In the Room of Mental Health First Aid™

By Heather Lanier

In the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we joke about bad therapists and the body parts we lost to cancer. We describe with lyrical precision the places where our panic attacks begin and whether they travel up or down. We compare notes on the panic attacks like we’re comparing notes on dining experiences at a new restaurant. Or we stay silent and listen, grateful to those willing to describe their panic attacks because we’ve never had one, or don’t remember a time when we did … although, now that someone describes them that way, maybe we have. We recant our understandings of manic depression, tell stories about doctors’ mental health misdiagnoses, and collectively laugh at the rawness of what it means to be human.

In fact, in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we’re invited to talk about so many things the world beyond these walls does not want us to talk about that I start to lose touch with my usual filters. At the beginning of this day-long training, our facilitator Mandi said that if we ever need to leave the room for any standard reason—bathroom, phone call—we should give her a thumbs-up, so she knows we’re okay. “Otherwise, I’ll think you’re in crisis,” she explains. A few hours into training, I feel nature’s call, walk towards the door, make eye contact with Mandi, and lift my thumb toward the ceiling. She gives me a knowing nod. As I yank on the door handle, I have the uncanny urge to call out to the entire group of twenty-seven in a jolly, assuring voice, “Just need to change my tampon!”

I do not do this. But in the room of Mental Health First Aid™, I imagine the group warmly nodding and/or chuckling in a way no group of near-strangers ever has in response to the words, need and tampon.

Maybe we laugh so much here because there is nothing funny about why we are here. We are twenty-seven college professors at a south Jersey university that will, in four weeks, make national headlines for suicide. Three in two months. But we haven’t hit the New York Times or CNN just yet. It’s November 2019, and right now the University of Southern California is in the news. Two months before, it was the University of Pennsylvania. Last month, while south Jersey’s October languished in summer-like heat, the CDC released its report: Between 2007 and 2017, the rate of suicide among people age 10 to 24 increased a whopping 54%.[*] A 2018 CDC report found that suicide rates in half the states increased among all age groups by 30%. News outlets clambered onto the stats but couldn’t position them into a landscape of meaning. Like a Brancusian sketch, the numbers offered a clear if bare-bones portrait: We are a nation in crisis.

I’ve been standing in front of a college classroom for fifteen years. I’ve never had so many students write about suicide before—their thoughts of it, their friends’ acts of it.

In the second week of this semester, a young man I hadn’t seen before walked thirty minutes into my creative writing class and sat in the back. It was my first semester at this university. I was still learning where the bathrooms were. I found his name on my roster and marked him present. At the next class, he arrived on time but left halfway through. I never saw him again.

Nine weeks later, a voicemail from the Wellness Center sat on my cell phone. It was about an unnamed student, and would I please call back? Before I could, I read the official email from the university: the student I barely knew had died. The university was not legally permitted to disclose the cause. An online forum would later name it suicide. Before the student’s death, I’d considered myself too swamped for this all-day Mental Health First Aid™ workshop. Ten minutes after reading my student’s name in that email, I asked if there was an extra spot in this room.

Four weeks from now, when we lose our third student, the conversations in the media will center around our university’s wellness center, about whether there’s a waitlist for counselors, about how well our school is supporting students in crisis. We are not counselors, and we are not in charge of hiring counselors, nor are we in charge of determining the nationally recommended counselor-to-student ratio. We’re a department of writing professors, peeking out from mounds of essays and stories and projects in this, the busiest month of the semester. We are setting aside eight hours on a Friday so we can learn how to save lives.

“You’re earning a certificate, not a superhero cape,” Mandi reminds us frequently. We nod from our seats.

The Room of Mental Health First Aid™ is, in its usual operating hours, a sterile classroom filled with six long rows of tables. This is the same room in which many of us meet monthly to discuss the unsexy specifics of curriculum changes and policy requirements. It’s the room I stood in six months ago and convinced a committee to give me the assistant professor position I now hold. I wore a black suit, clicked through PowerPoint slides, gave confident answers. I wore the very persona of infallible competence that this room has, at least for today, invited us to disarm.

Not quite public, not quite private, the room of Mental Health First Aid™ invites professionals to disclose, with promised confidentiality, all the ways it has been hard for us to be human. “We use Vegas rules here,” Mandi says, clicking to a slide that features the city’s iconic neon welcome sign. “What happens here stays here.” We can disclose adolescent-onset anxiety. We can explain how trauma might link across our years like beads on a string. We can say what we would otherwise never say in this room: “Nope, the textbook descriptions of panic attacks are incomplete. Mine begin in my arms, or my belly, or my dizzied head.”

It strikes me that if more spaces followed the norms of the room of Mental Health First Aid™, we might actually need less mental health first aid.

Mandi is a thirty-something woman with alto-voiced cheer. “How many of you have experienced depression?”

Hands go up.

“Anxiety?”

More hands. Nearly all the hands, including my own.

This is one of Mandi’s strategies: accessing our personal experiences. She has given us softcover textbooks, and she scrolls through infographic slides from the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. But she also invites us to use ourselves as references, as wildly imperfect maps that might touch or even lay over and align with the maps of others, and which might, along with the textbook and slides, help us cobble together a fuller topography of what it means to be human.

