Embodied Faith Transitions

I would not have identified as being on the Spectrum. 


I would not have identified as being on any Spectrum. 


Not a neurodivergent spectrum, not a gender spectrum, not a sexuality spectrum. 


Obviously, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t on a Spectrum. 


A Black and White picture does not show there was no color in the past. It shows something about the lens of the camera taking the picture. 


And my lens as a child did not include spectrums. 


I lived in a world of black-and-white decisions. Things were God-approved or they were of-the-devil. You listened to the Spirit or the enemy of god—the Natural Man. Choices were either aligning with God or they weren’t. People were either ready to be obedient to god or they were wicked and worldly. 


There was no thought, action, relationship, or mental playground that did not show up as either on one side of this tug of war or the other. 


Fifty shades of grey were a myth—a deception of Satan to overcomplicate life and justify sin. There was just a single climbing line of exponential growth from baptism to eternity. All I had to do was not fall off.


Life was a true or false test. 


And I was 100% committed to always and ever being true. 


That said, I also was a reverent disciple of color. 


There was no box of crayons big enough, no painting vivid enough, no garden varied enough, no 90s sweater wild enough for me. 


This made for a fantastic introduction to my first Elementary School classroom at 8 years old. Spangled banners of numbers, pictorial-glyphs of letters, vibrant pictures of animals, and pictures books were everywhere.


There were so many colors.


I had been homeschooled for years. And at home, the boldest colors were found in my toybox, in a coloring book, or maybe in the chips-aisle at the grocery store. 


But here at school, I was surrounded by color.


I wore iridescent pigtail baubles and a bright yellow shirt and pink tights for my first day. I hung up my purple backpack. 


At my desk, I brought out boxes of colored pencils, colored notebooks, and Lisa Frank folders and placed them next to the colorful nameplate taped to my desk. 


They matched!


Or rather, they were both at full saturation. Which to me, amounted to the same thing. I bounced my legs with joy. 


My teacher was nice. Sunlight streamed through the windows. This place was made for me, I thought. 


The classroom wasn’t the only colorful thing at school though. 


There were also my classmates.


They wore real jean jackets and sometimes pastel colored polos with pleated skirts. 


They wore their hair in different styles. They didn’t tie their hair into pigtails and they didn’t use iridescent baubles. It was all sleek-looking braids and barettes for them. 


They painted their nails in vivid blue and ornamented their backpacks with tiny toys.


On the first day of school, they asked me what my favorite color was. 


I said “Pink.” 


And the whole class laughed.


I couldn’t articulate these differences and I couldn’t tell what made single braids good and double pigtails bad, but I could tell that there were differences. I could tell that they mattered. 


They also spoke different. 


They didn’t talk about Church, didn’t talk about God or Jesus or duty or obedience. They didn’t seem to organize their lives around commandments or covenants or going to BYU someday either. 


“This is because your classmates are worldly,” said my parents, “you must be in the world but not of the world. You must be in school with worldly classmates without becoming like them. But they’ll recognize the light in your eyes and the glow of your countenance and eventually, they will be converted because it will be obvious that life as a Mormon is better.” 


So I learned to look different. 


But it was more than that.


I didn’t eat the same food that my classmates ate. Every day, they lined up for lunch and I pulled out a lunchbox. 


Everyday, they ate the schools food: pizza, tacos, sloppy joe’s, lasagna, chili. They could
Complain about it or criticize it because it was school food, am I right? 


Every day, I had the same thing: ham sandwich, potato chips, hostess cupcake. I couldn’t complain because I made it myself. Exactly the same, exactly the way I liked it. 


I actually envied that freedom to complain. I wondered if rolling my eyes at cafeteria food could buy me acceptance. 


But when it came down to it, lunch from home was more wholesome, more righteous. And cheaper too! And I must learn to provide for myself by making my own lunch. And I must not rely on government handouts like school lunches. 


I never was clear on whether I didn’t get school-lunch because it was too expensive or not expensive enough. But either way, I learned to eat alone.


My classmates used words I didn’t know too. 


Not just slang, but other words.


I had been warned by my parents not to learn unknown words from my classmates.


