(no subject)
hmmm, I'm awake. And you all know what can't sleep in the middle of the night means! That's right, it's confessional time.
Ever since I alluded to some of my more intense emotional stuff I've felt kind of obligated to talk about it. Well, not obligated, per se. I guess it's more along the lines of 'I'm totally going to use my lj for cheap therapy' again.
Though I won't just be talking about emotional stuff. In order to get to the heart of the matter I'm going to have to talk about that most eyebrow-raising of Mormon activities, the mission. Many of you, if not all of you, know that once upon a time I was a missionary in South Texas and that there were some emotional reprecussions when I wasn't one anymore.
So let's get down to business.
Being a missionary is not really considered woman's work in the church. While the young men are exhorted to serve missions (though not as heavily as when I was young when the exhortation was more of a commandment) the young women are exhorted to marry as early as possible. Of course, me being me, I made up my mind during adolescence that I would serve a mission, if for no other reason then because my brothers were expected to do so and what's good for the gander is good for the goose, or some such. [Tangent: I've always been of a particular Annie Oakley mindset because anything you can do I can do better. Though it doesn't generally take the form of competition with my brothers but rather a kind of stubborn spunk. Cause if they're going to help chop up the tree then I am too etc etc.] The fact that the idea of talking to complete strangers about my religious beliefs scared the crap out of me only strengthened my resolve.
Since women aren't allowed to serve missions until the age of 21 (unlike men at 19) I went to college and kind of put the idea on the backburner of my mind. Until late in my junior year, that is, when my bishop at the time suggested that I seriously think and pray about going on my mission ASAP. I did pray about it and I had what can be described as a relevatory moment when I knew that I should drop everything, which included delaying my senior year of college, and pursue that goal.
At that time when I decided to do something I did it. The fact that I really did feel called of God only intensified my OCD tunnel vision until I had all of my ducks in a row. To this day I'm fairly certain that things that happened during those months quickened the breakdown of the friendship between my roommate and myself. I've always felt that she blamed me for leaving which forced us to find a sublettor and which also caused her to have to move back in to her parents' house. But that's a whole other post entirely.
So there I was in September 2000, walking into the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT, feeling as if I'd been chosen by God. The MTC is a strange place and while it does help prepare people by teaching all manner of proselytizing techniques it's more geared towards at making sure that every person there is well and truly indoctrinated. It's kind of like boot camp, in a way, except with less intense physical activity and more fasting. And I was there 3 weeks longer than I needed to be, since I already knew Spanish and didn't need to spend 8 hours a day in language clases.
That, strangely, is the first sign of the intense hand-waving I'd do about all of this down the road. Because the people at the MTC screwed the pooch on that one, except at the time I totally believed that it was Meant To Be and not simply a result of a clerical error.
Anyway, cue early December 2000 when I arrived in McAllen, TX. For the next year, or so, I would be completely devoted to spreading the word. I put 110% of myself into that work. It was the primary focus of my entire existence. I thought of myself first and foremost as a missionary. To give an example of how extreme that was, September 11, 2001 was hardly a blip on my radar. Yeah, I heard about it on the day and even caught a news feed of it at lunch at a members' home, but I didn't understand the way it had changed America until I got home the next January. I was completely out of the loop.
In a lot of ways, missionary work was tailor-made for me. I'm really pretty sure that if I were a member of any other Christian faith I would have devoted my life to either being a clergyperson or a nun. I'm just one of those people for whom religious thought and devotion comes naturally. Plus, it was a time in my life when I felt like I was actually accomplishing something and helping to make people's lives better. You'll find a lot of missionaries who are obssessed with baptizing people but that wasn't really my thing, I was more about connecting with people and sharing things that had made my life better.
I also never shirked at helping out however I could. I remember stopping by a sister's house to find her and her kids out in the yard chopping at the ridiculously tall grass. Come to find out the city had told her she had until the next day to cut her grass or they'd fine her. Me and my companion went right to work, me with a hoe and her with a beat-up old lawnmower. The patches of skin I wore off my hands were legendary.
And then came Fall of 2001 when I started getting sick. I denied how worn-down and pained I was for a long time with excuses like I just tired and needed a vacation. Of course, the harder I pushed to work, the worse I would get. I didn't know what was wrong with me and to top it all off my medical decisions were being made, in part, by a woman who hardly knew me and was taking advice from a nurse who had never met me and only knew the bare bones of my medical history.
Because it's completely logical to blame widespread pain on a seizure medication that I'd been taking since high school. That's completely reasonable. *rolls eyes*
But I didn't blame anyone but myself. Even though I didn't realize it at the time I was sure that my illness must have happened because of some failure on my part. After all, I'd always been certain that as long as I was doing what I was supposed to be doing then everything would be okay.
