Last week, ALSSI released a “Ragecast Potpourri” episode covering a few recent headlines and explored some questions raised by recent changes. For fun, we challenged you all to share your best rage haiku with us. As always, we were BLOWN AWAY with the responses and just had to compile all the amazing poems in one place. This issue includes some of the haiku that were submitted on Facebook, Instagram and Substack. They have been grouped based on a loose theme to help fully absorb the impact of communal voices coming together to speak on one topic.
Haiku on The Nature of God
“The Lord loves effort!”
I’m confused because I thought
The Lord would love me.
Candice Clark Stevens
God was never small
only what you built around
I found Them outside
Kim G Bohne Landeen
The church claims Jesus.
Jesus claims no church on earth.
Who do they follow?
Valerie Atkinson
Is God asking us
To reach higher than a church
To really know Him?
Erin O’Dell Garrard
Please hear my prayers
I want answers to suff’ring
Not to find car keys
_louise_e
Do not blame Jesus,
Grasping tightly to dead things
And never growing
kjkj6363
Haiku on The Divine Feminine
I’ve needed so long
to know Her I can’t just stop
reaching for Her now
Mara Haslam
Dear Heav’nly Mother,
The boys are gaslighting us.
They need a time out.
Carol Colvin
I know no Goddess
Who claims my autonomy.
This reveals their lies.
Hannah H
“We need our Mother”
Jingle jangle go the keys
“You have a FATHER”
Shelli.Elle
Behind these shut doors,
I speak to Her as I please,
You can’t stop my prayers.
times.of.faith
Haiku on Purity Culture
“Modesty?” -humbug
avert your eyes if my thighs
offend your male gaze
Kajsa Kaufusi
Holy cloth clings tight
Texas sun turns faith to fire
I choose bare skin now
Julia Baldwin
Purity Culture
The seed of shame incarnate
Don’t yoke us with it.
Pat Catherall
They see us simply
Jezebels and Gilgolos
Unworthy of trust
Lisa Fluckiger
Storms rage in our hearts
One garment wedgie away
Mormon laundry sucks
Heidi C.
“Women are equal”
But men give us approval
On our worthiness
Laynie.markisich
You’d approach our girls
If a Prophet said to prey.
Blind trust is your God.
Annika Evelyn
Trans friends chaperoned
Sexual predators not
I’m out of here, Bye!
Sarah Porter Otter
Temple wedding day
Sorry you can’t come in
You did not comply
Kyra Dunshee
Purity, shame, guilt.
We cast our pearls before swine.
Not for God: for men.
Hannah H
Haiku on The Patriarchy
You win a crouton!
Oh, and YOU win a crouton!
Why aren’t you grateful?
Rebecca Bigelow
“Trust us, don’t murmur.”
Say, “All is well in Zion.”
Just bow and say, “Yes.”
Jessica Mitchell
For Eve’s transgression:
All women shall be punished
Ruled over by men
Nicole Slater
“Defend the BRETHREN.”
“What about the SISTREN, Jim?!”
Eyes flash. Heresy.
Kajsa Kaufusi
I am told to not
Get ahead of the brethren
But they do not move
Amy Sego Shumway
Leaders LOVE women
But we must scream to be heard
Silenced is not loved
Elizabeth Ludwig
A sister speaks up
Shhhh! Stop. The men are speaking.
We love the sisters!
Madwoman_c
“You don’t understand”
They tell me when I speak up.
They don’t understand
Elisabethbingham1
Trapped in spirit pris’n
Stunted in a male domain.
No progression here.
Mama_gale
By their fruits ye shall
Know them. Why are so many
Fruits then so rotten?
Eleanor Clark
“Stay off the damn stand”
“Not on the front row, either”
“Go make me donuts!”
Carol Colvin
Dear Patriarchy,
We have a Heavenly Mother
and no women leaders?
Nicci Cameron Lovell
Truth should not fear light
Questions were never the sin
Silence was the cost
Erica N.
Old men lead the way.
What will we do without them?
