There’s a movie that came out many years ago called “The Best Two Years” that is intended for Mormon audiences. The title is derived from the fact that so many missionaries have described their experience as missionaries as “the best two years of their lives.”
For me, my mission was hard, perhaps two of the hardest years of my life.
We’ll get to that.
I remember the day I left my home in Murray and was driven 45 minutes down the road to Provo, UT where the particular Missionary Training Center (MTC) I was to report to was located (The LDS church has multiple such training centers around the world).
I remember I had an ingrown hair or zit or something on my neck that I’d tried to get to come to a head so I could pop it. I’d put super hot water in a soda bottle and held it against the spot on my neck to try to get it to come to come and then go faster… but… I ended up burning myself, so I had a nice round burn there that perhaps looked a little like a hickey. It later scabbed over, I believe. I was super self conscious about that. 🙂
The MTC was awesome and challenging at the same time. I dove into learning Spanish and the gospel stuff we were being taught, and, contrary to what my teachers in jr. high might have believed given my performance and behavior, I actually had a gift for it. I learned how to speak very quickly and with an accent that sounded quite convincingly native. Understanding was another thing altogether, though. I could speak well but couldn’t understand what others were saying to me.
While in the MTC, I made friends with the “sister missionaries” (female missionaries) in our “district” (a district is a group of missionaries assigned to work together, usually in close geographic proximity, but in the MTC, it was more just assignments–the group or cohort you’d be going to classes with). If I haven’t mentioned that before, I’ve always had an easy time of it making friends with girls. As you’re already aware from my other autobiographical posts, I’m super sensitive, which helps a lot, but I can also be a really good listener, so that probably helps a lot more. I’ve usually had a really good guy friend or two, but it’s usually been girls I connect more quickly too.
Anyway, so I became good friends with the sisters in the district much more than the guys, though I was somewhat friends with some of them as well.
I was a dedicated missionary. I tried to obey all the mission rules as best I could and as best I understood them. I tried to be the best missionary I could be.
That was actually part of what made my mission so challenging.
Most of the hard times came once I was in California. My first missionary “companion” was a leader in the mission. (Missionaries are generally assigned to work in pairs, and they call the person they’re assigned to work with their “companion.”). As missionaries, we weren’t allowed to watch movies, generally (although there were some we did have permission to watch), but one night, while eating dinner with a member of our church whose vocation was installing high-end home theaters, he invited us to watch a movie with them in his home theater, or part of a movie… something like that. I was a brand new missionary, but I was a staunch rule supporter and wasn’t gonna break the rules. Accordingly, I sat outside the theater area while they were inside watching whatever it was that they were watching.
Since my companion was one of the higher up missionary leaders, I didn’t really know what to do. I couldn’t talk it over with a leader because my companion was the top of the chain of command in our geographic area, so I called the mission president later that night and explained what happened. My companion got a chewing out, I believe. As for me, that one experience had a huge negative impact on the rest of my mission. As I understand it, my companion shared that experience with the rest of the missionary leadership in the mission, and I got the reputation for being a stuck up pain in the butt. My own personal social failings only added fuel to the fire (I tried to be 100% obedient and didn’t know how to react to those whose ideas of living the rules were different from mine, so I think I just got quiet and didn’t say much, which tended to be interpreted as being stuck up. I also tended to try to go even further than the rules called for. For example, watching Disney cartoon movies was allowed in my mission on our preparation day (one day a week when we do laundry, get groceries, relax, etc.), but I didn’t want to even do that because I felt like it took away from what was possible to achieve spiritually. Those ideals, and me acting on them, put me on the outside. I was the outsider. So I was seen as the self-righteous one, too good for other people. I was the “Spanish Nazi,” as named in a caricature of me I found drawn on a piece of paper that I was probably never meant to see. I never lived it down. I didn’t have the social skills to know how to handle it, and so even though I can’t recall having any issues with the missionaries I served with, other than not knowing how to handle our differences in what was right and wrong, I never really made friends with the missionaries in my mission, and life was hell for me a lot of the time. I only stayed on my mission because I believed in what I was doing and also I think because I didn’t want to deal with the stigma of “going home early.”
No, my mission wasn’t the best two years. It was probably my hardest two years to that point. I loved the people I taught, and they loved me. That was enough to help me through at times. I had many struggles, though, emotionally. I was lonely. There was one long stretch of time where, for a ridiculous reason (I had a gash in my nose and was embarrassed by it and didn’t want anyone to see it, but couldn’t stop messing with it, so I had it for months, I think). I was so emotionally paralyzed that I couldn’t get myself to leave the apartment like I should for months. I mean, yes, we went out and worked and whatnot, but we also spent a lot of tine in the apartment. Knowing that I was struggling and wanting to still be useful and feeling badly about not going out to work, I spent my time doing other kinds of missionary work that I could do from the apartment. The main project I created was finding hundreds of lost members who were no longer on the records but who still lived in the area. I believe the local ecclesiastical leader, against church policy, had been removing the names of members from the local list if they stopped coming to church, thus losing track of them. I spent a lot of time trying to find them again, and if I remember right, I found 203 people.
Anyway, the latter part of my mission was a little easier, as the leaders and missionaries from the earlier part of my mission had gone home, but it was still hard due to my own social failings.
As I’ve given sort of a play by play of my struggle with sex addiction, I’ll add another piece here. I managed to stay free of pornography and masturbation for over two years–the whole duration of the mission. However, something began happening toward the end of my mission that would turn into one of the greatest challenges of my life. I’d never had a wet dream (nocturnal emission… whatever the term you prefer) in my life before, not that I have any memory of at least. Then, on my mission, twice, toward the end of it, I had these masturbatory experiences that happened while I was in this state of half asleep and half awake. I was awake enough to know what I was doing but asleep enough to have it still be part of a dream, if that makes sense. Because I was even somewhat coherent, I blamed myself and considered them relapses. I called those happenings the “night thing,” and I would allow their recurrence over the following years to rip out my heart and hope and send me spiraling back into full relapse, etc. There will be more on this later.
One thing… a side note… I tend not to spend time writing these little autobiographical sketches when I’m in positive happy moods, so I know they’re not quite representative of reality, more focused on hard, negative things. I plan on taking time in the future to go back through them all and to try to portray a clear and accurate sense of things.
Anyway, after my mission was over, I flew home, ready to start the next chapter of my life. College lay ahead, and I just sort of assumed that I’d be married within a year or so. That group of friends I was doing things with right before my mission voted my most likely first married out of the rest of them…
Funny how life just… yeah.
Lift the World 
Hello again, Brother,
I was on the wrong end of the gossip chain in my mission, too – for similar reasons. It really hurt and cast a negative pall over my mission in many regards while I was out. Like you, the incredible experiences I had with the people we served among were what kept me going. Well, and our genetics that impel us to “try until we die” because we don’t give up… Sending love… :}