One of these days I should dig up my old rulebook and copy out all of the rules we had to follow. If you think not drinking coffee or booze or smoking and no sex before marriage is bad, you won't believe the way a missionary's life is micromanaged.
Anyway, by January things had finally gotten so bad that I actually talked to the mission president about being sent home early. But my rationale for going home wasn't because I was sick but rather because the Work was suffering and I shouldn't impede it any longer with my physical weakness. A rationale, by the way, I totally and completely believed. It wasn't just something I made up to soothe anyone's conscience.
And just like that I was dumped. Two days later I was on a plane back to Michigan and a couple days after that I was officially released (decomissioned) and free to go back to my life.
I can't tell you how much it hurt to take off that nametag. I still kind of miss it and all it represented.
That was that. My life was suddenly my own again but I didn't have anything to fill up all the areas I'd so wholeheartedly devoted to serving God. Everything else felt pointless and meaningless. That plus a resurgence of my illness sparked a downward spiral that resulted in me failing what should have been my last two college classes for lack of attendance. It took me years to stop feeling like a failure for not being able to complete my mission the way I "should" have.
It's hard to lose what you'd so successfully made your meaning for everything. Yeah, I willingly drank the Kool-Aid. I more than drank it, I pumped it through my system like blood. It tasted vaguely of grape paired with OCD.
It took me until just a few weeks ago to realize something else, I also felt betrayed. There I was, doing everything I possibly could and I was still dropped like a hot potato without even a "Well Done" for my services. Not only did I feel betrayed by people like my mission president, I felt betrayed by the Church as a whole. A realization which makes my spotty attendance and failure to productively serve in any callings that much more understandable. Because how can I trust them when they've already ripped my heart out and stamped all over it?
*snorts* Church as a Bad Boyfriend on the next Oprah.
It's no wonder it took me so long to make that connection. When you belong to a church that is believed to be True you tend to live with the implied assumption that it can do no wrong. You don't question the people above you because they were called of God and if they say something should be done then that's the way it should be. Because, in essence, God said so.
But no matter your opinions on God, people are fallible. People can be wrong even, perhaps especially, when they are deemed to have a divine mandate. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to accept something like that about leaders in the Church, it feels like blasphemy. Except, if I don't accept that then I'd have to leave it all behind.
Which raises a salient question, why don't I just leave? I wouldn't let the people closest to me treat me like that, I wouldn't let anyone treat me like that, so why does some religious institution get to do so? The only answer I have to that is that I still have that religious connection I mentioned above. I don't doubt the good things I've learned as a Mormon and while I may not feel as if I can trust any of my leaders to be concerned for my well-being there are forces inside of me that won't let me turn my back on it. Though I certainly can't blame people who have left. There is injustice and alienation to go around topped off by having to accept as fact that a teenager found a golden book in a hill. Because that makes any kind of sense.
On top of a heavy dose of betrayal is a lingering sense of loss over the fact that I never had more authority in my religion than when I was a missionary. Sisters, for all intents and purposes, answer directly to the mission president (unlike elders who are directed through a more menial chain of command). After all, there's a big difference in the maturity level of a 21+ year-old woman and a 19 year-old man straight out of high school. Also, sister missionaries are accepted as clergy by pretty much everyone in the church and out of it, their opinions hold weight. When you return back to normal church membership your suddenly subservient to pretty much every other male member. There's a culture of Father/Bishop/Brother So-and-So Knows Best that permeates throughout the women of the church and even the men who take women's advice seriously can do so while they're patronizingly patting them on the head at the same time.
Like I said, patently flawed.
But for some reason I'm not ready to give it up, not yet. Maybe because I'm actually a masochist, who knows. And, hell, even if I did leave it would always be a part of me. Do I regret serving a mission? Absolutely not, the experiences I had and the service I was able to render to other people were definitely worth it. But I'm not going to run right out and sign myself up again. I might be a masochist but I'm not an idiot. At least now I see things clearly with my blinders off.
Wow, apparently I had a lot to say. You know, when I decided to start blogging about Mormonism one of my goals was to present how things looked from the Mormon side of the belief gap which caused me to subsume my own ambiguous feelings. It looks like I've overcome that conceit. Which is a good thing because brutal honesty is good for the soul.
