Day 36: I want this to be something else

I haven’t been very happy with this project for a little while now.

When I started, I eagerly snatched off all the low-hanging fruit: the stuff I knew I wanted to write about (as well as some things that were just easy to write about). And a few times unexpected fruit even showed up and surprised me, in a good way.

But every day now it’s getting harder to feel good about what I’m doing. I want something like discovery, and instead I feel I’m just kicking around in a puddle of nostalgia, loss, and reasons for leaving.

It’s easy to talk about loss and to wax nostalgic. I could do that with any time, any relationship, any thing from my past. It’s also not at all difficult to bring up all the stuff I didn’t much like about Mormonism and to dwell on all the reasons I got out. But that’s all well-trod ground for me. There’s nothing new there.

What’s more, I lament that in my waxing nostalgic, in my dwelling on what drove me away, I’ve painted a picture of myself as sad and embittered, hung up on this whole Mormon thing.

And yet I don’t feel that way. In fact, in spite of my very diligent effort to be truthful in each post, when I add them up, the sum of their sentiments somehow comes across as inauthentic, almost dishonest in its portrait of who I am in relationship to my past.

In fact, this morning — on my bus ride to work, notebook on lap — I was in a crisis. I didn’t know what to write about today, let alone 64 days after this one. I didn’t want to keep going on in this vein, but I also didn’t want to abandon something that still feels like a good idea. Had I just run out of material? Was my 100-day project doomed either to continue in an unsatisfying, inauthentic manner or to end prematurely?

So, stuck for what to write, I began making a list of words that popped up, words I I felt, when I thought about Mormonism. Some of the words were unsurprising, fairly well linked to the reasons I have for leaving. But other words surprised me. Or more accurately, I was surprised at the affection with which I wrote them. And suddenly I found myself abandoning this word list and writing a brief reflection on all these things that I love about Mormonism, these things that feel unique and beautiful to me — despite my disbelief.

Now that’s something to explore. What do I still love about Mormonism? And what do those things say about me? Maybe that’s a truer, more fruitful way to integrate the old Mormon me into what I’ve got going now.

So that’s what I’m going to look at for the next few posts to see where it leads me. Maybe it won’t amount to much and come Day 42 or 56 or 70 I’m going to have another crisis. But, on the other hand, maybe this is just the little jump start I need to open up a whole host of new ideas.

Whatever the case, I hope you’ll keep reading.

(This is Day 36 of a 100-day project. For more about When I Was Mormon, read the introductory post. To access older posts, visit the archive.)