The Unnatural Order of Things
An essay about breaking up with religion
For the past week I’ve been absolutely trashed with the flu. I haven’t had the energy to write anything new and so I thought I’d dig through my personal writing collection and share an essay I wrote a few years ago. It’s a longer read than my usual blog format and describes my experience leaving Mormonism.
I never thought I’d be that person who wrote about becoming an ex-Mormon. My music producer (and one of my closest and dearest friends) often tells me that to share my music is to share my story, that to be present on social media is to have a personal brand, and that my personal brand is unique and interesting. I’ve always hesitated sharing my honest emotions and thoughts of certain aspects of my life (especially regarding religion), partly because it’s raw and partly because I care deeply for people that may disagree with my current views. But no one tells you how hard it is to break up with your religion. It’s incredibly painful, and messy, and confusing, and ultimately liberating. The further I go on this journey the more inclined I am to share it. And so here’s an essay about it:
The Unnatural Order of Things
1.
The first time I stole something, it was one of those dollar mixtures from the corner dairy, you know the ones in the little white paper bags? There I was, six years old, snaking the lolly mixture into my armpit while my twin sister lingered by the counter, keeping watch. This was the natural order of things. She was quiet and observant; I was reckless and brave. As a twin, you adopt a caricature of yourself, as a way for people to perceive you as separate, capable of your own decisions and personhood.
There’s a particular thrill to this memory. Of getting away with something morally wrong. Of walking coolly out of the shop, successful in our thievery, silent all the way down the street until we collapsed in a roaring heap at our front door.
My bravery evaporated under the gaze of our mother. We confessed, tearily, and were promptly marched back to the dairy to return what had been stolen.
If there’s a lesson in this (and I was raised to believe there was a lesson in everything) it’s that guilt is heavy, like concrete, and I had cracked under the weight of it.
2.
On a shelf in my office sits the plastic model of a brain. I can tell you that somewhere inside it is an amygdala, which is shaped like an almond and processes emotion. I can also tell you that the prefrontal cortex is the main centre for critical thinking. But I am not an expert. That’s the job of my colleagues. I just collect the milk for their coffee and spend chunks of my day striding between the university fridge and the psychology department, up and down six flights of stairs. I could take the lifts, but the building is so old that they are constantly broken. Lately, I feel as if my brain is a little broken, too.
An email circulates around the office promoting an upcoming university debate. One of the proposed topics is about cults. Could cults actually be a good thing? Let’s discuss the positives and negatives of belonging to one!
It’s unsurprising that this tallies the least number of votes. Why, they say, would we make light of something that has been responsible for so many horrible things?
If anyone were to ask me (which they don’t), that’s the topic I would have chosen.
3.
Here are some other things I have confessed: throwing rocks at cars, smoking discarded cigarette butts found in gutters, telling lies, watching TV on Sunday, saying words like shit and holy shit, taking the Lord’s name in vain.
At first, I confessed these to my mother, but as I got older and the sins grew larger, I confessed them to our Mormon Bishop. I was ambivalent about confession. I didn’t love sitting across from a man (who was usually older than forty) and telling him about the things I had done wrong. But I subscribed to the belief that guilt could be functional and that a holy person could take it away.
In the Mormon household where I grew up, God was everywhere. Pictures of Jesus on walls, scriptures so fat and heavy they could break a toe if dropped on one, a hymnbook resting on our piano. Even now, the songs of my childhood religion rattle, claw-like, in my memory and I can’t seem to shake them loose.
Mormonism was the orthodox playbook that defined my life. I had been baptised at eight years old, which is the recognised age of accountability. Prior to eight, any mistakes you make don't get counted in heaven, and after eight, you have to use Jesus to wipe your slate clean. My twin and I were baptised together in a small font in our local chapel. We didn’t understand the enormity of it — up until that point, most of our learning came verbatim, from music and colouring books and over-simplified bible stories. I do remember one preparatory class where we were taught the Plan of Salvation, which is a concept that outlines Mormon heaven. Imagine a three-tiered cake, with each tier representing a kingdom. The bottom layer is where the unrighteous people go. The middle layer is where the good people go who don’t accept Jesus. The top tier is called the Celestial Kingdom, and to get there you have to follow rigorous steps and then endure to the end. Giving up is a no-no. It renders any previous service or commitment meaningless.
If you have a problem with the oversimplification, well, what can I say? I am not the one to blame.
