#and your mom suggested an all girls mormon camp

[savethepinecones]

1, 16, 20, 25! + any one of your choosing

1: what is your nickname?

i dont have any based on my name since its already v short but ive had internet folks call me pinecones or piney and i like those!

16: what do you think makes you attractive?

i think physically my eyes are my best feature but if were talking personality uhh i guess ive got a solid sense of humor?

20: whats a totally random and useless fact that you know?

every piece of knowledge ive ever had just abandoned me lol. if you feel like youre going to sneeze you can stop it by touching the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth a few times, like if you were saying la la la (i think i was told youre supposed to say "pineapple" but its the tongue thing thats the actually effective part)

25: do you/have you played any sports?

oh man. i did gymnastics for a bit when i was like four. tried ballet when i was seven but eventually decided to pursue piano instead (my mom had my sister and i try both for a year and then pick one to stick with). i also was on a soccer team at some point, maybe in first grade? i actually dont remember it at all but i vaguely remember looking at the team photos. also i remember the high socks lol. and then i briefly did softball in middle school because my childhood best friend had picked it up the year before and i wanted to fit in. im very asthmatic though so most if not all of these Did Not Go Well lol

and for the bonus one ill go with 19: a time that you told a lie

first off some important context for this is that i was raised mormon and every summer the church would have all the girls ages 13-17 go camping for like a week. they do hikes and crafts and devotionals etc. i think its all standard church camp type stuff.

so the first year i went they had the younger girls go on a short hike while the older ones went on a longer one. when we got back, a couple friends and i were curious about the longer hike so we decided to check the trail out during free time. we kept walking for quite a while. idk how long it was but we knew wed been gone long enough that people would have noticed we were missing. if i had to guess id say maybe an hour or so idk. anyway we got to a point where the path started to trail off and disappear so we decided to stop for a bit and then work our way back. we were in a pretty big meadow but there were some trees partway down a hill and one of my friends went down there to pee and carved some initials on a tree. i think she said she carved something for me and my crush at the time but i never saw it lol.

anyway eventually we started to head back and at some point we realized we were probably gonna get in trouble for disappearing. i was really worried about it but one of the girls was like "no dont worry about it ill take the blame" and suggested that we tell everyone that she had seen a deer and followed it and then the other girl and i went after her because we didnt want her to get lost in the woods alone.

about halfway back to camp we started hearing people calling our names. we kinda figured there might be some people looking for us but what we werent expecting was that they were men. remember, this is Girls Camp. usually the bishop would show up for a day or two but other than there werent any guys up there. turned out the bishop showed up while we were gone and some other guys whod driven up with him to drop off some food offered to help him look for us.

eventually the search party found us and we all stuck to our story when they asked us what had happened. i think we also said that initially wed been lost and really scared but then we said a prayer and just like that we found a path! and thats why they found us on a trail even though wed supposedly run off into the woods at random. it was very dramatic and spiritual. and also complete bullshit.

so we finally get back to camp and the leaders are all fretting over us. the girl who "followed the deer" did get a lecture about not chasing wild animals because they could be dangerous but that was about it. no big repurcussions.

that night we had a devotional, which is basically just the whole group sitting around the campfire and telling stories about when they felt the holy spirit or whatever. usually the leaders will start off by reading some scriptures or a talk from some church official and then theyll turn it over to the kids to talk about their experiences. in the middle of this, a deer wandered into the clearing near our camp. some of the girls pointed it out because cool, a deer. but the moment the three of us saw it, my friend who had supposedly followed a deer into the woods earlier that same day jumped up and shouted "thats the deer!"

for some reason everyone, including the adults, took it at face value that this random deer in the woods must be the exact same one wed supposedly seen earlier that day and also that it was some sort of sign that god had been looking out for us while we were "lost"

looking back on it now it doesnt really seem like a big lie but it felt like a huge deal at the time because we lied to The Bishop. for a long time i considered this to be the worst thing id ever done. we never came clean to anyone whod been there at the time and i dont think i even told my mom the real story until like a decade later lol

that story ended up being way longer than i thought it would be lol (ive told it before but never written the whole thing out so the word count is surprising) but its probably the most exciting lie ive got. the alternative stories are mostly like "i was super depressed but didnt think that would be considered a valid reason to bail on something so i said i had a migraine" so i think it was the best option despite the length. also its been a while since i thought about this and it made me nostalgic so yay

thanks for asking!! i had a lot of fun answering these (you can tell by how long this post ended up being lol)

[exmormonmusings]

My journey out of Mormonism

    Here goes, first original post from me. I would like to start this blog off by giving you some background. When I left the LDS church, I was 13 years old and it wasn’t exactly my decision. I had been happily lds my whole life, my parents were raised lds and as far as I knew everyone in my extended family was lds except a few random cousins. My major goals in life were to do good in school and better in church so that I could have a fulfilling, well-balanced life, spiritually and physically. I wanted to go on a mission after graduating high school because I thought it would make everyone proud and I reveled in the thought that I could bring people into the truth and save their souls. I loved young womens and girls camp and I had done baptisms for the dead with my cousin. When my ward went on trek, I was only 11 and was the youngest to go as my birthday was the day before the cutoff. I paid my tithing, didn’t swear, and made sure to surround myself with good mormon friends. I was pretty much your textbook, cookie-cutter mormon teenager.

