“A woman sitting with her chin on her hands” by Ben White on Unsplash

They taught us to fear the wrong things. Right from the start, we had it all wrong. The natural man is an enemy to God, our scriptures said, and we highlighted the passage in special colored pencils and prayed that God would smother out who we are and make us His friend. Please, God, please. We arrived on earth fallen. Help, we can’t get up.

They taught us to fear our own bodies, our desires, our fantasies. Bodies are sacred, they said, a temple. We could not defile this gift or give way to pleasure. So we dressed modestly, covering our shoulders and tugging our hemlines to our knees. We made ourselves into beautiful vessels, ready to be inhabited by the Spirit, by God, by righteous men who would help us fulfill our purpose to become mothers.

They taught us to fear our minds, our curiosities, our original thoughts, our doubts. Intellectualism was a dangerous sin and an arrogance before God. We knew the questions we could ask out loud and the ones we couldn’t. Nobody had to teach that, we learned the subtext before we could even read. There is so much we cannot understand, they said as they installed a ceiling overhead. The mysteries above it were of no concern. It’s safe in here. Trust the Brethren, they said. They will never lead us astray, we have God’s word on it. When you die, it will all make sense.

They taught us to fear the world, the great expanse of difference and diversity beyond our familiar valley. If we went out, it was in their uniform, for their purpose, with a short leash around our handbook-approved collars. We were teachers in these strange lands, never students. We pitied those who rejected us. We saw Satan working against our efforts. We did our best to help people. We came home to posters and balloons held by our families at the bottom of the airport escalator. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Aren’t you glad to be home?

We feared Satan, an invisible but very real boogeyman who infiltrated our thoughts and sometimes spoke to us in our own voice. (But, then again, so did the Holy Ghost?) He was always lurking around the corner, ready to deceive and destruct. We were never safe.

We feared paying our bills before writing out ten percent of our earnings on a donation slip and handing it to the bishop. Everyone had a miracle story to tell about paying tithing first and then anonymous groceries showing up on the porch, or a surprise promotion at work, a found crumple of cash in a coat pocket or street corner. We told the stories to ourselves again and again. God needs this more than I do.

We feared disobedience. We feared dissent. We feared reading anything critical. We were careful on the Internet. We sometimes sipped Diet Cokes with friends and made irreverent jokes, but that was just to show our maturity and our understanding of nuance. On Sunday, we held our hands to the square and sustained our beloved leaders. We looked forward to being dead when it would all make sense.

We had children, most of us never stopping to ask if we wanted them or how many. And as they grew, we had new fears given to us. What if they didn’t follow the path? What if they made mistakes? What if they were (gulp) gay? We built sturdy fences to keep them in line and checkpoints to signal that they were. The first lives we ever felt ownership over were our children’s, not our own, and it was terrifying. If they didn’t make it, it was on us.

We stayed busy. We signed up on spreadsheets to cook meals, teach lessons, drive people to doctor appointments, decorate gymnasiums, move furniture, sing in choirs, staff committees, chaperone dances. Being busy was our drug of choice, except of course for Prozac. Be anxiously engaged in a good cause, the scriptures admonished us. And anxiously engaged we were. So anxious.

We didn’t think twice about sitting alone in a room with a man and answering intimate questions. Sure, we dreaded it a little in our guts, but that was our own folly. We pledged our loyalty. We confessed our sins. We told him about our underwear when he asked. Yes, we did that.

They taught us to fear our own empathy. Do you support, affiliate with, or agree with any group or individual whose teachings or practices are contrary to or oppose those accepted by us, they asked? No. No, of course we didn’t. Then we bought books at their bookstore to help us understand how we should feel, instead of how we did.

They taught us to fear anything true that they hadn’t deemed as Truth with a capital T. Facts and evidence they batted away with faith, which taught us that faith was the opposite of fact. The antidote and cure-all. But — but — but — . Shh, shh, shhh. Faith. Truth, they told us, was something we would learn to believe. We didn’t have to know it right now. We said it into microphones until we believed it.

We cried in private when we disagreed with doctrine. We searched for answers using the formulas they gave us, over and over again, hoping this time the recipe would work. (It’s working for everyone else!) We tearfully bore testimony of leaving things in God’s hands, the only luxury we ever claimed. It made us feel better for a moment. We wanted to believe. We stared at the floor during talks and lessons that made us feel alone and heavy. We pushed away thoughts of leaving. We followed a few women on Instagram who had left and we wondered if these women were really happy. We couldn’t decide if we wanted them to be happy.

They taught us to fear a life without them. There were narratives about people who leave: they’re so angry; they’re so deceived; it’s so sad. Our own anger and sadness meant nothing, it was a trial to overcome. Temporary. We weren’t deceived. We tried harder. We kept the commandments. In this there is safety and peace, the song said. We knew it by heart.

Yes, they taught us to fear all the wrong things, but we didn’t realize it when we first left. We walked with the new legs of a baby giraffe and the same surprise it must feel, wobbling in a brave new world. Where even are we? We were terrifically afraid then, but it was a different kind of fear. It was the most peaceful exhilarating wonderful fear.

We wanted to believe it hadn’t all been bad. We wanted to love them still because loving them wasn’t in the narratives they’d given us, and it made us feel stronger, like we were penning our own story instead of someone else. And we were right, it wasn’t all bad. Just like middle school wasn’t all bad. But then there we were, in the middle of the grocery store years later looking at the boxes of tea and noticing how, without even realizing, we were scanning the labels for approved herbal teas versus forbidden black or green tea, and we realized that, yes, there was a time in our lives when we were afraid of tea. Tea! That’s pretty fucked up, we said to ourselves because we weren’t afraid of the f-word anymore. Well, mostly.

We kept following those same women on Instagram, the ones whose lives we had examined from afar. We felt we knew each other even though we didn’t. (But we sort of did, didn’t we?) We had lived privately so much of the same story while navigating what our public face would look like. We understood the significance of the first photo they posted wearing a tank top. The first wine glass. We cheered them on in our hearts. We signaled our support in comments filled with emojis we re-wrote three times because we didn’t want to seem weird. We wanted them to be happy at first because we thought it meant that we too could be happy, but later because we began to understand that happiness isn’t a reward, it’s a season that cycles with a handful of others for all of us. And isn’t it lovely to behold when someone is living in the sunshine of happiness?

We are afraid of different things now, of course, because being afraid is part of what helped our species survive to this point. Some of our fears are silly and some are legitimate, most of them are on the continuum in between, and new ones will arrive tomorrow or possibly in the middle of the night. But they are our own fears — organically grown for the most part. And what we have now that we didn’t before is a knowledge that we have been wrong about big things, that we are capable of being wrong, and that we are certainly wrong about something right now that we will discover later and definitely facepalm when we do. We know this about ourselves, and somehow it makes everything a little less scary.