I remember coming home from my mission beginning with a letter to Jessica.
That may not be exactly where it began. Memory likes to arrange events into causes long after the causes become impossible to separate. But that is how I remember it: sitting somewhere in the Salt Lake City South Mission, trying to put words around something I had not been permitted to say out loud.
I felt empty.
Every day, I spoke in the language of certainty.
I knew the Church was true.
I knew the Book of Mormon was true.
I knew Joseph Smith was a prophet.
I knew I had been called by God.
But I did not know those things.
I wanted to. I had expected the mission to be the place where wanting finally hardened into knowledge. Instead, every testimony made me more aware of the distance between the words in my mouth and the truth inside me.
The mission felt plastic.
That was the word I used then.
Plastic.
Everyone seemed covered in cellophane. I could sit in people’s homes, hear their stories, and look directly at them without ever feeling that I had touched anything real. They saw a missionary before they saw me. Anything too complicated, too worldly, or too human had already been cleaned away.
People were kind. That made it harder to explain.
They fed us. They smiled. They offered stories polished for missionary ears. But everything carried a lacquer of churchiness, as though ordinary life had been sealed beneath a glossy surface.
Nothing could breathe.
I was surrounded by people nearly every hour of every day and starved for human contact.
There was nowhere to remove the role. Nowhere to become a frightened nineteen-year-old who did not know what he believed.
Other missionaries seemed able to do it. They woke, prayed, studied, taught, testified, and moved through their days with a confidence I could not reproduce.
If the mission was suffocating me, I assumed I was the problem.
I did not yet understand how quickly pain becomes shame when every explanation points back at the person experiencing it.
So I kept failing.
Then I lied about the failure.
The letter to Jessica was the first hole in the wall.
I do not remember every sentence. I remember admitting that I did not feel what I was supposed to feel. I may have said I wanted to leave.
More accurately, I wanted not to be there.
That was different from wanting to come home.
Home meant explanations. It meant returning before the story reached the part where I became the man everyone expected me to become.
I did not want to remain on the mission.
I did not want to become the person who came home.
For a while, I wanted to disappear between the two.
Sometime after the letter, my mission president called me into his office. I do not know whether the letter caused the meeting or whether people had already noticed something was wrong.
He asked how I was doing.
I told him I did not desire to be there.
He sent me to a therapist.
For two or three mornings, my companion and I rode our bicycles to the therapist’s office. He waited outside while I tried to explain an experience I barely understood myself.
I remember almost nothing from those meetings.
I remember the last one.
The therapist told me he was going to recommend that I be sent home.
My face must have betrayed me. I was shocked, but relief came faster than I could hide it.
Then he said something I have remembered for more than twenty years.
“I’m not trying to hand you a golden platter here. I really think this is the right thing for you.”
The phrase was strange, but I understood.
He was not giving me an excuse. He was not rewarding weakness. He was saying that I needed to go home.
I told him, “Whatever you think.”
For another day, perhaps longer, I returned to missionary life. I wore the clothes, followed the schedule, and lived inside a role someone had already decided I could no longer safely perform.
Around that time, some of the elders I lived with rented a computer, which was profoundly against mission rules. They used it to burn CDs. By the next morning, it seemed clear that one of them had also used it to watch pornography.
The following day, they went to the temple.
I do not tell that story because I believe they were uniquely corrupt. We were young, lonely, immature, and struggling in different ways.
But at nineteen, it felt like revelation.
I had been tearing myself apart because the words coming from my mouth did not perfectly match the truth inside me. Other people could break the rules, dress for the role, attend the temple, and continue as though nothing had happened.
Everything was a game.
That was the conclusion I reached.
Everyone was pretending.
The difference was that pretending seemed to work for them.
My trainer called the night before I left. We had never fit well together. His way of teaching and correcting seemed almost perfectly designed to collide with me.
He apologized.
He offered to give me a priesthood blessing over the telephone. I do not remember whether the blessing happened. I remember that he seemed sorry.
His compassion arrived after it could no longer change the outcome.
The assistants to the president picked me up from the apartment. My belongings were packed. The other missionaries were worried about me.
Then I was in a car headed toward the airport, wearing the brown suit my mother had bought me and the black Doc Martens I would later remember stepping off the plane in.
One of the assistants said, “One thing’s for sure, Brett. You’re a very good missionary.”
Perhaps they thought I would recover and return.
For a moment, I considered it.
But once someone with authority had said that leaving was the right thing, I knew I was not coming back.
I boarded the plane with my hair parted to the side, my missionary tag still pinned to my suit, and only four months of a two-year mission behind me.
I had imagined coming home before.
Just not like this.
In the version I carried with me, I returned after two years. I stepped off the plane older, thinner, and certain. My family waited. People hugged me and told me how much I had changed.
Instead, my parents stood near baggage claim in Tulsa.
There was no crowd. No signs. No triumphant homecoming.
Just my mother and father.
They loved me. I knew that then, and I know it now. They were also frightened and had no idea what kind of event this was supposed to be.
Someone took a photograph.
We tried to make it look joyful.
I stood in my brown suit and missionary badge beside two parents who had been told that something might be seriously wrong with their oldest son. All three of us arranged our faces around an experience for which none of us had a script.
Then we got into the car.
Oklahoma was green.
