Digital Manticore

Hello friends and enemies. Happy anniversary to a bizarre life milestone! On December 17, 2005, I was expelled from Brigham Young University, which means today we are observing the twenty-year anniversary of me being kicked out of school. I was 19 and I thought my life was over.

When people ask me where I went to college, I usually say I graduated from the University of Washington. This is true but it obscures the full story. It’s all the answer that most need, to be honest, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about my current belief system. Most people I meet now are shocked that I was ever Mormon. Though, to be honest, many people I knew growing up were shocked that I was Mormon too; they all thought I was too smart for that shit and they were right, just a little early.

I started college in fall 2004 at BYU and, at the time, I was a true believer in the Mormon church, officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as their PR team wants you to call it but everyone I knew within the church thought of themselves as Mormon. I spent most of my childhood in Mormonism; after my parents divorced when I was seven years old, my dad started taking us to the church he had grown up in but had left as an adult. I did all the Mormon stuff you’re supposed to do as a young person like go to early morning seminary throughout high school; it’s a Bible (and Book of Mormon) study class that, in my town, started at 6:10 a.m. because high school started at 7:30. I woke up at 5 a.m. every day to go do church shit and, frankly, that sucked. I was very tired all throughout school for a variety of reasons but this was definitely a big one.

In high school, I was sure I wanted to be an Egyptologist (I changed my mind but that’s okay). So when I applied to college, I wanted to go somewhere I could study ancient Egypt and learn Arabic, since that’s what they speak in Egypt today. I got accepted to BYU and UC Berkeley, and both had programs I wanted to attend. Turning down Berkeley is still a notable regrets, which I guess isn’t too serious of a regret all things considered, but I think I would have had a much better time. Then again, it might have taken me a lot longer to figure out that Mormonism was not right for me if I hadn’t been immersed in such a staunchly Mormon environment. We’ll never know for sure, but I think seeing Mormonism applied to such an extreme level had a chilling effect on my relationship with the religion.

Brigham Young University was and is very strict about its vision of how Mormon youth ought to be living. All students are required to follow its honor code and there is a whole office dedicated to its enforcement. This isn’t just the standard “don’t plagiarize;” BYU’s honor code requires that students “abstain from same-sex romantic behavior” and it includes strict rules about dressing “modestly”—everyone has to cover their shoulders, women can only have one ear piercing and men aren’t allowed to have beards unless they get an exception (colloquially known as a “beard card”). It’s ironic when you consider that Mormon religious art always depicts Jesus with a beard (Jesus also had 12 dudes following him around at all times but apparently he was abstaining from “same-sex romantic behavior”). It’s cool if god does it but I guess not anyone else.

They do really enforce the honor code at BYU. My first encounter with it was right after I moved into the dorms. I went to eat at the cafeteria and was told to leave and change into shorts that went all the way to my knees if I wanted to be served. For the record, I was not wearing booty shorts, the shorts landed a few inches above my knees, but they were not going to let me eat until I did something about it! They also have a “testing center” on campus where students can take exams. They won’t let you in if you’re not dressed and groomed appropriately. I remember seeing a bearded guy get turned away once when it turned out he didn’t have a beard card. Insane that wearing a tank top or something can prevent you from being able to take an exam that affects your grades, but that’s a choice BYU made and a policy that all their students technically agree to.

The transition to college was difficult for me. I felt like I had time making friends when I started school, although in retrospect I think a lot of people felt they were friends with me and I simply had no idea. I just thought I was a weird outsider all the time but I now understand a lot of that feeling comes from autism. I think the rest came from the alienation of living in a deeply authoritarian environment during an age when I was supposed to be figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be and who I might want to romantically entangle myself with. It seemed like everyone was pairing off and getting married immediately (according to this article from the BYU student paper, a quarter of BYU students were married in 2021), including one of my good friends from high school who got married as a sophomore. I felt I was cool and likeable but this didn’t translate into romantic encounters so I kind of felt like I was being left out of something. I made friends with a few girls in the dorm and I made a couple of friends by showing up at the juggling club, but otherwise, I was struggling. One time I tried to get a date by hanging out around the cafeteria and juggling. I made a little sign to say I was looking for a partner for some dance event. There’s probably a better way to get attention but I was using what I knew! Many dudes stopped to tell me I was being intimidating and that guys do not want to go out with a girl carrying knives (their loss). I did eventually get a date for the evening, so my methods worked.

