My Underwear Will Save Me

Illustrated confessions of a terrible Mormon missionary--now a much happier feminist lesbian. (Insta: @myunderwearwillsaveme)

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When I arrived at Brigham Young University as a freshman, I was surprised when, after church on one of the first Sundays, the leadership wanted everyone to pose for a headshot. “It’s for the ward directory,” they said. Several days later, a girl in our all-female dorm building came by squealing, “The shopping list is here! Check out apartment 206; they’re SO cute.” I glanced at the photocopied stapled packet that resembled a zine, but was more like a catalogue of potential spouses, and hated it immediately. I was at college to get an education, not a husband. But then I read quotes by apostles counseling women to give up our education if/when necessary to start a family and support our husbands. I felt like a second-class citizen at BYU: it was clearly a school for the men. I also read all the “love it or leave it” editorials, so I kept quiet and endured. I couldn’t afford anywhere else. I graduated with zero debt and zero husband, so I think I won. 😉🌈🤓

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Pardon the break from paintings, but I realized I don't post much about the "now a much happier..." part of my profile description. So here is some effing happy! I got married this June to my wife (happy #nationalcomingoutday btw) and it was one of the best days of my life. This pic is terrible and it's still my favorite. We walked ourselves down the aisle (partly bc my dad stopped talking to me about 7 years ago after I left the church) surrounded by almost 100 friends and family who were on their feet and cheering. You couldn't even hear the music! And then we had an irreverent, funny, sweet ceremony with vows we wrote ourselves. Then we walked back down the aisle, high-fiving and hugging, and had cake and desserts and beer and wine and a dance party. My Mormon grandmother came and she danced with me. (!!!) I can't even type that without tearing up. Everyone danced! And hugged and laughed and got their photo taken by an adorable nephew with a Polaroid (scroll to the third pic; that kid is a pro!). You guys, I was the worst Mormon and I am so glad I stopped trying to be a good one and instead built an authentic life. It got better. Don't ever believe someone who tells you they know what you "should" do to be happy. Listen to your own heart.

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If you were also at BYU in the early to mid-2000s, maybe you recall these obnoxious posters, featuring a smug blond wearing a *terrible* orange and pink ensemble, posed in front of 3 anonymous women with black censor bars declaring "BARE" across their bodies. At the time, I kept quiet about how much I hated these, but it took me years to articulate why. The shame-based approach to modesty (and everything else) at BYU always put responsibility on women for men's thoughts and behaviors. As a woman, it felt like the only real power I had was negative: to seduce and tempt. After leaving the church it's taken me years to come to terms with my body, and to understand that females are shamed because our bodies ARE powerful, and not just in the ways that we relate to men. Whether we are "sexy" or not, whether we can carry children or not, whether we are big or small, or young or old, femme or masculine, our bodies are ours and ours alone. No one gets to paste shame on them.

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There were enough Mormons in my high school that we could take a "release time" elective hour, during which we crossed the street to attend Seminary in a brick building owned by the church. Most of my time in Seminary included learning a ton of Mormon urban legends (rainbows = no 2nd coming for a year) and watching lame old movies like "Johnny Lingo." But it also taught me how I didn't fit in: I didn't eat lunch in the Seminary building. I didn't pray over my lunch. I didn't carry my scriptures around to my other classes. I was not ostentatiously Mormon, and this was becoming a problem. My social standing became crystal clear when we were assigned writing anonymous nice notes to our peers, or "warm fuzzies." I barely got any, but I pretended like I didn't care. I couldn't help being sarcastic and jaded and questioning everything, but I kept going and hoping being a good Mormon would be easier someday.

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One dark winter morning my companion and I were jogging in Waterloo when we were nearly attacked by a group of young guys. We hid in some bushes while they yelled threats, close enough they could have reached through and grabbed us. I didn't understand much, but I knew they said rape. After it was quiet my companion made a run for it and I sprinted after her, but I tripped. I fell, skidding on my hands and knees, and heard a shout. I got up and kept running, adrenaline pounding through my limbs. We made it back to our apartment and locked the door behind us. My companion kept a lookout while I called President, who acted like I was calling about getting a splinter from our dining room table. "Maybe exercise in the apartment for a few days," he said. "You're fine, right?" But it was more a command than a question. I hung up and wiped the blood off the phone, then went to the bathroom to dig the gravel out of my shaking palms.

