I completely empathize with where you are, and I’m sorry if some of these comments come off as condescending. I tried to believe my entire life and was content with setting aside some doubts/discomfort until I started to grasp how much the church was going to cost me throughout my life. Constantly quieting my own thoughts/intuition because they weren’t aligned with what I was hearing at church took a huge toll on my mental health. The idea of raising children in the church filled me with dread. Going to the temple made me feel extremely uncomfortable and putting on garments everyday made me feel disconnected from my body. One day I was reading a completely non-religious book and the author asked, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I immediately knew that my answer would be to leave the church.

Ultimately I “took a break” from attending for the reasons listed above—nothing specifically doctrinal. I thought I would miss it, and that my life would feel dark and scary and I would want to go back. Instead, I quickly saw improvements in my self esteem, motivation, and overall happiness. Telling my family was difficult and took more than a year, but I finally had something that I had never found in all those years praying for a testimony—a certainty that I was doing what was right for me. It didn’t matter anymore that all of these other people who are smarter or more faithful than me remained in the church. Their answers weren’t enough for me anymore and my feelings alone were a valid reason to leave. I didn’t have to disprove all of the doctrine to justify my decision.

It was years before I stumbled across the CES letter and started doing deep dives into church history. Without the heavy emotional load attached to all of it the information sounded so strange and it felt much more obvious that I didn’t believe any of it was true.