Losing my religion
I always had questions about the doctrines we were taught, but mostly kept these to myself. But those questions kept niggling at my brain and I developed a distrust of the control the organization had over almost all aspects of our lives. Eventually, those voices got very loud in my head.
I was in an extremely unhappy marriage, my doubts about the religion’s promises were confronting me, and I wanted out of both. So in 2013 I separated from my wife and soon stopped attending meetings. This decision was the most critical of my life, and was not an easy one to make.
Leaving the religion subjects a person to shunning by everyone still adhering to the doctrines, even family and close friends. As a result of my course of action, choosing to live my life on my terms, I lost contact with my children and my parents.
Many who make this decision to leave, or are forced out because of breaking the rules, find it horrendously difficult to adjust to a world that they have been taught is wicked, full of hate, and will chew you up and spit you out. They don’t have any friends, because they were forbidden to make “worldly” friends while in the religion.
Some of them return to the congregation after serving a period of penance, others turn to self-harming practices, using alcohol or drugs to relieve themselves of the mental anguish. Others, sadly, have committed suicide.
I was rather lucky, I believe. Because of my extroverted personality which I had cultivated, I found it a bit easier to make acquaintances and friends. I joined a couple of social groups and soon had an ever-growing circle of people with whom I could associate. One of these was Mealsharing, a now-defunct program in which adventurous people cooked a dinner and allowed strangers to dine with them at their homes. I made many local friends and ate some extraordinarily good meals this way.
The other was a hospitality exchange platform, Couchsurfing, where travelers would be hosted by locals in a city or town instead of staying at a hotel. Serving as a host at my apartment in Chicago allowed me to meet hundreds of different people from around the world, and I learned about their countries and cultures. I also learned that it didn’t take a fortune to be able to travel.
Mostly they were much younger than me, some even junior to my own children. They were often traveling during a gap year, and I wistfully regarded their stories of travel, wishing that I had taken the opportunity to do so when I was in my twenties.
A few, however, were more mature in age, and I was astounded by their experiences and how they funded their journeys. One of them, 62-year-old Renata from Toronto, was traveling on her own as she often did. Her stories and boundless courage really inspired me.
I soon wanted to travel as well. But even though I had a good job by this time, with enough pay to be able to afford it, I didn’t have enough vacation time off work to actually go anywhere for more than two weeks at a time. It’s not easy to experience a new culture and region on the other side of the world when half of your time is spent getting there and back, and dealing with jet-lag.
So I did the best I could. I bought a used backpack and went traveling alone for the first time in my life. I went to Toronto, Canada and San Francisco, California. I had originally intended to go to Boston as well, but had met a beautiful young woman from Vietnam who had emigrated with her family and was living in Southern California. So I switched tickets and went there instead.
She taught me many things about Vietnam and its culture. My only education about the country in the past had come from scant material in our school’s history books and western movies about the war. My own father had been an Army nurse stationed there during the time my mother was carrying me in the last stages of her pregnancy and returned after my birth. He never really talked about his experiences.
While on a road trip with some strangers I had just met, I received a request to host a young woman named Emmy during her trip to Chicago. She explained briefly to me that she had just returned from Vietnam after three years of teaching English there and was going to be taking an instructor job at a teaching certification school in the city.
I wasn’t able to host Emmy because my girlfriend was going to be traveling to visit me during the dates requested. But her seemingly nonchalant mention of teaching English in Vietnam made me very curious about this. I had many questions for Emmy, and after a brief conversation, I had already made the decision that this was going to be my new goal.
I was going to move to southeast Asia to teach English and live a completely different life.