For some reason, every year around April 1st I make radical revisions to my life. In software development terms, it’s like I have a new “release” on or around April Fools’ day. I’m very aware of the pattern. Knowing it is coming has really helped me anticipate it better, and accept it. These days it’s a healthy continuation of what started oh so many years ago, probably in my teens. I really should pour through my journals and find that pattern, but I’m not sure it is something unique to me. The change in seasons does something to us as a human species, for the better, I believe.
When I was 15 I remember it was around this time of the year when I gave up Mormonism and stopped attending, pretending, and dealing with all the lies. Then, by July of that same year, I was at the park with my family when I consciously decided to “pretend” I believed it in order to keep the peace in the family. My not being Mormon brought so much pain to my parents — especially at that time. That was a mistake. I eventually ended up meeting with the Bishop, a good man, who helped me fight back my “personal apostasy” and re-indoctrinate myself. I deeply regret that decision.
I ended up going on a Mormon mission. I’ll never forget shooting hoops on a Sunday out in front of the house in the Spring some months before my May start date. I contemplated the path of life before me. I imagined what would happen if I just didn’t go and moved away. I realized how successful my life in High School had been, that I would be able to do very well for myself outside of the church, that I could spend so much more time outdoors, exploring, adventuring, and discovering new people, cultures, and places. But I concluded to take the easy way out and let the pressure of my entire existence make that decision for me. So I went to the West Indies, after all, who gets a chance to see that West Indies?
In the Caribbean I met amazing people from wonderful cultures and had exposure to things I never would have had I stayed home, including factual anti-Mormon literature that simply restated was I confirmed was in the official Church history books. By 18 months in I had zero “testimony” of the church even though I was the Assistant to the President and regular trained missionaries. I remember one particular car ride back to our rental (we got a car because we were the highest ranking missionaries in the mission) and just shaking my head at the irony and hipocracy. I watched missionary after missionary collapse under the lies for different reasons but never made the causal connection. It was the Mormon mind-fuck that almost destroyed many of them, sometimes literally.
By the end of my mission, I ended up being asked by the most stubborn convert of the entire island of Barbados to be the one to finally baptise her. She told me she chose me because of my spirit and attitude. The fact that I had to baptise her twice because here hair kept floating was a good symbol for the utter irony of the entire thing. A wiser, older me now realizes that I had no testimony of it, but I saw her committment to living a better life and made it though it on that alone. I felt something warm and positive, but I know now it wasn’t “the Holy Ghost” but a rational human appreciation for another human’s conviction to be better. Mormons certainly don’t have any special access to bonus Holy Ghost points like they teach. It’s part of the avalache of bullshit the Mormons heap on unsuspecting, good people. There’s a very demonic reason Mormons insist 19-year-old boys “must serve” a mission. It’s before they go to universities and explore cultures and world literature. They control every aspect of their “monastic” experience in order to solidify as much as possible their indoctrination in the Mormon cult. It’s a methodical, evil thing that feigns to provide free-will producing inhumane levels of psychological pressure to comply.
In 2010, perhaps the most dramatic change in my life happend. I remember watching the Spring blossoms for a cathartic moment from through the wrought-iron bars locked in a mental ward having committed myself for my own safety. My marriage and life literally collapsed and I almost didn’t survive it. I never actually did attempt to take my life, but boy did I think about it. I’d been unplugged from the Mormon lies, done foolish things as a result, and could never go back to eating fake steak in the Matrix ever again. Realizing my Mormon wife’s love for me was completely conditioned on my staying Mormon had drove me into the arms of an unconditionally loving woman struggling with similar challenges in her own world. That meant excommunication for me, even though the Stake President asked if I wanted it and was happy just to disfellowship me instead. I begged to be excommunicated. I even said that it was the only way my wife (whom I loved at the time) would ever be able to deal with it. Little did I know the level of pure evil that would come from her because of it, including seeing an officer at my door “for my own protection” randomly one day when she lost her shit and disappeared. She was just as bat-shit crazy as me, but dealt with it entirely differently.
So why all this rememberance of drama? Because, when my dissillusionment with humans sets in it can be a dangerous thing, not physically, but to one’s own psychological health and overall happiness. It’s so easy to see all the evil of our species, the institutionalized lies that make massive suffering somehow okay “in the eyes of the Lord.” The only thing that matters is the here and now, what am I doing right now with that which has been given to me. None of us can control how we came to be or where we live, but every one of us does control what we do in this moment with that situation. If nothing more, we’ve been given consiousness, the ability to think, to breath, to exist. It may be that is the only moment this consciousness will exist, which makes is even more precious. Who cares what everyone else is doing. What am I going to do with what I have?
First and foremost, my body is the most amazing thing I have. My mind is a part of my body. Everyone gets one (and only one), a unique, precious gift from the Mother Earth. How am I treating mine? I hate that I have allowed myself over the last year to put aside how I care for my gift for the false priority of “helping others” and “changing the world.” No amount of change or positivity I can put into the world will ever be worth squandering my more precious, most sacred gift. Honestly, I don’t see how “spiritual” people can rationalize the intense irresponsibility with which they treat the most sacred and precious gift from their God. To willfully allow oneself to give in to gluttony and seriously bad health practices is to essentially accept a gift, throw it in the dirt, shit on it, and walk away. This is especially true if you believe in an intelligent God who gave you that gift. How the fuck can these people live with themselves?
I’m just glad I caught myself. As I head into my upper 50s and 60s my committment first and foremost — losing my fucking job if it requires it — is to my physical and mental health, and indirectly to helping others make their own personal steps in that direction. I would rather be healthy and destitute than decrepid and rich. I realize everyone is at their own place on this and needs to make these realizations in their own time and way. I certainly did. I’m just saying that this is revision 2023 of rwxrob, new and improved.