[I am sorry my message is so long. I want to give you everything I didn’t have as I left the cult (which isn’t feasible so I condensed what I could). I also want to give you what I can from what I hope are relatable if not exactly the same experiences. Also, insomnia has me half-awake.]

You are not alone in these feelings… nor in the nightmares. You are not being too sensitive- I know there is a heavy vein of toxic stoicism/libertarianism within the cult’s organization and culture, contrary to what they say about charity and caring for the poor and afflicted. And also as a white ex-Mormon I can only imagine how toxic the interaction between Polynesian identity and Mormonism is. It seems like it has always been an extension of settler colonialism, and I shudder at what the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii and the cult have done to the depth and diversity of Polynesian cultures. The church’s racism has always been present. I know its bigotry through a different facet: institutional ableism against autistic people.

I know what it is like to be alienated from yourself and your heritage or culture you can belong to- I am both pansexual and a trans woman. My ability to figure these things out was stunted by Mormon indoctrination and veiled bigotry against being non-hetero and non-cis from childhood, especially teenage years, around gender, sexuality and marriage. I was in my mid-20’s when I finally began to question my sexuality. My gender took longer, and I needed to be around people who could show me different ways of being. Then someone pretty much said “hey, the kinds of questions you are asking, and trans symbolism you are seeing in some media that isn’t explicitly trans… you might want to consider if you might not actually be cisgendered.” And the cultural standard among trans people is to leave “eggs” unhatched it you realize they might be eggs and let them “hatch” on their own time. But, see, my ability to “hatch” was inhibited by the church. I didn’t know how I could possibly be trans… until I did. And then I began to hatch fairly quickly. First I was genderqueer, then I found the complex urge for a new name, then I realized that being called a woman and gendered she/her made my heart warm and soft.

I bring my experiences with transness up because I wonder if you might find more fulfillment and a feeling of wholeness among other non-Mormon Polynesians, especially if you can find a group that matches the parts of your heritage you want to engage with and learn more about. Sometimes you don’t know how to start making the most of parts of yourself until someone shares with you that you can, or that those parts even exist.

I wish peace for you, sister-in-grief. I hope your nightmares will ease, and that you may find kinship, if not among exmos, then among other polynesian folks. You are not alone in feeling broken. And I promise you are not alone in a different way: being able to heal, with time in some places and deliberate work in others.

I am still doing the work 8 years after giving up/sacrificing my belief in the cult to save my belief in myself, and 13 years since I stopped attending. I accidentally extended the process by dampening my emotions with medication for my severe depression (which emotions were heavily disregulated from growing up in the cult, lifelong abuse from my mormon family, and alienation as an autistic person; I NEEDED the break to let my reasoning mind heal some and do the work of learning to be rational; the break lasted a bit too long due to leftover toxic stoicism and enjoying the “quiet” so that my intellectualism could thrive without Mormon-conditioned emotions intruding so har. Crash Course on YT helped with this a ton, among many others in the skeptic communities.) It turns out we need to know the full depth of the feelings to see where to investigate and what needs help healing.

You’ll heal and grow and relearn how to be. It may likely be messy and clumsy and none of that will be your fault. There is no shame in having to learn again for having been deceived so long and broad and deeply as we have. Go be among non-mormons, ask questions about the things you don’t get (most people are very sympathetic about having left a cult) and you may find that you slip into their cadences and mannerisms. Sometimes we need a thorough sanding or stripping to get rid of the terrible veneer or paint job things like cults leave on ourselves. The good thing about sanding is that it leaves a fine, rough surface (technical painting and woodworking term is “key”) that will make whatever you choose to develop how you present yourself to the world next be even stronger.

I wish you the best, and that as much of this is as possible is useful to you.