“The kids at school,” they said, “will use words you don’t know—don’t copy them. Those are swear words. We’re not going to tell you what those words are, but you’ll know which ones they are because they drive away the spirit. You must keep your language pure and clean. You must not be like the kids at school.”  


They spoke nostalgically of times when parents would scrub a child’s tongue with a bar of soap or make them hold it in their mouth as a penalty for swearing. “Teachers and parents do that anymore,” they said, “but that just means you must be extra careful. You must keep myself separate, they said. You must keep myself clean and pure as a vessel for the Lord. Swearing was sinful and dirty. The Lord loved clean language.”
 
They were dirty words. They were so dirty that even using them accidentally could taint me on the inside too. So, I must not copy those words.


“Oh, and sometimes,” they added, “even normal-sounding words were used to communicate dirty ideas.” 


I must not copy those either. They wouldn’t give me examples. I would know, they said, because the spirit would depart from me when those dirty ideas were present. If I was to remain a valiant example of the Gospel for my classmates as Jesus wanted, I must stop up my ears to both the foul language and the foul ideas. 


It was hard to know which words would make me dirty. It was hard to know which ideas would be worse. It made me very very nervous to think that I was always only a few syllables away from angering Jesus so much that he would abandon me in this new place. 


And the only thing worse than being abandoned by my classmates would be to be abandoned by my classmates and God.


So, I learned to avoid talking to other kids. I learned to keep quiet. I made a small room in my mind where I could stay clean from the pollutions of the world. 


When my classmates began talking of something exciting, something new, something they had seen on tv, something they wanted to talk about in whispers, I learned to leave. To sit alone. To excuse myself to the bathroom. To be by myself. 


I thought I was staying clean. 


My classmates just thought I was weird. 


I didn’t talk, they whispered to each other. “Why doesn’t she talk?” 


“Is she dumb?” 
 
“Is she retarded?” 


“Is there something wrong with her?”


“Oh, no. She’s just Mormon.” 


“Oh.” 


I never contradicted them. I was proud of being Mormon—or at least, I used to be before I heard it said like that. When the kids at school said Mormon, it didn’t sound like they were impressed or curious about the light in my eyes. It sounded more like they were mentioning some accident in the bathroom that they were hoping someone else would go ahead and clean up.


I tried to change their opinions by sending my Mormon glow of righteousness at them and by not swearing or not copying any of their words, but it didn’t seem to work. 
 
The kids knew celebrities and TV shows I had never heard of.


I talked about Church leaders and a prophet in Salt Lake City, about temples and missions and about how I wanted to have a big family someday. I thought everyone wanted that. I thought everyone got magazines with pictures of these things. I thought everyone had framed pictures of men in suits and temples in their house.


My classmates raised their eyebrows, shook their heads, said they’d never heard of them. Said they sounded boring. Said they sounded lame. Then they turned to each other and spoke of their own heroes: The Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Michael Jordan. 


I didn’t know any of them.  


But since my parents and Sunday School teachers weren’t talking about them, they must be wrong people to like, I thought. So, I never asked. I was intentionally non-curious. I worked at not liking anything my classmates liked. But I remembered the names. I pinned those syllables to the bulletin board of my mind to remind me what was forbidden.  


The kids knew social moves that I didn’t know—tricks and puns, covert eye-glances and passed notes, songs and rhymes. I was an easy target and soon everyone was passing around names and notes and giggling behind their hands as I passed by. 


I spent less and less time in the colorful classroom and more and more time in the bathroom, locked in a stall and waiting as long as possible before going back to class. 


“Why does she go to the bathroom so much?” 


“What’s wrong with her?” 


“She’s just weird.” 


“She was homeschooled.” (Cringe) 


Our school probably did have counselors—most schools too. But I never asked. Even if I had known about counselors, I wouldn’t have asked. I didn’t tell anyone about the whispers. I assumed this was just the worldliness of school. I assumed this is what everyone experienced at school, or at least what every other Mormon experienced. And if my Sunday School lessons had taught me anything about worldly persecutions, it was that they were necessary, refining, and unavoidable if you were a true disciple. 


