The Provo, Utah Years, Pt. 2 (’03-’05)

I remember walking down the steps of the Salt Lake airport to meet those who’d gathered to welcome me home from having served a mission for the LDS church. It was a good little reunion to see everyone again. I’m sure a little surreal after more than 2 years as a missionary away from family and friends.

My first night home was spent watching the first Lord of the Rings movie at my brother’s then in laws home. The first movie had come out while I was on my mission, and having read the books as a child and having wanted to turn them into movies, it was fun to go see it.

Peter Jackson did a much better job than I could have done. 🙂

Anyway, my next night back was filled with another Lord of the Rings movie, the Two Towers, which was in theaters at the time.

Welcome home, Stephen. 🙂

After that, life just sort of got going.

I went to live with my Dad and Step mom in Provo again while I attended school. Sadly, I relapsed with my pornography addiction one day, probably within the first month or two after coming home from my mission. That was hard, and it began the battle all over again, this time with the added bonus of that “night thing” I mentioned in the last post. 😦

Before getting back into the school grind, I spent five weeks backpacking around Europe, starting by myself–hitchhiking my way through England, Scotland, Norther Ireland, Ireland, Wales, back to England, and down to Paris, France, where I met up with two of my sisters. We spent a few days there before one of my sisters and I parted ways with our older sister, and we headed all around Europe courtesy of our Eurrail passes. We had stops in Spain, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Hungary during the next four weeks. It was a great trip. 🙂

Then… it was back to school. I didn’t get in to BYU (where I’d wanted to go) right away. My grades and test scores and all that weren’t good enough. Too many years of goofing off, not paying attention, and wasting my life away caused that…). Fortunately, A’s during summer classes at BYU (not as hard to get accepted for BYU summer classes) and a solid semester of A’s after that at UVSC (Utah Valley State College) landed me not only accepted status at BYU, but a full-tuition scholarship for the following semester.

Happy Valley (what Utahans call Utah Valley and perhaps more specifically, the Provo/BYU area of the valley) was both wonderful and challenging. Despite my teenage fears that I’d never find someone to marry, by that point in my life, and still with plenty of dating fears, I think I just expected that returned missionaries came home, got married within a year or so, and life just went on from there.

Boy was that naive.

(As of this writing, 12/29/2019, and having just been ghosted a day or two ago by a woman I’d taken out a few times and who’d given every indication of interest in me before disappearing, I’m still single and never have been married. My greatest childhood fear coming true right before my eyes).

Anyway… I started going on lots of dates right away after my mission. My fear of girls, probably more aptly labeled “fear of rejection” was still quite there, but unlike my teenage years, I was able to overcome it enough to at least ask girls out on dates. And… I had a lot of fun.

Though I lived with my dad and stepmom, I attended a BYU singles ward on campus, and most of the girls I took out came from that ward. In my singles ward, things were a lot like my teenage years in jr. high. I was one of the people that every body new, regularly in the middle of everything. Yet, as before, there were plenty of times I felt quite alone and quite rejected–down on myself and life. It was an up-and-down roller coaster for me, just like pretty much every other time in my life.

I made one very good friend with whom I’m still friends today–the only one from that era, I think, that I’d still say I’m an active friend with. Though we don’t talk much, he’s one of those friends where when we meet back up, even after years, it’ll be the same as always, just different stories to tell each other.

Anyway, back to school stuff… I thought about majoring in English and becoming an English teacher (thanks to a fabulous writing teacher I had that short summer term at BYU). Later I thought about majoring in Spanish, I think. I left Psychology in the dust after taking a psychology class and hating it.

Eventually, I sort of zeroed in on being a marriage and family life educator (not a therapist, but a teacher, so to speak). My brother’s then father in law did that for a living, and I started to follow a bit in his footsteps. I switched majors to Marriage, Family, & Human Development, and I graduated as a super senior (at least in number of credits) in that degree, with plans to head to graduate school for the type of degree(s) that would give me credibility in the family life education field.

Again, I had a lot of fun as an undergraduate student. I went on fun adventures all over the place, locally, and around the country. Surfing in Florida and California (no, I’m not a good surfer, lucky to even get up, but fun trips, nonetheless 🙂 ). Trips all over the country to pick up cars I’d bought off Ebay–flying out and driving them back. Mountain-climbing adventures, caving adventures, and on and on.

Despite all the dates I was going on, I only had one real girlfriend during my 2 1/2 years at BYU. She was an absolutely amazing woman, just incredible. We came close to getting married, talking about it, and both wanting to, but never at the same time. We ended up right on the edge of getting married before I ended it for good (having been sort of on and off for a while).

That final bit actually happened after I’d moved on to graduate school, and I’ll detail more of that in the next post.

Anyway, she was absolutely wonderful, perhaps the purest person (at least one of them) I’ve ever met. Unfortunately for both of us, I was not ready to be the person she deserved, and I think she would have been miserable with me for years (if we’d lasted that long) before I would finally become the kind of person she deserved. For the most part, we were great together, but I was a very impatient person, and that, I learned from others, left her in tears sometimes. My heart breaks when I think that I did that to her. She was an angel and didn’t deserve that from anyone.

Moving on… I did have a few times in college where I wasn’t honest in my classes, mostly not living the spirit of the law, so to speak. As sensitive as my conscience is, any indiscretion, be it spirit or letter of the law, gnaws at me, and I had a few emails to write to professors admitting to things I’d done. I remember one research paper that I wrote for a class at UVSC where all my research came from one book. I quoted and cited probably 20 or 30 sources, but it was basically all from one book, just taking the quotes and citations the one author had gathered from all the others. I justified it as acceptable because I literally went and found every book I cited and looked up the pages where the information I was citing came from. I told myself that made it okay because I actually went to the sources I was citing, but it wasn’t really honest, and it certainly wasn’t good research, by any means. For the most part, the perhaps three or four professors I emailed with issues of conscience because of conduct in their classes/with school work were super understanding and kind about it, even encouraging.

I applied for graduate school at BYU and also at the University of Utah. I was accepted to both, and I accepted both, finally choosing the U over the Y because that was the program I was more excited about. BYU wasn’t very happy with me because I’d already accepted to go there, but they required me to accept before I’d heard back from the U, and being the only two schools I applied for, I didn’t want to not get in to graduate school.

Sorry, BYU. 😦

Aside from the bajillion fun stories that might each get their own autobiographical posts one day, that was pretty much it for Happy Valley–at least that time around–and I was off to red country, and the school up north.

(I’m sure I’ll update this post and add pictures at some point in the future, but here’s at least a beginning to this chapter in my life. Enjoy… 🙂 ).