Thrashbrowns Loses his Religion: Pt. 8

 

Hell is Other Mormons

If you've ever watched even a single zombie movie, you know there's a point in just about every one of them where the heroes of the piece are cornered, trapped in a house or a warehouse, or, Hell, sometimes at the end of a dead-end street. They're tired and low on ammo. There's nowhere to run and worse, a shambling throng of the living dead is bearing down on them. This is the lowest point in the story.

I watch these scenes of cornered heroes at the end of their ropes and it feels a little similar to me. It kinda feels like how I used to feel after church meetings on Sundays.

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Unless I know and like you, I'm a pretty quiet, keep-to-myself type. I like having a lot of time to myself to think and write and do music-related shit. Hell, I'm perfectly content watching cooking shows by myself and a perfect Friday night involves cheesy old sci-fi films and a big plate of nachos. Sounds like bliss to me.

I'm also someone who highly values my individuality and doing my own thing. I've had a strong fear of becoming another clone, another pod person, for as long as I can remember. I don't want to live according to the expectations of others and I don't want to care about what anyone else thinks of me. 

Mostly, I just want to be left alone. I'm not hurting anyone. My drummer ain't your drummer. Let me march to him.

Yet, during my years of church activity, I found that I couldn't do any of that. All I wanted to do was go to my meetings, get spiritually inoculated for the week, then go home and chill. But the church doesn't let you do that and when I say "the church doesn't let you do that," I mean the whole point is to build the kingdom of God and everyone has a responsibility to add rooms to the Lord's mansion. 

Building the kingdom means fellowshipping with one another, fulfilling the duties of any calling you may have and attending various activities like Family Home Evening. You can't just be in the church, you have to be of the church. As a fundamentally introverted nerd, one of the hardest things to do is to put myself out there and the church expects you to do nothing but put yourself out there if you want to remain in good standing.

Operating like that was exhausting, not to mention the way it robbed me of my peace of mind.

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I tried to hide. I'd go home, barricade myself in my room, turn my music up to 11 and hope that I'd be left alone. Some nights, I was golden and nobody would bother me. Other nights, I'd get phone calls. "Hey man, I have home teaching appointments set up." "Hey man, can I get you to come with me to visit this person that just moved into the ward boundaries?" "Hey man, I just wanted to check on you cuz I didn't see you at FHE this week." (Note: I understand the church doesn't do the home/visiting teaching program anymore. That doesn't change the fact that I struggled with it.)

You have to keep showing up, all the time. If you don't, they come looking for you. And it's like "Chill out, Brother Nosey-pants. I wanted to sit at home listening to death metal with my cat." 

Only, I never said that. I thought it a hell of a lot, but I never had the balls to actually say it. Instead, I would slip into a personality I call "My Better Self." My Better Self is a more socially acceptable persona to LDS folks. My Better Self doesn't rant about the awesomeness of metal cuz that might be offensive. He doesn't discuss film or politics or cool, crazy science stuff cuz that might be offensive. Hell, that motherfucker doesn't even use profanity cuz that would absolutely be offensive. He's actually pretty bland, truth be told. Worse, every time I would slip into My Better Self, I'd feel like I was losing my grip on who I really was. Every time I'd slip into My Better Self, I'd feel like was just a little bit closer to becoming a pod person.

*****

 

I'm a pretty fucking weird dude, and I think that's okay. But one thing I know for sure is that my weirdness doesn't blend well with LDS culture on the whole and it led to me being hassled a whole lot more than I wanted to be. A few of my least favorite barbs thrown my way by churchy people:

