Jeff

I believed I had life all figured out before I went to visit Jeff. My experience that day changed my life forever.

I had never encountered anyone in my life with the depth of sadness I saw in Jeff’s eyes as I entered his room. His mom had told me in confidence that he had not gotten out of bed in weeks. She had asked me to come visit him because she was worried about him. She hoped that my visit would cheer him up. Jeff was one of my best friends. He had just returned home early from his Mormon mission due to a deep depression. My visit with him would change my life forever.

I walked towards him, leaned over, and embraced him. I sat down on a chair next to his bed. I looked at him inquisitively, trying to read him. I listened intently as he told me of the dark feelings that consumed him. It was like I could feel what he was feeling. It made me feel lightheaded and sick to my stomach. I didn’t know what to do with the dark sensations that seemed to envelope me. I had never felt fear and despair to that level before in my life.

I was 18. I was scheduled to leave in two months to Las Vegas for my two year Mormon mission. Up until the moment I looked in Jeff’s eyes and saw his despair, I was looking forward to going on a mission.

He wasn’t the same, cheerful Jeff that I had come to know and love. He was in a lot of pain. In the thirty or so minutes I visited with him, I wasn’t able to cheer him up. He didn’t laugh with me or smile as he had before his mission. My witty, fun, jovial, kind, loving, charismatic friend was experiencing something that took all of those attributes away from him. I did my best to act like nothing was wrong with me as we talked, but he could probably tell that there was.

He told me that he believed that his depression was his fault. He then said the words that have stuck with me ever since. “I’ve lost my love for life, Daron. That’s the only way I can explain it. I don’t love life anymore. I just need to be more obedient,” he said as he looked up from his bed at me, his eyes filled with sadness. He couldn’t see what I could see - that he was naturally worthy of happiness. His depression wasn’t because of his disobedience, I knew, but there was no convincing him.

I said goodbye to him. I left his room and walked down the stairs to say goodbye to his parents, who seemed eager to hear from me how my visit with Jeff went. “How did it go?,” they asked with anticipation. I didn’t know what to say. I had just experienced something dark and I didn’t know how to handle it or the ensuing conversation with his parents. “It was really great to see him. I’m going to visit him again next week. We’re going to spend some time together before I go on my mission in two months. I’ll see if I can cheer him up a bit before I leave.” I said confidently, not wanting to let on that I felt sick and panicked. I left out the front door and walked out to my car that was parked in the driveway.

I sat in the driver’s seat of my gold 1980 Honda Accord hatchback, my head spinning. I was glad that it was dark outside because I didn’t want Jeff’s family to see what I was going through in their driveway as I caught my breath and tried to compose myself. I thought I was going to throw up, but held it in. I was shaking. I took a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to bring the usual relief that a deep breath would usually bring me.

I began the drive back to my house. I took the long way home. I needed time to think. Questions were coming to my mind a million miles an hour. I was sweating and my mouth was dry. “What did I just experience? What happened to Jeff? Why is he so sad?” I asked myself.

I was starting to realize why the experience of seeing him was so troubling for me. I had never understood my emotions or what contributed to feeling OK inside. I realized that all the things that I believed brought me happiness - like money, friends, the Mormon church, and my family - were all external. I wanted to naturally feel content, loved, and confident from within. I realized that my inner world was much more complex than I previously believed.

I realized that I had no idea how to define the way I felt inside and why. It was the first time that I became aware that I had no understanding of my inner world of emotions. The blankness as I tried to understand why I wouldn’t also be susceptible to sadness like Jeff was experiencing filled my mind and my soul. I had no idea who I was, I realized. I had always been who my parents and grandparents wanted me to be. I wanted to know who I was. I wanted to know how to be happy.

In the following weeks it felt like I was falling through space. I was ungrounded and I had no idea how to fill the gap of insecurity that grew within my chest. I talked to my boss at work one day about what I was going through. “You’re feeling anxious,” he said. It was the first time that I had a word for what I was experiencing.

I let my parents know that I had a word for what I was experiencing - anxiety. I told them that I wanted to meet with a therapist to see if I could work through it. I met with a therapist. I knew I was out of luck when I explained what I was going through and the therapist opened a text book and asked me to repeat what I was experiencing. She looked over the list of the symptoms of anxiety as I repeated to her as best as I could what was going on inside of me.

She followed along in the textbook. I was expecting her to share some important knowledge with me to help me at least function without the high level of anxiety that I was experiencing. Instead she said, “Yep. It looks like you meet the criteria for anxiety,” she told me just before the end of the session. “Seems to me like you need to relax a little bit.” My heart sank. I wanted someone to teach me how to find peace in my internal world of emotions.

