The Long Work of Deconstruction
The work of deconstruction is so long, y’all. I first stopped believing in Mormonism (at least, I thought I did) in 2006, after Mercy died. I didn’t believe in an after-life, in heaven, in a wonderful or punishing God. And yet, if I look at my actions in the following years, I’m not sure you could tell any difference between before I believed and after I stopped believing. This is the long work of deconstruction.
Some of the steps of deconstruction have included (for me):
1. Doubting the idea/institution of marriage.
2. Letting go of the idea of gender roles.
3. Reconsidering who I am and what I like or want for myself from the ground up.
4. Trying to figure out how I want to be in relation to my children if NOT THAT.
5. Seeing misogyny everywhere, and especially in people who insist that they love women and then want them to continue to offer them free labor and sex.
6. Understanding the importance of money on a very basic level.
7. Trying to reconnect with my body after a lifetime of dissociation.
8. Testing out friendships and family relationships to see if they could survive my change.
9. Seeing racism and white supremacy everywhere.
10. Letting go of myths about America that are tied in with The Book of Mormon and lots of Mormon culture.
11. Seeing how lies work in religion and trying to be more alert to how people tell lies everywhere.
12. Doubting the concept and value of art and myself as a creator of art and a participant in various institutions of art.
13. Belief in the meaning of life or any meaning that is laid out for you
14. Distrusting a basic equality of different people, an equality that was supposed to be promised by God in an after-life, if not here
15. Letting go of the myth of free will and that any of us are anything other than animals who react based on past trauma and expectations
16. Losing belief that I was a good person if I followed certain rules
17. Followed by the loss of belief that there can ever be such a thing as a universally agreed upon set of morals that “good people” agree to.
18. Anger about the many things/years/time/money I gave up to Mormonism and to other people within Mormonism that I did not understand the cost of at the time.
19. Losing the belief that I had a “mission” in life, a set of pre-set out goals (not quite destiny, but akin to it) that I was to achieve in my life before I could die.
Some of these are things that I began to think about long before Mercy died. But I didn’t start doing a full reconstruction until then, in part because my marriage had been a way of me walling off those questioning/doubting parts of myself to survive the requirements of the marriage.
I think me realizing that I didn’t care about being alive anymore became a way into doing radical things to save my own life. One of those things was the deconstruction of Mormonism. Another was the (unconscious) destruction of my old marriage (I tried to make it anew, but that failed utterly). In some ways, I admit that this was a gift. But it was a terrible gift, like a cancer diagnosis. It destroyed me. And saying it is a gift makes it sound like someone else gave it to me. No one gave this gift to me. I built it on the ashes of my old self and my old life.
I sometimes find myself judging other ex-Mormons as not having deconstructed as far as I have. People who have remained married and have left the church together, for instance. Or people who have remained in the same job or idea of self that they had before. My transition has been extreme, and I don’t think it makes me better or worse than others. It just makes the fall a lot farther down. Some of those people may hit these other steps later. Some may never hit them. I don’t think there’s any universal set of steps that happen because I don’t think there’s anything universal anymore. That’s the deconstruction that hit me.
The loss of everything mooring me to life and to myself. It has not been a fun ride. I thought I’d finished it when I started feeling allowed to talk about Mormonism in 2012. But that was just the beginning. Sometimes someone tells me that hey, this is going to keep happening at new phases of your life and I’m like, no, please. Let’s not do this ever again.
But yeah, I’m aware that the universe doesn’t seem to listen to those kinds of prayers, except as a kind of dare. So I’ll just keep hanging on as best I can to this side of the cliff.
I love that word, "deconstruction." I have had to deconstruct religion, family, so many things. I am fascinated by how we do this, and why. I have just finished reading "The Exvangelicals" by McCammon and "Cloistered" by Coldstream -- two writers telling, in different ways, how each had to leave the religions that meant so much to them. Your books, and your story, and theirs, all help me feel less alone, to remember that being honest with oneself is the only way to live sanely. It can be dangerous -- think of all the "heretics" killed and/or cast out to die -- but how can we do otherwise? To keep living in lies is to die every day while still breathing.