Am I bad for wanting to pursue more education and wait to have kids?

A week ago, a friend asked me to share a little bit about life right after coming home from my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He knew I'd had a bit of a hard time and wanted to know some of the details. 

This question brought me back to journal entries from that time (2014-2015). I love keep journals because it is cathartic for me in the moment of writing and I also love going down memory lane--I'm often simultaneously embarrassed, entertained, disappointed, and impressed by my past self. 

Journals can be vulnerable, personal, and fascinating. They aren't always something to share, but while reading my entries from seven years ago, I thought they may have some value to the endless void of the internet. Enough time has passed that it also feels more removed. My journals highlight some real issues with the religious and social culture I grew up in. I was a baby feminist who wouldn't have used that word to describe myself, but I craved agency alongside love and acceptance from God, my peers, and potential romantic partners. I was hurt by patriarchy and perceived cultural norms.

This is my new digital project: sharing portions of my journal to suggest change and compassion for those in their late teens and twenties and beyond (perhaps simply a more personal version of my Mormon Millennial Project).

Allow me to set the stage and give some background: I spent February 2013-July 2014 running around northern and eastern Germany as a missionary, believing I was doing hard and occasionally fun things so that I would come home and be rewarded with all the blessings I wanted. Forgive me for simplifying my former self, but I truly believed I knew what would follow a mission: finding true love, finishing school, and then having kids. I knew marriage wasn't certain, so I spent time investigating career options with the mindset of "just in case" I didn't get married while at BYU. One of those options was going to graduate school to become a professor. As uncertain as this was, this idea was the beginning of dreaming big for me.

October 4, 2014: "I met with two professors and an academic advisor this week to try to plan out my life. I found out if I continue to pursue the history professor path, I have another 6-10 years of graduate school ahead of me. Which I thought was going to be shorter for some reason. And I hate to pull the woman card, but I hate trying to plan my life with someone who actually isn't in my life yet because I want to follow my dreams but my main dream is actually starting a family in the next 6-10 years and write history children's books on the side, but if that doesn't happen, I still want to be engaged in a meaningful cause add be happy. That's just a big time commitment for something that isn't certain and a ton of academic work that I don't know if I can really do (like writing a 200 page dissertation). I'm unsure if I'm willing to pay the price to make a career out of them. And yeah, I am just plain scared of uncertainty."

Spoiler: I made it to graduate school and it has been worth every wonderful year. If I had really understood then that I could basically be paid to be a student, a lifelong learner, I think I would have prioritized that more articulately. Another spoiler alert though: my dreams of going to graduate school proved a significant obstacle for three romantic relationships at BYU.

The first relationship started in November 2014 when I found someone who was fun to be around. After I'd been dating this guy (whom we'll call Steve) for almost two months--around six months after coming home from my mission--cognitive dissonance started bubbling up inside of me. 

January 13, 2015: "I spent an hour today crying nasty, emotional girl tears. Because I feel like I'm losing my dreams and plans and expectations for the future. I've been feeling weighted the past few days about my relationship with Steve and I kind of dumped it all on Steve tonight. There is discontinuance in my head and my heart and I feel like my culture and Steve's culture are very different--maybe too different--to be reconciled. I made a list of questions/concerns and presented them to him while we were at open mike night at The Wall. And when he confirmed some of my fears--like him really seeing the world in black and white while I mostly see shades of gray and him not wanting me to go to graduate school and instead stay home and be a traditional mom my whole life and starting a family right after we get married (what the heck I can't be a mom so soon?!) and it was just very scary and kind of a reality shock so all I could do was cry and wish to be a child again. I came home and wept on the stairs and then wept on Carol's lap in her room and tried to talk it out because I don't know what to do...Am I bad for wanting to pursue more education and wait to have kids? What do I like about myself when I'm with Steve if I feel like he's asking me to give up so much?" 

Things didn't get better.

January 16, 2015: "It started with an institute date and it ended with an institute date. Steve and I broke up last night, which means it took Steve approximately two days to realize/decide he didn't want to be with an emotional instability like me who didn't want to be a stay-at-home mom and instead supported heretical nonconformity. Which is admittedly faster than I thought would happen. I thought we'd continue to try to figure things out/carry on our interesting dialogue and maybe we'd break up but it would feel less like abandoning ship because of logistics...When we drove home, he said he'd been doing a lot of thinking about our major "foundational differences" and didn't think it would work and asked what I wanted to do. I hesitantly asked if he wanted to break up and he said no, but it might be best if we did. So I said me too and exploded into those stinkin' tears again. We said how much we liked each other and how wonderful these couple of months have been. As I sat there sobbing like a toddler, Steve told me I was really strong, that my strength was what originally attracted him to me. Which is ironically also partly why we broke up. Because guys don't want to marry a strong woman...I felt sadness when Steve left...Sadness that who I was wasn't acceptable/good enough for Steve. Sadness that I had to reenter the lonely, brutal world of being single again. Sadness that if I couldn't get things to work with a great guy like Steve, I'd never find someone....

This turned out to be one of the best things that happened to my little 22-year-old self because it invited months of searching on my part. I wasn't sure what I was searching for, but I felt that my self wasn't whole. Steve and I breaking up highlighted some of the vulnerabilities I felt in my community, of where I felt my worth lay. 

Coming next: deconstruction.