Just when I think I'm out...
It has now been two years since I first stumbled on to the Zarahemla City Limits website (linked over on the side there) and started my journey out of Mormonism. My time line was roughly like so:
1 weekend reading essays on website
2 weeks reading books by Grant Palmer and Fawn Brodie
2 months struggling to be NOM to maintain family peace
1 meeting with 1st counselor to quit callings
2 months trying to think of excuses not to go to church at all to avoid brain implosion
2 months not even making excuses but just not going to church
1 meeting with bishop to formally request no further contact
5 quiet months
1 letter to 5 year old son inviting him to Primary
1 letter to bishop with cc: to Greg Dodge resigning
1 year of happy post-Mormon life
And so I still get very disconcerted when I have Mormon dreams. They have become less frequent, but damn - I had another one over the weekend. In most of these dreams, I am at the MTC. Probably because that was the worst two months of my life ever, and the first time I started to feel like I belonged to a cult.
The details of the dream are fuzzy now. But the theme is always the same, every time, in every dream. The feeling of being trapped. Feeling trapped but surrounded by people who are completely fine and can't understand my panic. Feeling the overwhelming desire to run, to escape, to break free and yet terrified of...?
This is what those fools who harp on "leave the church but can't leave it alone" will never understand. I can't leave it alone because it won't leave me alone. For the first six months after my disaffection, I felt so anxious that I had to rely on drugs just to sleep through the night. And even now, after two years out, I'm still having nightmares.
4 Comments:
I still dream I'm in church under a blue moon. And I've been out 15 years this January.
Usually it's when I'm either stressed out or if I've been spending too much time on exmormon.org.
Haven't heard from you in awhile and wanted to see how you are doing. Everything ok?
Hope all is well!
I always dream I am at church, in the ward I grew up in. It's wild though because nothing even remotely religious is ever happening, for instance in one dream Michael Jordan was the speaker and he didn't talk about mormonism. The other night I dreamt that I was in the ward building for some sort of soccer thing. Weird!!
I loved reading your blog. I grew up in Baltimore, attending the LDS church too. (I wonder if we know each other-- I've blocked much of my childhood out. YW alone took weeks of therapy as an adult to resolve!)
I haven't attended church in 12 or 13 years, but I still feel guilty about shopping on Sundays, and I can claim all I want that I don't drink because I don't like the taste, but it's still a WoW issue for me! Crazy.
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