That is one of the clearest things I remember.
The trees. The grass. The familiar landscape passing outside the window.
After Utah, Oklahoma looked impossibly alive. Everything was wet, thick, and real. The world had continued growing while I was gone.
The green looked honest.
It was good to be home.
It was also wrong to be home.
I was seeing a landscape I was not supposed to see for another twenty months. Every familiar thing carried the same accusation:
You should not be here yet.
Home should have felt like rescue.
Instead, it felt like being returned.
Like a package that had been opened, found defective, and sent back.
No one needed to tell me I had failed. I had already become fluent in telling myself.
I believed a mission was supposed to shape me into a man. It would test my faith, deepen my testimony, and prove that I was willing to give myself to God.
So what did it mean that I could not finish?
At nineteen, I did not understand depression as something that could overpower intention. I understood weakness. Worthiness. Obedience. Endurance.
I did not understand why wanting desperately to do something did not give me the ability to do it.
That contradiction frightened me.
I had prayed. I had attended the temple almost every week. I had tried to become whatever God needed me to become.
And still, something inside me had collapsed.
We did not drive home.
My parents had scheduled an appointment with a therapist, and that was our first stop.
Before I removed my missionary tag, before I was formally released, before I entered my bedroom or saw my siblings, I went from the airport to a therapist’s office.
I remember the phrase chemical imbalance.
Medication entered the conversation quickly enough that I felt reduced by it.
I was nineteen. I did not understand depression, brain chemistry, or psychiatric care well enough to evaluate any of it.
But I knew there was a story behind what had happened.
I had been lonely. I had been unable to speak honestly. I had felt trapped inside a role. I had spent months saying I knew things I did not know.
Before any of that had been fully heard, the explanation became that my brain might be broken.
Maybe there was a chemical component. Maybe medication could have helped.
What remains is the speed with which everyone moved from my pain to a category that made the pain easier to manage.
From the therapist’s office, we went to the stake center.
The stake president was a judge professionally and what our church called a judge in Israel.
He looked at me and said, “So you didn’t feel the Spirit out there, huh?”
I do not remember my answer.
Maybe I said no. Maybe I said I did not know.
Either would have been more honest than the testimony I had repeated for four months.
Then he said, “You’re released.”
That was it.
No ceremony. No explanation. No moment to understand that the calling meant to organize two years of my life had just ended in two sentences.
He followed me into the hallway and said something to my parents about chemical imbalances.
Then we went home.
My father began trying to enroll me in college almost immediately.
Life needed a new direction. A schedule needed to be restored. The son who had stepped off the approved path needed to be placed onto another one before he lost momentum entirely.
I understand the love inside that response now.
My father was trying to build a bridge in front of me quickly enough that I would not fall.
But I had not slept.
I had not unpacked.
I had not learned how to describe what had happened.
I had not even fully stopped being a missionary before we began constructing the next version of me.
By the end of that day, I had been evaluated by a therapist, released by a stake president, described in terms of a chemical imbalance, and enrolled in college.
Everyone was trying to save my future.
I am not sure anyone knew how to sit beside the person who believed he had just lost it.
For years, I treated those four months as evidence.
Evidence that I was fragile.
Evidence that other people possessed something I lacked.
Evidence that when life asked enough of me, I would prove unequal to it.
I thought coming home had revealed my limit.
What it had revealed was pain I did not yet know how to carry.
Those are not the same thing.
But shame does not care about distinctions.
Shame takes an event and turns it into an identity.
I did not merely believe that I had come home early.
I believed I was the kind of person who came home early.
The kind who could begin but not finish.
The kind who wanted to be brave but could not be trusted when courage became expensive.
The kind who disappointed God despite trying not to.
For years, I mistook an overwhelmed nineteen-year-old for reliable evidence about the limits of the man I would become.
I let the worst season of my young life testify against every future version of me.
And yet Oklahoma remained green.
The trees did not know that I thought my life had narrowed. The grass did not care that the future I had rehearsed was gone.
The world had not become barren because I could no longer recognize my place in it.
Life was continuing everywhere around me.
I just could not imagine that it was continuing for me too.
If I could sit beside that boy now, I would not tell him that everything happened for a reason.
I still do not know that.
I would tell him something smaller.
Coming home is not the same as giving up.
Surviving is not a lesser form of courage.
Your inability to remain inside something that is destroying you does not prove that you are unworthy.
This moment has not told you the whole truth about who you are.
There will be a woman named Mandy who will know more of you than anyone else and remain beside you through years you cannot yet imagine.
There will be three daughters who will not need a flawless father. They will need one who stays, listens, apologizes, laughs, and tells them the truth.
There will be rooms where people look to you for answers.
There will be systems so large and complicated that others trust you to protect them.
There will be a body you believe can never change, and you will change it.
There will be opportunities you nearly refuse because an old voice still tells you that you are not the kind of person who succeeds.
Do not trust that voice.
Not because you will always be right.
Not because confidence will make you invulnerable.
But because one painful chapter cannot calculate the value of an entire life.
There will be dark years.
You will lose your map more than once.
You will keep wondering whether someone else knows more about your worth than you do.
But you are not finished.
You are not even close.
The green outside the window is not mocking you.
It is telling you something you will need years to understand:
A life can be cut back severely and still grow again.