Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

this is a remix.

I was, for better or worse, one of those kids who grew up going to church. I attended every Sunday up until I was sixteen, right about when COVID hit, and my relationship with God became complicated.

I was raised Mormon. Now you might know the media’s version of “Mormon” — the multiple wives, the “soaking,” the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives reality show — but the fundamentals boil down to Christianity. There’s the Father, then there’s his son Jesus Christ, and when you’re baptized at eight years old, you receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, who is said to lead and guide you. In this church, I was taught to love my neighbors, read the Book of Mormon, pray often, and create an eternal family (amongst a laundry list of other teachings).

In retrospect, those values are fine. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in them. But I grew up in an environment that was strictly right versus wrong. If you don’t like someone, you aren’t Christlike. If you don’t read the Book of Mormon, you can’t receive blessings. If you don’t pray, you lose contact with God, and if you don’t create an eternal family who is sealed in the temple, then you will be alone after death. Because of this mindset, there was serious judgement placed upon those who weren’t “perfect” Mormons.

To put it simply, I left because I wasn’t perfect, and I no longer wanted to live my life striving for something so unattainable. Perhaps one day I’ll go into exactly why I’m no longer a Latter-day Saint, but for now I’ll say that it’s because I’d rather chase happiness than perfection.

And also, I realized God wasn’t the only avenue to peace.

It took me four years of college, a drug-induced psychosis, and a confusingly Catholic ex-boyfriend to come to terms with the fact that, even given my past and my thoughts about the Mormon church, I still believed in a higher power.

But with this higher power, there was also nature.

And with God and nature, there was also the universe.

The Father, the Sun, and the Holy Spirit.

God. Nature. Whatever unseen force connects everything together.

There’s something I pray to, something I find peace in, and something I find clarity in. And with those three things, I tapped back into my spirituality.

It wasn’t about religion for me. For some people it is, and that’s okay. It’s okay to be an atheist and believe in the stars, or to read the Bible every morning and frown upon tarot. I won’t preach what is right and wrong because it’s never about that, and who am I to force something to swallow my regurgitated beliefs.

Life isn’t black and white. How you feel about God or tarot or holistic medicine isn’t right or wrong. You have a brain. You have morals. You have strings of experiences that make up the web of your thought processes and beliefs.

I left the church. But I didn’t leave spirituality.