Who am I

Who Am I?

I am a 54-year-old middle-aged man.  I am a father.  I am a husband. I am a son. I love to read.  I love to write essays and poetry.  I am very highly self-educated.  Because I am very high functioning on the Autism Spectrum, I have a need to continually gather fresh information.  As I get older I have a much more difficult time recalling the data at a whim. I am very good at taking two facts and creating a third fact that builds on the first two.  This talent used to drive my mother crazy.  She thought I was making fun of her lack of education when I would ask her questions and then create facts and then appeared to know more about the subject than she did.   

I am an unorthodox heretical nonconforming Mormon.  I am highly respected in my faith community because of my vast understanding of church history, and scripture study, and my depth of knowledge of religious matters.  I found about 10 years ago this knowledge left me with no lasting peace or enjoyment in life.   I can remember going outside and cursing god in my unhappiness in this situation.   As I prayed and worked through this faith crisis, I learned to universalize my faith and began to understand how God will redeem all mankind.  I do not have time to describe it in full here, but it is based on the Light Of Christ, The Law of Atonement, and our Temple Ordinances.  I believe God does speak to all and there have been plenty of non-Mormon prophets in the world.  I have spent decades of my life searching out and finding their writings.   Their study has enriched my life.

I am dirty and disorganized at times.  I sometimes have to be reminded to shower on a daily basis.  It has not been a problem in the last few years, but it caused me great difficulty in my early grade school years.  I had a poor experience in grade school.  I was intellectually gifted but socially backward.  I discovered in my forty’s this was most likely caused by my undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome.  Once I took the Aspie test my whole world became clearer.  I began to understand why I think and socialize differently than most of my friends, especially in grade school.

I am a father who was born sterile.  I discovered this after I had been married a couple of years and my wife asked me to take a fertility test.   I have the privilege of adopting two children, a boy, and a girl.  They are the joy of my wife and my life.  I am so grateful for the chance to be a father. I often feel like a failure as a father when I compare myself to others in the ward.  Then I remind myself  I was the best father I knew how to be and if I was not their father they would never have been born.  My adoption made their life possible and they have blessed my life and my wife’s life.

An assignment for Comm 150