By my second semester, I was losing the will to participate in Mormonism, which means BYU beat the religious inclination out of me in mere months. Everything seemed hypocritical and fake. I can’t remember exactly how and when I arrived at the decision to start skipping church on Sundays, but I distinctly remember my dorm neighbor asking me on Easter if she could borrow a skirt. I told her it was fine especially since I wasn’t going to attend. She was scandalized that I wouldn’t be attending church on Easter of all days, but a guy I had been hanging out with and crushing on for most of the year had revealed the night before that he actually had a girlfriend back home (that he had never mentioned before). So, you know, I felt like shit. Jesus is risen every year. It’s fine.

The summer after my freshman year, I tried going to church at home now and again, but whatever I thought I had been getting from it before was gone. My dad and sister had already stopped going (and, of course, my mom had never been Mormon). I thought that I should keep trying but it wasn’t working for me and I had no idea what would make it work. It seemed like everyone at church felt sorry for me since my family wasn’t attending and my dad and step-mom had recently divorced (and my ex-step-mom had been talking shit about us at church) and I had very few friends in town so I was not having fun.

When I returned to school for my sophomore year, I was generally following the rules and the honor code, but I didn’t want to go to church anymore. I told myself I wasn’t sure how I felt about it all and I just needed some time to think. I spent a lot of time that semester feeling miserable and hiding in my tiny bedroom in my off-campus apartment. School felt difficult for the first time and it felt like I was going through the motions in everything. Of course I can now see this as a depressive episode but I didn’t realize then and, in fact, the only person who did was my friend Kael. He would call me now and again that semester to check on me. He told me later he was worried about me because I was so clearly depressed. He remains the only friend from my time at BYU and I will appreciate him forever. Everyone else stopped talking to me after I stopped being Mormon and began posting angrily about Mormonism and everything else on Facebook (please recall that this was 2005 and we were all on Facebook).

Part of BYU’s honor code stipulates that you have to attend church regularly, I believe the rules then (and perhaps now still) required you to make it to church 80 percent of the time, and yes, someone at church is in charge of tracking attendance. In telling this tale over the years, some people have asked me “What about non-Mormons? Do they have to go to church?” There are non-Mormons who go to BYU (my friend Kael, for example) and they are required to attend whatever services are appropriate to their religious beliefs, just as Mormons have to attend Mormon church, which is weirdly held on campus in various lecture halls. When I stopped showing up at church, I was technically breaking the rules. At first, no one really noticed but then I accidentally called attention to myself.

That semester, I was looking for a job and since no one in my life warned me about multi-level marketing (MLM) scams, I ended up an “independent contractor” for Vector Marketing. That is, I was selling Cutco knives. I was amused by the gig at first because I was like, well, I actually juggle knives so it will be funny if I sell them (it was not funny). If you know about MLMs, then you already know that they rely on you selling to everyone you know and I mostly knew poor college students who did not want or need to spend hundreds of dollars on a set of kitchen knives. I was desperately trying to figure out who I could put on my little song and dance for, so I turned to my congregation’s directory and bravely cold called the wives of my ward’s bishop and first counselors (Mormon church is divided into “wards”, which are congregations governed by a bishop who is aided by two counselors and these people are always men). They generously agreed to hear my sales pitch. I guess I didn’t think my plan all the way through because during one of my meetings, the woman’s husband, that is, my ward’s bishop, showed up and realized he had never seen me before, which led to some uncomfortable questions about what the heck I was doing and why I had not been at church. Whoops.

