I was nineteen when I walked out of the only world I had ever known.
I am the great-great-grandniece of Joseph Smith. My faith wasn’t just belief. It was bloodline. Identity. Inheritance.
Leaving cost me things I still grieve. But those losses, the ones that nearly unmade me, turned out to be the most incredible gifts of my life.
The first hard thing: You lose certainty.
The Church gives you a complete world. Every question answered. Every doubt pre-addressed. You know who you are, why you’re here, where you’re going. That scaffolding holds everything up.
When you leave, it collapses.
The silence where the answers used to live is not peaceful at first. It is deafening. Existential philosopher Paul Tillich called this the anxiety of meaninglessness, the vertigo that hits when the ground you’ve stood on your whole life simply isn’t there anymore.
I remember lying awake wondering if anything was true. Not just the doctrine. Anything.
But here’s what I didn’t expect. Rollo May, the existential psychologist, wrote that anxiety is not the enemy of freedom, it is the price of it. That vertigo is what genuine inquiry feels like. It’s what wonder feels like before it learns to trust itself.
The gift hiding inside the loss of certainty is this: a sense of awe that can actually be earned. Not assigned. Not inherited. The sky gets bigger when you stop already knowing what’s in it. Questions become luminous. Curiosity stops being dangerous and becomes the whole point.
I fell in love with ideas for the first time at nineteen. Frankl. Camus. The Stoics. Not as threats to my faith, but as companions in the dark.
That’s not nothing. That is almost everything.
The second hard thing: You lose your community.
This one didn’t always announce itself the same way. And sometimes it arrives in increments.
The friend who lectured me about falling for Satan’s voice. The cousin who spoke to me in the practiced warmth of someone visiting a patient. The way my mother’s face changed when my name came up at family gatherings I’m not quite invited to. Embarrassed. Long-time girlfriends who dropped me from their wedding guest lists.
In my family, leaving the church didn’t just mean leaving a congregation. It meant stepping outside the gravitational field of a dynasty. The Smiths didn’t just practice Mormonism. We were woven into its founding myth. My departure was, to some, a kind of apostasy with a genealogical footnote.
The grief of that is real. I won’t dress it up.
But Brené Brown makes a distinction I’ve held close ever since: belonging is not the same as fitting in. Fitting in requires you to be what others need you to be. Belonging requires you to show up as yourself and find the people who can receive that.
I didn’t know what belonging felt like until I left. I had only ever experienced the other thing.
What I have now, the friendships built outside any institutional framework, the connections forged in the honest territory of here is who I actually am, are the deepest relationships of my life. They are held together not by shared doctrine but by authenticity, vulnerability and shared humanity.
That is a rarer thing. And it is mine.
The third hard thing: You lose yourself.
Or rather, you discover there was never a self there to begin with. You can feel lost. Empty. Who am I?
High-control religion doesn’t just tell you what to believe. It tells you who to be. What to want. How to feel about what you want. The self that emerges inside that system is not really yours. It’s a composite of approved options.
When that system falls away, there is a terrifying blankness where your identity used to be.
Carl Jung called this individuation, the lifelong, often brutal process of becoming who you actually are, as distinct from who you were told to be. He didn’t promise it would be comfortable. He promised it would be real.
The gift of that loss is the one I reach for most often when I write.
Self-directed autonomy. The daily, deliberate act of choosing your own values, not inheriting them. Building a life from the inside out rather than the outside in.
I spent years writing my memoir about the family and the faith I came from. What I discovered, chapter by chapter, is that the fracturing was not the tragedy. The fracturing was the beginning.
The wound was the door. It wasn’t the end.
With Love,
Lyn
