The Haven Hill Years (’16-present)

(last updated (5/6/2020)

I never planned on moving to Arkansas. It just sort of… happened.

My intent was to spend about a year visiting my family members and friends all over the country and to stump around where my ancestors used to live in the hopes of unlocking some of the genealogical puzzles that we’ve faced as a family in trying to trace our ancestors back as far as we can.

As planned, I started my trip by visiting my dad and stepmom in Nevada (well, after having my car breakdown only 40 miles into the trip, spending the night in my car, and going to the junkyard to get it going again the following morning). Visiting my dad and stepmom in Nevada was a good little visit. I hadn’t been to visit them since they left Utah, so it was good for me to be there, to see the house they’d built, and see what was going on in their lives.

After that enjoyable visit, I headed east.

I stopped off briefly at Hoover Dam in Nevada, saw the beginnings of a funnel cloud in I think Texas (the funnel formed just briefly, a little tiny curly cue way high up in the sky that didn’t even come close to touching the ground), and finally, I plopped myself down in Arkansas.

The last time I was in Arkansas visiting my mom before this most recent arrival, I remember thinking to myself how it just felt like home. Utah had stopped feeling like home. The mountains were my home, but nothing else about it was anymore. I love my friends, but I was uncomfortable in Utah. I think I still am. It’s gotten far too crowded for me; the pollution is terrible, the pace of life is just way too frantic for me, there are reminders of painful memories everywhere it seems like, and there are some particular people I’m afraid to run into.

Anyway, I don’t know why I stayed in Arkansas… I just did. And though I’d lent 95% of my savings to someone to help them move forward, I had kept back just enough to subsist for a while without having to immediately get a job.

One of the things I was hoping to do was to start an LDS-based private school that used a curriculum of my own design. When I first got to Arkansas, I spent months and months, studying and reading and writing, trying to get the curriculum figured out. I worked on writing a book that outlined everything.

I also spent countless hours trying to get the house and property that my mother lived in/on into such a shape that it would be cheaper and much easier to maintain. I’ve probably taken out 100 or so dead, dying, or problematic trees. I re-contoured the backyard to stop the basement from flooding like it used to after big storms. I re-did the dog yard fence. I redid the garden area, moving tons of dirt in order to put the garden on a single level instead of having a two-tier garden. Etc. Etc.

I worked and worked out in the yard, and I studied and studied and wrote and wrote in my room, and I still struggled a lot with what had happened only a handful of months before where my whole life was turned completely on it’s head. I was reeling, in some ways.

But the slide wasn’t to end there…

It wasn’t but a handful of months after I’d lent the money to the person that things started to go south with what the money was used to try to accomplish. Not only did it start to go south, but everything was used up and gone within a handful of months.

My whole was savings was gone.

That was an absolutely massive blow to my financial life, having to start completely over. I was sick over it for months, if not years.

It was’t just a little bit of money. I had been paid well for the five years I worked at my last job. My expenses were minimal, and I’d saved everything. Pretty much the only money I spent on myself for those five years was gas to help me get out of Dodge when I really needed out. (When I needed out, I’d drive to the mountains for a day, often hanging out in my favorite little spot way up in Mineral Basin where most trucks don’t even dare to go, and I’d just… exist there, away from the hustle and bustle.

I loved it up there.

Then I’d cringe and sigh as I rounded the last bend coming down Parley’s Canyon to see the sprawling Salt Lake Valley…

Back to the rat race.

And now here I was in Arkansas, after having saved everything so diligently for the future, now having lost everything but the little I kept to live on during my year off.

I was devastated. I was terrified.

About the time that I lost all my money, I also did what seemed like some major damage to my knees, so much so that for many months, I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to hike or run or carry things again. That was terrifying as well.

Then, something happened in August of 2016 that weighed on me a good bit. It seemed like the final nail in the coffin to what I’d understood to be true for so many years before falling apart shortly before I undertook my “year off”; and it would’ve been the final nail in the coffin, except that I’d felt like god told me it was going to happen months before there was even a clue that it was coming. So, when I found out, it wasn’t a surprise. It was like, god told me this was going to happen, and he told me to keep waiting, so… I’ll keep waiting.

I did fine for a while, trusting that message mostly, but living that same old cycle at the same time. But I was starting to break down, bit by bit. The financial collapse, the health collapse (I’d also started having diabetic like symptoms but completely unrelated to blood sugar at all, and it’s been giving me major issues for a few years now), and I had this absolutely massive spiritual crisis.