And that God was pleased with followers who could suffer without complaining. 


So I didn’t complain. 


I didn’t tell my teacher. 


I didn’t ask for help. 


Sandbagging against the deluge of worldliness was exhausting.


I was the only Mormon, but I wasn’t the only kid struggling. 


Other kids in my class struggled too and they were also bullied. 


There was a boy named Kyle who never seemed to say the right things. Kyle had dark hair and teeth that pressed outwards and very pale skin. He did unusual things with his arms. He sometimes hit the desk. Sometimes another grown-up came to sit with him. He sometimes hit the other grown up. He spoke too loudly and often at the wrong times. 


He didn’t seem to understand the giggles and the notes either. 
 
I didn’t understand Kyle. It would be another couple of decades before I first reflected on Kyle and realized that he was probably on at least one spectrum. 


But for me as a child, he just looked lonely. He wasn’t invited to play. He wasn’t picked for teams. People leaned away and rolled their eyes, covered their ears and complained when they were assigned to sit next to him. 


I wanted to be different. I wanted to glow like Jesus. Jesus loved everyone and I had been baptized. I knew I had supernatural boosters in being like Jesus. So, I tried to be nice to Kyle. I said hello to him and I smiled at him and one time, I gave him a packet of fruit snacks from my lunch. I didn’t know if that mattered to him but I figured that being left out hurt him just like it did me. And at least he didn’t swear or talk about Spice Girls. 


Soon after, I realized this was a mistake. I had crossed an invisible line. I had broken an unspoken rule.


I had done something bad?


I started hearing a new song from my classmates. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” they sang. 


I didn’t hear the rest of the words but when I did, I went redder than the apples on the A’s of our classroom. My classmates had made a song, I thought, a song about me! A song about me and Kyle in a tree. “K-I-S-S-I-N-G.” 


It took me a bit to work out what they were spelling. I had to write it on a paper to read it for myself. 


Then, I was embarrassed. So embarassed. 


I tore the paper up and almost threw it away. 


But throwing away paper was bad. It hurt the planet. I recycled it instead. 


I went home and told me parents that my classmates were singing about me and that it made me uncomfortable. 


They laughed, “Oh, that song has been around forever,” they said, “it’s just something kids do.”


“But what do I do?” I asked. 


“Who was singing the song?” They asked. 


“Mostly a group of boys from my class,” I said. 


“Ah,” they said knowingly, looking at me sideways in an inscrutable way, “then that means they like you. They probably think you are cute.”   


The way they said this sounded…dirty.


“They just like you.” 


“They think you’re cute.” 


“Be careful—no dating until you’re 16.” 


I stopped asking questions. This seemed to be their final word on the discussion. And it gave me nowhere to go. I saw no kindness in the boys’ sneering. I felt no joy from their finger pointing. This was a type of “liking” I had never witnessed before and it felt as invasive and as dangerous as all of the dirty words combined.


But what could I do? Nothing, apparently. They just “liked me” and that meant that the problem wasn’t something I could fix through action—it was something that had gone wrong through being. I hadn’t caused the problem with fruit snacks, I realized. I was the problem. 


I wasn’t embarrassed anymore. Now it was deeper. Now, I realized there was something else causing the problem, something more foundational. Something I couldn’t control, something inside me. 


I realized it was me that was the problem. 


Now, I was ashamed.


I got quieter. And things at school got worse. More notes. More singing. More pointing. More giggles. 


I started avoiding Kyle. That was difficult because the teacher had placed us next to each other, seeing as I was the one of the only kids in class who didn’t complain about Kyle’s arms and sounds. She had said it was a compliment—she could trust me to be nice to him. 


My classmates said it was a sign. 


A sign of “K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
 
I didn’t know anything about birds or bees or baby carriages or how “K-I-S-S-I-N-G” in tree related to those things, but I could tell from the way my classmates sang the song that it was bad. That it was dirty. That it was definitely not something Jesus would approve of. 


I could tell from the notes shoved towards my desk while the teacher wasn’t looking that this was the kind of wordliness that I must be very careful of. 


