Since I have the reputation of a hardened exmo, it may surprise you to hear that I have a lot of good memories of the temple, at least at first. Early on, I saw the temple the way I was taught to see it - as a symbol of God’s love and mercy, plus as somewhere romantic I would get married someday. As I got a little older, being worthy of a recommend, and using it, set me apart as a cut above the rest - not just of the world, but of the ward. The fact I had one showed everyone that I was walking uprightly before God, and it gave me entry to a special sort of club that other people couldn’t enter. Over time, the subject of worthiness would become more of a burden, as I developed an attitude of scrupulosity, but it didn’t bother me at the start.
I generally liked youth temple trips because I felt comfortable with the kids in our ward and I liked feeling - as always - like I was doing one of the many things that would earn me a spot in the celestial kingdom. I liked feeling like I was helping save people on the other side of the veil. I liked the hypothetical peace of the temple (on youth temple trips it was typically noisy and if not that, at the very least distracting). I liked (and hated) the feeling of pride at finding my own ancestors’ names to baptize while my classmates used “mere” names from the temple. Of course, it was also a huge Mormon milestone and something Lydia got to do for two years before I did, so I liked feeling grown up when I finally got to participate. And lastly, I loved the feeling of community when we went with the ward. It was something bigger than myself, and there’s something beautiful about that kind of experience.
After my friends and I turned 16, we were able to drive ourselves and began organizing small group temple trips together. I also happened to be dating a Worthy Priesthood Holder who was able to baptize us/me, but most importantly me. It felt intimate to have him baptize me, in front of all these people, in a white suit that would cling to every part of my body as I turned my back to him and climbed out of the font. It felt romantic to go to the temple together, even if we were in a group, because that was what my parents did for date night, and because someday I thought maybe I’d marry him there. I liked the feeling of anticipation, of dreaming about a future with this boy. I liked feeling grown up because we were driving ourselves all the way to Seattle and doing a mature spiritual activity instead of partying or watching R-rated movies or whatever else I thought our peers were doing with their Friday nights. And the temple workers always praised us for taking the initiative to go to the temple at such a young age.
Sometime around 2020, when I was sixteen or seventeen, I finally knew that I didn’t want to serve a mission, and I knew I wouldn’t get married right away since my boyfriend was going on a mission, but I really caught on to the dream that I would go through the temple for myself as soon as logistically possible. The policy changes allowing a woman to go through without one of those key life events (mission or marriage) were incredibly recent, and I wondered if God had laid a path for me to go through in this way, early. It couldn’t be until after high school and after I turned eighteen, but I resolved to begin preparing anyhow. Pretty much concurrently with when I developed this fixation on the temple, Lydia prepared for and went through herself. Per the usual, rather than just patiently waiting my turn, I threw myself into preparation with even more fervor. I studied everything written about the temple I could get my hands on. All the talks, all the articles, all the books. By the time I was eligible (i.e., old enough) to take the ward’s temple prep course, I knew the curriculum they were teaching inside and out, forward and back, and I was bored. The biggest - and pretty much only - point the temple prep material tried to make was that the temple ceremonies are symbolic and won’t be understood the first time you go through. I expected to be overwhelmed the first time, and then to unpack rich symbolism for the rest of my life.
As a quick aside - at this point in 2021, when I went through, the way they prepared youth for the temple had changed drastically even from when Lydia went through two years prior. I was able to know what the covenants were before entering the temple, and I could even see what the temple clothes looked like through an official church video online. Obviously they still kept quiet about the rest of it, but these were big strides towards informed consent that I didn’t at all appreciate at the time.
There were some complications in getting approval for me to go to the temple, and then in picking a date, but I managed to secure an appointment on the evening of my eighteenth birthday. It felt absolutely miraculous, like God was helping me achieve a dream. I actually went to the temple twice that day - once in the morning to do baptisms with my siblings, then that evening I went back for the initiatory and endowment.
