Happiness Outside the Box

I've been thinking about happiness, and I was surprised to realize that even as an atheist, my understanding of how to achieve happiness is practically unchanged: in my opinion, happiness comes through cultivating deep, loving relationships and by living with purpose and integrity. True when I was a Mormon, and true now.

So, why was I unhappy as a Mormon if I defined happiness in the same way? What has enabled me to achieve happiness outside the LDS Church, rather than within it?

When church teachings were combined with my personality, I ended up restricted in the following ways:

1) I felt limited in my opportunities to love.
Looking back, I see two main areas in which this was an issue.

• I felt a sense of duty to be a giver and not a taker. I think this inhibited my ability to achieve true intimacy (both platonic as well as romantic).
• I felt limited by my role as a woman. Although I tried to be attractive (in every sense of the word), tried to put myself "out there," and even asked guys out occasionally, I felt it was inappropriate to actively seek after the kind of romantic relationship I desired (and subtlety was NOT my game either).

2) I felt limited in my opportunity to live with purpose.
As I understood it, my purpose in life was to prepare for motherhood, find my eternal companion, and raise children to the Lord. Preparing for motherhood was no problem, but I felt powerless to fulfill the rest of my purpose and found it difficult to feel satisfied in the meantime. I felt like the clock (and my personality) was against me.

3) I felt that it was more important to be true to ideals than to myself.
It was not until my mission that I truly began to sense cognitive dissonance, or internal disagreement with what I had been taught to believe. For the next several years, I continued to conform but felt less and less emotionally connected to/convinced of the rightness of the teachings I had spent my life conforming to.

Through counseling, I became empowered to let go of shoulds. I began to tear down my emotional walls, to seek after the kind of relationships I wanted (regardless of what anyone else thought), and to truly live with integrity (that is, I began to see the superiority of following an internal rather than external moral code).

I learned for myself that happiness comes through principle, and not through context. That is how I know that it is not the state of "being Mormon" that makes some people good, and others bad. That is how I know it is not sexual orientation or a wedding which makes love and sex appropriate or not. That is how I know that things like alcohol and pornography are not self-destructive in and of themselves (it is how/why they are used).

The most astounding thing to me about the journey has been how difficult it is for others to relate the post-Mormon me with the Mormon me. In most ways, I am the same person I have always been. What has changed is my devotion to "the box," or one proposed model for the context of happiness.