There was just so much–all at the same time.

I eventually broke down, my faith, my patience, my optimism, my happiness… eroded all away. I began to have mental and emotional meltdowns. It got so bad at one point that we had to get rid of our cat (a stray that had literally come running up to me out of the woods as a baby) because I was starting to be abusive to him. Me, a complete animal lover. Me. Abusive to an animal.

I was so broken, so devastated inside.

But… I came crawling back. Dragging myself up and fighting, moving forward. I’d never given up, and I wasn’t going to now.

The thing with Max (our cat) was super scary to me, though. I’d seen myself almost do things in other circumstances–seriously tempted to commit sexual assault at least once years before, continued sexual addiction now, including a few relapses into voyeurism well into my adulthood. Those were all shameful things, but this… this was the worst I think I’d ever seen from myself.

I was starting to be scared of myself. I was broken, and I didn’t know how to fix me.

Somehow, I began crawling back. I lost and then regained my testimony of the church. I started a mobile auto detailing business that quickly morphed into a mobile auto repair business. I started to make enough money to save. I started trying to serve again like I did in Provo and Salt Lake.

Then… after years had gone by, and I’d continued to trust and to wait as I’d felt like god had told me, finally, it was just too much. I’d trusted and trusted and waited and waited, and I was watching my hopes and dreams seem to just flitter away. Time was marching on, and my dreams were just… melting away.

One of my church leaders convinced me to tell him the whole story (everything I’d like to share here but won’t out of respect for the other people involved), and I told him just about everything.

It wasn’t a good experience at all, but among the things that were said, he suggested that I let go and move on.

I’m not very good at letting things go without closure, and in this circumstance, I think pretty much only a god could give me that, as the other parties are no longer in the picture.

Anyway, I decided to give the “moving on” a try. Call it a coincidence, but something happened that was super interesting. I ran into a woman who was in the middle of having an eerily similar experience as the one I’d been living for years–following a plausible but quite out of the norm direction from god.

It was uncanny running into someone going through such a similar experience. She shared it with me, and I was worried for her. Of course, I couldn’t tell her my experience, because of the promises I’d made to god, but knowing what I’d gone through for the previous several years, I was worried for her and didn’t want her to have to deal with the same kinds of pain I’d gone through.

Anyway, ours was a relatively brief encounter, as she was from another state several hours away, and we weren’t going to really be seeing each other again much.

And life continued on. I continued waiting and trusting that somehow everything that I’d understood that god had promised was going to come true as it seemed he’d told me it would, knowing now, though, that for such a thing to happen, great pain would be experienced by some others who were part of the circumstance.

How could I want that?

I didn’t.

And though part of me would love for it all to work out just as I’d always understood, (consequences be what they may) because I don’t want to have been living a wasted life all this time, at the same time, I’d be almost as happy to find out that it was all a sham. At least I’d know.

It’s the not knowing that’s so hard.

Anyway, life kept going, and that cycle was still there. Doubt, fear, etc. faith, etc. My mobile mechanic business started becoming busier and busier.  I started getting enough work to hire employees. I also started working as a temple worker in the Kansas City, MO LDS temple.

I absolutely loved that.

I miss it.

Then… I relapsed in my sex addiction again, sometime in the summer or fall of 2018, I think it was. I don’t know what was different, but after that last relapse, I broke more spiritually than I ever had before. It wasn’t necessarily the relapse at all. I just had hit the end of my rope. I can’t even tell you what it was. I just snapped. I was done.

I lost all faith in god. I didn’t trust him anymore, at all. I no longer had confidence that god even existed. I didn’t know what to make of the experiences I’d had. There were too many times that god had shown me the future, and it had come to pass just as he’d told me. There were too many experiences where I’d felt the spirit as I understood it, and I was right. Too many to doubt… Except… then there was this one, the biggest of them all, that still hadn’t. Even when there was another person who was having powerful confirming spiritual experiences to the same end. Even when priesthood blessings and counsel and all that pointed me in the “god is pleased with you and the course you’re following” direction, so keep going… Even after all that, the biggest most powerful, most important spiritual experience of them all had fallen apart.

What did that mean for all the rest?

I was tired of trusting. I was tired of trusting what seemed like empty promises. I was tired of waiting. I was tired of letting the deepest desires of my life slip away waiting for something that seemed ridiculous at this point and that I wasn’t even sure I wanted in the first place but was super excited about because of what I’d understood the context and whatnot around it to have been.