• "My morality is based on the word of God and that means it's more moral than yours." Except for the fact that you feel you need to point out your moral superiority actually means it's not.
• "I know it feels like I'm tearing you down, but I swear I'm building you up taller than you could be without my help, and the Lord's help, of course." Except if the way you choose to help me makes me want to kill myself and hate who I am to my core, it's not helping. If that's how you help, then please fucking stop.
• "How's Thrashbrowns' Word of Wisdom problem?" Except I don't have a Word of Wisdom problem, asshole. I've been drunk, I've smoked a few cigarettes. But those are fairly isolated incidents and nothing chronic or habitual. (The WoW is a health code found in the Doctrine and Covenants that prohibits using tobacco, alcohol and shit like that.)
• "Taking offense is a choice and doing so makes you look petty and sad." Except, doesn't the person who committed the original offense hold any sort of accountability for what they said or did? I get that it's like the football coaching wisdom that says "don't react when someone fucks with you, cuz the person that reacts is always the one who gets the penalty flag." But if someone chooses to do or say something shitty to me, they choose to do that and doesn't that choice come with any responsibility? 
• "Maybe you need to change the things that you're interested in if you want friends." Thanks, Dad.

It became my goal to avoid as much of this kind of "input" as possible. To me, the solution was to try to be as milquetoast and vanilla Mormon as I could possibly be without driving myself to suicide. I didn't let people see my rough edges but trying to hide all the shit only exposed more flaws and impurities in my character. 

I began to hate my fellow churchgoers for making me feel like I had to be this sanitized version of myself. That mutated into me hating myself for not having the spine to stand up for myself. How much of this pain and damage would I not have sustained had I just put my foot down and said "This is who I am and fuck you if you don't like it"? I might still be an active church member if I didn't let assholes push me around. That, or I'd have been excommunicated a long-ass time ago.

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When I say "Hell is other Mormons," I don't mean that all LDS folks are shitty shitbags full of shit. Some definitely are, although it doesn't do much good to notify them of their shittiness. Most of them are so convinced of their own moral superiority, all your words would amount to for them is the annoying buzzing of a mosquito. In my experience, calling LDS folks out about their hypocrisy or acting contrary to what we've been taught only gets you in trouble. You become a shit disturbed because you want others to practice what they preach and act according to what we learn in the Gospel. 

When I say "Hell is other Mormons," I mean that the groupthink and desire for unity and conformity within the culture can cause the "weird people" to put themselves through Hell trying to create a place within said culture to belong. We do it to ourselves, so ultimately it's our own fault. But we do so under the influence (and fear) of the feedback we get from the Mormons we're trying to blend in with. 

See, the exhaustion and despair I felt as an active church member was created by the wide-ass chasm I saw between who I was as a person and who I felt like I needed to be to find my place in the church. Any time I had to be in front of people, even if it was something as simple as sitting by myself in meetings, I felt it. When I was serving in a calling that required me to teach or perform some other function where I needed to appear like I knew my shit or had it all together, I felt like a complete phony. I felt like everyone could see through My Better Self and they could tell that I was at the edge of my capabilities and that I didn't have that much to give in the first place. It felt like I was an alien hiding inside a glitchy hologram and people could just tell what I really was. And I got so tired of trying to hide. 

I wanted to listen to my music and be left alone but they wouldn't leave me alone. It makes me soooo thankful I've never been popular. 

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I had originally planned on this post being a bitch session about shitty things that Mormons had said to me over the years and how, most of the time, the people saying these shitty things have been disregarding their own beliefs or acting as hypocrites or completely lacking in self-awareness. But after much thought, I decided that those things don't matter all that much. They did damage but people are fucking dumb, no matter how smart they think they are, and none of them are part of my universe anymore, so it's not like I have to deal with them on a regular basis.

But I STILL deal with issues of self-concept and self-worth that took hold during my churchgoing years. I STILL feel like a phony much of the time as I still feel all too often that I need to hide who I really am, dumb myself down to make people feel more comfortable. Am I ever gonna outgrow this? Am I ever gonna reach I point where I'm proud of myself for who I am? Am I ever going to disconnect myself from the guilt and shame I feel for misrepresenting myself to benefit the Mormon folks I found myself among? Only The Shadow knows...