An Echo of Someone Else's Music

In Lourdes, fall of 1985

I have found myself recently, somewhat surprisingly, going through yet another phase of sifting and sorting, trying to make sense of my life. One of the things I have been doing as part of this process is going back through my old journals.

Oh! How I wish I had kept journals starting when I was in high school. But, alas, I didn't start one until just before I joined the LDS Church. Recently, I have been focusing on the period that covers the last few months of my mission, followed by the seven-month period leading up to my marriage to my former wife.

I wrote once on my former blog about these last couple of months in France:

My last area proved to be the most challenging of my entire mission. I was one of those elders who was called as an 18-month missionary, then we had a choice of whether or not to extend to the full 24 months. I had wrestled with this decision, but had ultimately decided to extend after an especially spiritual and uplifting experience in my previous area. Then I was transferred to missionary hell.  Why is life like that?

Well, ok, maybe hell is too strong a word. But my new companion absolutely drove me up a tree. I had never had a companion like him. Not necessary to go into details except to point out that he had – in spades – a number of character traits found among some missionaries/members that I was finding increasingly irksome. Narrowmindedness. A fixation with numbers, but no interest in people in where they were at. Condescension toward other religions.

At the same time, I was finding that, especially after going through the same-sex attraction struggles I had faced over the past six months, that I was dealing with a lot of self-identity issues. I had rejected a lot of my pre-convert self upon being baptized, and a process of re-integration had been going on throughout my mission. In this last area, I hit the wall. 

After being in my new area a month, I wrote the following in my journal: “I am going to keep trying, but I don’t know how much more I can take. I feel like I am in a prison and the walls are slowly closing in on me. The air is becoming shorter and shorter. I’m suffocating and I’m lashing out in desperate rage, trying to breathe fresh air, to liberate myself.”  

I had heard of elders simply walking away from missionary work to take breathers, and I considered it. One day at church, I almost did just that.  

By now, I had lost the “golden convert” halo that had been placed upon my head only 2-1/2 years before. I felt jaundiced, like I had been through a war. I questioned whether I wanted to be active in the Church when I got home. This was not due so much to my struggles over homosexuality; I just didn’t know if I was cut out for the regimented life that the Church seemed to require. It wasn’t a matter of faith so much as questioning whether I could continue to contort myself into something and someone that I was fundamentally not.

My struggles during this period of time were essentially about identity, not homosexuality per se. My attraction to men was only part of who I was. Rather, at this point in time, I was trying to recover who I had been before joining the Church. I was trying to understand who I really was.

I have written in the previous couple of posts about me reading Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund. I had started my foray into Literature a few weeks before leaving France by reading a book recommended to me by my last companion, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I followed this by reading Hesse's Steppenwolf. I was amazed, as I read my journal and read the passages from these two books that I had copied into my journal, at how much these passages still speak to me after almost 30 years, such as these words that Wilde had Lord Henry speak:

"... because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's own nature perfectly - that is what each of us are here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us."

I had never been very in touch with my self. I believe the genesis of this occurred as a result of the abuse I experienced as a child, then was later made far deeper by the dawning realization as an adolescent that I was sexually attracted to boys.  

When I joined the LDS Church, I think I felt that I could acquire a new identity as a Mormon. I strongly believed that the Church was true. Though this is a topic for another time, I desperately wanted, at that point in my life, some direction. Among other things, I truly believed the Church when it said that I could "outgrow" my same-sex attraction. Again, a topic for another time.

The important point for now is that I felt - like many, many converts before and since - that I needed to bury those parts of myself that were not conducive to the picture-perfect Mormon persona I called this "convert shock."  I had started, near the end of my mission, to come out of this, to make efforts to reconnect with the person I was before I joined the Church - a person my former wife never knew, not to mention my children. But these efforts were to be aborted and I would instead, during the months ahead, draw in some important respects even further away from the person I really was by getting married, jettisoning the plans I had been making for years to go to law school, and concurrently moving to my former wife's home in Vancouver, B.C.

This is why, at this point in my life, I am revisiting this period of my past: the last few months of my mission and the first few months at home - to discover why I was an echo of someone else's music, an actor playing out a part that I had not been written for me.