We learn the official statistics: Twenty percent of young adults, ages 18 to 24, experience a mental health disorder.^[†] Two-thirds of students who need mental health support do not seek it. The average number of years between when a person needs help and when they receive it is eight. The age of a third grader, the time it takes for a typical human to go from drooling baby to sassy calculator of math problems. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for adults age 18 to 24.

“Why?” Mandi asks us to speculate.

“Social media?” someone calls from the front row.

“Climate change fears?” another person guesses from the side.

Mandi nods. “Sure. Those are all factors.”

But why, she says, is a question even experts haven’t answered. In our eight hours together, we will attempt to answer another: What can we do?

•••

It turns out that what we can do is remarkably simple.

She splits the twenty-seven of us into two groups. One group is labeled “Listening.” Another is labeled “Not Listening.” The groups must race each other to come up with as many outward signs of their designated label as possible. I am in Not Listening.

“Looking at your cell phone!” one of my group members calls out.

“Looking away!” another shouts.

“Not making eye contact!”

I’m not making eye contact. I’m looking at my notepad, frantically recording their ideas. A colleague grabs my list and runs to the whiteboard to scribble our answers. With equal urgency, members of Listening do the same.

“Time,” Mandi calls.

She tallies our lists. We of Not Listening have generated twenty-one outward signs. Listening only has nineteen. Not Listening wins!

But the whole point of the activity, of course, is that listening wins. It’s the “L” in our five-step Mental Health First Aid™ plan, which goes by the acronym ALGEE. We’ve skipped over the letter A for now. Mandi says it’s the hardest—we’ll get to it at the end.

Why ALGEE? “Because this program came from Australia,” our facilitator says to laughter. Maybe the others imagine what I do: surfers along the Gold Coast, aerial views of the Great Barrier Reef. Algae, the photosynthetic organisms that made the planet hospitable for life. Maybe it can help do so again.

•••

Sidenote: It is strangely freezing in the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I say this with zero metaphoric intention. I circle my hands around a mug of hot water. I wonder if I should slide my wool ski cap off my head, so I look more professional among my new colleagues. Then I remember: We’ll be talking about suicide here. It’s fine to strive for cozy.

“You are Anxiety,” Mandi calls out to three people clustered in the front row.

Their faces look up, stunned.

“And you right here,” she circles her hand around a group beside them, “are Depression.”

Nervous laughter erupts.

Another group is ADHD. A fourth is Schizophrenia. The laughter spreads, morphing from nervous to raucous. In a culture of person-first language, where we imply that people live with diagnoses rather than become them, her wording is jarring, but also hysterical.

So I am Eating Disorders, along with two men flanking me.

“Do you want to be Psychosis?” Mandi calls to a lone woman in the back. “Or you can join another group?”

The woman laughs. She’s fine with Psychosis.

Mandi has written age-ranges around the room’s whiteboards. “Go stand where you think your assigned mental health disorder, on average, begins.”

Substance Abuse stands beneath “13-17.” We of Eating Disorders sally up beside them. ADHD idles to our right at “8-12,” as does Anxiety.

Mandi asks Anxiety why they guessed eight to twelve.

“Personal experience?” a female colleague peeps with upturned uncertainty, then bursts into a low-bellied laugh.

She’s correct. So is ADHD, Substance Abuse, and we of Eating Disorders. Depression has planted themselves below “18-24,” but they’re off by a decade.

We return to our desks, and Mandi clicks to another slide. “Remember,” she says. “A mental illness is a physical illness. The brain looks physically different.”

I write these two sentences in my notebook. I box them and surround them with stars. Mandi’s quote gives new meaning to the dismissive phrase It’s all in your head. People hear this sentence in response to everything from depression to sexual harassment to autoimmune disorders. It means: What you’re describing, you’ve invented. It also means: Quit being inconvenient. But Mandi’s quote reminds us that the head is a powerful and real place in which to experience something.

The single greatest factor that contributes to mental health disorders, Mandi says, is trauma. Capital T trauma comes to my mind. The neglect of a parent. The fist of a spouse. A box for a bed. But she says no one can define trauma for a person.

“If anyone tells you that what you’ve experienced isn’t trauma, that’s bad counseling. In fact,” she adds, “everyone probably has trauma of some kind. Because everyone is alive.”

It’s the simplest mathematical proof:

Being alive causes trauma.

Everyone you have ever known has been, or is still, alive.

Ergo ….

I’m the stepdaughter of a chiropractor. If you fill out a form at a chiropractor’s office, it will likely ask you about your birth. Was it medicated? Were forceps used? A vacuum? The concern is for your neck and spine as it moved through the birth canal. But the implication is this: the very act of entering this world is traumatic.

•••

We break for pizza. We talk about our dogs, our cats, our Netflix binges, our children. We stretch cheese-covered triangles from our teeth and describe the things we love in this world. “I like your hat,” the man to my left, of Eating Disorders, says. I thank him.

•••

In 1990, I sat in a room with a judge and explained to him an ongoing experience of trauma. I was twelve. The judge dismissed my experience as not trauma. On my lap sat a composition notebook in which I’d written about my trauma. The judge wouldn’t read it. So mine was not, could never be trauma.

