Let Me be Sick

“Maybe if I starve myself, I will get sick and they will have to send me home. There’s no shame in that.”

This thought and many similar to it constantly ran through my head during my short time as a missionary in a small, empty apartment in South Bend, Indiana. Those long January nights are still ingrained in my memory two years later. The cold, the wind, the dark, the masks.

After countless talks with my mission president and a few priesthood blessings later, I was put on the next flight home where another hurdle awaited me: What would people think?

I could already hear the voices echoing around my Salt Lake neighborhood and knew that for the next few weeks I would be the main talking point of the Little Cottonwood 5th Ward. 

But the voices I was most scared of weren’t those of family or ward members. I had spent the last nineteen years engulfed in Church culture and was used to the typical ward gossip. What I feared most were the people who would say, “I told you so.”

I was no stranger to people telling me not to go on my mission. Because my friend groups in high school consisted of various members of Utah’s counter culture, I was always put in a sticky situation when it came to my affiliation with religion. Sometimes it was subtle, like people distancing themselves a little bit when they found out about my religious background, and other times it was not so discreet.

Once, my best friend from high school tried to convince me just two months before my mission that I shouldn’t go, bringing up a supposed conversation between the two of us where I confessed to him that I didn’t believe in the church. That conversation never happened.

Another friend who was two grades above me, a close friend I had looked up to my whole high school career, responded to my “Opening my mission call tonight!” Instagram story with a simple “rip.” While I brushed it off as a joke, it was clear that our friendship would never be the same. I used to go to his house where we would jam for hours on end in his basement. He was the best musician I had ever met, but I knew there wouldn’t be many more basement jam sessions in the future. I was going to leave for two years, he would finish up school, and by the time I got back he would be graduated and living in a new city. He would tell his new friends that he actually knows one of those crazy Mormon missionaries who wears the name tag and everything. I would be reduced to a piece of Mormon lore.

The truth was I had troubles with the church too, but to those friends, you either had to be a “raging anti” or a stereotypical “Molly Mormon.”

To a certain extent, I understood. In a state dominated so heavily by conservative Church culture, those who do not fit in tend to band together. While I usually identified and found solace in those groups, when people found out who I was, it was as if I intruded into their safe space they had worked so hard to create. To them I could never be just Sam. I would always be Sam, the Mormon. “He’s Mormon, but don’t worry. He’s cool.” I always came with a caveat.

I knew what was waiting for me back home, and I didn’t want to explain myself. People would prop me up as someone who had a traumatic experience due to the Church and has now left and hates everything about Mormons and Mormonism. I would become their new token “exmo.”

None of them actually cared about my well-being. They didn’t want to see how I was doing or how I was improving. I had been suicidal for the last few months, but people were more concerned about whether or not I had left the church.

They didn’t know why I really came home. It wasn’t because I decided I didn’t believe in the church, and it wasn’t because of a traumatic experience caused by an orthodox religion. I wasn’t this way because of the Church. I was this way because I had a serious mental illness.

Why did my mental health always have to have to be intertwined with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? I had been having panic attacks for months leading up to my mission. Nobody seemed to ask about those. I needed help and was not ready to make a life-changing decision about my alignment with the Church, yet people expected just that.

I didn’t hate my companions.

I didn’t hate my mission president.

I didn’t hate the Prophet.

It’s not that I didn’t want to be in Indiana anymore.

It’s that I didn’t want to be alive.