Growing Up Mormon Pt1

Weird shit can get in your head when you grow up mormon. Like, fellow x-mormons know about the usual stuff. The anti-coffee, the temple, how culty it can be, etc. Hell I occasionally watch a woman on youtube that talks about this whole subject in-depth. I'm certainly not the first to talk on this. It's been roughly a decade since I left, and there's been a lot of unlearning.

What I wanna talk about is the little ways that stuff stuck to me, and ways I didn't even realize I was stifled. In one way, the limitation was clear, but it was almost a point of pride to work around it.

One such way is modesty. Mormons are real big on modesty. No tank tops, skirts have to be below your knees, don't show cleavage, etc. It negatively effects those that grew up percieved as girls. While I've long grown out of that percieved need to be modest, and wear whatever the fuck I want, I noticed this stuff lowkey carries over in my character design process. I defaulted to more coverage on my characters. Nothing shorter than a t-shirt. It stifled my creative process in ways I didn't even realize. I'm kind of impressed with the ways I managed to work around these limitations in my old art. I remember designing lovely dresses that still upheld those values. But it was still a limitation that I didn't put on myself.

Limitations in art can be fun when you decide to do it yourself. A limited palette, only using the lasso tool, even trying to draw with your non-dominant hand can be an engaging challenge. But when it's something that's been ingrained into you from a young age? That's different. I was constrained in the shapes I could pull off, how much I could show. The only time I felt comfortable drawing the nude form was for anatomy practice, which I enjoyed doing.

The human body is just that. Your body. I now hold a firm belief that your body is a tample, but not to god. A temple is usually a house of god, but this temple is for you. Your house. Alter and decorate it however you want. Nobody should stop you. Wear that slutty outfit if you want to. Don't shave if you're not feeling it. What are they gonna do? Call the HOA?

I label this as "Part One" because god knows I'll come back to this subject. I figured I'd start with something lighter in content, and continue on from there. Plus, this particular subject was on my mind after sifting through some old art of mine. I just wanted to grease the gears of blogging again. It's been a while, and I miss how fun it was.

I'm late for Blaugust again, and probably won't really participate. But I want to try and at least post a little this month. My writing muscles have been a bit rusty since I took a hiatus on in-character diaries for my TTRPG characters. Maybe this'll get me back into it? Who knows? I make no promises, because weirdly saying I'll do something can make me averse to doing the thing; at least when it's something creative.