Item Detail
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27910
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0
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0
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English
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"A Branch of Honor" Or Fallen Leaf
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Hanover, New Hampshire
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Dartmouth College
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156
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Thesis
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For twenty three years of my life I identified as one singular thing - a descendant of Mormon pioneers. In all that I did, and all that I said, I lived to honor this legacy. Every decision in my life was based on the perception of myself as a Mormon and a pioneer descendant. This was the culture that I grew up in and the identity that I attached my physical and eternal well-being to. I carried the pride of this history, it set me apart and made me special. I also shouldered the burden of honoring their names and the religious foundation that they establish after experiencing so much tribulation.
The distractions that church membership afforded allowed me to ignore certain oddities that manifested, particularly in the way that I dressed, my lackluster attraction to the opposite sex, and my peculiar insistence to be just "one of the boys." In my late teens and early twenties these idiosyncrasies would no longer remain hidden under the cloak of faithful church attendance, and submission to God's will. After battling bouts of depression, I discovered and accepted the upsetting truth that I had homosexual desires. With this revelation my identity took a paradigm shift. What was I, if no longer a Mormon?
This memoir illustrates the minor and major choices of my own, along with those of my family members, which left their impression on my personal character. The sketch of my life examines how an identity can be fashioned, maintained, and transformed to form an independent human being. In essence, it is the story of my family, the love that still binds us, and my own self-discovery to become independent of their inherited expectations. [Author's abstract]