Now I can focus on the meta that's been poking at my brain; it's tentatively titled Free Will vs. Determinism in the SPN Universe. It has the distinct possibility of turning into a monster post all of its own. I'm sure you're all "thrilled" to hear that. ;-)
Ever since I alluded to some of my more intense emotional stuff I've felt kind of obligated to talk about it. Well, not obligated, per se. I guess it's more along the lines of 'I'm totally going to use my lj for cheap therapy' again.
Though I won't just be talking about emotional stuff. In order to get to the heart of the matter I'm going to have to talk about that most eyebrow-raising of Mormon activities, the mission. Many of you, if not all of you, know that once upon a time I was a missionary in South Texas and that there were some emotional reprecussions when I wasn't one anymore.
So let's get down to business.
Being a missionary is not really considered woman's work in the church. While the young men are exhorted to serve missions (though not as heavily as when I was young when the exhortation was more of a commandment) the young women are exhorted to marry as early as possible. Of course, me being me, I made up my mind during adolescence that I would serve a mission, if for no other reason then because my brothers were expected to do so and what's good for the gander is good for the goose, or some such. [Tangent: I've always been of a particular Annie Oakley mindset because anything you can do I can do better. Though it doesn't generally take the form of competition with my brothers but rather a kind of stubborn spunk. Cause if they're going to help chop up the tree then I am too etc etc.] The fact that the idea of talking to complete strangers about my religious beliefs scared the crap out of me only strengthened my resolve.
Since women aren't allowed to serve missions until the age of 21 (unlike men at 19) I went to college and kind of put the idea on the backburner of my mind. Until late in my junior year, that is, when my bishop at the time suggested that I seriously think and pray about going on my mission ASAP. I did pray about it and I had what can be described as a relevatory moment when I knew that I should drop everything, which included delaying my senior year of college, and pursue that goal.
At that time when I decided to do something I did it. The fact that I really did feel called of God only intensified my OCD tunnel vision until I had all of my ducks in a row. To this day I'm fairly certain that things that happened during those months quickened the breakdown of the friendship between my roommate and myself. I've always felt that she blamed me for leaving which forced us to find a sublettor and which also caused her to have to move back in to her parents' house. But that's a whole other post entirely.
So there I was in September 2000, walking into the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT, feeling as if I'd been chosen by God. The MTC is a strange place and while it does help prepare people by teaching all manner of proselytizing techniques it's more geared towards at making sure that every person there is well and truly indoctrinated. It's kind of like boot camp, in a way, except with less intense physical activity and more fasting. And I was there 3 weeks longer than I needed to be, since I already knew Spanish and didn't need to spend 8 hours a day in language clases.
That, strangely, is the first sign of the intense hand-waving I'd do about all of this down the road. Because the people at the MTC screwed the pooch on that one, except at the time I totally believed that it was Meant To Be and not simply a result of a clerical error.
Anyway, cue early December 2000 when I arrived in McAllen, TX. For the next year, or so, I would be completely devoted to spreading the word. I put 110% of myself into that work. It was the primary focus of my entire existence. I thought of myself first and foremost as a missionary. To give an example of how extreme that was, September 11, 2001 was hardly a blip on my radar. Yeah, I heard about it on the day and even caught a news feed of it at lunch at a members' home, but I didn't understand the way it had changed America until I got home the next January. I was completely out of the loop.
In a lot of ways, missionary work was tailor-made for me. I'm really pretty sure that if I were a member of any other Christian faith I would have devoted my life to either being a clergyperson or a nun. I'm just one of those people for whom religious thought and devotion comes naturally. Plus, it was a time in my life when I felt like I was actually accomplishing something and helping to make people's lives better. You'll find a lot of missionaries who are obssessed with baptizing people but that wasn't really my thing, I was more about connecting with people and sharing things that had made my life better.
I also never shirked at helping out however I could. I remember stopping by a sister's house to find her and her kids out in the yard chopping at the ridiculously tall grass. Come to find out the city had told her she had until the next day to cut her grass or they'd fine her. Me and my companion went right to work, me with a hoe and her with a beat-up old lawnmower. The patches of skin I wore off my hands were legendary.
And then came Fall of 2001 when I started getting sick. I denied how worn-down and pained I was for a long time with excuses like I just tired and needed a vacation. Of course, the harder I pushed to work, the worse I would get. I didn't know what was wrong with me and to top it all off my medical decisions were being made, in part, by a woman who hardly knew me and was taking advice from a nurse who had never met me and only knew the bare bones of my medical history.
Because it's completely logical to blame widespread pain on a seizure medication that I'd been taking since high school. That's completely reasonable. *rolls eyes*
But I didn't blame anyone but myself. Even though I didn't realize it at the time I was sure that my illness must have happened because of some failure on my part. After all, I'd always been certain that as long as I was doing what I was supposed to be doing then everything would be okay.