Shout hallelujah!
Pat Cathall
Waiting and hoping
Maybe things are improving?
Then disappointment
Whitney Webster Pack
Teach what men preach.
Personal revelation?
Keep it to yourself
Allison.deibel
I am not enough
To pass bread to the people
But twelve year olds can
Aerynnec
I am the witness!
But then a man from the back
Does my job for me
Ajsjonm4
Haiku on Feminism
“Feminist” was taught
To me as a bad word. Oops.
I’m one, anyway.
Kaylee.a.skinner
Perimenopause
Meets ongoing faith crisis
No wonder they’re scared
Jilleneladle
I am not enough?
I throw away the men’s words.
I find I am strong.
cristallharper
They buried our names—
wild seeds under heavy stone.
Still we rose up green.
Melanee Green Evans
I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen
Please, tell me again
what I can and cannot do.
I know my power.
Annisija Wallin Hunter
You shudder at my
“wokeness”, yet holy words call:
Awake and arise
Sarah Hale
Women, we breathe life
Heart listeners-who lead
With healing and hope.
Ananda Isaken
Coercive marriage
Taught to absorb all the harm
Rage feels like freedom
Unschmuck
Please less “explaining”
Just don’t care much anymore
Your view from up here
Christiehp
Notice me I said
I did everything right here
I want to be seen
Heathermimib
Haiku on Spiritual Autonomy
Words are powerful.
Screaming out in defiance.
No, no, no, no, NO!
Jessica Mitchell
Lie to me today
To gaslight me tomorrow
Watch me walk away
Stephanie G.
I don’t like meetings.
“Where will you go?” they ask
I go home and nap.
Su_lott
Not Naive, not blind.
Eyes clear, arms weak, willing heart.
I plant my feet here.
The.vision.beautiful
Smile, serve, and be still.
Questions bloom like contraband.
I walked out in bloom.
Becky Sanchez
Foundation anew,
I choose my own bricks this time:
Spiritual freedom!
Andrea Meecham Neahusan
I must leave to love
The tender heart who receives
Careless musket fire
Jenny Garrard
I bent till I broke
now I rise without your name
whole, and not afraid
Kim G Bohne Landeen
Don’t rush connection
Covenant path instruction
Can not satisfy
Brooke
I asked honest things
They called it a slippery slope
Yep. Slid on out
Erica N.
We take our lives back
Joyful, adventurous, and
Our own to direct
Lisa Fluckiger
I see the forest
And the trees. I know
I am not alone
Kcampbella
Say More: At Last She Writes It is thrilled to continue a series called, “Faith in Focus: ADHD and the Mormon Mind,” by Brittney Walker.
This series explores how ADHD shapes the faith experience for women raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from the early moralization of difference, to the exhaustion of trying to measure up, to the courage of rebuilding identity after leaving. Each essay stands alone but together they trace the arc from misunderstanding to self-understanding.
The goal isn’t to critique the church, but to name what so many women feel but can’t articulate: that our struggles aren’t spiritual defects. They are neurological differences met with impossible expectations.
The following essay, “When Faith Loses Focus: For every woman whose questions were treated as a spiritual problem” is the third of the series. The next of the installments will be included each month.
When Faith Loses Focus: For every woman whose questions were treated as a spiritual problem
by Brittney Walker
The night my brother came out to me, I got off the phone
and went straight to my knees.
I had questions and I knew where I’d been taught to take them.
I prayed for a long time. And what I felt was peace. Clearly, unmistakably, the way I had been taught to recognize revelation. Not the complicated kind. The simple kind. My brother was right just as he was. He didn’t need fixing.
I stood up from that prayer believing something true.
And then my brain, the one that has never once in its life left a loose thread alone, started pulling.
The thread you cannot stop pulling
If my brother was right, and the feeling was real, then the disconnect was somewhere else.
So I went looking for it.