And I could tell from the pointing fingers that it was all my fault. 


So I told no one. I threw away the notes. I pretended not to care. I ran to the edge of the schoolyard at recess to hide behind a tree. I talked little and I listened less. I leaned away from Kyle. I pretended not to hear him if he spoke to me. I didn’t smile at him anymore. 


I looked away when people looked at me. I left class as often as I could to go to the bathroom and hide. I tried to sponge my mind of anything except pluses and minuses and true and false quizzes and spelling tests. 


Then,  I began spelling words in my mind as they left someone’s mouth, just to get away from what they were saying. If I was busy spelling what they said, I couldn’t be as hurt by what they were actually saying. AT least, that’s how it started I think. But it quickly became a coping mechanism, a compulsion. I spelled everything, anything, staring at the shapes of the letters and the words and chanting them like mantras to anesthetize the school day. 


“May I go to the bathroom?” 


B-A-T-H-R-O-O-M


Ham Sandwich for lunch.


H-a-m  s-a-n-d-w-i-c-h


“Why are you so weird?” 


W-e-i-r-d


“Is it because you’re Mormon?” 


M-o-r-m-o-n


I got very good at spelling. 


One day though, it all came crashing down. 


We were asked to color in an American flag and draw 50 little stars onto its top-left square. 


50 stars, I thought, How in the world do I do that? 


The  other classmates started coloring things in. Jessica, across from me began deftly scribing stars in neat little lines across her flag. I tried to watch her, tried to copy her movement. I couldn’t figure it out. She was too fast.


I raised my hand and asked for the teacher. She came and looked over my shoulder. 


“Just draw the stars,” she said. 


S-t-a-r-s


“I can’t,” I said, “I don’t know how.”


“I thought you liked to draw?” She said. 


D-r-a-w


“I do,” I said, “but…” 


Silence.


I could tell that my teacher had thought I was joking. But that just made it worse. I had never drawn a star and hadn’t known that was a prerequisite to 3rd grade. So it was just another thing I was bad at, I realized. 


My teacher caught up quickly. “Oh, I see,” she said, “you’ve never done this before.” She leaned over to show me: 


“Up and down like an A,” she said, holding my hand with the pencil inside it, “but don’t lift up your pencil—then we cross up and over, then straight across, and then down to where you started.” 


I copied her movements. 


“Yes,” she smiled and walked away. 


I labored over the stars, my face burning. Th points were clumsy and irregular. I had never drawn stars before. Why had I never drawn stars before? Maybe I really was stupid. Maybe I really was weird. Maybe the other kids were right—they were all so fast and so neat and so match-y. Why was I so slow? They had all figured this out long before me—not just stars. Everything. 


What was wrong with me?


A curly-haired blonde boy with very pink cheeks sat just barely farther than arms-reach away from me. His name was Scott.  liked to eat his pizza with ranch. He and his best friend Todd wrote most of the notes, sang most of the songs, did most of the pointing. A few years later, when I read  about Dudley Dursley for the first time, it would be Scott’s face that I saw. 
 
I felt Scott’s eyes on me as the teacher was showing me how to draw stars and I was working very hard to pretend that he didn’t exist. When our teacher left, he was bent over his desk scribbling across his own paper. As my teacher sat down at her desk, he leaned towards me, lifting out of his seat to push a folded slip of blue-lined paper onto my desk, right next to my colorful name card. 


I paused my stars. Scott’s eyes were still on me, pressing me towards the slip of paper. I didn’t want to open it. But when I didn’t read his notes, Scott would sometimes poke me in the side or flick tiny bits of paper to draw my attention until I did. 


So I put down my pencil. I knew it was bad. Scott and Todd were already snickering and grasping hands quietly with each other. 


What was worse, reading it now or reading it after being spitballed? 


So, I opened it. 


The tears came all at once. 


Not a little cry—a big torrent of emotion. Heavy. Confused. Painful tears. 


My teacher stood up and called me out into the hallway. 


Going to the hallway was something that only happened to kids who were in trouble—bad kids. 


I was so ashamed. 


