As I have heard from many therapists, our identity is not some concrete thing to be discovered. Identity is something we craft ourselves, over and over again our whole lives. We know how it feels to feel like ourself, but is it truly something static, unchanging? Is it something we can describe without using trite words like “outgoing” or “friendly” or without over-identifying with the things we do, clothes we wear, or relationships we have? Sure, it’s much easier to introduce ourselves using these sorts of contexualizers (“I’m so-and-so’s girlfriend” or "I'm a Seattleite"), and they can help us find people similar to us (“I’m an athlete” or “I’m a morning person”), but they are not who we are.
There are some things about Mormonism - and about life - that occupy our consciousness as children and can either be abandoned altogether, or simply slip into the unconscious mind by the time we reach adulthood. One of those things, I think, is the stark us-versus-them dichotomy that Mormonism preaches. As a child, I believed deep down in my bones that being Mormon made me special, and even a better person than my peers. I was a righteous Latter-day Saint, and they were sinners or at least innocently ignorant of God’s higher, holier ways. Even if they were Christian, I was a better one, because my church was “true” and theirs wasn’t. In this way I quickly learned to identify myself not just by the in-group I was part of (Mormonism) but by the outgroup we shunned, preached to, or feared (everyone else). Even though I stopped explicitly thinking I was better than everyone as I got older, an air of superiority remained an integral part of how I saw the world and saw myself.
I was also taught - as literally every child since Joseph Smith has been - that my generation was a chosen generation, reserved for the perilous latter days. I was told I would live to see Jesus return, and that I would play an essential part in preparing the world for that return. I had a special call to bring others to Christ and lead by example. Since I was instructed to be outspoken about my church membership, if I ever did anything wrong, it would reflect poorly on the church, and thus on Jesus’ name. Assuming I didn’t ever do anything wrong, I also couldn’t just be average, I needed to let my light shine, I needed to prove to the world that our way of life was the only path to happiness and success - and if I was a failure in any way, it told the world that our way of life wasn’t just not “the only” valid option, but that it wasn’t a valid option at all. Should this happen, I would be massively letting God down, letting the church down… God was the church, the church was God, and I ought to be an extension of the same. I learned to identify myself by my success or failure to meet the church’s/God’s expectations; and those were the only two options. I was either among the successful faithful or among the unfaithful failures.
But you already know what kind of kid I was, I was good at it - good at being obedient, I mean. People sometimes refer to “the sea you’re swimming in” and how you can’t see the environment you’re in as anything other than normal; but I was the sea. I dissolved in it, lost myself in it. I was not my own, I was part of the church. I was God’s pen. Honestly, the question of who I “was” didn’t matter to me that much, because I believed what I did, how I contributed to the kingdom was most important. Obedience was far more important than individuality. I identified simply as a tool God would use to complete his incomprehensible work.
At the most basic developmental level, it’s important for toddlers to obey their parents, just as a matter of safety. Then it’s a normal part of development for children and young teens to try to obey each other, so to speak, to “fit in” and categorize themselves into the tropes they fit the best. I adopted the persona of the classic know-it-all, good girl, the smart kid. I don’t know that anyone ever called me any of those things to my face, but I know I was known by those tropes, and I obediently shaped myself to fit them better. In everything I did, I did my utmost to please and impress others. I lived for the praise of adults and authority figures in my life, and I often got it. I was rewarded for obedience, incentivized to shun individuality, so why would I rebel? I came to identify myself as the good girl.
Eventually kids become teens, childhood gives way to adolescence, and people try on new identities, rebel a little against who they were. They expand beyond the tropes. This never happened for me; I continued to live in my youthful naivete, and I seemed more and more the Molly Mormon compared to my Mormon peers. They were growing up, wearing what they wanted, maybe cussing a little when their parents weren’t around. I heard whispers about what couples were getting up to behind closed doors or in car backseats. They were sometimes caught vaping or sneaking out. They dated non-members (abandoning the us-versus-them dichotomy) and chose secular colleges to go to. They might still call themselves Mormon, but it didn’t define them or dictate their every choice, their every relationship, their every waking thought…and for some reason it defined me, and dictated mine. I began to perceive my identity as being especially saintlike (you know, in the Latter-day Saint way), as I observed the differences between my own piety and the looser devotion of my peers.
It was unsettling when I went to BYU because I assumed that everyone there would be like me - obedient, righteous, faithful, to the same degree. Since they picked a Mormon school, they’d “act Mormon,” right? A naive thing to think. Very rapidly, I observed that the other students at BYU were not keeping the exacting standards I was - and something shifted in me where in seeing this difference, I began to see myself as naive, uptight, and compulsive instead of mature, righteous and successful. What was I supposed to do with that information?
I put it in a box and shelved it. By the time I got around to proper deconstruction, my immediate concern wasn’t identity, but navigating the rising tension with my orthodox parents and siblings, who I was living with at the time. It actually took a vague knee injury, which happened a few months into deconstruction, to wake me up to how much my perceived identity was disintegrating in tandem with my faith. I have always had an active lifestyle, but the pain in my knee limited the activities I was able to engage in. When I took my frustration and grief about the situation to therapy, we realized part of what made the injury so demoralizing was that I was losing one of the last parts of my identity from before deconstruction. I had already lost the faithfully optimistic version of Ellie when mental illness crept in. I lost smart kid Ellie when I dropped out of school. I lost Molly Mormon Ellie when I stopped keeping my faithful habits and stopped attending church. These things all contributed to the loss of perfect daughter Ellie, another identifier I was used to. I worried that the weight I had gained as I recovered from an eating disorder, plus, again, all of the above, demoted me from “wife material” Ellie to god-knows-what Ellie.
Really what it all boils down to is that I was in pursuit of perfection, and suddenly…I stopped pursuing it. All of those things I just listed, all those versions of “Ellie” that I “lost” were about how I measured up to the church’s particular idea of perfection. They weren’t me at all, they were about what the church asked me to be. Once I stopped struggling to be that very specific, imaginary person, all those pseudo-selves fell away. And what was left? I had no idea, and it was terrifying.
It’s less terrifying now, but it’s still been overwhelming to have to start from scratch to re-make the decisions that were made for me early in life. I committed from a young age to be who the church wanted me to be, and now I have to analyze each of the standards imposed on me and ask myself what I really want. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t made any progress in this reconstruction at all, but I have to remind myself that what matters is that I feel more like myself. It’s a craft, something I will work on forever, and it’s okay if I don’t make every decision immediately, it’s okay if I change my mind; identity shouldn’t be rushed and it shouldn’t be a struggle to fit into.
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