So let’s catch up…

Hello old friends!

It’s been a while, and in that time, a whole lot has changed. In a “burn your life to the ground and start over” kind of way, even though so many of the big things in my life are the same. Still Atti’s mom and he is doing awesome. Still married to Bear with no plans on changing that any time soon. Still living in Northern California, but we’ve just finished a move away from my mountain haven and closer in to the city.

But internally? Internally it is a completely different landscape. My inner state feels like Mad Max Fury Road and the best version of me is Furiosa walking away from an explosion.

This all started before I stepped away from the blog. All of us fight off change with denial until we’re up to our eyeballs in it and there’s nothing else to see. I can’t even really decide on a true start date for the slide into calamity. 2016 when I got so sick we thought I was dying of MS? 2014 when I did a stint at the mental hospital? 2012 when we Mormon Feminists began engaging in direct action and learned first hand that the leaders of the church were not what we had been taught to believe? We toss in Atti’s whole childhood and his near-death birth and we’re back in 2008, and then we can really just keep going all the way back to the beginning.

For whatever reason, I just seem to be a hard luck kinda kid. :shrug: I don’t have a lot of self-pity about this. Some self-pity, I’m not a saint. Sometimes I have myself a good old fashioned “why me” fist shake at the heavens. But these days I usually just accept it as part of how the world works. I have worked in grassroots activism for 23 years now. I have listened to so many different stories of oppression and tragedy, walked people through the inadequate or rigged justice system, fought against bias in health care, listened to women describe the horrors they lived with everyday that were still less dangerous than leaving their spouse. I know in my bones that this world is not just or fair. Bad guys win every day. Sometimes things don’t work out. Not everything happens for a reason. It’s grim, sure, but pretending otherwise doesn’t actually make anything change, it just changes the resources you have to deal with it.

If you expect the world to be just, you are blindsided every time it demonstrates it isn’t. It is harrowing, and traumatic. But if you understand that “life is pain, highness, anyone who says different is selling something” then you can prepare for it. Create support systems. Take your pain seriously and responsibly. Mindfully choose who you allow into your life. Fight for justice. And treasure all the beautiful things in this world as they happen instead of expecting them as an entitlement.

Even though I might sound like a nihilist, I think of myself as an optimistic nihilist. An optimistic nihilist and a skeptical mystic. My philosophies are as bipolar as my brain.

I stopped attending the LDS church in 2014 when they started excommunicating Mormon Feminists. I loved the church with everything I had in me until then and it was one of the most traumatic and hurtful betrayals in my life to discover that our sincere efforts to follow where we felt called, with all the pure Mormon-ness of our hearts, was not only unwelcome but viewed as its own kind of betrayal. We were putting everything we had been taught to believe to the test, and the foundation cracked. Personal revelation isn’t that big a deal after all. Revering the pioneers is only for a certain kind of pioneer and not for those women giving blessings. It is a far greater sin to question leadership than to abuse another human.

Back when I was a practicing member I couldn’t imagine a life without the church and now that I have six years of freedom under my belt I know why. A lifetime of avoiding certain media and certain environments and certain people will create a stronger bubble than any Facebook algorithm. If I could have imagined a life like what I’m living, I would have understood the risk to leave it all behind was worth it. But I couldn’t see that from the inside. The whole world was coated with a one way glass that only reflected back to me the vision created by fear-mongering leadership, and all the people I loved and trusted told me it was reality.

In 2014, things took another unexpected turn when two of my nieces came back into my life. I have long written about having a shitty childhood and going no contact with my parents 20 years ago. Over those years I’ve also drawn some boundaries with other family members, and that meant that these two nieces, L & S, have never known us. And then they moved in with us, and now we think of them as our daughters. They are both grown and living on their own now, and family dynamics being what they are, might not be a regular feature here. There’s still a lot to sort out. I couldn’t be prouder of either of them and want to link to all their work, but I’m going to do it very thoughtfully.

For the last four years I’ve been pinging back and forth wildly between medical procedures. At one point I had 6 surgeries in 18 months. It appears that MS was just a temporary destination on the journey to a proper diagnosis and what has really caused my rapid decline can actually best be summed up as: Trauma. A host of intersecting autoimmune conditions and muscular/skeletal problems exacerbated or brought on by trauma.

I spent last year in what I have affectionately termed Traumapalooza 2019. Most of the year was in surgical recovery, and after so many years of that I honestly didn’t know how I was going to make it back to the land of the living. Chronic illness, yall. It adds up. But I’m doing really great now and feeling hopeful about the future. Trauma recovery is real.

Now I finally feel like I am coming through the great Midlife Sifting that Brene Brown talks about. I turned 41 in December. Every vision I had for my future has crumbled into dust around me. I expected to be living on a working farm with a brood of children and spending all my time dedicated to God. Now I use a lot of weed, we rattle around this big empty house, and my concept of both God and humans is so much bigger than I ever imagined. I love my new life so much I burst into tears in random intervals, grateful for the expansive feeling of an open road before me. But it did come at a cost. Giving up that feeling of stability and security the church gave me. It this chaotic world, people do a lot worse for security than stay in a harmful church, and for me the church was every connection I have ever known. I don’t have a family I came from. I don’t have a hometown. Leaving took with it 20 years of friendships, college friends, job opportunities, extended family and even risked my marriage. Mormonism is my heritage and ethnicity. It was my people and my past and my future, and without it sometimes I still get vertigo. But now that I’ve stepped out of that cage, I’ve found all the parts of myself I carved off to try and fit.

My big sassy sailor mouth I never successfully bridled now gets to carry my authentic voice. My love of beauty and art doesn’t have to be a secret shame and fear of being vain. My desire to perform can be about so many other things than attention seeking. Now that I’ve let go of the dreams I had of a certain kind of motherhood, I can pick back up all the dreams I abandoned for it.

In my deepest of hearts I wanted to be an actress. And I gave it up at 21 because I thought it was incompatible with my dreams of Mormon motherhood. And honestly, I don’t think I was wrong about that. I just didn’t realize that the Mormon motherhood dreams were just as much of an illusion as the brightest of Hollywood fantasies. I’ve hustled for years, scraping whatever opportunities I could through the loopholes of “appropriate” Mormon womanhood. I don’t want to settle anymore. I don’t want to tell myself that the odd storytelling show or comedy open mic is enough. I want to chase it. I want to see what I can actually do if take all that faith and dedication I used to give institutions, and see what happens if I put it into myself.

I’m grieving Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, but one thing I’m keeping from that experience came from her last press conference when she was talking about what it was like to cast a vote for herself in the primary. The symbolism of that moment struck me, and I told myself then: Vote For Yourself Like Elizabeth Warren.

So that’s my new goal and the new focus of this blog. What happens when, at 41, I drop every expectation I was ever given and do things my way? What happens when I pick up all those long abandoned dreams? I don’t know what will happen, but I already tried doing it someone else’s way and it brought me nothing but heartache. So I’m going to vote for myself.