He had, almost without my realizing it, become my best friend, and I couldn’t fathom or remember why or how I had been so wrong about him at the beginning. He had become more confident, assertive and emotionally transparent, and I was calmer, not so judgmental and considerably less manic about rules.

There are a lot of rules on Mormon missions: Stay with your companion at all times, don’t call home except for Christmas and Mother’s Day, exercise for 30 minutes every morning, etc. Following them is almost always a good idea, but obedience for the wrong reasons can be toxic. Missions are supposed to be difficult; they’re supposed to change you. But I wanted my mission to make me straight and believed that, if I worked as hard as I could and followed every rule, it would.

Every time I woke up late, or let someone walk by me on the sidewalk without stopping to share my message, or hummed a song from the radio instead of the hymnbook — every time I broke a rule — I felt as if I was not keeping my end of the deal, as if I was going to be gay for the rest of my life and it would be my own lazy fault.

When I was 13, I came out to my local bishop, and we agreed that I should see a therapist. I made my bishop promise to not tell my parents why they had to drive me all the way to Houston (two hours from the coastal, Cajun bedroom community in southeast Texas where I grew up) every Tuesday evening, and my parents reluctantly cooperated with my desperate insistence that they not ask questions. The therapist, my bishop assured me, would help me get my sexuality “under control.”

He did not. He didn’t even try.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” he said. He told me that I would always be gay (not at all what I wanted to hear) and that homosexuality didn’t have to stop me from doing and having everything I wanted in life, including Mormonism. Our sessions were always positive and validating, which was cool (and probably lifesaving), but they were never interventional or transformative. I was more than a little disappointed.

The acceptance that I really would be gay forever did not come until seven years later, and was accompanied by the liberating realization that I was O.K. with that. I became, instantly, happy. The second year of my mission will always be one of the most magical times of my life, and not just because I spent most of it with Elder Ellsworth. I finally liked myself. I finished my mission triumphantly, and just as gay as the day I was born.