The details don’t matter—I’ve written about them elsewhere. (Thumbs up, reader. I’m okay.) What matters: Twenty-first century living sometimes affirms experiences that twentieth-century living denied. Not across the board, but in pockets of places, like in an op-ed that worries for the safety of transwomen needing to pee, like on a bestseller list where sits a memoir about a brown-skinned woman’s daily experiences with racism, like in a large discussion classroom on a patch of New Jersey that was once deciduous forest inhabited by the Lenni Lenape. We name at the onset of gatherings the tribes that inhabited the land we stand on. It’s a microscopic way of acknowledging Native people and the violence of white supremacy. It also ends up saying: Trauma brought us here. Trauma is embedded in the very birth of what we’re standing on.

Six months ago, when I stood at the front of this room wearing the black pantsuit, I described how I would structure my creative writing courses. I showcased my students’ work. Projected on the screen was a student’s poem about living in a female body in a country where the president bragged about grabbing female bodies. I talked about how I diversify my reading lists, distributed grading rubrics of varying complexity, and watched committee members nod.

Here’s what I didn’t say: When I ask my students to write, I sometimes invite them to excavate the ineffable little monsters in their guts. Just like I held a little monster in my lap in the form of a composition notebook when I faced that judge. I invite my students, however gently, to gather the courage to hold these little monsters up to their ears and listen to them. And what my students end up writing in response are often beautiful and strange and powerful songs about how they have managed to survive in this world.

But it is not always easy, handling these monsters. They can and do bite. If the student who died last month had been in my classroom, what would he have unearthed? Would my lessons have helped? Hindered?

During that interview six months ago, I was required to read my own work. I read a piece of nonfiction that excavated a little monster of my own. But the prose was polished, the structure artfully arranged, pressed into shape as neatly as my dry-cleaned suit. And when I was done, my future colleagues asked about professional things: how to craft a sentence, how an essay becomes a book. This is the professionalism of my field. This is also the gift I give my students: I take seriously the craft of their writing. Which means I also assume they, as people, are okay.

But Mandi’s ALGEE requires more. She’s still reserving the hardest letter, A, for the end. And we covered L, for listening. The G stands for Give reassurance and information. The two E’s stand, respectively, for Encourage appropriate professional help and Encourage self-help and other support strategies. As a writing professor, I not only need to help my students with syntax and diction and structure and voice and revision. I also need to help them stay whole.

It’s a daunting new job responsibility in the role of twenty-first century professor: to worry about how an absence of eye-contract might trigger isolation; to keep dibs on a student’s possible need for professional counseling; to make note of any mentions of suicidal ideation (so far this semester, three) and have the follow-up conversations: Are you okay? Are you getting the help you need? I feel the weight of my students’ well-being on my shoulders.

•••

What are signs of an eating disorder? What is the difference between substance abuse and addiction? How do PTSD triggers work? Much of Mental Health First-Aid™ training requires us to understand the range of mental health disorders, so we can identify signs of them and guide people toward appropriate help. We’ve become, in eight hours, like mobile triage rooms.

We tackle letter A, as promised, at the very end. And I too will get to it at the very end. For now, know that the light from the classroom windows eventually turns pink. The sun eventually falls below the horizon. And all twenty-seven of us eventually complete our training. Mandi reminds us to do something kind for ourselves tonight: a glass of wine, a bubble bath. Every flight attendants’ emergency instructions are both clichéd and true, and Mandi reiterates them: “Put the oxygen mask on your own face first. You can’t help anyone unless you also help yourself.”

The next morning, I am ensconced in a scene the Internet might call self-care: cocooned in bed beneath a weighted blanket, supine and turning pages in a book. My children are miraculously at their grandmother’s. I am burritoed in bed past ten. I have nowhere to go for two hours.

It will make every bit of sense if I want to stay in this place forever. It will make absolutely zero sense if I start to long, ever-so-slightly, and then very much so, to return to the room of Mental Health First Aid™.

It’s the book’s fault. A memoir about being gay and Black in the south, it’s one I planned on assigning next semester. But as I turn the pages, the author’s mother is unexpectedly diagnosed with a terminal illness, and it’s the very same illness that a student’s mother has recently been diagnosed with. This student has already registered for next semester’s class.

I want to go back to the room of Mental Health First Aid™. I want to raise my hand and ask the question I haven’t figured out how to answer. Not the first question perched on top of my head (Should I assign this book?). The question buried underneath it: How responsible are we for each other? Exactly how much are we in each other’s care?

The boundaries in the room of Mental Health First Aid ™ were clear. The doors were closed. The personal stories were confidential. People gave thumbs-up. We were okay, we were okay. The only signs of the outside world showed through the windows. By training’s end, the sky was nearly indigo, and we drove home in the dark. There are only so many questions you can answer in eight hours. How responsible are we for each other? It’s a question I’ll keep carrying.

•••

The answer I left with, though, is this: At least a little bit. We are all, every one of us, at least a little bit in each other’s care.

Over the next days, I catch up on grading, read a few dozen short stories, return them to my students with comments. Ten minutes into a lesson, a student is openly weeping. She can’t be upset about my comments—she didn’t turn in any work. I assign the class a short writing activity and whisper to her: “Do you want to talk?” She shakes her head no. I say okay. Five minutes later, she’s still wiping her face with her sleeve.

“Come on outside,” I say. She follows me into the hall. It’s a night class, and the hall is lined with bluish-black windows.