“WHY IS EVERYONE SO CLUELESS ABOUT SOMETHING THAT’S SO IMPORTANT!!!,” I screamed inside my head. I thanked her for diagnosing me and left feeling more frustrated and helpless than I did before my therapy session. No one else that I knew cared about my happiness as much as I did, I realized. I stopped trying to get answers from my Mormon leaders, friends, and family. No one had answers to anxiety except to pray for strength, but I needed real answers.

My anxiety at times turned to panic. My panic was like a snowball that would start rolling from the top of a mountain. I would picture a snowball starting at the top of the mountain at Sundance ski resort where I skied as a teenager. As it rolled down the mountain, it got bigger and bigger. As it rolled and grew, the likelihood that it would stop became less and less. Soon, the snowball was as big as a car and it was rolling down the hill out of control.

I began to recognize that I had no control over my anxiety - the huge ball of snow rolling down the mountain. My fears grew and grew. “Who’s to say that what happened to Jeff won’t happen to me?” I thought as my anxiety filled me with a pressure and heat that left me sweating profusely on many occasions. “Who’s to say that my anxiety won’t be this debilitating my entire life,” I thought. Just like I didn’t know how to release feelings of guilt, I now was fully aware that I had no relief for my anxiety. My entire worldview and identity was in question. I began to suffer from debilitating panic and anxiety.

Mission Prep

A few weeks after seeing Jeff for the first time since his return home from his mission, I began worthiness interviews for my Mormon mission with the leaders of my Mormon congregation. I almost couldn’t go on my mission due to recording a video of myself naked and with an erection with the family VHS camcorder. My Mormon bishop was also my boss at the construction company I worked for. It was awkward as hell telling him the details of the recording of the VHS tape. When I saw the shock on his face when I confessed to him that I had done the recording, I imagined him telling his daughter, who I had a crush on, to steer clear of me. The bishop told me that if I came to him with any more confessions of a sexual nature even one more time in the months leading up to my mission, that he would withdraw his endorsement of my worthiness to go on a mission.

I felt like I was being disconnected from everything that brought me joy in my life. My worthiness interviews would only add to my nearly unbearable anxiety.

“How many times have you masturbated in your entire life, even the times that you’ve already confessed to your bishop?” My Mormon stake president asked with a look of distrust as he sat so closely to me in a chair in his office that our knees almost touched.

“Hundreds of times,” I thought. “Ten. Maybe,” I said. “I’m a liar,” I shamefully told myself. I began to panic, my stomach in knots. “When was the last time you masturbated?” He asked, this time more sternly than the first masturbation question. He leaned in, looking deeply in my eyes for a sign that I was lying. “I’ve confessed everything to my bishop,” I said. “That’s good. But I want to know now,” he said, getting visibly frustrated that I didn’t answer his question. I gulped. “I don’t know. Maybe a year ago,” the old man paused for what seemed like hours. “Maybe?” He said. I swallowed my shame and confidently answered to get him off my ass about my masturbation history. “At least a year.” He was finally satisfied with my answers. I took a breath of relief from the uncomfortable questions that didn’t feel right for an old man to be asking.

The truth was that I had masturbated only a month earlier. I lied about my worthiness, and in my mind, I was unworthy to serve a mission. Telling him the truth wasn’t an option. I was more afraid of my family’s disapproval than the wrath of God. The old man signed my temple recommend, the document that verified my worthiness to enter the temple, and sent me on my way.

That meeting was a week or so before my mission started. The shame that I felt from that meeting, combined with the anxiety I was feeling because of my experiences with Jeff that had me questioning my existence seemed to be more than I could carry at that time in my life. I went on my Mormon mission.

I was constantly in a battle with myself to not do something sexual that would get me in trouble with my Mormon church leaders, which would cause me to lose the approval of my family. I really cared about what they thought about me. I wanted their approval. My shame would grow. The only way to not feel the shame was to escape. In Vegas on my mission, I escaped to the nearest porn mega mart.

My shame would make me confess it. I can’t tell you how many times I had to tell my mission president, “I stole the mission car and went to the porn mega mart and bought a stack of porn magazines.” My mission president didn’t make a big deal about it. He would say, “Well, work on not looking at porn magazines, and it’s not good to steal the mission car.”

My internal world was constantly bringing me to the brink of insanity. I started to have hallucinations. I had no idea what I was feeling and why. I had no control over my impulses. I had no control over the depth of fear that I was feeling. I was afraid of everything. I was terrified of fucking up in life. I was afraid of being abandoned by my future wife, but I also wanted to find love more than anything. I had to figure it out. I was getting lost in hours and hours of obsessive rumination, mostly about worst case scenarios and how to avoid making mistakes.

I was in the depths of despair. I felt desperately alone. I had no insight into or control of my internal world of thoughts and emotions. I was not ok. I was spiraling emotionally. My Mormon mission president in Las Vegas did all that he could to help me, but I agreed to go on an antidepressant medication and Xanax, a drug that I would have a long relationship with.

