Little Hooks

In Sylvia Plath’s “Tulips,” the poet describes a hospital bed, bright red flowers, and those little smiling hooks that tether her to what Shakespeare once called “this mortal coil.” Plath craved freedom from consciousness—a total erasure that would relieve her of every burden. Only near the end, when the “redness” of life offered her a way back, did she reclaim her sense of identity.

Indeed, the struggle for life remains unavoidably physical: each breath we draw demands measurable force, every swell and collapse of our lungs an act of labor. In the starkest sense, Work = Force × Distance; but in a more existential sense, I never appreciated how much force was needed to stay “alive”—whether inside or outside of Mormonism—until I weighed the implications of believing in nothing at all.

My naïve, almost childlike approach to faith taught me that anything erasable by truth should indeed be erased. Yet I failed to foresee how my own scalpel—honed by years of scrutiny—could become so sharp that it ended up slicing the very chest of my identity. Every new revelation felt like regression, a backward journey through each Piagetian developmental stage. Now, at twenty-seven, a medical student—and never less certain of my path—I can only smile sheepishly when my closest friends and my therapist paradoxically call that “progress.”

Mormonism stands both apart from Christianity and yet remains a subset of it. You cannot fully grasp Mormonism outside a Christian framework, much to the displeasure of some Christians who see Mormonism’s bolder claims as an uncanny imitation—a sort of “fan fiction” of Christianity. But Mormonism also tries to reify the God of the Old and New Testaments in a distinctly American context, tying nineteenth-century frontiers and twenty-first-century corporate culture into one theological package. This makes it relatively simple to debunk using archaeological gaps—like the supposed existence of pre-Columbian horses or Joseph Smith’s questionable “Egyptian” translations. Yet because Mormonism is built on a Christian bedrock, it’s easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater. As Christianity is woven into the American experience for a child raised in a devout family, so too does Mormonism integrate many useful, adaptive beliefs.

When I began deconstructing Mormonism, I was eager to discard the faith’s unique trappings—those claims of ancient compasses, pre-Columbian horses, and imaginary Egyptian languages. But that same critical thinking quickly turned on cherished Christian ideas that also clashed with science: the literal flood, a historical Adam and Eve, the denial of evolution. As soon as I used reason to dismantle Mormon apologetics, I found Christian apologetics just as vulnerable. Occam’s razor was too sharp, slicing even into philosophical dilemmas like free will and how much genetics predestine our every choice. I had, in essence, detonated a black hole beneath myself in the name of truth. That Christianity collapsed so swiftly proved how much it and Mormonism share in their underlying structures—perhaps part of why many Christians react so strongly to Mormonism in the first place.

And so I return to Plath’s tulips—those red blossoms reminding us that life, messy and mortal, can still call us back to ourselves. It is the greatest irony that in trimming away illusions, we sometimes cut the very ground beneath our feet. Yet it is also an awakening: if we can stand in that unsettled space—knowing we’ve let go of comforting myths—we might discover that living is still possible, that purpose can be found or created, and that the hooks anchoring us to existence can be gentler than we once thought. I hope they are.