Thrashbrowns Loses his Religion: Part 11

 

The End Complete

See that hairy motherfucker up there? That's me, not too long before I started this series. Two-plus months, ten posts and an ocean of depression caused by digging up the past later and it's hard for me to believe I'm the same person as the guy in that shot.

For one thing, I got a haircut and trimmed my beard so I don't resemble Captain Caveman so closely anymore. For another thing, I've stumbled across a few pretty powerful realizations about myself and my relationship to the LDS church over the course of this series. 

So, what have we learned? The two major points that come to mind are:

The death of my faith was a death of 1,000 cuts. I remember when I was active in church hearing tall tales about people who had left the faith. It was almost always due to one slightly challenging situation that the deserters blew way out of proportion. Usually, speculation ran rampant that whatever reason they gave for leaving was just a cover for some sin they couldn't let go of. I don't know how many of those stories were true. I suspect not many. But I know for a fact that my decision to leave the church was the result of many, many issues that built up over decades. Not a single one of the issues brought up over the past ten posts would have killed my faith on its own. But combined, they were too much to weather. Kinda like how the Constructicons kinda sucked ass until they combined to form Devastator. Then, you (and the Autobots) were fucked.

Little offenses don't matter but they can kill. A lot of "good" Mormon folks said a lot of pretty heinous shit to me over the years. They treated me like garbage. I held on to those little offenses for years and they tore me apart inside right up until a conversation I had with my energy healer a few weeks back. I was bitching about how the assholes in my mission made me feel like shit. She told me something along the lines of "It didn't matter to them then. It doesn't matter to them now. Why are you letting it matter to you now?" 

That was a good question to ask, cuz when I'm honest with myself, I realize that the words and deeds of people who don't really take the time to get to know you are fucking meaningless. It would be like me wandering into a graduate-level cosmology class, a subject I know very little about, and talking shit about the professor's knowledge of gravitational waves. Fucking. Meaningless.

But they still hurt, and the longer you hold onto them, whether it's because you might believe what the ass hats say or just cuz you're fed up with people dissing you, the more they wound you. Sometimes those barbs get wedged in you really fucking tight, so it hurts to pull them out. But it's better to experience a bit of pain now than to let those barbs infect you and rot you from the inside out. 

*****

One last story:

It's coming up on the twentieth anniversary of my little brother's death. So he's been on my mind even more than usual lately. I miss him and I often wonder what could've been done to prevent his murder. Like, what alterations made earlier in the timeline could have helped avert it all? How much more stable would everyone in my family be if it hadn't happened?

My sister told me that my parents' bishop at the time came by the house, ostensibly to provide support and comfort. Instead, he essentially told them that my brother died the way he did because he had stopped going to church and lapsed into making bad life choices.

Wait - what are you telling me? Are you actually gonna sit there with a straight face and tell a pair of grieving parents that because their son chose to leave the straight and narrow path, he deserved the pain, desperation and fear of being stabbed multiples time and left all alone on a cold city sidewalk to bleed out and die? Seriously? Seriously?

(ahem...)

GO FUCK YOURSELF WITH A DOUBLE-ENDED DILDO YOU CALLOUS, SELF-RIGHTEOUS SACK OF PIG SHIT!!!!!

Ok, let's step back a bit. I wasn't there myself so I don't know what he actually said. I don't know whether he realized he fucked up and apologized. I only know that if I had been in his presence when those words left his lips, he wouldn't be leaving in an upright fashion. 

I also know, sadly, that there's a high likelihood that this motherfucker actually did say what my sister claimed. For one thing, there's no reason for my sister to lie about something like that. For another thing, I'd seen this kind of shit many times before. Not to this extreme, but I had seen many people devalued because they weren't living up to church standards. That's not a problem if you're not a member, but once you are a member and you know the truth, it's apparently an offense worthy of murder.

*****

I'm actually kind of embarrassed how long it took me to understand what was actually going on with me and the church. It took a long time to realize that I wasn't of any value to the church I belonged to unless I was fitting into this one-size-fits-all life. That nobody in the church gave a fucking rat's ass about me unless I was going to all my activities and running around quoting scriptures like I had a set of the Standards Works jammed up my ass. And that's just never been who I am. Even at my most active and faithful, being Mormon was just part of the person I was. I never wanted my church membership to completely define me so I never let it.

Once it was finally beaten into my head that I was no better than spiritual cannon fodder, I had a decision to make. Not everyone can be a General Authority or a star in the LDS pop culture firmament. But I could still be there to help the people around me. I still found value in that. So I decided to press on, always pushing through my perception that no one around me thought I was worthy to even serve my fellow beings. But eventually, it stopped making sense for me keep on keeping on when nothing I did was ever good enough.

That's why I will never go back. Well, that and the fact that my music gives me all the feelings of validity and connection I was told I would find in church. But I will NEVER put myself in another situation or organization where my adherence to someone else's ideas of what makes a decent person is so much more important than whether or not I AM a decent person. That's a bullshit game I refuse to fucking play.

*****

So what happens now?

In a lot of ways, I've only begun to get to know the "real me" in the past year or so. For most of my life, I sidetracked myself trying to figure out who I was supposed to be through the lens of the church. If you're a weird kid, of course viewing yourself through the lens of a culture that advocates a one-size-fits-all kind of life and expects its members to look, act and think basically the same is going to fuck you up.

Some things were always there. My love of metal music and sci-fi movies and the like. I've been into those things so passionately for so long, they've become part of my identity. Other things are still in flux. My ideas about relationships, politics and so many other things constantly grow, develop and change. I'm still figuring out what things really matter and what I think about them. I expect that to be the case right up to the time I pass out of this world.

As far as me and the church are concerned, this is just a beginning. This project helped to begin to purge the negative emotions I've had roped to my neck like a millstone so that I can heal. But one other very important thing I've learned through doing these posts is that I have to own a significant part of what got me to this point. And I have to forgive myself for those mistakes and free myself from all that guilt.

Years ago, when I first started writing novels, I came up with a story about the Mormon guy whose faith has lapsed and who is dealing with the guilt he feels from abandoning his religion. I'm now convinced that dusting off that story and completing that idea will be a vital part of forgiving myself for leaving the church and leaving such a huge spiritual void in my life.  Beyond that, I feel slightly more free now than I did before I started this project. This was a really, really good start. To quote Fountains of Wayne, "Constellations are blinking in the sky/ The road is open wide/ And it feels so cinematic..."