She demanded to know what was wrong. “Was this about the stars? It’s fine,” she said, “if we didn’t finish, we could just take the project home and finish it there.” 


I shook my head and handed her the note. 


She looked at the clumsy drawing of two faces: one with pigtails and one with dark hair and teeth pressing out. There was an ugly heart in between them and a title “Mr and Mrs. Retard.”  


Her face creased together.


“Who sent this?” She asked. 


“Scott.” 


She called Scott to the hallway. 


I don’t remember what she said. I don’t remember how he responded. My ears were ringing. I felt the sting of failure. I hated that I was crying at school. I hated that I was crying in front of Scott. I didn’t look at him. I hated him. And I knew that made me severely, irreversibly worldly. But I couldn’t help it. I hunched my shoulders, trying to disappear, while choked down sobs and punished myself for this show of weakness. 


So I wasn’t worthy, I thought. I hadn’t been able to do it. I hadn’t been strong enough to keep being kind of Kyle in the face of persecution. I hadn’t been strong enough to hold the shame in the background. And now I hated Scott and I hated Todd and I couldn’t even tell where that hate ended. There was so much. I wanted to run away. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom forever. I wanted to stop existing. 


And to me, this all amounted to failure: failing to be like Jesus, failing to undo the cruel “liking” that had happened, failing my parents, failing school, failing everything.  It proved that I was desperately horribly worldly and wicked and not Godly. 


Scott was sent to the Principal’s office. 


My teacher took me to an old fashioned coil-corded phone attached to the wall. She dialed my parents and tucked the phone against her neck. While the phone rang she turned to me and asked, 


“Why didn’t you tell me?” 


It was a genuinely new idea to me. My teacher was there to teach, I thought, not do…whatever this was. 


“I…didn’t think it was appropriate,” I said. And now, I was ashamed that I hadn’t know that I should tell her.


“Oh,” the teacher said, her eyes full of pity, “Oh, honey.” 


My mom answered the phone. She heard out the situation. I didn’t hear what she said but later, we all met in the office with Scott’s parent and there was a forced apology so that we could “reconcile” before going back to class. 


That afternoon, I walked home from school alone, feeling despicable. 


I had broken my covenant to be like Jesus, I thought, by crying like that, by hating Scott. And I didn’t know how to make sure it didn’t happen again. After all, I had somehow made those boys like me, so in essence, it was still all my fault. I prayed in my head and tried to repent. I tried to think of what I could do to make up the difference to God to be good again.


On my way home from school, I always passed an older woman’s house. In the autumn, her yard filled up with brown and yellow leaves and on my way home, I saw her raking them.  


Her movements were stiff and small. Her white hair spread into the breeze. The rake looked heavy in her thin hands.


I walked by slowly. Then, I doubled back and offered to help. 


Maybe, I thought, even if I couldn’t be a glowing beacon of the Gospel to my classmates, and even if I couldn’t love Scott, I could at least love my neighbor. 


She said her name was Marnie and that yes, she would really appreciate the help with her leaves and also “thank you, dear.” 


So, I dropped my backpack on the sidewalk and grabbed the rake with both hands. The handle felt long and waggled in my grip, but I made up for it with passion. I raked and raked until my shoulders ached. The yard wasn’t done, but Marnie told me I ought to go home before my parents worried. And I felt a little bit better.


It felt like penance to rake Marnie’s leaves—or, rather like Mormon repentance. It also just felt good. I liked serving Marnie. Marnie was nice, I thought. Marnie didn’t swear or talk about the Spice Girls either.


As I walked the rest of the way home, I was also glad that none of my classmates had been there to see. 


If fruit snacks led to baby carriages, who knew what raking leaves could lead to.


That night, after my dad got home, my parents asked more questions and I realized the process wasn’t over. I had to confess the whole ordeal again, cry again, feel ashamed for hating Scott again. 


“How long had all this been happening?” They asked, and “Why hadn’t I told them?” 


“I did,” I said, “you told me they just liked me.” 


“Oh,” they said, “well obviously that’s not what we meant.” 


“Oh.” 
 
“You should have told your teacher,” they said, “that’s what normal kids do when something happens in class.” 