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At first I was THRILLED to be home from my mission, but things quickly went south. My classes at BYU felt pointless--my next life task was to get married and start having babies--but no guys were interested in me. They dated my roommates, while I felt weird and ugly and repellent. I figured they could sense that I was struggling with my testimony, after encountering so many unanswerable questions on my mission. But negativity and discouragement and doubt were not acceptable in the narrative at BYU, so I finally went to the on-campus counselor. When I explained my symptoms, she told me to attend the temple more and wrote a prescription for Prozac. I was so ashamed I hid the bottle in my sock drawer and never told anyone. I took it for about a year and felt exactly the same, probably bc my emotions were not a chemical imbalance: I was facing a future I didn't want, and I believed this not-wanting meant I was sinful and broken. [spoiler: it turned out that leaving the church was the best prescription for joy and engagement with life and inner peace. Who knew? 😎🌈] [edited to add: chemical imbalances & depression & anxiety are real and so is taking medication for them and no one should feel ashamed about it. I've also had YEARS of therapy, which was/is awesome & we're all works in progress, yo. ❤️]

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The first job I had after leaving the Mormon church was at a law office in Portland, Oregon. The person training me was leading me around the office and mentioned that making coffee would be one of my first duties in the morning. "Oh, cool," I replied, trying not to freak out. I made a mental note of the brand and then furiously searched Google to figure out how to do something I'd never done in my whole life. It worked out. #thanksgoogle Also, if you're in the PDX area and want to see some of my paintings in person, I'll be reading new material and showing several of my little illustrations alongside some VERY talented peeps at Get Nervous PDX, a reading series about anxiety and depression, this Saturday (July 8) at 7pm at Ford Food & Drink! Come by!

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For the entire 18 months of my mission, I was only allowed to read 5 books besides my scriptures. They were all nonfiction written by the leaders of the church. I'm someone who reads around 40 books a year-- it was a major form of escape/coping that was taken away. Of course, reading a diverse array of books can lead to being open-minded, curious, empathetic, and even *gasp* intellectual, so it's easy to see why such behavior was banned during "the best two years." 🙄

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When I was a young teenager in the 1990s I had a hard time finding "modest" (knee-length) skirts. One evening I was heading into a Stake Dance for youth when the woman sitting at a card table checking our dance passes pointed at my skinny legs. "Your skirt doesn't touch your kneecaps," she said. I blushed hard. "I'm five ten," I replied, thinking how proportionately little of my leg was exposed. "Well, everyone ELSE in there is modest..." she continued, glaring at me like I was trying to smuggle an open flame into a mattress factory. I turned & fled into the mother's lounge before she could see me cry. I was too proud to call my parents, so I hid in there for hours until the dance was over. It was during that long wait that I realized I was barred from entry to "protect" the minds of my male peers from dirty thoughts. I began to wonder, why couldn't they police their own thoughts?

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Here is the real 22-year-old missionary me. It's startling how much older I look--maybe it's the terrible haircut, maybe it's the homesickness and anxiety and self-loathing I was trying so desperately to hide. I couldn't look at this photo for several years without all those terrible feelings coming back. But over time, it's become easier to see my old self with compassion. We're all humans, bumbling along with limited information, hopefully always learning and growing and changing. ***** Apologies for the lack of illustrations lately. I'm currently consumed by the Kickstarter campaign for @beefcakeswimwear and wedding planning. It's going well, but I miss being on here! Thanks for your patience while I'm on a brief hiatus...I'll get back to drawing soon! ❤

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As a Mormon kid, I was never told outright not to associate with "nonmembers." Instead, at church I was always told to choose friends who had "high standards" which is essentially code-speak for "Mormon or someone you can easily baptize." And I had this handout from YW hung on my corkboard all during my teenage years. 🙄 I thought this advice was stupid, since everyone knew that the bishop's kids were usually the worst-behaved. This pressure to stay in the Mormon clique only increased when we hit 16 and began dating. I felt bad for kids in areas where the majority weren't mormons..... Of course, later I found out those kids were the best adjusted and most accepting, and now they tend to be my favorite Mormons. Who knew that not just being "tolerant" of but actually embracing and having deep, caring, authentic relationships with people different from yourself would turn out to be a highly useful life skill?