She chokes on a sentence. It cracks past her vocal cords. She’s in a domestic violence situation. It’s bad. What follows is another Vegas moment. The details of her story stay with her. But the all-day Mental Health First Aid™ shifts me into gear. I listen closely. I ask questions. I hug her for as long as she wants, which is much longer than I expect, and she weeps into the crook between my neck and shoulder. She holds tight, until she lets go.

I ask about her safety. I ask whom else she has told. We return to class, and I finish teaching, and then we sit together on a bench in the hall as she calls campus safety. She speaks to the counselor on call. The counselor gives her good advice. There are next steps. A way to feel safe tonight. An expert to talk to tomorrow.

I walk her to her car, which is right in front of the building—a spot she tells me she waits for each night that we have class. This is why she’s been late, she says. I watch her close her car door and hear the click of the lock, and she drives away. It’s raining, almost seven p.m.

Reader, I’ll tell you this: She won’t pass the class. But she’ll get counseling and a safe place to live.

On my way to the parking garage, someone behind me shouts with all their might: “FUCK!” During my ascent up the garage’s concrete stairwell, two men pass me. They are very tall, and loud, and seem amiable and they could also crush me against the wall, and they could be carrying something that crushes them from the insides, and they could be perfectly fine.

We’re all a little in danger, we’re all a little in each other’s care.

When I get inside my own car, I lock the doors, relieved to create a room of just myself.

•••

It is only at the tail end of the daylong training, when my blood sugar is low and the sun is threatening to set and I have the uncanny urge to scroll mindlessly through social media, that we tackle the hardest letter: A.

Assess for risk of suicide or harm.

In other words, ask a person if they’re planning to kill themselves. If we ever suspect someone is thinking of it, we need to ask.

We practice as a group, repeating the questions in unison:

Are you thinking of killing yourself?

Are you having thoughts of suicide?

We get the words right. We commit them to memory. Mandi tells us that it can be scary to ask, which is why we’ll practice in pairs.

“And if they say yes,” Mandi asks, “then what do you do next?”

A voice pipes up in front: “Ask if they have a plan.”

She nods. “And if they do?” she asks.

“Stay with them,” another voice says.

“Do not leave them,” Mandi adds. “Call campus safety. Call 911.”

Then it’s time. I turn to the male colleague next to me. I met him two months ago.

“Are you thinking of killing yourself?”

He knows it’s coming, and still he winces. His eyebrows relax, and he assumes the role. “Yes,” he says calmly.

“Do you have a plan?” I ask.

He pauses. “Yes,” he says.

The end of the role play is remarkably stark, like a cliff-edge. We switch roles.

“Are you considering suicide?” he asks.

I’m a terrible role-player. I give him the true answer. I give him the only answer I hope people will always give me, the answer I hope every person on this planet can give every day of their lives. It’s a hopeless hope for the world’s eight billion people, all of whom have been born and have lived years and are still alive. I say “No.”

[*] From Sally C. Curtin, M.A., and Melonie Heron, Ph.D., “Death Rates Due to Suicide and Homicide Among Persons Aged 10-24: United States, 2000-2017,” NCHS Data Brief, No. 352, October 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db352-h

^[†] All statistics in this paragraph come from the presentation literature from the Youth Mental Health First Aid ™ USA training.

•••

HEATHER LANIER is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Longreads, The Sun, and elsewhere. She writes about parenting, disability, spirituality, and what a kindergarten teacher would call “big feelings.” Her TED talk has been viewed over two million times.

In the Language of My Former People

Photo by M.Peinado/Flickr

By Leah Elliott

One day, my mother’s name appears in my inbox. I open a message announcing that my parents have been called to be missionaries in the Philippines. I cringe, sigh, and think, I’m sorry, as I picture my parents—oh so pious and paternalistic—carrying out the Lord’s holy work of perpetuating colonialism in the Philippines.

I close my eyes. Truly, sincerely, I’m sorry.

•••

I was a Mormon, the earnest, orthodox, devout, faithful, believing kind.

On my father’s side, my ancestors were some of the very first members of what would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were among those who knew Joseph Smith and those who walked across the plains with Brigham Young to settle Utah. My mother was a convert from Florida. In 1966, at the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements, my mother’s big act of rebellion was to stand up to her pastor and defend her decision to leave the Southern Baptist Church to join the Mormon Church. In 1968, she gave up a scholarship at a state university and instead enrolled at Brigham Young University. By the time she was nineteen, she and my dad were married. My oldest sister was born before their first anniversary, and there would be no ebb to the procreating for the next twenty years.

Mormonism made up the fabric of my childhood. It saturated my days with its regimen of six a.m. daily family scripture study; morning and evening family prayer; blessings on meals; individual prayers; individual scripture study; a weekly three-hour church bloc; midweek church activities; monthly fasting and bearing of testimonies; obedience to the Word of Wisdom, meaning abstention from alcohol, cigarettes, and caffeine; observance of the Sabbath, in the form of refraining from activities deemed too raucous or worldly; General Conference, Stake Conference, ward conference, youth conference; temple preparation, missionary preparation, celestial-marriage-to-a-returned-missionary-for-time-and-all-eternity preparation; seminary; modesty in dress; Book-of-Mormon distance for dancing partners; avoiding even the appearance of evil; being in the world but not of the world; absolutely no sex ever, of any kind, not ever, not even with yourself, never, not ever until after you’re married, and then only with your opposite-sex spouse, and even then nothing too kinky .