My mission president granted me permission to go to the local Barnes and Noble in west Las Vegas to find psychology books to help me start to feel better inside.

I found the book, How to Conquer Your Fears, Phobias, and Anxieties.

This book was instrumental in helping me begin to unwind the knots of anxiety, stress, fears, and self destructive behavior.

It helped me in two ways. First, it gave me hope. In the first few pages of the book, the authors, Herbert Fensterheim and Jean Baer promise the reader success in overcoming their fears if they stick with the protocol they would prescribe in the following chapters of their book. They said that change can sometimes take time, but to stick with it and results would happen. I believed their promise and I believed in myself to be able to stick with it and bring balance to my internal world.

The second way it helped me was to guide me as I sought awareness of my internal world. The book gave me the steps to try to understand myself. I had never looked inside before. I began to ask myself why I was feeling the way that I was feeling and then I did my best to see the truth. I began to try to understand myself and my emotions. I soon could see that my internal world was beautiful.

The other book that I bought at Barnes and Noble was, Love Is Letting Go of Fear.

Most of my thinking patterns were a result of my shame and my guilt that seemed to have no outlet before I began to try to find internal peace. Love Is Letting Go of Fear gave me a different way to think about my mistakes: Forgive myself for them and love myself. I learned that I was worthy of love no matter what.

I became aware of my thinking and emotional patterns. I saw my patterns of destructive and catastrophic thinking. I began to manage my guilt and shame with complete and unconditional forgiveness. With the help of the book, my anxiety and panic were impacting my life much less often within thirty days.

I began to feel good inside again. These two books brought peace and love into my life in such a beautiful way. I felt so fulfilled by what I had accomplished when I did all that I could to find answers to my problems. My self confidence grew. I believed in healing. I reduced the dose of the antidepressant medication. Shortly before my return home from my mission, I learned that Jeff had taken his life.

I had found peace and happiness outside of my Mormon religion. I returned home from my mission as a different person. I didn’t share with my family how deeply beautiful my experience of healing was. I made the conscious decision to keep what I had learned to myself. In doing this, I also played the part of a devoted Mormon return missionary.

The conflict between who I am and who I had portrayed myself to be. The pressure to be good. The guilt from not being worthy by their definition. The amount of work that I put into that exhausted me.

This would be the conflict of my life. Learning to love the parts of myself that didn’t conform with my family of origin. I would soon meet Krystal, and she would give my life purpose and show me how beautiful I was.

I had only met Krystal 20 days earlier. As we drove, I looked over at her in the passenger seat of my burgundy 1987 Toyota Supra. She smiled back at me and her pretty blue eyes sparkled as we sat in silence. It was overcast. There was a lunar eclipse earlier that day.

We loved being together and escaping our responsibilities. We had a hard time getting things done in the months after we met because we wanted to spend every minute together.

Over the previous 20 days, I had been feeling more and more connected to Krystal. I told her about the dream I had when I was 14 and that I hoped to find love and happiness one day. I shared my experience of my friend Jeff's return from his mission and how much that experience impacted me. I told her all about my anxiety and my journey to overcome it while I was on my mission. I told her how I learned how to connect to my emotions and gained a beautiful relationship with myself. I told her about searching for peace in my life and that through love and forgiveness, I found it, at least for a season. I shared that I was having a hard time reconnecting to myself and all that I had learned on my mission since I returned home. She accepted all of me.

I had only known her for a short time, but as I looked over at her in the seat next to me, I felt like I knew her beyond that moment and beyond our time together since we met not even three weeks earlier. With this feeling of knowing her, I was overcome with a strong emotion that there was nothing that she wouldn’t go through with me. She was never going to abandon me. I saw her clearly, in that sense. I felt unquestionable trust and love for her, and somehow I knew that she would be by my side through anything.

Krystal made it ok for me to be who I was and who I wanted to be. She loved me. She thought it was cool that I had gone on the journey to find myself on my mission. She loved that I had an attitude of “fuck you” to authority. Her approval and love for me wasn’t based on my commitment to the Mormon church. I didn’t have to be anyone that I didn’t want to be.

I accepted her the same way. I understood her and she understood me. I wanted to be with her the rest of my life. We wanted to have a fairytale relationship. We both had dreams of sharing a deep connection with each other one day. We wanted to have great relationships with our future kids. Our dreams aligned with each other.

After the 20 minute drive, we made it back to my parent’s house and sat in my car in the driveway for a minute or two. I was thinking about what I had just experienced. I turned to Krystal. “Do you want to get married?” I said. “Yeah,” she said without hesitation. “Really?! Ok! Whoa. Let me do this right.” I said as I took in a deep, nervous breath. “Will you marry me?” I asked. “YES!” She said with a big smile. After only 20 days together, we were engaged.

Click the link below to read the first chapter of my book, Mornings in Lil’ Assy