Puncture Wound

To the girl who once asked me for advice on being a lesbian at BYU, 

I repeatedly have dreams where I wake up in a body that is not the same as when I went to sleep. Something pierced, something amputated—always without my previous knowledge or consent. Most recently, unseen hands puncture my Cupid’s bow with implant grade titanium. I didn’t ask for it. I didn't want it there. The blood pools around my cuticles as, blind with panic, I attempt to scratch the piercing out.

I’ve developed a script for when people ask me if I’m dating anyone. No, not right now, I’m too busy with my major and my job and anyways, the Provo dating scene is tough and just not for me so, you know, I’ll pick it up again after I graduate and move away from here. Really, it’s fine. It is what it is. How’s your husband?

It’s not entirely a lie. I throw myself into what I’m studying and I’m good at it. I’m involved in so much outside of school that if I was going to meet someone it would have happened by now. I always wonder, though, if that was convincing enough. Can they read between the lines? Can they see the heartbroken fists pounding at the backsides of my pupils? It’s not that I haven’t dated anyone; it’s just that I live somewhere where it’s so hard for that kind of love to thrive. It’s just that I don’t talk about it.

At a university where the worth of sports is great and souls are just an afterthought, wholeness is hard to come by. A chisel chips at your spirit with every man you have to figure out how to turn down, every couple clasping hands on their way to Eternal Families, every girl it might have worked out with if not for the cougar-clawed shadow cast across the valley. It’s not so bad at first. Pierced skin heals; what’s a nick here and there? It’s only four years later, on a plane ride bound for elsewhere, that you can take in the mountain of grisly shavings carved from your sides.

I’m aware that none of this constitutes advice, but to be honest I’m not sure I have any to give. If you had asked me when I was a bright-eyed, hot-blooded sophomore fresh off her first year of sticking it to the school, I would have cheerily told you all about my battle armor basics: Surrounding yourself with other queer people. Taking classes in the JFSB and the JKB and at West Campus. Remembering that you don’t owe anyone, not even your bishop, information about your sexuality. 

  It’s not that those aren’t still useful or that they didn’t serve me well. They did. They brought some of my closest friends into my life, kept me safe from prying ecclesiastical leaders, and ensured my head remained above water in a frigid tide of royal blue. But at some point, the floaties stop being enough. At some point you just need to get out of the damn lake. 

I’m so tired of trying to find meaning in these past four years. The Mormon instinct to valorize suffering nips at my heels, telling me that there must be sanctity in my deepest distress. But as the end of my time at BYU draws near and I start the process of sifting through the ashes, all I can feel is how pointless it all was. There is no lesson to be learned in watching my high school friends and bi or heterosexual peers catch fish after fish while I spent my college years shriveling from artificial scarcity. There is no moral in performing a plasticky persona just so that a man older than my father and drunk off spiritual self-importance will permit me to continue working on my degree. There is no edification in putting walls between cousins and mentors and classmates with every self-protecting lie that slips from my tongue. None of it exalted me; it just made me hurt. And it hurt all the more because I thought I could avoid it. 

I was never blind to the harm BYU causes. The testimonies of queer students of yore hovered over my shoulders as I worked on college applications and I promised myself that my parents’ alma mater was just a safety school. But, as it became increasingly clear that my future did not lie elsewhere, I took stock of my supplies: supportive parents, fledgling local queer orgs, a mostly resolved relationship with religion, a treasured roommate, and a slew of queer friends thanks to Instagram. These were all things past students had struggled without, so I thought that having them would permit me to make it out largely unscathed. 

I suppose, then, the real piece of advice I have is this: do not be surprised when, despite it all, BYU still sucks a tithe from you. There will be car rides akin to a sacrament and Provo summer sunshine and people you cannot imagine your life without. You will fall in and out of love, find God in the library, Kiwanis Park, and the overhead lighting of her apartment. At times you will feel so overwhelmed with joy for the way your life has turned out that you could scale Timp in ten minutes flat. And yet. 

BYU has no intention of letting us flourish. It’s a bayonet with a blood gutter; you’re not supposed to find it easy to heal from. The scars are mandated by the curriculum and cut into our skin by the barbed wire of the Honor Code. For the sin of being a woman who can never find fulfillment in a man, you pay an extra graduation fee in grief and lost time. 

Please listen to me when I say that, despite the harshness of my words, finding yourself on a plane bound for Provo is not a death sentence. Love and solace will continually bubble up from even the most unexpected corners of your time here. You are going to make it out alive. But please also understand that ‘alive’ is going to feel like a knife in the gut, and, more importantly, that when it does it is not your fault. The severed segments your post-grad self will have to learn to fit back together are not the result of a lack of resilience or fortitude. Hacking yourself into tidy pieces at eighteen was, in a funny way, your best chance at maintaining a semblance of wholeness at a school that would rather you pull on a false skin than feel the sunlight on your own. 

Your last day in Utah County will eventually come, and when it does you will find that your once-gaping wound can heal. There is a whole world out there, full of people to whom BYU and its cruelty are completely foreign, and they won’t care that you feel inadequate or broken or far behind. They’ll only see your insatiable lust for life, your tenderness towards the neighborhood cats, or how beautiful you look in this dim bar light. You’ll take their hands and, united, you and all the many more people who are going to love you will stitch the ragged edges back together. 

And this time the needle won’t feel like a violation. Because you got to choose to let it pierce you.