Here is a core memory: I am eight years old, watching a Sunday School teacher draw a diagram of this life-saving plan, and internally I’m derisive. I may not understand the problematic hierarchy that’s playing out on the whiteboard, but I do understand fairness. I feel enormously sad for the people who won’t make it to the top layer. I also feel something new and weighted. Fear. It’s an emotion that will pervade my sense of wellbeing for the next twenty years.
4.
Many cult survivors are integrated back into life with the support of psychologists. I saw a psychologist once. She told me that my Mormon upbringing had cultish traits. For example, I had been taught to think only in black and white. I had been hemmed in by fear tactics, discouraged from thinking critically. ‘There is an art,’ she said, ‘to questioning things.’ It is, I think, an art I have yet to master. I still don’t know why every website wants me to accept their cookies. As soon as someone says something I disagree with, my mouth jams shut. Once, on a train, a ticket collector told me to do push ups in exchange for the ticket I’d forgotten to purchase. It was my penance, to lie there on the floor and sweat. I did five complete push ups before getting off at the next stop. I cried all the way home.
5.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a nineteenth century philosopher who wrote about many things, including truth, morality, nihilism, and the meaning of existence. I stumble upon him as I stumble on most things: via the internet. I am deep into the research of existential nihilism, which explores the notion that life may not have any intrinsic meaning or value.
Nietzsche’s discourse on perspectivism and nihilism has exerted enormous influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history. He spoke of ‘the death of god’, foreseeing the dissolution of traditional religion and metaphysics. He believed that values were created by humans as aids for survival and growth, and that much of the time, humans forgot this. Maintaining allegiance to the absolute was a fool’s errand. What once served as an advantage could turn into a disadvantage. What was once the prudent deployment of values could transform into a life-denying abuse of power. Nietzsche posited that when this happened, the human being must reactivate their creative capacities and construct new values.
He is also famous for saying, ‘Become what you are.’
6.
The second time I stole something, it was a large plastic tub from a hardware store. I was thirty years old and my twin wasn’t there to watch my back. I was my own person, making my own choices. How I got it out the door, I don’t know. Maybe the security guards just sucked at their job. I probably smiled at them as I walked past.
The problem was this: I was on the precipice of leaving the church and suddenly there was no black or white, only greys. I was dismantling my value system and leaning too hard the other way. I was a toddler testing boundaries, a teenager getting drunk at parties, a monogamous relationship in disrepair. How dare the supermarket charge me six dollars for a single tomato?! Perhaps I could just slip it into my bag. These were the thoughts I was wrestling with. I no longer wanted to be polite. I wanted to slip into movies I hadn’t paid for. I took face cloths from hotels. I turned left when the road sign indicated not to. And because confession is so deeply ingrained in me, I would find myself confessing to my husband.
My husband is the epitome of a goody two shoes. And not just because he was raised Mormon, like me. For him, goodness is innate. He never cuts in line. He lets every single car go in front of him when they indicate. He remains standing in a packed-to-the-brim bus instead of being greedy (like me) and taking a seat the minute someone leaves it.
The difference between us is that, suddenly, breaking rules gave me an indeterminate thrill. That’s how I felt walking out of the hardware store with that large, exorbitantly expensive plastic tub. The thrill was filling up some strange hole inside me, making me feel alive. But there was another part of me that wanted to get caught. If the security guards could catch me, then I’d have to return it. I could be labelled as bad and I would go home satisfied, knowing that justice had prevailed, that the world was settling back into its natural order of things.
7.
I have started to develop a sore muscle in the inner groove of my left arm. It hurts to put on clothes, to type at my keyboard, to lift the smallest of things. I book myself in to see a massage therapist. She sits me down and says, ‘What do you know about trigger points?’
I think she wants to teach me something.
‘Muscles,’ she says, ‘are like an accordion. They stretch out and then back in, causing stress on the muscle fibres and the formation of knots.’ Trigger points are like tiny grains of rice, so small that they go undetected and can be lodged in your system for a long time. To get rid of them, they have to be muscled out of you.
She gently runs her hand along my forearm. ‘Ah. It’s as I expected.’
My arm is riddled with these tiny, seemingly insignificant grains, which are shooting pain all the way up my arm, across my shoulder girdle, up my neck, and right into my brain.
‘It is causing me a lot of discomfort,’ I admit.
