Shannon

Annegb over on one of the MoBlogs posted a cool story about how her friend started to see himself differently (in a good way) when someone threatened to beat the shit out of him. Of course, annegb did not say "shit" on a MoBlog, but I could read underneath the asterisks. Annegb concluded her post asking if any of the readers had anything similar happen to them ever.

Yes, it has.

In the not too distant past, I was fighting a pretty serious depression. Even with therapy and meds, I was not coming out of it as much as I would have liked. In retrospect, I was having a lot of distorted thinking, much of it a direct result of my loss of faith.

Early this summer, I posted over on the New Order Mormons board about how I was tired of being a defective Mormon. I was very eloquent :) Chris Tolworthy (my friend in Scotland) wrote a very empathetic reply.

And then Shannon weighed in. I had never met Shannon in Real Life, but she'd read a lot of my stuff (and I'd read a lot of hers) and so we knew each other in that way that you can only know people you've never met on the internet. Her reply caught me a little off guard: "It's sad that two people as beloved all over the world as Ann and Chris are made to feel like they are defective people because of their religious beliefs or lack thereof."

At first, I kind of blew it off. It certainly was a nice thing to say, but obviously it was just hyperbole.

A few days later, though, I was driving home from water aerobics and making a left hand turn at a traffic light and it hit me: she's right. I AM beloved by people all over the world. Not by millions of them, of course, but probably in the dozens. Lots of people think I'm pretty amazing.

Suddenly, I realized that all of those things I'd been telling myself about myself were wrong. I wasn't defective, I wasn't a loser, and I wasn't a failure. In the blink of an eye, I became someone beloved by people all over the world.

Nothing had changed, except that Shannon had told me so.