Not one wisp of my life escaped Mormonism’s touch.

By the time I was twenty-five years old, my mounting disillusionment with Church culture and unsatisfactory answers to doctrinal and historical questions led me to leave the Church.

That year was the first time I tasted alcohol.

My experience of Mormonism was more harrowing than not, something I think of having survived and something I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to distance myself from.

Still, the tendrils of it follow me everywhere. It comes up frustratingly early with new acquaintances. When the answers to common getting-to-know-you questions are responses such as “I have ten siblings,” and “My parents live in Utah,” you can’t really plausibly deny ever having had anything to do with Mormonism.

I’m not especially proud of having been a Mormon. It was an unchosen identity, assigned to me at birth like gender, one that I earnestly tried to fill but ultimately found ill-fitting and had to drop. I get tired of being defined in terms of what I’ve chosen not to be, and my most painful life experiences aren’t really what I want to talk about with people I’ve just met. I’ve settled on a response for the inevitable, “Are you Mormon?” question: “I was raised that way, and my parents are, but I’m not anymore.” All of which is true, and none of which conveys any of the actual truth of the experience.

I usually ignore Facebook friend requests from people I don’t know, but if all my ex-Mormon friends show up as our friends in common, I accept the request. I know what it means to have been Mormon, and to go through the never-ending process of becoming not-Mormon. I know there’s a story of loss, grief, betrayal, disillusionment, and abuse. I know they’ve lost friends, and not uncommonly, have become estranged from at least some of their family. I know that, regardless of where they fall on the gender and sexuality spectrums, they’ve dealt with intense shame over their sexuality. I know they’ve had to learn how to reorient themselves to a world they were taught to remain aloof and unspotted from. Those within the Church regard you as fallen, deceived, succumbed to the influence of Satan, but life in The World is foreign.

Every former Mormon who sincerely believed the One True Church narrative, who had a testimony of the truthfulness of the Gospel, as they say, has come to a point of realization that this Thing that they have based every aspect of their lives on is not what they thought it was. The sheer terror of being thrust into freefall when your entire worldview collapses, the enormity of the gaping maw of the “So now what?” that you are left with, is impossible to explain to someone who has never been through it, and needs no explanation for someone who has.

•••

There are lots of names for people who leave the Church: ex-Mormon, Jack Mormon, former Mormon, recovering Mormon, anti-Mormon, or (my personal favorite) Mormon Alumni.

But still “Mormon,” all of them.

I had a Sunday School lesson when I was about four years old. It was an object lesson, a Mormon favorite. Our teacher gave us each a fresh sheet of clean, white paper and told us to crumple it up as small as we could. We were excited at being instructed to do something we’d normally be scolded for, and the room erupted with the noise of crackling paper. After a minute or so, our teacher reversed her instructions: Try to make the paper as it was before you crumpled it. Of course we couldn’t. And that was the point of the lesson, which was on consequences: Some things just can’t be undone.

I can be not-Mormon, but not never-has-been-Mormon.

In 2009, four years into my journey out of Mormonism, I arrived at a brief period of atheism and started a blog, which I titled “The Whore of All the Earth.” The Bible mentions the whore of Babylon, but “the whore of all the earth” is a phrase from the Book of Mormon, unique to Mormonism. I chose the title, in part, because I knew it would serve as a homing signal to other ex-Mormons. It was me trying to snap my fingers and catch their eye across a crowded room: “Yo! Yo! Over here! I’m one of you!”

And it worked. I blogged my way into an online community of others who had left the Church, people who got it in a way that never-were-Mormons can’t. But after a couple of years, I got burnt out on hearing “this was my awful experience of Mormonism” stories, weary of talking about Mormonism in general. There were reasons why I left, after all. So I withdrew from the ex-Mormon blogosphere.

•••

I constantly jot down random thoughts that go through my head. Sometimes these scribbles become the building blocks of poems. Sometimes lines of scripture come to my mind, and then I have to Google to see whether it’s from the Bible or from one of the books exclusive to the Mormon canon. In my upbringing, “scripture” was an umbrella category. There wasn’t much need to pay attention to whether a passage being quoted was from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, or the Bible, because all carried equal authoritative weight.

If a line I’ve jotted turns out to be from the Bible, I’ll go ahead and use it in a poem, but not if it’s from one of the Mormon scriptures. For one reason, relatively few people would recognize the allusion. For another, most of the time I wish I could just excise this past of mine.

One night, I was scribbling away, when this mash-up of the Mormon children’s song “I Am a Child of God” and the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” started working its way through my head. I noticed how similar the melodic and formal structures are, and even some of the words, and the delicious chromaticism that happens if you start the chorus of “I am a Child of God,” then swap out the line “Help me find the way” with the melody and words of the line “Help me find my proper place” from “Jesus.”

