All the unspoken words

My faith crisis began in February of 2018 after I'd arranged a business meeting that went badly wrong. By November of that same year, I felt like I was going to explode.

My late husband Eric was incredibly loving and supportive, but I felt increasingly isolated and alone. I don't know if I can explain it to someone who has never left a high demand religion or who has never stepped away from an intense family culture; there's a heavy weight---a responsibility you can't quite shake, to not disappoint. To not harm. To not make anyone cry.

I also remembered, with the kind of sharp-focus, unignorable clarity a paradigm shift of this nature brings, how it hurt me when others left. I still remember how sad I was when Casey announced on her blog she was stepping back from Mormonism; when my best friend Kat sent an email to her closest friends attempting to explain why she would no longer be wearing our sacred undergarments. The unique way I grew up meant that I wasn't worried about their immortal souls; I wasn't worried they wouldn't 'make it' into the highest level of Mormon heaven (my dad's worldview had some lovely parts to it), but I was sad.

I didn't feel like I could write about any of it. In whatever iteration of my blog existed in 2018, I wrote some kind of dumb update about stuff that didn't really matter, and at the very bottom, I added a single line about my faith crisis. I wrote it as gently as I could, as innocuously as I could. I framed it like it was something that might still be solvable; I wanted to give hope to those I was about to disappoint, but I needed... desperately needed... to send up some kind of SOS; some kind of message that said, "Hey, if you have also left, will you please reach out? I am drowning."