Thursday, June 15, 2006
It's interesting to see how recovery from mormonism goes. You just keep on working on it and think you have it down to just a few issues left. They may be large issues, but at least you have a grasp on what they are.
Then one day you see something or some place that brings back up old feelings. Today, while in Utah for my grandparents' 50th anniversary celebration, I went to BYU campus for the first time since my relatively abrupt transfer out of the school two years ago.
As I walked across the campus, I had so many mixed feelings it was overwhelming. In a way I felt like I was back at school there while being simultaneously aware that my life is completely different from that now. I remembered that in order to maintain my integrity, I really had no choice but to leave and I've enjoyed my time at my new school, but I couldn't help but wonder if it was really necessary that I left it. I even went so far as to philosophize that perhaps God is real there as a cultural construct and that the mass belief in a common system somehow made it actually work as if it were literally and objectively true. It didn't make me want to return to the church or believing in or anything, but it made me wonder if I couldn't have just meshed into the culture and used the culture as a frame of reference to measure truth against rather than objective reality.
In the end, I realized that I did what I had to do and it really couldn't have happened any other way. Despite all of the problems that were there then and now, there were a lot of experiences from my time at BYU that I really enjoyed. Though still poor, I had much more of a social life there and I was able to participate in many more social activities. My feelings on the school will always be mixed I'm sure, but hopefully as my recovery progresses I won't find the feelings so overwhelming.