It was one of the hardest conversations I ever had…
I was nineteen and I was in Uruguay for my Mormon Mission. This was supposed to be the prime of my life, proving to my church, to my family, and most importantly, to myself that I was an upstanding Mormon… a valuable member of the community… and a valuable young man ready to be matched with a bride soon.
Instead… only 6 weeks into a two-year mission, I had to tell my mission leader: “I can’t do this anymore. I’m having panic attacks. I need to go home.”
The shame was unbearable.
It’s virtually unheard of for a young man to end his mission. My mission leader tried to talk me out of it. “This will impact every area of your life for the rest of your life,” he said.
I believed what he said. But I had to leave anyway. As I saw the landscape of Uruguay retreating through the plane window… I thought God was going to make the plane crash because He was so mad at me.
It wasn’t always this way. In my early teens, I had been a happy kid, doing happy kid things… like playing in a baseball league.
Until the unthinkable happened…
When I was 13, in eighth grade, my baseball coach, who was also my seminary teacher, used to invite some of us on the team over for what he deemed was special athletic training at his home gym. Except he had no intention of training us there — just abusing us.
I didn’t really understand what was happening. It felt super wrong and weird. But this was way before the time when there was widespread awareness about sexual abuse from coaches, teachers, and religious leaders… so I didn’t have the language or concepts to understand or describe it.
I wanted to stay as far away from this creep as possible. I quit baseball, which was inexplicable to my parents, because it was the center of my life. I lost most of my friends, because most of them were playing baseball.
The perpetrator was also my seminary teacher the next year when I was a freshman in high school. Which meant I also avoided seminary and didn’t want to do my homework.
The dream of every Mormon kid is to go to Brigham Young University. Since sports and seminary are such a big part of getting into BYU, my dreams were stolen from me by this monster. My parents were shocked and thought I was a failure.
They had no idea the secret I was carrying around.
My sophomore year of high school, I came home one day from school, and the police were there waiting to question me about the perpetrator. Before I knew it, the perpetrator was arrested, there were criminal charges against him, and I was getting therapy through the court system.
During the trial, I felt protected by my lawyer. He was the first person who was truly advocating for me during this whole process, and the first person who was fighting back. It was the first time I saw the power of a good lawyer.
After I graduated high school, it was time to go on my mission. Four hundred members of my community, including all my family, gathered to send us young missionaries off to Uruguay.
I thought my life was coming together… and I was finally over all the hurt and trauma of the abuse.
And then…
I couldn’t do it.
Weeks into the mission, I had a mental breakdown. I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was whether my younger brothers and sisters were being hurt like I was… while worrying that my parents would not be able to protect them. I fantasized nonstop about running away from the mission and going home to protect my siblings.
I finally told my mission leader. He tried to get me to pray away the problems. But no amount of prayer was going to solve these problems. I finally flew home.
