I might be having another imposter syndrome/mid-life crisis after encountering two Mormons this week
I'm from the UK (20F), and I am in deed of some advice or suggestions to a situation that happened about two days ago.
I was heading to a charity shop to do a couple of hours of volunteering (recently returned after needed a week+ break because of a burnout), listening to FKA twigs and just wanting to be left alone with my thoughts without having to interact with anybody.
That's when two women approached me from ahead and were asking me about my relationship with religion once I took my headphones off my head and asked for them to repeat their question. They introduced themselves (for anonymity I will be calling them the Mormon Sisters so I do apologise in case anybody gets offended by this) and explained that they were helping people connect with Christ and anything else that involved religion.
Just so everyone is aware, I am NOT a religious person. Growing up, I only went to church a few times: for my primary school's choir club, one wedding, several craft fairs because I was friends with an author who writes fantasy books, and two funerals. I never enjoyed R.E. expect for when the teacher would read us the stories from the Bible (I never chose to do it for GCSE as I thought the subject sucked and did things I enjoyed like History and Hospitality.
One thing I will admit is that I aspire to become an author (not really into achieving J.K. Rowling levels of fame) and write about my experience during the pandemic and going back to school with the restrictions at the time as well as everything else afterwards. I also plan on doing an Access Course for a year in September and going to university straight after if I pass. That's been my main focus so far.
So you can imagine my shock when the Mormon sisters approached me. Normally, most people nowadays would probably ignore them or just flatout refuse whatever they had to say. I could have done that because I felt a little startled and freaked out by it. And I tried to answer as honestly as I could: "No, I'm not much of a religious person but I have faith in the stories from the Bible". I thought that would be the end of it. Instead, I found tjat my answer had satisfied the sisters enough to exchange phone numbers as a means to further contact me about more information.
The whole time as I went into the charity shop and told the manager what happened (he was the one who told me about who mormons are that same day), and figured they might be busy with other religious duties.
The next day was my second encounter with them. After a tired 4+ hours at the charity shop, I was about to leave when I saw them pass the shop (the door was open) and they saw me. My jaw was on the floor and in my head I was like "This must be a joke. There's no way that they know where I volunteered."
And the only reason they were in town was because they couldn't reach my phone number as I accidentally typed it out wrong. My manager came around the corner the exact moment I was talking to them and felt embarrassed because now I am inclined to believe that he must think I am actually going through with it it.
The Mormon Sisters called me again this evening to further explain about the Book of Mormon and I felt like I was on autopilot agreeing to everything they said despite feeling this unsettling nerve in my stomach that would be a sign of something seriously wrong. They wanted to meet me again this weekend at 8:30 (perhaps in the morning) as they wanted to go through the BoM with me.
The Mormons seem like very nice people, but I wanted to see if anybody can give me advice on what I should say to them when I meet them again? I want to tell them that as much as I appreciate what they are doing, I feel like I'm being pulled into something that is so out of character for me and I don't wish to have any further involvement whatsoever.
How do I explain this to them without hurting their feelings? I want to be honest and come clean. It's been eating away at me for a while now and I am afraid to go outside again in case I bump into them in town like before. Everything is happening way too fast and too soon for me to process.
Posted Apr 9, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC