Hello close readers,
This Sunday, I thought I’d tell you a story.
I highly recommend listening to this album as you read, as it features heavily in the lyrics I quote here — and because it’s the album I listened to the most as I left the Mormon church.
When I was a first-year college student, I had a horrible living situation that became more and more horrible as the spring semester unfolded.
And in addition to living with a cohort of absolutely bizarre and bully-ish personalities, I’d cooled entirely on the concept of religion. See, I’d been talked into living in church-approved housing in Provo, Utah, near Brigham Young University, even though I was very intentionally not a student at that university.
I was attending the state college up the road, but the church had a chokehold on virtually all student housing in the area — and I struggled to find friends and roommates who weren’t wholly dedicated to living a strict Mormon lifestyle.
They were in fact so dedicated that they “reported” me and each other for minor infractions in our apartment, like letting a boy use the bathroom or making out after midnight or staying up “too late,” whatever that meant.
I was in this same living situation when the Bishop of the apartment’s Mormon ward insisted that I accept invitations for two dates a week, after I’d turned down multiple offers for dinner dates with returned missionaries I wasn’t interested in dating.
“You’re hurting their feelings,” he told me with a pouty frown. “You’re getting a reputation for being very picky!”
(This same 50-something man — an age I emphasize for the fact that I wish I could’ve believed he should’ve known better — once tried to force me to pose for a photo on his personal digital camera so that, he said, he could use it in what he called the “ward menu,” a photo catalogue of all the young women in the apartment complex, designed to help the young men decide who they wanted to date.)
You have no idea how much I wish I was making any of this up.
After calmly and politely telling him that I did not want to pose for the picture and was not interested in dating anyone — because I wanted to focus on school for a while — I locked and chained the door. My roommates were all gone for the weekend to various family events and date nights and parties, and so I shut the blinds and turned off the porch light. Poured another cup of water.
Sitting on the nasty old living room couch, I placed my headphones over my head, and turned on my little Sony CD player to resume the album I’d been listening to as I reviewed my essay assignment for my modern philosophy course. I ran my thumb along the ridges on the little volume wheel, making sure it was turned up as loud as it could possibly get.
“I’ve got to say goodbye
To the pieces of me that have already died”
-from Ghost by Ingrid Michaelson
That March, at the end of a week where several strange events took place right before Spring Break, I found myself moving back home an hour away, traumatized and unsure I’d ever want to live with anyone but my family ever again.
(A sad story for another day.)
I then commuted ninety minutes in traffic every day to finish the semester. And by the end of it, I had decided two things: I would never ever live with a BYU student ever again and I needed a long break from Mormonism and would not be attending church for the foreseeable future.
As I tore down I-15 toward campus in my silver CR-V, I’d blast music to keep myself awake. Soon, Lily Allen made way for Fiona Apple and Alanis. Old Beatles albums led to Led Zeppelin and The Doors. And then: I met indie rock, thanks to a new friend who worked at a pizza factory and loved to blast music on her walk to and from work every day.
“No one’s gonna watch you as you go
From a house you didn’t build and can’t control”
—from Obvious Bicycle by Vampire Weekend
Later that fall, I moved into a new apartment and I completely fell in love with college. I had my own room. I could watch movies until 3am without being threatened to be “written up” for breaking curfew in my own bed. My roommates were an eclectic blend of women who (mostly!) cared about their education — a feature not a single one of my previous roommates could even pretend to. Pizza factory girl was among them, with bright red hair and second-hand clothes and a complete give-no-fucks attitude about church.
I declared an English major during my sophomore year, and packed my schedule with electives like “The Literature of Reason and Madness,” “Feminist Readings of Philosophy,” and “Contemporary American Fiction.”
I read Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, and Lorde, Baudrillard, de Beauvoir, and hooks. I was learning deconstructionism — and it was setting me free in ways I never even knew existed.
I was starting to see myself, and experience the world, in totally new ways. I was hungry for it; I was insatiable.
“A man of faith said hidden eyes could see what I was thinkin’
I just smiled and told him, ‘that was only true of Hannah,’
and we glided on from Waverly to Lincoln.”
—from Hannah Hunt by Vampire Weekend
After 10 hour study days, and long library research sessions in which I was teaching myself how to write like the academic articles I loved more than anything I’d ever read, I’d come home to an apartment where no one judged each other for wearing short shorts or tank tops, or held an irrational, obnoxious fear of what a cup of coffee was.