Aw, man, this is genius! I thought. Who could I share this with who would possibly appreciate how genius this is? There are approximately nine million Mormons in North America, or about 1.5% of the total population. I don’t have statistics for the number of Velvet Underground fans in that same area, but let’s assume that they’re a similarly narrow segment of the population. We can deduce that there probably isn’t a lot of overlap between these two groups. I felt a wistful twitch at the corners of my mouth as I realized that I might be the only person who would appreciate how cool the mash-up was. For the first time, I wanted to use something from Mormonism to make art. The problem wasn’t needing to hide having been a Mormon; the problem was that no one would get it.

But then I thought of other writers who allude to a non-mainstream heritage. Joy Harjo, for example, has used the names of Native ceremonial dances in her poems. There’s a little asterisk and footnote for those unfamiliar, and it’s not an issue.

I had another thought I’d never had before: Maybe having been a Mormon could be a thing that made me unique in a positive way, instead of just making me a weirdo.

I was in high school the first time I realized, We’re one of those weird religions! It was 1996 and Mike Wallace interviewed Gordon B. Hinckley, who had recently become the president of the Church, for a segment of 60 Minutes. This was long before Mitt Romney and The Book of Mormon on Broadway. At that time, it was a Big Deal for Mormons to see anything about One of Us on “real” TV, and Very Big Deal for our prophet to be talking a real newsman. My whole family gathered around to watch it. What I remember most is the image displayed behind the talking head who introduced the segment: “MORMONS” in huge banner letters.

I didn’t have a name then for what I was seeing, but I recognized it: sensationalism. I witnessed myself being portrayed as Other.

So I knew that being Mormon had made me weird, but might I want to claim this heritage after all, perhaps the way secular Jews claim theirs? Or the way my queer friends now embrace and celebrate identities for which others once mocked and shamed them?

But this wasn’t like that. Although Mormons are a minority in most parts of the United States, and in broader American culture, where I grew up, in a region north of the Grand Canyon known as the Arizona Strip, we were the majority, and often we were real jerks about it. And I’m the one who finds this identity shameful, a thing to be hidden and denied.

Still, it’s been more than a decade since I left. Most of its sting and noxious fumes have dissipated for me. Mormonism has become a thing I can manipulate and examine with a degree of detachment that I didn’t have when I first left. Maybe that heritage could be a source and a perspective that informs my work instead of something I’m always trying to run from. Maybe I could begin to integrate it.

I mentally played the rest of “I Am a Child of God” in my head:

I am a child of God

And He has sent me here,

Has given me an earthly home

With parents kind and dear.

I noticed that that last line always plays in my head as, “With parents kine dandeer.”

Then I realized why this must be, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way it would if you suddenly sensed that there was someone hiding in the closet behind you, watching you.

I knew this song before I even really knew language.

•••

During a solo road trip soon after, I was singing through hymns that I hadn’t sung in years, mining them for material, interesting ideas or turns of phrase. I sang the chorus of “Praise to the Man,” a hymn in honor of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith:

Hail to the prophet,

Ascended to heaven!

Traitors and tyrants

now fight him in vain!

Mingling with Gods he can plan for his brethren!

Death cannot conquer the hero again!

I burst out laughing as I spotted the resemblance to the self-aggrandizement of a certain commander-in-chief. I texted the lines to one of my brothers, with the comment, “Joseph Smith started a religion, a fantastic religion, incredible, the best, tremendous, you’re gonna love it, believe me!”

Alluding to Smith’s clandestine marriages to dozens of women, some as young as fourteen, others already married to other men, my brother texted back: “When you’re a prophet, they let you do it.”

Joseph Smith was just a silly old megalomaniac conman. I had a living example of his type to compare him against now, and somehow that took most of the menace, and all of the validity, out of him and this whole enterprise that he’d started.

I wiped tears out of my eyes. Of course I’d known that it wasn’t my fault I was born into generations of Mormons, but that was when I knew, in the way that’s the real beginning of healing for a survivor of abuse: It wasn’t my fault.

The culpability for Mormonism’s ills fell from my shoulders. The weight of the need I constantly feel to say, “I’m sorry,” for having been a Mormon was gone. I need no longer bear the sins of my fathers.

•••

Just as Trump was taking office, I unexpectedly found myself adding Civics to my community college teaching course load. I’d never taught the topic, so I was doing a lot of reading every week to prepare for classes. The daily headlines seemed to me the natural result of the history I was reading: a country founded on corruption, oppression, racism, imperialism, and crony capitalism just as far back as the historical eye could see. And the parallels and connections between the corruption in Washington, D.C., and the corruption in Salt Lake City were about to start popping up all over my consciousness.

I read an article about a Mormon Maori man’s unsuccessful efforts to prevent the Church from demolishing a Church-owned school near Hamilton, New Zealand. The school had been an important center to the Mormon and non-Mormon community there, but it was near a Mormon temple, around which the Church was now undertaking an expensive real estate development. Like so many imperialists and capitalists before them, the Church dismissed the concerns of the local community to make way for its business venture and to increase the allure of its temple.

Speaking of its developments near its Philadelphia temple, the Church’s senior real estate manager claimed that “the church is sensitive to what can be developed next to its temple” and always wants to have something “very compatible to the sacred nature of it.” I wondered, was he perhaps conflating “sacred” and “lucrative”?

