Showing all posts by Lynnette

Last summer, I posted about some of the mental health-related challenges that I’d been facing in the previous year. It’s been about six months since I wrote that post, and I thought it would be interesting to write about some of the things that have happened since then.

I saw my psychiatrist a few days ago. He’s new, and we’re still getting to know each other. We agreed that I’m doing pretty well and there’s no need to tinker with my meds right now. I said, as I always do, that I’m still not convinced that I need to take them, and that I want to have another “me” who’s not on meds to be a control group, so that we can determine whether or not they are actually doing anything. He said we could do a double-blind study in which neither of us knew whether the meds were placebos, and see what happened. Except that he doubted we would get approval from the Human Subjects Research Board. I had to laugh. It’s always nice when mental health professionals have a sense of humor, and actually talk to you instead of lecturing. Read More

1) What is your current occupation?

2) What would be your dream job?

I’ve been thinking lately about some of the challenges of blogging. (Millennial Star recently had a really interesting discussion about Bloggernacle dynamics here, and I’ve also been thinking about some of the issues regarding audience  that Eve raised several years ago in this post. Additionally, T&S recently had a conversation about the boundaries of the “Bloggernacle”, and its relationship to LDS blogs more generally.) And one particular question I’ve been contemplating goes back to a much-debated question: what are the issues at stake when we publicly discuss more difficult aspects of the church? (As long as I’m linking, I’m pretty sure that Kaimi had a post several years ago, which I can’t seem to find, on the question of whether we should ever say anything negative about the church when non-members might be listening.) Read More

In blog conversations about a variety of Mormon feminist topics, someone will occasionally stop by to say something along the lines of, “Admit it. What you really want is the priesthood.” Or perhaps, “What’s next? Women demanding the priesthood?” (I’ve noticed that this has been a particularly frequent occurrence in the infamous FB discussions of All Enlisted’s proposals that women wear pants to church, and write GAs about women praying in conference.) Read More

Maybe this can be blamed on my being a middle child (I’m the third of seven). Or maybe it’s just a temperament thing. But whatever the cause, I would describe myself as a pretty conflict-avoidant person. I really like people to get along. Tension and fighting often make me anxious—and if I’m personally involved, they can make me extremely anxious. In such cases I’m prone to feel sick, and often unable to sleep, until things are resolved. I can deal with disagreements, but it’s a lot harder when there are bad feelings involved. I probably worry too much about people being mad at me.  Read More

You might not guess this if you know me now, but when I was a teenager, I was a BYU Education Week junkie. (If you’re unfamiliar with Ed Week, see here.)

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Carmella is a devout Mormon who would describe herself as conservative. She is highly critical of feminism, worrying that it focuses on the wrong things, devalues the important contributions of women, and potentially leads to apostasy. However, over time, small things begin to bother her, and she starts dipping her toe into feminist waters. She notes that all the women’s organizations are presided over by men, and wonders why women can’t pray in General Conference. She becomes more concerned with the gender roles outlined by the church, and more skeptical of the priesthood/motherhood equation. She wants to know more about Heavenly Mother.  She becomes more and more aware of the ways in which patriarchy is destructive. Her belief in the church slowly wanes, until she describes herself as agnostic at best, and she is uncertain that she can continue to be part of the church and still have integrity.

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President Dalton’s much-discussed talk was particularly hard for me. It’s of course frustrating to hear that if you see inequities, the problem is your lack of righteousness, and if you want more of a voice in your own church, you’re insufficiently virtuous. But I’ve heard those sentiments so often that usually I can take the Teflon approach: roll my eyes, and get back to whatever I was doing. This talk, though, hit me harder, and left me more seriously wondering than I have for a while what the heck I’m doing in this church (even as my use of the phrase “what the heck” makes me feel ridiculously Mormon). Read More

“Scrooge regarded everyone with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humored fellows said, ‘Good  morning, sir! A Merry Christmas to you!’ and Scrooge said often afterward, that of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.”