N-o-r-m-a-l


“Okay,” I said.


The next day, my teacher switched my seat with Jessica’s so that I wasn’t sitting next to Kyle. I kept trying to be kind to him, but I didn’t share fruit snacks anymore. 


Scott and Todd still giggled and pointed but they stopped sending notes and they stopped singing. 


Jessica colored the most beautiful map of the United States I had ever seen—each state seemed to glow in jewel-tones. I asked her how she had done that, how she had taken the flat piece of paper and turned it into a collection of glowing shapes. 


So, she taught me—“Don’t color everything the same,” she said, “Make the edges darker. Fade the color in towards the center. It’s called shading.” 


I kept serving Marnie all through the fall. I brought my mom to rake leaves with her. On trash days, I dragged her bins inside. In the spring,  we helped her plant flowers.


None of my classmates asked me where the light in my eyes came from, so I didn’t get to tell them how they too could be blessed by a prophet in Salt Lake City but my teacher did ask me once and a while if I had gotten more notes and if I was doing okay. 


I never felt sure if I had passed the test of school—not the spelling tests or math tests, but the bigger test. 


I never felt quite sure that the notes and the singing and the bullying weren’t my fault or that being liked wasn’t a personal defect on my part. I never felt quite sure if I was good or if I had succeeded in staying unsullied by the world.


U-n-s-u-l-l-i-e-d.  


But two dozen years later, I wanted to find out. I looked up the word “autism” on the Internet and the word “religious OCD.” Then I searched “scrupulosity” and  “binary worldview,” and “how do I know if I am neurodivergent?” After that, I searched “environmental factors,” “LDS Mormon influence on neurodivergence,” “Mormon scrupulosity,” and “symptoms in childhood.”


I remembered the boxes of crayons and the safety of the bathroom and the black and white lines in my mind. I remembered being alone and pretending not to notice while also scrutinizing the rules I had learned from classmates and from Jesus. I remembered going silent after the accusation of being “cute,” and the shame that moved into that silence, and my teacher’s pity as she said, “Oh, honey.” 


I sighed. I was over 30 years old, but it felt like the first time since that first day that the 3rd-grader inside me could breathe.


I thought it was righteousness. 


Or worldliness. 


I thought it was a true or false test. 


I thought it was a good and bad tug-of-war. 


I thought I was either good or bad.  


But finally, all those years later, I exhaled. 


Finally, all those years later, I could stop wondering if it was actually all my fault. 


Finally, all those years later, I stopped being ashamed. 


There were more tears to cry. But I followed the beacon of search results through page after page of explanations. I followed the clear lines of logic going up, down, across, over, down. 


It was all spelled out. 


A-D-H-D


O-C-D


A-S-D


It was such a relief.


I didn’t really understand these letters. I didn’t know if I should be wearing some of them or if Kyle had been wearing some of them, or my parents, or Scott. 


But they did help me be kind to my memories of them.


They did help me stop the incessant judging of worldliness, of worthiness, of goodness.


I sat back and crossed my arms, closed my eyes and hugged that 3rd-grade self through the flesh of my 30-year-old arms. I thought of my own children, butting up against their own years in public school. I wondered if they were already wearing some of these letters too, without me knowing it. 


What if… I thought:


I didn’t need repentance. 


It never was a true-or-false test.


It wasn’t a tug of war. 


What if being alive is not supposed to feel like war, I thought. 


That was new. 


Then, I realized something else. 


I hadn’t needed repentance. 


I hadn’t needed righteousness. 


And with all due respect to Jesus, he didn’t exactly solve my problems either. 


I had needed letters, colors, numbers, words. 


I had needed permission to be smile at Kyle, to rake Marnie’s leaves and to see Scott as Dudley Dursley. 


I had needed accommodations.


I needed someone to talk to.


I just needed a teacher who wasn’t scared of all these messy letters.  


“Oh Honey,” the results said, “of course you did. It wasn’t your fault. You’re not wrong. People are colorful. People are complicated. People aren’t just good and bad. The world was never black and white. You are like a big box of crayons and the world is full of spectrums.”