She spends the next hour generously massaging me. When it’s over and I pack up to leave, she tells me that I am likely to feel bruised for the next few days. ‘Don’t worry. It’s just the muscles repairing themselves.’
8.
If religion is my trigger point then I suppose I still feel bruised.
9.
Leaving a religion is like leaning over a cliff. I had no idea where I was going to land. On the outside, it seemed like a simple thing. Walk away. But it was more of an unravelling. A body walking through swamp, where the water is dark and at any moment you might get sucked under. It was being born into something — an idea, an identity, a bias. To be sucked in so completely you never had time to take a breath. It was the loyalty of a god who never left your side and the love of a beautiful community. The fear the fear the fear. I thought I would be struck down. It was Moses parting the red sea while Egyptian children were murdered in the night. It was eating manna in the wilderness for forty years. It was an endless cycle of love and punishment. Who was right? Had blind faith in God taken from me something that was inherently mine? Trust in myself? My gut, my intuition, my ability to make mistakes? I grew up believing in sin. Sometimes I felt sick with it, the sin. Even now, making mistakes makes me want to lie down. I can understand that it is easier to fight for what you believe in than let the doubt take hold. I can understand conviction. I can understand radicalisation. I can understand never being able to jump.
10.
I have a friend who left the church long before I did. It was painful to watch; they swung out into the world like a broken gate. ‘I no longer know what my values are,’ they told me once. ‘What do I really believe in?’
It was one of the things that worried me most, not having a spiritual spine with which to prop me up.
I can vividly remember the first time I had alcohol. It felt like my heart would jump out of my chest. Sweat pooled in my armpits and my eyes darted around the bar, taking in the relaxed faces, the nonchalance, the lack of guilt. I should have prefaced this by saying that Mormons are forbidden from drinking alcohol. My margarita arrived and I nervously slugged it back. Nothing happened. I wasn’t struck down. It took a lot of mental effort to rationalise the situation, to tell myself that God wasn’t stomping down from heaven to march the entirety of Rosie’s Cantina into hell.
I was slowly learning that religion didn’t have the monopoly on goodness, just as black and white aren’t tonally isolated, and values aren’t absolute.
I began to write down all the things I stood for. I read books on philosophy, religion, psychology. I listened to a podcast that reimagined the lives of women within Mormon theology. When my psychologist handed me a value exercise, I went home and highlighted all the words that resonated. I looked them up on the internet, wanting to fill in the gaps. I was in a manic haze, going down rabbit holes, googling different types of black (abbey, asphalt, gunmetal) and different types of white (frost, coconut, bone). I discovered a colour called ‘unresolved problem’. It blended so well into the white background that I could barely tell it was there.
11.
I suppose it’s true when they say that you are always writing about the same thing. I write about God while living in a war zone, while on a beach in Mexico, as a Mormon missionary knocking doors in northern Queensland, as I trudge between English classes in the cold Santiago basin, on the blue chair in my living room. I wish I could give you a resolution. End it all neatly. Tie it up, as they say, with a bow. The truth is that there are days that I miss God. Where there was once an omnipotent being there is now a big open space, like a prairie. There’s a sense of loss that accompanies expansiveness. Which way do you go?
12.
These are things I am sure of. The stairs in my office building, steep and marbled and speckled yellow. My husband’s sweet, soft hand on my back. The bird that sings outside my window. I don’t know its name, only that its voice is tender. When it falls silent I wonder where it has gone and if it will ever come back.
I worry that someone will read this and judge me.
I worry that no one will read this and I will be rendered voiceless, incapable of positioning myself as separate, as someone who doesn’t make their own decisions.
I worry that I will never be able to stride across a room with a strong, unfailing sense of self.
I try to remember the names of things, like the hippocampus or the amygdala, but they are simply structures within my brain that I use to move through the world. My quadriceps help stabilise my knee joint, propelling me up the stairs. The soleus allows my toes to flex downwards.
I am taking one step at a time. I isolate something to give it a name. I give the name meaning. I go up up up the stairs and then down again.
The bird comes back to my window.
I am waiting for it to sing.
Thank you so much to whoever took the time to read this. For those who have made it to the end, I’m so excited to share that I have a song coming out in 13 days! It’s called ‘Saintly’. Sneak peak at the cover art below.
xx MT
Beautiful and real
This is so incredibly powerful and resonant, as all your writing is. Thank you so much.