If you were here, we'd eat chips and salsa together. We'd sit around the new dining room table with the pretty rock inlays, on the dark wood chairs, and we'd eat.

The past seven days have been difficult, with last Friday as the heaviest, highest-pressure point. Poor-performing quarter at work; staff changes; dropped balls. Not enough sleep. Not enough decompression time. Too much train travel.

This happens from time to time. Too many negatives and a switch flips somewhere inside me. There's a threshold that I haven't quite pinpointed (or that moves?), and if I don't have my guard up, life sometimes pops me in the face.

What's interesting is how my response has evolved. Back in the day, when I was freaking out over these new and unpleasant feelings of hopelessness and weighty pressure, I just sort of flailed. I blogged pages and pages of angsty prose. I cried. Called my mamma. Hurt myself. Dug into a book. Wrote pages and pages of angsty fiction that you should pray you never have to read.

As I came out (but separately from coming out?) I learned to put words to feelings. "Anger" was a hard one. I have a temper, and I had kept it so tight under wraps I hadn't realized. "Hurt" was another, since I was so invested in an image of myself as powerful and on top of things. "Anxiety" became my catchall for the waxing, waning, hopeless pressure. To some extent I started understanding where the feelings came from, after admitting their existence. They came from laziness. They came from weirdly incomplete mental models of how things should be, and human-faulty examples of how to live, and from an unfortunately milieu of fakeness that's endemic in the world at large and also in mormonism.

With the new knowledge, I began adding to and taking away from my coping repertoire. I learned to talk with my roommates about serious things. I asked my home teachers to check in and bless me. I stopped hurting myself. I set down my books and screens and walked outside. I dove in to yoga, and responsibility-focused introspection (as opposed to angsty complaints).

I can't say that it's made the bad times not bad. Every three or four months, I still feel for a week or two something drawing off my hope and happiness and trying to crush me. The roommate talks and the outside walks and all the rest, those things bridge the gap between the crushing times, where I feel so alien and disconnected, and the rest of the times. The rest of the times are good, or at least normal. Having faith that those will be the times again--that saves me. Anything I can do to build my faith--that saves me too.

If you were here, we'd go to a nice cafe to sip tea and chat. I've grown quite fond of tea, since Japan.

There's so much going on! Life seems to have begun expanding at a faster rate. Talking today for the first time in a year or so with my dear old BYU friend Kyle, I focused almost exclusively on sharing my happiness. There's always unhappiness, in low moments or stressful or physically painful times. That said, what used to be an ocean of sorrow choking and drowning me has drained down to a shin-high sea. Most of my life is dripping with sunshine and glowing feelings. The wet cold sorrows make me pause and consider before sloshing forward, but there's no doubt about sloshing forward, not even a hesitation.

The past year has seen me more and more involved with and at peace with the LDS church, first attending very little, and then regularly, and then accepting a calling and facilitating both official Mormon events and unofficial but pro-Mormon events. I'm now an "active" member of my congregation by just about any definition. I think about why that is, after the dark black drowning that was adolescence through BYU.

Part of it is simple forgiveness. I want to be clear: I do not trust the leaders of the church at large. They are responsible for an amount of anguish that makes me tremble. Five years ago, that was all I saw, and forgiving it was literally impossible. But with time, age, and study, the pain--great as it was and is--has stopped dominating my life and taken its place in a much larger context. Forgiveness is possible now, and I work at it.

Part of it is a desire to represent 'the gays.'

Part of it is a hunger to be useful, bringing my professional skills to bear on passion projects like FHE activities or the weekly yoga classes I help organize.

And part of it is the people here. I've begun reading Les Miserables again, and something like the first 20 or 50 chapters are about the priest M. Bienvenue, long before Jean Valjean even comes close to entering the picture--such simple, elegant depictions of Christlike humanity! My bishop is like M. Bienvenue, and I bless him for it. My roommates are intelligent, funny, acerbic and sweet. My ward is full of people who want to be better than they are.

The result has been that I've started taking Mormonism back a little bit at a time--judiciously--and testing it in my life to see if it was good. And it's been good. (The judiciousness is critical. If I tried to swallow everything about Mormonism, I would choke.)

I still wouldn't be able to get a temple recommend. For me, for now, that's not a problem. I have a direction. It seems to be leading me deeper into the LDS church, but that's not the main thing; the main thing is that it's leading me to more happiness, and more growth.

And roads wind: the path toward the church might curve away, or it might not. I'll continue moving in the direction of happiness.