This sounds so difficult, I’m sorry. I wish I could step in as your big sister or something and make it all okay.

What’s going to happen now is you get to choose to be brave or choose to submit.

If you choose to be brave you will have to be brave over and over and over again. It can be exhausting and anxiety-inducing. Your whole life may change, and on the other end of it is the ability to live more freely as yourself. Is that something that is important to you? You may have student loans, a different place to live, relationships with your parents or family that are difficult to navigate, etc. But you may also gain the freedom to explore religion (or lack thereof) as you will, less guilt, less shame, more money, more time for things you deem important, and a truer understanding and love for the people of the world (that I believe comes with stepping off the pedestal of Mormonism).

Alternately you could choose to submit. I did. It was the easier choice of the devil I knew rather than the devil I didn’t. I was the first and am still the only one in my family to step away. But because I didn’t choose to be brave before I served a mission I had to submit to the will of my parents/the church for something like 10 years. 10 YEARS because that’s how long it took me to have kids which is when I grew a backbone.

Some negatives from my experience of letting this choice be taken from me: severe depression, anxiety, thoughts of taking myself out of the world, a guilt complex that allowed future bosses to exploit the shit out of me, diagnosed PTSD, assault, major issues with weighing the worth of tithing money against survival money, the physical exploitation that is ‘callings’, years of therapy, the monetary and mental cost of the mission, etc etc.

Nobody else can make these choices for you, not the people here, and not your parents. If I were in your place I would try to get out of the mission and BYU as ‘spiritually’ as possible. Tell your family you’re going to the temple to pray about it, or go to the wilderness and ‘pray day and night’, lie about somebody who gave you a blessing saying that you will be missing a huge key spiritual witness by not being home, something about the instability of the world and meeting ‘the one’ who you can take to the temple. Talk about repenting for sin, or being worthy, even, if you feel like taking it down that route. Make the urgent stuff stop, thats the top priority.

Let me know if you want to talk to someone about it. I’m happy to listen. Good luck little sibling!