I remembered something from EFY(?) as a teenager that makes me sick to my stomach as an adult

content warning: homophobia, transphobia, mention of a mass shooting

In 2016, When I was 16/17, my mom made me go to one of those super fancy youth conference things. I don’t think the acronym was EFY, but I cannot remember to save my life what it was actually called. It’s kind of nice, actually, that I can’t because it goes to show how far removed I am from it all. But it was at BYU in Utah and was three days long. We stayed in the dorms and did all sorts of stuff.

It was a lot for me , to say the least. I was a queer teenager with a queer partner. I still mostly believed in the church, but the cognitive dissonance was brutal even before this conference. I always sort of felt like I was being torn in half because I felt like I loved the church, but I also loved my partner and I am queer in multiple ways, so trying to reconcile those two things was difficult.

The passion I felt for the church inspired in me at that conference, the “Holy Ghost” feeling, (which btw the Holy Ghost is deeply unserious) made things even more difficult, and it caused me to do even more mental gymnastics as one does. The worst part is I never actually enjoyed church, and I could not for the life of me connect with the other girls at this conference. It makes sense bc they’re all these really intensely Mormon girls,