One of these days I should dig up my old rulebook and copy out all of the rules we had to follow. If you think not drinking coffee or booze or smoking and no sex before marriage is bad, you won't believe the way a missionary's life is micromanaged.
Anyway, by January things had finally gotten so bad that I actually talked to the mission president about being sent home early. But my rationale for going home wasn't because I was sick but rather because the Work was suffering and I shouldn't impede it any longer with my physical weakness. A rationale, by the way, I totally and completely believed. It wasn't just something I made up to soothe anyone's conscience.
And just like that I was dumped. Two days later I was on a plane back to Michigan and a couple days after that I was officially released (decomissioned) and free to go back to my life.
I can't tell you how much it hurt to take off that nametag. I still kind of miss it and all it represented.
That was that. My life was suddenly my own again but I didn't have anything to fill up all the areas I'd so wholeheartedly devoted to serving God. Everything else felt pointless and meaningless. That plus a resurgence of my illness sparked a downward spiral that resulted in me failing what should have been my last two college classes for lack of attendance. It took me years to stop feeling like a failure for not being able to complete my mission the way I "should" have.
It's hard to lose what you'd so successfully made your meaning for everything. Yeah, I willingly drank the Kool-Aid. I more than drank it, I pumped it through my system like blood. It tasted vaguely of grape paired with OCD.
It took me until just a few weeks ago to realize something else, I also felt betrayed. There I was, doing everything I possibly could and I was still dropped like a hot potato without even a "Well Done" for my services. Not only did I feel betrayed by people like my mission president, I felt betrayed by the Church as a whole. A realization which makes my spotty attendance and failure to productively serve in any callings that much more understandable. Because how can I trust them when they've already ripped my heart out and stamped all over it?
*snorts* Church as a Bad Boyfriend on the next Oprah.
It's no wonder it took me so long to make that connection. When you belong to a church that is believed to be True you tend to live with the implied assumption that it can do no wrong. You don't question the people above you because they were called of God and if they say something should be done then that's the way it should be. Because, in essence, God said so.
But no matter your opinions on God, people are fallible. People can be wrong even, perhaps especially, when they are deemed to have a divine mandate. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to accept something like that about leaders in the Church, it feels like blasphemy. Except, if I don't accept that then I'd have to leave it all behind.
Which raises a salient question, why don't I just leave? I wouldn't let the people closest to me treat me like that, I wouldn't let anyone treat me like that, so why does some religious institution get to do so? The only answer I have to that is that I still have that religious connection I mentioned above. I don't doubt the good things I've learned as a Mormon and while I may not feel as if I can trust any of my leaders to be concerned for my well-being there are forces inside of me that won't let me turn my back on it. Though I certainly can't blame people who have left. There is injustice and alienation to go around topped off by having to accept as fact that a teenager found a golden book in a hill. Because that makes any kind of sense.
On top of a heavy dose of betrayal is a lingering sense of loss over the fact that I never had more authority in my religion than when I was a missionary. Sisters, for all intents and purposes, answer directly to the mission president (unlike elders who are directed through a more menial chain of command). After all, there's a big difference in the maturity level of a 21+ year-old woman and a 19 year-old man straight out of high school. Also, sister missionaries are accepted as clergy by pretty much everyone in the church and out of it, their opinions hold weight. When you return back to normal church membership your suddenly subservient to pretty much every other male member. There's a culture of Father/Bishop/Brother So-and-So Knows Best that permeates throughout the women of the church and even the men who take women's advice seriously can do so while they're patronizingly patting them on the head at the same time.
Like I said, patently flawed.
But for some reason I'm not ready to give it up, not yet. Maybe because I'm actually a masochist, who knows. And, hell, even if I did leave it would always be a part of me. Do I regret serving a mission? Absolutely not, the experiences I had and the service I was able to render to other people were definitely worth it. But I'm not going to run right out and sign myself up again. I might be a masochist but I'm not an idiot. At least now I see things clearly with my blinders off.
Wow, apparently I had a lot to say. You know, when I decided to start blogging about Mormonism one of my goals was to present how things looked from the Mormon side of the belief gap which caused me to subsume my own ambiguous feelings. It looks like I've overcome that conceit. Which is a good thing because brutal honesty is good for the soul.
Now I can focus on the meta that's been poking at my brain; it's tentatively titled Free Will vs. Determinism in the SPN Universe. It has the distinct possibility of turning into a monster post all of its own. I'm sure you're all "thrilled" to hear that. ;-)