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As a young Mormon girl, I made many lists of what I wanted my future spouse to be like. Still, I could never picture myself as a happily righteous Mormon wife...it felt like I would be a cat always trying to pass as a dog. Even after I left the church, marriage still felt like a trap. But then I came out, and then I met a certain broad. She was funny, and smart, and passionate, and loyal, and all the things I'd put on my lists (except a return missionary 😂). And suddenly marriage seemed less like an impossible role to fill and more like an exciting partnership. This is the image I painted to put on our wedding invites, which we just sent out. It's a few of the decorations we collected for the "1960s lesbian book nerds go camping" theme, put together from our love of reading and a nostalgia for our working class Rocky Mountain backgrounds. Wedding planning is so different from what I expected. Then again, so is pretty much my entire life. It's nice to feel like I'm no longer playing a role, but putting together a life that feels authentic.

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The worst part of the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah was the Teaching Resource Center, or TRC. (Missions are all about acronyms...much like a business, but I digress.) Anyway, in the TRC we knocked on one of several doors in a long hallway. Strangers from the outside world answered, pretending to be foreign strangers. Despite our terrible door approach, they invited us in to a cinderblock classroom set up like a living room and let us teach them the first discussion. This was awkward and uncomfortable on its own, but what elevated it to nightmare status was the red eye of the video camera mounted in the corner. Everything was recorded, and afterward we'd watch the video with our instructor. It was humiliating to watch myself fail, week after week for 9 weeks, at being a good salesman. I told myself it would be different once we got to Belgium.

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Confession: this is a repeat, because I'm re-doing a few illustrations now that I've got a better grip (literally) on this drawing/painting thing! ....................... When I was five, I desperately wanted a pink bikini, but Mormon modesty forbade it. So I took matters into my own chubby hands, cutting out circles of construction paper and stapling them to a stretchy pink belt. My grandma caught me wearing it & dancing around with my best friend. My friend got sent home and my homemade top got destroyed. I couldn't help thinking that secretly my grandma was proud of me. But I still had to wear one-piece swimsuits. ............. Also, I'm excited to be making swimsuits once again--this time a bit more professionally. 😜 Check out www.beefcakeswimwear.com, or @beefcakeswimwear on insta, if a 1920s style androgynous swimsuit sounds interesting.

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On my mission in Belgium, when someone we were teaching pointed out that the chronology of the Book of Mormon wasn't plausible, my knee-jerk reaction was to argue. But as I began to sputter a response, I realized I didn't have one. Everything I’d learned about Native American culture didn’t exactly jive with the Book of Mormon. Weren’t Mayan civilizations much older than 600 B.C.? And Native Americans didn’t speak Hebrew dialects, nor was there any Jewish culture in Native American culture. And why would Moroni trek all the way up to New York from Central America to bury the plates? I vowed to study this when I got back to BYU. But I told our investigators the standard response: they should pray to know the truth. It felt hypocritical when I wanted answers that made sense in my heart AND my mind.

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As a missionary, biking on a cruiser and wearing a long skirt made me feel more like the Wicked Witch of the West than part of the Army of God. One time I wrecked on a slick curb and banged up my shin. I wore thick tights to cover the hematoma and bruising that ran down my leg and pooled in my heel. In my experience, everyone believed that righteousness meant God was protecting you, so the inverse logic meant injury and illness was a sign of disobedience. My mission was the first time I felt guilty for catching a cold.

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My childhood Mormonism was extra special because I grew up with a bully who used his priesthood authority as an excuse to make our home his little kingdom, with him as tyrannical king. Me being me, I got my (much nicer) grandpa to install a lock on my bedroom door when I turned 13. In the evenings, after my siblings were in bed, my mom would often take refuge in my room. We'd play Yahtzee and eat cookies, pausing when we heard the garage door open--we knew that my stepfather's good moods were as rare as landing a full straight on the first roll. Throughout this time, I had a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt hung on my wall: "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'" Bravery is only bravery when you also feel fear. And really, the more fear we feel, the more audacious and courageous it is to act, speak, and live in opposition to people installed as "leaders" and "authority." (Joke quotes intentional.) To all my fellow rebels, I'm sending you love and solidarity. And a reminder for good food and games with the people you love. 😉 Sometimes just being happy is winning.