Shortly afterwards, I got a call from the bishop asking me to meet with him in a more official capacity. I barely remember this meeting but the gist was that I had to go to church or they would have to kick me out of school. I remember telling him it felt hypocritical to go to church when I was confused about my beliefs. This was apparently an unsatisfactory answer. I also brought up the fact that there are plenty of people who drink and party on Saturday night (also an honor code violation) who roll into church on Sunday as if they weren’t hung over. I suggested it was much worse to hypocritically attend church after breaking the rules than to not break any rules and simply not attend church while thinking about things. This was the wrong answer. People love it when you keep up appearances and hate when you point out contradictions (autism strikes again).

I was then contacted by office of the next person up the Mormon hierarchy, the stake president (groups of wards are organized into “stakes” overseen by the stake president). I remember a lot more of this encounter because it was contentious and I felt convinced of my rightness (classic 19-year-old behavior, but you know what I was actually right). The stake president lectured me for a long time about how I was being terrible and he told me that going to BYU is a dream opportunity for so many, but I was squandering it. I specifically remember him telling me that I was taking up space for someone who deserved to be there. I paraphrased a well-known piece of Mormon lore at him, “whom the lord calls, the lord qualifies.” If god wanted someone to attend BYU, they would be there, regardless of what I was doing. Did you know that old dudes in power super hate it when young women disagree with them and they do it with citations? Well, I learned on that day (I re-learn this lesson often, I fear). By the time the meeting ended, I knew my academic career at BYU was over.

I went back to my apartment after I told my roommate that this is probably how it feels to be on drugs. I was laughing and crying. I was freaking out. The stake president told me I would be asked to leave BYU until I sort myself out. I was sure my life was over. I had worked so hard in high school—taking AP classes, getting good grades, going to church all the fucking time, doing activities—because I knew college was the way out of my town and my family drama and now it was all falling apart. I had always assumed I would go to college and get a job and I thought my life was going to be ruined forever (spoiler: it wasn’t. I don’t want anyone to worry). I had no idea what happened to people when they got kicked out of college. I had never heard of such a thing. I felt like I had done everything right only to do something so incredibly wrong.

I was technically not “expelled” from school in a traditional sense, but I knew I wouldn’t be going home and getting right with the lord just to return to a place that was making me miserable, even if I hadn’t yet fully articulated what was making me unhappy. BYU sent me a formal letter informing me that they had revoked my “ecclesiastical endorsement,” which meant I had lost the rights to attend class or graduate from BYU and even to live in my apartment because it was “BYU-approved housing” until I got my local bishop to say I was in good standing with the church and endorse me again. I finished my semester unhappy and angry with everything, not to mention fucking cold because a year and a half of school later and I still had no idea how to dress for Utah winter. My roommate Devon—who was not Mormon at the time but later converted to marry some man—and I spent the time dreaming up funny pranks that might actually be worth being expelled over, like distributing condoms all over campus.

I left school and moved back in with my dad. Of course, I did manage to graduate college a few years later, and I moved out of my hometown again too. I had a rough year dealing with the dissonance between what I expected my college experience to be and how things happened in reality, but that is a tale for another day.

It seemed then, and honestly still seems to me now, so silly to be kicked out of school over not showing up to church for a few months. I wasn’t doing anything really bad. I didn’t drink or have pre-marital sex, act on any “same-sex attraction,” or try “soaking” (I am still not sure this is a real thing but perhaps the mormon youth are that desperate to bone down). I just wanted time to think about what I believed in and what kind of life would feel right to me, and within a single semester I lost something I had worked so hard for. I thought I was going to be able to graduate college in just three years because I had come in with so much credit from taking AP classes in high school. Although I’m not sure it would have ultimately worked out, I was really upset about it for a long time. I might have graduated before the 2008 recession and gotten a job before that kind of thing was impossible for recent graduates! Again, we can’t know all the alternate universe versions of ourselves. I’m ultimately grateful to not have Brigham Young University haunting my resume for the rest of my life.

I am sharing this today because every year I think about this strange anniversary. I thought people might be interested in this whole story. People are shocked whenever I bring it up but it’s something that’s hard to explain in brief. It’s been twenty years since I thought my life would be ruined by being kicked out of college. In hindsight, I’m proud to have been expelled from Brigham Young University. How many people can add that to their resume?