My son asked me what my mission was like.
Not the casual version. The real one. The kind of question a kid asks when he's starting to realize that the thing his dad did at nineteen might be the thing he's supposed to do at nineteen, and he wants to know what that actually means before anyone hands him a name tag.
I gave him the version. The formative one. Discipline. Service. Learning to talk to strangers and care about people you'll never see again. All true. All incomplete. The highlight reel of a thing that doesn't fit in a highlight reel.
So here's the rest. Or as much of it as I can hold at 5 AM with chai steaming on the desk.
I was nineteen. White shirt, black name tag, a suitcase full of scriptures and garments and a journal I filled with writing I didn't know was writing yet. A kid from the western United States who read too much, talked too little, and believed what he was told about having something to offer the world. So I went.
Here's something nobody tells you about a mission: it's a mimetic structure. I didn't have that word then. I have it now because I spent years reading Rene Girard and once you see mimetic desire you see it in everything, including the thing that shaped you.
You model yourself after your companion. Your companion models himself after the zone leaders. The zone leaders model themselves after the mission president. The mission president models himself after the apostles. Turtles all the way up. The pressure to conform isn't a bug. It's the architecture. It's what makes the thing work. It's also what makes the thing suffocating if you're the kind of person who notices architecture instead of just living inside it.
I noticed.
I knocked doors. Taught discussions. Memorized scriptures in a language that wasn't mine. Ate food I couldn't identify in apartments I wouldn't have entered otherwise. Prayed with people who were hurting in ways I was too young to understand but not too young to sit with. I grew up the way you grow up when the world stops letting you hide behind your parents.
But I was also a poet. Not a published one. Not a good one. Just a kid who noticed things sideways. Who sat in district meetings watching Elder Johnson's hands shake during testimony and thought about what the shaking meant instead of just feeling the spirit. Who read the Book of Mormon and kept getting stuck on the parts that don't resolve neatly, the way a poem doesn't resolve neatly, and wanted to sit in those contradictions instead of ironing them flat.
There's a thing that happens on a mission. You ask a question. A real one. Not a faithless question. An honest one. And someone, usually a companion or a zone leader, gives you the look. You know the look. Every Mormon knows the look. It says: we don't ask that here. The question itself is the problem.
I got that look so many times I could set my watch by it.
Not because I was doubting. I wasn't. I was doing what poets do. Trying to see the thing clearly. Trying to hold it up to the light and look at it from underneath. And it turns out that institutions, even good ones, even ones that produce real fruit in people's lives, have a complicated relationship with clarity. Because clarity reveals the seams. And seams make people nervous. And nervous people give you the look.
I'm reading Elaine Pagels right now. The Origins of Satan. She traces how early Christianity manufactured an adversary to consolidate institutional power. The people asking hard questions didn't just become inconvenient. They became the enemy. Not because their questions were wrong. Because the institution needed unity more than it needed honesty.
I'm not saying my mission was that. I'm saying the pattern is old. Older than any of us. Older than the church. And I'm saying I felt the edge of it at twenty years old in a district meeting where I asked why we taught the discussions in that order and got the look from a kid who'd been out three months longer than me and thought that made him qualified to decide which questions were safe.
Here's the thing I keep circling back to, the thing I can't land cleanly, which probably means it's true:
The mission made me. Not despite the difficulty. Because of it.
Two years of being the weird one. Carrying two identities that don't fit in the same body. The poet who wants to sit with contradiction and the missionary who needs to stand up straight and deliver answers. The kid who writes in his journal at night and the elder who teaches by the script during the day.
I learned to listen on that mission. Really listen. Not the performance version where you nod and wait for your turn. The version where you sit in a stranger's living room on a plastic chair that's probably older than you are, and they tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and you're twenty, and you have nothing to offer except the fact that you showed up and you're not leaving.
That's where my whole career started, though I didn't know it then. The Hidden Layer. The 215 buyer quotes before a single word of copy. The obsession with hearing what people actually mean underneath what they actually say. All of it traces back to a plastic chair in a room that smelled like cooking oil and laundry soap, trying to hold space for something I didn't understand and wasn't going to pretend I did.
I wouldn't trade that. I also wouldn't call it the best two years of my life, and I'm done performing like it was.
Those two sentences live in the same paragraph now and I'm not separating them.
Girard would say the mission works precisely because it's mimetic. You learn by imitation. You become someone new by copying someone who already became that person. The companion system isn't logistics. It's a desire machine. You want what your companion wants because wanting is contagious.
That's powerful. That's also terrifying. Because when the thing you're imitating is faith, and the person you're imitating it from is also twenty and also scared and also pretending he has answers he doesn't have, the whole system runs on a kind of gorgeous fragility that nobody is allowed to name out loud.
We were kids. Leading each other. Inside a structure that called us men and meant it.
Some of us broke a little. Some of us came home different in ways that took years to surface. Some of us are still figuring out which parts were God and which parts were the institution and whether it matters that we can't always tell the difference.
My son might go on a mission.
He's getting to that age where the conversation shifts from hypothetical to calendar, and I feel something I didn't expect: I'm torn in a way that doesn't have a clean resolution, and I'm a person who makes his living finding the right words, and I don't have the right words for this.
It's not about doctrine. Not really. I believe the framework produces good fruit. I've seen it. I've lived it. I'm living it now, tonight, at this desk.
What I don't trust is the world. I don't trust what happens when you put a teenager in a country he can't navigate with another teenager he didn't choose and tell them both to figure it out. Not because the church is careless. Because the world is careless with young people. Because I was that young person. Because I remember the nights that were hard in ways that had nothing to do with testimony and everything to do with being far from home and carrying something heavier than your body knows how to hold at that age.
Would I bet my eternal soul on them being wrong? No. Would I send my kid into the same machine that shaped me without acknowledging that the shaping included some bruising? Also no. Both of those are true and I hold them in the same hand.
I think about Pagels. About how institutions create mythology to maintain coherence. About how the question-askers become inconvenient. And I think about how the church I grew up in, the one that made me who I am, the one I'm still in, has its own version of that pattern. Every institution does. Every company. Every agency. Every family, if we're being honest about families.
The question isn't whether institutions compress their people. They all do. The question is whether what gets built is worth the compression. Whether the fruit justifies the pruning.
I don't have an answer. I have a tension. And I think the tension is the point. The day I resolve it neatly is the day I've stopped telling the truth about it.
My son is asleep down the hall. He doesn't know I'm writing about him. He doesn't know that one question at dinner is the reason I'm up before anyone else, still at the desk, still trying to say something honest about an experience I've been carrying for two decades without ever fully putting it down.
I was a Mormon missionary and a poet. The missionary learned obedience. The poet learned to see. And the person I became is still at this desk, still holding both, still not sure they fit together, still refusing to let either one go.
If he goes, I'll be proud. And I'll be terrified. And I'll pray for him the way I prayed on that thin mattress in a room that smelled like mildew: honestly, without performance, asking questions I might not get answered.
It's 5:47 AM. The chai is steaming. I'm going to start the day.