and then I come crashing completely down and I would end up, in best case, flat on my back for several days, or worst case, in a crisis center. All of my hard work would unravel, and I would have to start over.
And I never knew why. That was perhaps the most frustrating thing about it. I understood that most problems can be worked out if you begin with the premises. But I never knew the premises of this problem. It seemed to permeate every waking moment, some days less, some days more. And yet for its ubiquity, I couldn’t figure out what it was. It’s like getting flooded out of your house again and again when the sun is shining and you don’t live anywhere near water.
Granted, I wasn’t completely ignorant. I knew it had something to do with being gay in the church, but I also know that neither of these things seemed to completely address the anguish that I continually felt.
I also couldn’t figure out what people meant when they said “Be who you are.” Scoffed at the notion, really. I was gay, and to my credit I never attempted to run away from that truth. And yet, I also knew that it wasn’t everything-- not enough of a thing to completely explain all the horrible pain I was in all the time, anyway. “This isn’t who I am,” I would say in response to people telling me to just be who I am. I am gay, yes, and that’s a significant part of me, but it isn’t everything.
So...what is everything, exactly?
The church, obviously.
I was Mormon through and through. I had taught and believed the gospel. It was everything to me.
But there were moments, despite my faithfulness, that had me baffled. I remember looking around at my high school choir as we sang together close to the end of my sophomore year, thinking “This is my religion.” I felt shame at that thought, and I also knew that I didn’t have the resources to address the nagging feeling that represented that something was wrong with my commitment to Mormonism. So I stuffed it away. It was a very similar experience to the first time I ever “felt the Spirit:” I was in church as a 12 year old, I felt warmth, and my initial response was, “Oh no” and a feeling of dread. I was very confused by that even then-- I have always been perhaps more self-aware than I’ve known what to do with. “Isn’t this supposed to be joyful?” I asked myself. But I had no other way to engage with these questions and doubts, so I stuffed them away and did what I thought was supposed to be right. Read the scriptures. Pray. Go to Jesus. Take the sacrament. All the things good little boys did.
This was a common theme for doubts or feelings of dissonance with what the Church expected of me. I worked through those doubts or feelings of dissonance in ways that were genuinely admirable. I honed my commitment down to core principles and told myself that the rest was chaff. And that was a genuinely good thing-- but personal commitments do not erase the social pressures I discounted as chaff.
Read the scriptures. Pray. Go to Jesus. Take the sacrament. Get baptized. Get the priesthood. Go on a mission. Get an education. Find a remunerative career. Marry in the temple, raise a family in the Church, serve the Church, endure to the end faithfully. In the name of Jesus Christ, the end.
Looking back on it I can see the self-serving hubris written in these expectations. The church did not put them on us for our benefit, but for its own survival.
But I didn’t see it at the time. I had thought, because of that initial experience with “The Spirit” as a twelve year old, that this is who I was, and what I had to do. So I put it on and carried it from that moment on.
What does this have to do with that suffering 24 year old ten years ago?
It has to do with who he is-- or rather, who he is not.
I am not a stereotypically masculine man. I have many things that are masculine about me, but these expectations were built by straight, stereotypically masculine men, for straight stereotypically masculine men. In effect I was told that I had to wear size 9 slim dress shoes when my feet do best with a size 11 relaxed sneaker.
But there was no way I could’ve known that, because discovering and owning one’s shoe size is not a part of the covenant path as the church constructs it.
For all its talk of honoring agency, the Church compresses and diminishes it at every turn it can, not for the good of those it impinges, but because its own institutional survival depends on it. The theopractic axis, the engine of the church-- the making and keeping of so-called sacred covenants-- it does not tolerate real individuality. The church knows that those who go on a path of genuine self-discovery are unlikely to turn out large, faithful families who can then carry on the Church’s legacy, and so it uses fear and shame to pressure people into “The Path.”
“The Path,” for men, is outlined for them from birth. Deviance from this path is met with resistance on all sides.
Now many people, men and women and in between in the Church, can at least survive on size 9 slim dress shoes. But my feet were just too big. I put on the shoes, knowing that doing so would please those around me. I put them on because I genuinely thought doing so was what was best.
But….it wasn’t.
“I have a good life. Why do I feel like killing myself?”
I did have a good life
but
It wasn’t mine.
It was a life others had told me to live, and because I trusted them, I put away my own thoughts, feelings and desires and followed.
I sacrificed many things in order to be faithful the way the Church had taught me to be. 10% of my income, years of wearing uncomfortable underwear, being kept busy with all sorts of empty callings and activities, two years of young adulthood. All of that I can forgive. None of that I regret, at least by themselves.
But underneath all that activity was a deeper sacrifice, one as fundamental as it was meaningless. It was a sacrifice of the thing that ultimately is the foundation of a meaningful life-- my identity. Or, at least, the chance to discover what that is for myself, at the time when it is developmentally appropriate to do so.
The past few years since I’ve left have seen me going through growing pains that I should’ve undergone as a teenager. I am having developmental experiences that would be more appropriate at age 15, not 34. Who am I? What do I like? What am I good at? What makes me tick? What do I desire? What am I feeling, and why am I so mad? What matters most to me? Who am I in this world? All these questions, except that I am trying to formulate answers while also juggling adult responsibilities. I can’t turn back the clock. I am no longer a youth even as I’m doing the kind of growing that youth is for to begin with. Juggling this kind of basic identity formation while being a fully grown adult is extremely challenging by itself, and even more so as a sexual minority where I have no scripts and basically have to invent that identity out of whole cloth. It is this process of (re)discovery that many gay men who leave the Church call their second puberty.
It is this loss, most of all, that I hate the church for. It stole my youth, and with it the chance to discover who I am on my own terms at a time when I had the space and opportunity to do so. Instead of investing in my own God-given gifts, it sought to appropriate the energy of that time in my life for its own ends. I do not know if I will ever have the ability to forgive the church for this theft of something so fundamental and basic.
Now I know why I was feeling that way, so many years ago. I was living a life that was not mine, on terms that others had set, for purposes that were not fully explained to me and which I did not agree to. I almost lost my life for it. The extreme damage the church did will take a long time to recover from-- and perhaps it is not fully resolvable in the time I have left.
And yet. Life is still beautiful. The sun shines, the rain cleanses the earth. I breathe it in. Beauty abounds in the stars, the mountains, the rivers, the deserts. I appreciate these things even as I slowly empty one wheelbarrow of dirt after another into the empty chasm where my identity should be.
Not what I’d prefer to be doing at this stage of life.
But I can’t deny the view.
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