Coming As I Am

  After putting the message up, I baptized myself in Disney movies. I remember the sequence went Tarzan, The Little Mermaid, Toy Story 2, Ratatouille. 4:32 in the morning and I’m still not tired, but I bury myself in my blankets anyways. By way of total coincidence, I’d needed to reboot my Facebook account only about a month prior to this, which meant I had to rebuild my contacts. It also meant the algorithm wasn’t particularly kind to me, and so my post was just going to be buried. Not a lot of people found my message right off, which is not how I envisioned this happening at all. I would be getting comments on my post for nearly two weeks after the news broke as it trickled out. My message includes the disclosure that I would be stepping away from social media as a mental health precaution. That didn’t stop a lot of people from reaching out to me anyway.             It was nearly a week after my post went up, just after I...

            After graduating from BYU with a liberal arts degree, I moved back home and allowed myself to attend my home ward. This was about a year after my Dad’s unexpected passing, a time when a person really needed the social equivalent of wrapping up in a pile of blankets and watching Disney movies (which incidentally is my typical Sunday evening). Moreover, I just didn’t really see the practicality of attending a singles' ward, certainly not at that point in my life.     During my college period, I had adopted a lot of maladaptive ideas about myself. I had internalized, for example, that I was not worthy to serve a mission, and so I never let myself follow-through with the application process, which made me the rare BYU graduate who did not have this rite of passage under my belt.  I was really struggling for definition during these years. It was also during this time of my life that I started writing my ...

About halfway through college, I was at the reception for a cousin’s wedding, and one of the family members of my new cousin-in-law (either her uncle or her dad), introduced himself and asked me who I was and where I was from.  I told him I was the groom’s cousin, and when I said I was from Utah, a weird sort of smile crept onto his face. And it kind of stayed there without either one of us saying anything. Me, shrinking ever so slightly. Him, grinning down at me like he suddenly knew something about me. Another cousin-in-law was in the vicinity and, carrying the conversation, he asked this guy if he made it out to Utah very often. There was a dismissive laugh in his response as he assured him that he did not , saying something along the lines of, “Folks tell me, ‘Oh the Utah mountains really are something,’ but they never say that about Utah people for some reason.” He said that with me just standing there. Not that I think it would have bothered him: he seemed confident th...