That first time, I loved the initiatory and the explicit promised blessings. I still believed in a transactional relationship with God/the universe, where if I did things right and was good myself, good things would happen to and for me. This affirmation that my faithfulness and goodness would bring blessings was comforting and hopeful in a time when I felt really lost and afraid. If I just kept doing everything right, God would heal my depression and anxiety. I also was awestruck at the idea of being given a new name, which I (for whatever reason) believed was specific to me individually and was the name I had in heaven. I’m honestly not too sure where I got that idea, but I think it had something to do with the fact that Joseph Smith had revealed the premortal names of some individuals to them back in the mid 1800s. I can’t remember the exact conversation that corrected this belief, but it was probably within a few days, weeks at most, after going through. It was surprisingly impactful (in a bad way) to learn that actually, every single woman in the temple that day got the same name - which also meant that all of those women knew my name which was supposed to be secret. It also meant that the woman officiating for my initiatory did not have prophetic power to reveal a premortal name to me. And it simply felt so…mundane. Bureaucratic.
When I got to the endowment for the first time, I cried as pictures of the universe showed on the screen. I think it was mainly a physical release of the enormous buildup to the moment, plus a sense of wonder at being so small in such a big universe. I was overcome with relief and awe that there I was at last, not in the holy of holies in the literal sense, but pretty close. Honestly, the temple was my last hope. Even at the time I knew that. I had been doing every little thing asked of me for years, and the temple was the last step on the covenant path, as Nelson says. After that, it was just enduring to the end - for the rest of my life. So I believed going to the temple was the right thing to do and necessary for my eternal salvation, but it was also a last-ditch effort to feel better during my earthly life, to even make enduring to the end possible. It was temporal salvation I needed.
I wasn’t weirded out or overwhelmed by the endowment at all, and it wasn’t until my deconstruction that I really let myself see it as it was - weird. I had been primed, for over a year, to overlook the oddness of what I would see and engage in, to not think about it, because it was all so symbolic that of course I wouldn’t understand. And the world wouldn’t understand. And any member who thought it was weird or cultlike or not for them was just too spiritually underdeveloped to understand - milk before meat and all that. So I could imagine I saw Jesus in the signs and tokens, even if he was buried under layers and layers of “symbolism,” and I thought this meant I was spiritually strong. I blinded myself to the weirdness, disconnected from my own discomfort, and counted myself among the faithful.
I went to the temple weekly that summer with my mom, both because we had nothing else to do in our new small-town Idaho rental home, and because, again, I was dying for God to save me.
When I went to BYU that fall, I continued to go almost every single week, on my own, walking to and from both/either of the Provo temples since I didn’t have a car. It didn’t take long for me to start falling asleep in sessions, which was both regular-embarrassing and a source of shame. I was running myself into the ground and the temple was not helping. I’d leave exhausted, drained, lonely, and just as hopeless as when I went in. (Surprise! Secret ceremonies don’t lift the malaise!)
Eventually my pace slowed as I realized that my level of religious observance was verging on the mentally-ill, scrupulosity side of things. Plus the first rays of deconstruction were dawning on me; if God wasn’t rewarding my efforts, what was the point in trying to worship and obey him? Regardless, I continued to do pretty much everything I’d always been doing, just at a jog instead of a sprint. I went to the temple less frequently, although still regularly. It took a few years after that to deconstruct and see the temple objectively. But during those intervening years, as I kept trying to go often, the building and its ceremonies very rarely brought me any sort of peace or respite, and even fueled the opposites.
In the end, the temple was not a symbol of Jesus’ mercy and love for me. It was a symbol of inadequacy rather than grace, fatigue rather than peace, weakness rather than strength, depression rather than joy - a symbol of empty promises. The blessings promised in the initiatory felt like curses each time they were laid on me, reminding me my faith was not enough to earn them.
As the pinnacle of obedience and worthiness, the temple proved to me that my scrupulous faithfulness was entirely ineffectual. The temple became a haunting reminder that I was never enough. That my immense efforts to impress and please God were unnoticed, unappreciated, unimportant. That as a person struggling with mental illness, I was simply broken beyond repair, and even in God’s own house, his spirit couldn’t (or wouldn’t) speak to me. I couldn’t climb any higher or dig a hole any deeper… I was simultaneously at the pinnacle of worthiness and the lowest point of my life, and there was nowhere else to go.
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