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

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It was a Catholic friend who first introduced me to the term “scrupulosity,” a condition in which one is overly obsessed with personal sin. The topic came up because of my friend’s observation that I had some tendencies in that direction. I didn’t disagree. But I must confess that on some level I actually took the observation as a compliment.  I secretly believed that it was an indication of a virtuous life. I must be a truly moral person, I thought, to be so acutely aware of my constant failings—and to be so unwilling to cut myself any slack for them. Read More

One of the things that has stood out to me in wading through the comments on The Great Pants Uproar (not a great use of one’s time, I must say, though that didn’t stop me) is the number of people who have expressed the sentiment, “if you don’t like the church, you should leave.” I want to think about this idea from a theological angle, specifically what it means in the context of religious pluralism. Read More

An oft-made statement in discussions of gender equality in the church is something along the lines of, “I’ve never felt unequal.” (Or, if the speaker is male, “My wife/daughters/sisters have never felt unequal.”) Sometimes there’s a barb in it: “I’ve never felt unequal, so why do you? What’s wrong with your testimony?” But more often than not, I think it’s simply an honest account of a person’s experience, combined perhaps with a bafflement that other women have the concerns they do. Read More

When we started ZD nearly seven years ago, I don’t recall that we had much discussion about whether or not to use pseudonyms—I think we simply took it for granted that we would. Some of my co-bloggers spent some time coming up with creative names. Seraphine originally went by “S”, and I recall an extended email conversation about name ideas for her. In contrast, I was pretty boring; I decided to just use my middle name, of which I’ve always been rather fond. Read More

I’m less than thrilled that I’m going to be stuck in class from 6:00 to 9:00 pm on election night. (Though I’m sure everyone will be surreptitiously checking the election returns.) For the last presidential election, we had a family Skype, which was a fun way to watch things unfold. (It was also memorable because I was staying with my sister Eve, and my niece was born in the early hours of the following day.)

I’m curious as to what other people will be doing. Do you have traditions? Do you get together with people? Do you skip the whole thing?

(NOTE: THIS IS NOT A POST TO DISCUSS THE MERITS OF SPECIFIC CANDIDATES OR PROPOSITIONS, AND COMMENTS ALONG THOSE LINES WILL BE REPLACED WITH RANDOM STAR WARS MATERIAL.)

I mentioned in my last post that I found FMH in the spring of 2005. I periodically looked at the bloggernacle that year, but much of my time online was spent on another, mental-health related message board, and I didn’t have time to be involved in many more online activities. Also, while I was intrigued by Mormon blogs, I was also intimidated, and I have to admit that I was uncertain that I would find any welcome there. In Mormon contexts I’ve so often felt like an outsider, and I worried that the same dynamic would be at work online. So while I was interested to see people discussing such a wide variety of questions, I didn’t follow the blogs very closely.

I’m not sure what shifted, but in December of that year, I decided to start commenting on FMH. Read More

As I mentioned in my last post, I wasn’t planning to study theology when I went off to grad school. But once I started, I fell in love with it. I’ve blogged before about how it affected my faith more generally. But here I want to mention some of the issues that came up which were particularly related to my developing feminism, and mention some of the questions I was thinking about.

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I didn’t plan to go to BYU. In fact, I planned to go anywhere but BYU. As a teenager, I was determined to get out of the state of Utah. But when my senior year rolled around, and BYU offered me money, and I looked at the financial realities of my situation—it made sense. So in the end, I gave in.

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I first saw the Star Wars movies when I was eleven, shortly after my parents purchased our first VCR. I was an immediate and enthusiastic convert. My siblings and I watched the movies over and over—in the days before we owned them, we used to check them out from the library every week (my mother would ask, are you sure you don’t want to try something new? and we would inevitably answer, no). I can divide up my life into Before Star Wars, and After. Read More

When people talk about the reasons for uncivil behavior on the internet, anonymity is often mentioned as a culprit. If no one knows who you are, the theory goes, you’re less likely to censor yourself. And it certainly is ridiculously easy to find people posting under pseudonyms and tearing each other apart. (Just check out the comment section of most newspapers.) Read More