I have an 18-year-old son who recently started his mission. He’s not going anywhere, though; he’s doing a service mission. He lives at home, and he works every weekday (and occasional Saturdays) at a nearby bishop’s storehouse and a community food bank. Between the two, he does lots of physically moving stuff around to organize it and to fill people’s orders, and he also gets to do things that he finds far more entertaining, like fiddle with the record-keeping and reporting processes at the storehouse to try to make them more efficient.

My son decided near his eighteenth birthday that serving a two-year proselytizing mission would be too anxiety-provoking for him. He still wanted to serve a mission, though, so he approac hed our bishop and told him he wanted to do just one year and do a service mission. Happily, our bishop was on board, and he’s been very supportive through the whole process. The process of getting my son officially called was long and drawn out because the way the Church was handling service missions was in the middle of a major change when my son went to the bishop. So it took a while, but he’s finally official and doing his work. He seems to be enjoying it.

I am thrilled for my son. I couldn’t be happier that he had the confidence to speak up and say when he felt like the standard approach of a proselytizing mission wasn’t going to work for him. And, I expect like many parents whose kids do end up serving proselytizing missions, I wasn’t looking forward to having him be away for so long. I’m very happy that he’s at home and he still goes to church with my family and me and does family activities with us.

Honestly, though, I’m also jealous of him that he has the option of doing what he’s doing. Because you know who else was an anxious eighteen-year-old and didn’t think he could stand to be away for two years knocking on strange doors and getting yelled at? Me. It’s been over twenty years, but I can still recall vividly how overwhelmed I was as I approached mission age, and faced the reality that I was going to have to serve a mission, no matter how miserable it was going to make me.

I say “have to” because I never felt like I had a choice about serving a mission. I was a teenager in Utah Valley in the 80s and 90s, and I was male and I went to church regularly, and going on a mission was just the thing that was done. It never occurred to me to ask whether I wanted to do it. I just had to. Really, I think I felt no more choice in the matter of serving a mission than I did in getting baptized at eight. It was the thing everyone around me expected me to do, so I did it.

Just for comparison, there were other areas where I went against the conventionally done thing because of my anxiety. For example, after several false starts, I gave up on Cub Scouts and later Boy Scouts and all weekday YM activities. I was teased at Cub Scouts, and I never liked how outdoors-focused Boy Scouts was, and parts of both made me anxious, and it was eventually just easier for me to skip all the outside-of-church activities than to work out which if any I might actually enjoy. I didn’t get my Eagle; I never even made it past Tenderfoot. Another non-church-related example is that although all my friends learned to drive at sixteen, I didn’t. I took the driver’s education class at school and I went on the road with the instructor, but I clearly made him very nervous, and I figured I was obviously not skilled enough, so I just didn’t pursue getting a license. I think these examples illustrate that I was a stubborn kid, and so it’s not from lack of willingness to go against convention when I was anxious that I went on a mission. It’s that I genuinely didn’t experience it as a choice.

In the mission I was called to, we did a lot of tracting. I was very bad at tracting. Approaching strangers is extraordinarily difficult for me. I had to mentally steel myself before every door we knocked. I got better at it over the course of my mission in that, I think, I just kind of got numb, where unless someone yelled at us or threatened us, it bothered me less to knock on doors and have people turn us down over and over. But it’s not like tracting is unique in being something I was bad at. I was bad at pretty much every aspect of being a missionary. I was an indifferent teacher at best. Perhaps the best that could be said for me is that I didn’t get in much trouble, as I was also anxious about seriously breaking mission rules. It probably goes without saying, but I was probably in the bottom 10% of my mission when it comes to how many people I taught who were eventually baptized.

All that being said, my mission was good for me in a lot of ways. It was the first time I had lived away from home, and it forced me to learn how to deal with that but with some built-in comforts like not having to live entirely alone and not having to worry about paying bills (other than groceries). Serving a mission also definitely helped me with some social skills, like making small talk, which I was amazing bad at beforehand, and I think I was passably good at by the time I came home.

Looking back, I’m grateful for what I learned on my mission and for some of the interesting people I met, but on balance, I wonder if I might not have been better off if I had been given the option to do a service mission like my son has chosen, or really, perhaps if I had felt like it was a genuine choice whether to serve at all.