But at that point, I just wanted answers, be they to whatever end they were. Truth be truth. Let’s have it. That’s what I wanted (and still want).

Nope, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I broke. I stopped going to church. I stopped believing in god (not that I disbelieve either, I just… I’ll confront those things after I finish these sketches).

Though I don’t attend church, I haven’t left behind the ideals of the gospel.

Honestly, the gospel as I understood it was absolutely beautiful. I’d love for it to be true.

Anyway, after over a year of trying to get these things written, we’ve finally reached the present. Here I am, sitting in my little recliner, not knowing where to go from here. I’m still completely broken, pieces everywhere. I have so little patience. I’m quick to anger, rage, even, though it’s never taken out on people, and fortunately not anymore on animals either. I have emotional breakdowns all the time. I’m a mess.

But at least I’m a mess that’s making progress now.

Honestly, I do miss the gospel, not the way that LDS members generally interpret it in my experience, but the real meat and guts of it that I think most members don’t even really ever think about–the things that make it so beautiful to me.

I miss the temple. A lot. Such peace and perspective in that place.

Honestly, I’ll probably go back to the LDS church–eventually. But I’m not ready, and I won’t unless I can come to terms with what happened over these last several years where I gave absolutely everything I had to god, giving up my dreams over and over again, exercising faith unfailingly. Trusting. Working. Serving… Only to have him either not be there at all, or to have had him abandon me, or to have had him give me everything I asked for, and I just wasn’t ready to handle it. (I did plead for him to “bring it on,” after all, to push me to my very limits of faith, to give me the experiences that would require the greatest faith I could possibly exercise as a mortal on earth. So… this whole mess could also just be one more answer in a long line of answered prayers. But right now? Right now I need something concrete from god, if he’s there. I need closure. I need to know why it all fell apart. I need to know why his last direction was to keep waiting when outside circumstances make such a course seem ridiculous.

I’m no longer capable of having those spiritual experiences and simply saying, like I did so often, “Okay, Lord, I’ll trust.”

I can’t trust that anymore. I need more. I need tangible real answers. I need tangible real experiences that demonstrate what was and was not true, and what is and is not true now.

I still wonder if the latest direction to wait is true, and I just don’t have enough faith to follow it, to trust it at this point… Was this all an answer to prayer god giving me exactly what I asked for? Was it all just a mistake that sucked in multiple people?

I don’t have the answers. Some day, if god doesn’t give them to me himself, perhaps I’ll find them out from others who were a part of the experience. But that’s not possible right now.

And so here I am. I’m 38 years old. I run a mobile mechanic business in the northwest corner of Arkansas, covering basically the Arkansas/Missouri border down a little past Fayetteville. I am trying to move on (again), but every attempt seems to be met with yet another slamming door, which only adds to my wondering if that “keep waiting” message that I thought came from god is real. Every time I tried to go against it in the past, it backfired. Years later, the same still seems to be true. I try to move on. Walls. Doors slammed in my face.

Why?

So… I still don’t know what to do, but I know what I’m going to do. I’m just gonna keep trying to move forward, move on. And for the others who were/are a part of that whole experience, I wish them the best. I want them to be happy. May sadness and ugliness and any angry feelings if any be replaced by love and happiness and peace.

And I’m gonna keep running my mobile mechanic business for the moment, but I’m going to leave it probably within the next year, if not sooner.

I want to go out and make more of a difference for good in the world, and I’m not gonna let anything stop me anymore.

Soooo… This is me. If you’ve wondered who Stephen Carman is through all these sketches and journal entries, I hope you’ve found a little bit of who he is. And if it’s helpful, here’s a little summary: I’m kind and gentle and shy. I care and want to help and heal. I wonder. I ponder. I plan. I invent. I am quick to anger these days, even rage. That scares me, and I want to get it out of my life. I want to see a happy world, and I’m willing to sacrifice my life, both in life or in death, to make strides in that direction. I want the world to be a better place for my having been born. I want to love every person and every creature with a pure and perfect love, and I want to find someone who wants to give her whole life to making the world a better place, and I want to marry that woman, start a family with her, and walk hand in hand in our effort to change the world for good, one act of love at a time.

***

(p.s. I’ll likely be updating these sketches periodically to fill in the picture to hopefully give an ever clearer picture of who I am and the experiences I’ve had that have brought me to this point. I’ll have little dates at the top of each sketch letting you know the last time it was updated/edited/revised. For the time being, they should be considered drafts in progress.)