There were open bottles of half-drunk, cheap wine in the fridge and trays of homemade vegan treats on the counter; there were yoga mats on the living room floor and nobody was asking anyone else what scriptures they’d read that morning. No one prayed before dinner or hung photos of white, blue-eyed Jesus on the walls.
No one was policing each other in that apartment; I was slowly learning how to stop policing myself, too.
“I took your counsel and came to ruin
Leave me to myself, lead me to myself
Oh, I was made to live without you
But I’m never gonna understand, never understand”
From Everlasting Arms by Vampire Weekend
I’d lay in my twin bed, draped with the light linens I found on discount and three strands of white, warm-light twinkle lights that I thumbtacked into the ceiling — creating a kind of light-filled canopy around my bed.
I framed old photos I printed on plain paper in wooden frames from the D.I. and I stacked my books on the floor of my closet, into tall teetering piles, having completely run out of shelf space within a month of moving in. (I discovered used bookstores for the first time and was completely in love with buying beat-up old paperback classics for $.50).
I’d spend hours creating playlists on my iPod and plug it into the little alarm clock dock that my dad gifted me as a high school graduation gift. I would lay there with my notebooks and my colored pencils and my piles of dusty books, pulling the window open when it finally cooled down for the night. And every night, around 10:30pm, when the local NPR station played an hour of jazz music, I’d switch from iPod to radio, writing down names in my notebook when I loved a song.
One of my roommates — a 17-year-old genius who brewed her own beer in the little cupboard under her bed and smoked stanky bowls of weed in our shower — had impeccable music taste. I knew lots of 70s rock bands, but mostly knew Top 40 and pop music from my childhood.
So, a few times a month, I’d hand her my iPhone and ask her to add everything she thought I would like onto it, and would then walk to campus with my bright yellow wired earbuds pulsing with David Bowie, Regina Spektor, Vampire Weekend, Janis Joplin, and Modest Mouse.
“You know that I’ve been wicked
And the road to hell is wide
A sense of curiosity
that made us go inside
Everyone was charming
But we took ‘em for a ride
Baby, you’re not anybody’s fool”
-from Finger Back by Vampire Weekend
Within weeks of returning to college for my sophomore year, I’d lost all interest in church — and the people who were threatening me with all kinds of dire consequences if I didn’t go back.
They asked if I cared about the welfare of my eternal soul. What would happen to all my unborn heaven-side children now?! What would my future husband think — if I could even find a man who’d want my disgustingly disobedient self?!
I’d open Facebook to find dozens of DM’s from “concerned” friends who hadn’t spoken to me in years, a litany of vacant “testimonies” written in the kind of robotic rote memorizations that I had, myself, committed to memory. Like funhouse mirrors, I saw all these odd beliefs, including blatant propagandist lies about people like Joseph Smith (that bastard), swirling around in a cacophony I had absolutely no interest in listening to anymore.
Their anxieties had shifted from questions I’d politely entertain to pathetic projections that revealed their own underlying delusions. I’d simply nod and say I’d be okay — or, more often, say nothing at all — and put my earbuds back in.
“I’m not excited, but should I be?
Is this the fate that half of the world has planned for me?”
-from Unbelievers by Vampire Weekend
If my uncertain future was a triggering nightmare for them, it was a dream come true for me, as I soaked in the need to be nowhere but where I chose to be. Which was usually a seat three rows from the front, on the side nearest the window, with my notebook wide open, my pencil ready, and my headphones around my neck.
These days, as often as I possibly can, I sit down on the couch with a notebook and a novel and an album, and I remember the radical freedom such a simple act once afforded me — and I let myself feel it all again.
I grew up in Idaho, and although I have never been affiliated with the Mormon church, I've seen exactly how much power it weilds. Even my public high school was so tightly connected to the Mormon church that a religious education class for Mormon students was offered FOR ACADEMIC CREDIT. (I have absolutely no idea how that was even possible.) It takes incredible bravery and persistence to disentangle yourself from a network that tightly woven--especially as a someone who is specifically disempowered within that structure. Thank you for sharing your story.
Love this piece -- thank you for sharing it Haley! I esp love this part: "Their anxieties had shifted from questions I’d politely entertain to pathetic projections that revealed their own underlying delusions. I’d simply nod and say I’d be okay — or, more often, say nothing at all — and put my earbuds back in." as I think it's both hard but good advice in these polarized times. I'd love to hear anything you can share about how you learned to navigate this situation where lots of people are insisting you believe something that you simply don't. It could help many of us now I think!