I thought of downtown Salt Lake City, which the Church has groomed to function as its Mormonland theme park. The Church controls the experience by means of varying subtlety, from signs discouraging giving to panhandlers, to paying the retail stores at the recently-built, upscale Church-owned City Creek Center to stay closed on Sundays. Temple Square and its accompanying visitors’ centers and museums are all free, but visitors spend money in Church-owned businesses downtown, and if they convert, they become tithe-payers.

When it was completed in 1972, the Church Office Building was the tallest building in downtown Salt Lake City, almost twice as tall as the adjacent temple in Temple Square. No nefarious outside entity or city ordinance created a building that dwarfs their temple; they chose that themselves. The building that they claim is their most sacred edifice is literally in the shadow of the building devoted to their administrative and financial affairs.

Among other rites, Mormon temples are where sealing ordinances take place; only in the temple can members receive the rites that guarantee that they’ll be with their families for eternity. Members must pay ten percent of their income to the Church for the privilege of being worthy to enter the temple to receive these rites. All of these funds go to Salt Lake City before being disbursed locally. In addition to tithing and other offerings collected from members, the Church has various for-profit business and real estate holdings, many of them near their temples.

The Church has not publicly disclosed its finances since 1959. I have two thoughts about this. First, I don’t trust anyone with a lot of money who isn’t willing to be transparent about where they get it. Second, what would I expect from a church founded by Donald Trump’s early nineteenth-century counterpart?

During the first few years after I left, I’d been able to see the Church as misguided but well-intentioned. I still thought this was true of most individual Mormons, but the Church as an institution was looking to me like just as corrupt a sham as ever there was and entrenched in the larger systems of corruption and oppression in the United States.

One Sunday morning, an article on the backstory of the publication of Silent Spring came up in my news feed. As I sipped my coffee, I read that Ezra Taft Benson, who simultaneously filled the roles of Latter-day Saint Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture under Eisenhower, and who would lead the Church as prophet, seer, and revelator from 1985-1994, had written that Rachel Carson was “probably a communist” because he couldn’t conceive of any other reason “why a spinster with no children was so worried about genetics.”

I went searching for more context and turned up some other facts. This man whom I had called “prophet” through the bulk of my childhood had authored a pamphlet titled “Civil Rights, Tool of Communist Deception.” Then during his tenure as Secretary of Agriculture, he had brought us industrial agriculture and factory farms with his insistence that farmers “get big, or get out,” and had attempted to silence the woman who sparked the environmental protection movement, on the grounds that she had a vagina whence no babies had come.

I was indignant. I took it personally, because between the two of them, where I saw myself was in Rachel Carson: a woman intellectual, a writer, a lover and defender of the natural world, and not a Mormon. I wanted to tell the dead man off on our behalf.

You went after Rachel Carson?! You fucking clown! Guess what? Rachel Carson was right. What the hell kind of prophet are you? You’re ridiculous! You’ve got no fucking clothes! Let me just blow away your remaining shreds of credibility there.

I went back to my coffee and Sunday reading.

I’m not afraid of you anymore, so just get out of my closet, and go on now.

•••

Can you ever really divorce the parts of yourself that you don’t want? Can you pick and choose what you’re made of?

I’ve got plains-crossing, polygamy-practicing ancestors. I was born under the covenant, one of eleven children to parents kine dandeer who met at the B-Y-motherfucking-U. Except for the part where I reject all their doctrine and terminate my membership, I’m as legit as it gets. If there’s a minority culture I could definitely claim I’m entitled to appropriate, it’s Mormonism. But did I want to?

I started compiling a list of uniquely Mormon phrases that I found aesthetically or conceptually interesting. I could almost feel my neurons firing with connections, ideas, possibilities of all the things I could craft out of these words. The title of a volume that Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited of writing by Native women came to my mind: Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Yes. That’s what I would do. I would not claim Mormon as my identity, but I would take that crumpled paper for my art.

A stupor of thought,

a son of perdition,

the brother of Jared,

the City of Enoch,

a stripling warrior,

an eight-cow wife,

health in the navel,

marrow in the bones,

strength in the loins and in the sinews,

popcorn popping on the apricot tree,

and Saints and angels sing…

Take it! Take it all!

•••

LEAH ELLIOTT is a writer, poet, teacher, and journeyer. She lives in North Carolina with her partner, children, and stepchildren. You can find poetry, social media links, and other good stuff at her website: www.leahielliott.com.

Escape

Photo by Gina Easley

By Reyna Eisenstark

The birth of my first child was the most traumatic event of my life. Nothing has come close. I’m talking about trauma in the physical sense, but also in the emotional sense, and truly in any other sense that you might use to describe trauma. What I’m supposed to add right here is that at the end of it I had this beautiful child, who is now a remarkable young woman, seventeen years old. This is true, of course, but she had nothing to do with it. This is about me.

The very same day my daughter was born, seven convicts broke out of a maximum-security prison in Texas. They stole guns and a getaway car and spent six weeks on the run, stealing money and weapons and additional vehicles and murdering a police officer before they were finally captured. Just before they escaped, the men had left a note in the prison that said, “You haven’t heard the last of us yet.”

•••

I don’t know what would have happened had I not overheard a nurse, at some point early in my labor, say that when she was in labor, she just sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked. It was the last thing the functional part of my brain picked up and latched onto right before it abandoned me. Picture me, a hugely pregnant woman rocking and rocking in a chair, her eyes wild and clearly no longer connecting to this world. If she could have spoken, she would have said, “Help me, please, help me.”