    The summer after seventh grade, I noticed a few things that should’ve tipped me off that something was wrong. First of all was that my dad would always leave church early, usually right after sacrament meeting. My mom made the excuse that he just needed to get something to eat and with my dad being a type one diabetic, I believed her. I did think it was weird that he hadn’t had this problem before but I just justified it by saying that maybe it was because we switched to a later church time. Besides, I couldn’t really complain because my dad leaving early always meant that lunch was ready right when we got home. The second thing that happened was that I overheard my parents watching a show at night that talked about joseph smith being a liar, a deceiver and a blasphemer. This really shocked me for a moment and I thought “is my dad struggling with his testimony?” But, being the solid-faithed mormon that I was, I decided that I would just have to help him out. So I started looking through the book of mormon for scriptures confirming joseph smith’s validity. Not seriously though as I figured that sacrament meeting talks and other church activities would set him straight eventually. However, a few nights later me and a couple of my siblings saw my dad wearing actual underwear to bed instead of his garments. I know it sounds really silly but it scared us. It hadn’t happened before. After asking him about it, he got kind of angry and told us not to worry about it. I tried to comfort my siblings and myself that maybe his garments had holes in them and he was in the process of getting new ones, and it worked. I tried to ignore the feeling that something was off and thus remained, for the most part, happily oblivious to the revelation that would change my life forever. 

   Finally, one Sunday in July, two weeks after my thirteenth birthday, it happened. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first.We went to church, dad went home early. At church, my Sunday school teachers asked a question: had our parents borne their testimonies to us recently. They asked us to raise our hands if our parents had borne their testimonies to us in the last week. A couple hands. The last month. Couple more hands. The last year. Every hand except mine went up. I thought about it and I realized that they hadn’t. Everyone turned to look at me but my teachers quickly said that’s ok, that means this is a great opportunity for you to ask them to. But I couldn’t get it out of my head. I realized I hadn’t heard my parents speak positively about the church or get up in sacrament meeting talks or anything like that for quite some time. When church was over, my mom seemed really...deflated. Nervous, sad, just...not herself. She told us she had something to tell us when we got home. I got a really bad feeling but I tried to shake it off. When we got home my mom called us in for a family meeting. My sister Kayla, ten at the time, wanted to change out of her church clothes first but my mom said we needed to do this now. I thought that someone had died. And in a way, I guess they did. But we all sat down, all seven of us. My parents, me(13), Kayla(10), Alayna (8 and recently baptized), Carly(5-6) and Nicolai (3-4). My mom tried to talk first but she ended up crying. I really thought that someone had died. One of my mom’s sisters or brothers, maybe my grandparents...I didn’t know but it seemed like my mom was having a really hard time with it. But then my dad asked us if we had noticed anything weird recently. Suddenly all the things I mentioned before flooded back to me but I didn’t want to mention any of them in case they made my dad angry, especially about overhearing my dad watch that show. So I just shook my head. My siblings didn’t either. My dad’s voice broke when he said “no? none of you?”. And that’s when I knew something was seriously very wrong. I think I knew what was coming for a long time but my brain wouldn’t let me think about it. Then they said the words. “We don’t think the church is true anymore.” This all may seem very over dramatic to you reading this but I can’t even convey how much this changed my life. I never would’ve thought we’d leave, never could’ve imagined all the lies and horrors wrapped up behind my “one true church”. Those words put me in shock. I started crying without really being aware of what was going on. I tried to fight it, tried to keep convincing myself that the church was true but all the doubts and unanswered questions I had over the years all came back to me and I just broke. Most of my siblings were too young to really understand what this meant and Kayla tried to get us to stop crying by making jokes. “At least we wont have to wear these awful clothes anymore” “Hey, now we don’t have to listen to people talk and be hungry for three hours!”. My parents told us that if we wanted to keep going to church they wouldn’t stop us but they also wouldn’t come with us if we went. I considered continuing to go for a while but I was scared people would ask me why my parents didn’t come anymore or judge me because my parents left. I also decided I needed to hear what made my parents leave first. After I heard what they said, I didn’t feel the need to go to church anymore.

  The summer after was mostly filled with questions. Did this mean I could drink coffee, did this mean God didn’t exist, did this mean that we were bad people now? It turned out that a couple of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side had been out of the church for a while and they started the chain reaction that led to my parents leaving. The rest of the summer wasn’t that bad. It was starting school again that really made things hard. 

I think I’ll end this post here though, if you want to hear more about my journey and experiences out of mormonism, follow me or comment. If not, thanks for reading and I hope I didn’t bore you. If you have any questions for me or suggestions on what you’d like to see me post, feel free to ask/leave them. Until next time,

Maryn