There’s no point in describing the pain because if you’ve gone through it you know exactly what it feels like, and if you haven’t there’s nothing I can do. However. The second time I gave birth, I discovered that contractions do not last for hours. I finally knew what people meant by a “break” between contractions. I understood that there really was time to catch your breath. But the first time around, this was not true. The steady wrenching pain across my back was simply punctuated by bursts of even sharper wrenching pain. The term for this is “back labor” which, like so many other birth-related terms, is a euphemism.

And yet, we had learned so much at our birthing technique class! For example: why would you avoid drugs throughout your pregnancy only to take them right at the end? And so, contrary to my natural predilections, I avoided drugs. Instead, with my desperate wild eyes, I rocked and rocked in a chair like the mental patient I had become, and, just as they tell you never to do, I held my breath with each contraction. The midwife on call and a nurse stared at me in my crazy chair. Stared and watched me rock and rock and hold my breath through a contraction. “She’s doing great,” said one of them. “Yes, she is,” said the other. And they left.

My then-husband, also in the room, by the way, happened to be the kind of person who waited to see how long he could go, how cold it would get outside, before turning the heat on. Let’s wait until November first! he’d say every year with a delighted grin. And later, when we had a wood stove in the living room, he insisted we heat the entire house with it except for a few hours very early in the morning. I had grown up with a mother who turned the heat down at night to 68 degrees. She was a desperately needy person, needy for attention and for luxury. I was not going to be like her, I’d decided. Instead, I spent my winters huddled around a wood stove.

One thing I didn’t know about giving birth was that the midwives, nurses, and etc. check in on you from time to time, but if nothing’s happening, they don’t stick around. Mostly, it was just me and my ex-husband, who tried to be encouraging. Really, though, I didn’t even want him to look at me. I could not bear to be in that kind of pain and have anyone’s eyes on me. It had been probably twelve hours by now.

At some point, the midwife and my ex-husband got into a verbal disagreement. He was probably refusing some kind of test that we were supposed to refuse according to our birthing technique class. But the midwife was nasty, something you might find surprising. The male doctors in that practice turned out to be patient and gentle. The midwife snapped at both of us. She threatened to leave if he kept disagreeing with her.

I had no energy to intervene.

This same midwife, after even more unhelpful hours had passed, offered me something that was too good to refuse. What if we gave you, she said, something to take the edge off? What she meant was Demerol. I had a thought that I might be able to climb back to myself, if only briefly, and I agreed. This was when my ex-husband got angry. At me. Hadn’t we decided that I wouldn’t take any drugs? We had decided that, yes.

I don’t really want to say this, but what happened next was that he turned away from me, picked up his Economist, and started reading. He was done with me.

Unfortunately, the Demerol’s effects only lasted a short time. But in that short dreamy time I could collect my thoughts. The pain was no longer me. It was a little separate from me, and I felt something like relief. But my ex-husband, the man I had come to the hospital with, the man who had stayed with me for all these hours, was angry. Somehow he connected the pain that was wracking my body with the child we were going to have. I did not. I never had.

Time passed. Twenty hours in, I said to a nurse, I feel like I have to push! I didn’t really. But I knew that pushing was supposed to happen eventually. My words were like magic. Suddenly, there was action, people coming into the room and not walking out again; they were wheeling in trays with equipment, acting busy, like I was finally, after twenty fucking hours, doing what I was supposed to be doing. Well, now I couldn’t let them down. And so, I pushed. I pushed as fiercely as I possibly could, the way someone who isn’t pregnant at all might push, just thinking that by sheer force, but with no help at all from my own body, I would push this baby out. It turned out that I strained my pelvis muscles so badly that over the next few days I could barely sit up from the pain. But at that point, I was fierce. I tried, I really tried. But nothing happened.

At nine p.m., after twenty-four hours of labor, I was wheeled into the operating room. If the past twenty-four hours had been my greatest trauma, my greatest moment of relief was the next one, when the anesthesiologist stuck a ridiculously long needle into my spine and I felt the absence of pain, which is sweeter than anything you can imagine. This is what I’d been waiting for, wanting, for twenty-four hours. Someone, this beloved stranger, had simply known.

•••

Not long after my daughter was born, I would be told that the midwife at my practice had stopped attending births. “She was burned out,” someone would explain to me. Ten years later, I would tell my husband, the man who had turned away from me, that I could no longer be married to him.

As for the Texas Seven, as the men who broke out of the high-security prison came to be called, I need to point out that during those same hours that I spent rocking and rocking, trapped in pain, the men made their escape. It was midday, a time when surveillance of certain areas in the prison was a little more lax. The men had worked out a plan beforehand, which seems improbably simplistic but ended up working out perfectly, according to news reports: one of the men would call someone over, while another would hit this man on the head from behind and then throw him into a maintenance closet (just like a movie about men breaking out of prison). After the men had stolen the clothing and credit cards from their victims in the maintenance closet, they made their way to the back of the prison. There, the rest of the group was waiting with a stolen prison pickup truck. Finally they drove off. They were free.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a freelance writer and editor living in Chatham, New York. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. You can read more of her writing at reynaeisenstark.wordpress.com.