I didn’t choose to go looking. I want to be clear about that. The search wasn’t an act of rebellion or spiritual carelessness. It was compulsion. My brain identified a problem it could not resolve and it went to work on it the way it always had—relentlessly, around the clock, whether I invited it to or not.
In the middle of sacrament meeting. At 2 a.m. On the drive to pick up kids from school. The questions kept arriving.
If the feeling was right, was the teaching wrong? If the teaching was wrong, who taught it? If he taught it, was he—the prophet—wrong? And if he could be wrong about this, what else? And if that, then what about …
The dominoes fell all the way down.
To the prophet. Then further. Then to God.
And then there was nothing left to land on.
What they called it
There is a word the Church uses for what I was experiencing: doubt. Sometimes faithlessness. The cure prescribed is almost always the same: pray more, study more, serve more, trust more. Do not let your intellect get ahead of your faith. So I did.
What no one told me was that I have a brain with a specific, documented, neurological inability to leave a question unresolved.
I have ADHD. I also have scrupulosity, an anxiety pattern that hijacks the religious framework and turns it into an engine of obsessive moral accounting. My brain doesn’t just notice inconsistency. It cannot rest until inconsistency is resolved. It needs certainty the way other people need sleep.
Put that brain inside a faith system that asks you to hold unanswered questions peacefully, to sit with not-knowing, to “doubt your doubts,” and you don’t get a crisis of faith.
You get a machine that cannot stop running.
I wasn’t falling away from God. My brain was doing exactly what it was built to do. It was following the evidence. It was refusing to look away. It was doing, in the language of faith, what it had always done in every other area of my life: working the problem until it either resolved or broke open entirely.
That’s not weakness. That’s not wickedness.
That is an ADHD brain, functioning precisely as designed, inside a system that had no category for it.
The year of falling
What followed was a solid year of grief.
The only image I have ever found that fits is this: falling through space. A bottomless black hole. Nothing to grab onto. Nowhere to land.
I had built my identity inside this structure. My calendar, my community, my sense of what I was for—all of it organized around something that was coming apart faster than I could process. And the falling felt endless because there was no floor. Every answer I found opened into another question. Every certainty I tested failed.
I want to say something to the women who are in that falling right now, or who have been, or who are watching someone they love go through it:
The falling was not a punishment. It was not evidence that I had been faithless or careless or spiritually reckless.
It was what happens when a brain built for pattern recognition finally finds a pattern it cannot reconcile.
The grief was real. The loss was real. I am not going to tell you it wasn’t.
But the falling was not my fault.
What the Church called sin
Here is what I have come to understand, years out from that night:
Every trait that made my deconstruction feel so total, so unstoppable, so consuming—the relentless question-following, the inability to unknow something once I knew it, the need for coherence, the refusal to hold contradiction in peaceful suspension—those are not spiritual defects.
They are ADHD.
The same brain that got sent into the hall for asking too many questions in Primary. The same brain that couldn’t stop mentally arguing with myself over what was said in sacrament meeting. The same brain that needed the pieces to fit, always, desperately, at the cost of everything.
That brain didn’t destroy my faith.
It followed my faith all the way to the edges and kept going when the edges ran out.
There is a version of my story the Church would tell where I was deceived, or weak, or led astray, or just didn’t try hard enough. In that version, the problem was always me.
But here is the version I know to be true:
I went to my knees the night my brother came out to me. I sought God in the way I had been taught. I received an answer that felt true and real and certain. And then my brain—my beautiful, relentless, impossible, truth-seeking brain—refused to stop at the edge of what that answer meant.
That is not a failure of faith.
That is faith, taken seriously by a mind that could not do it any other way.
What I wish someone had said
Your questions were not a spiritual problem.
Your inability to sit with uncertainty was not a character flaw.
Your brain’s relentless need for coherence was not the enemy of your faith.
It was just a mind doing what minds like ours do: following every thread, refusing to look away, insisting that the truth, whatever it turned out to be, was worth finding.
The Church didn’t have a category for that kind of mind.
But that doesn’t mean the mind was wrong.
Contributor
Brittney Walker
I am an ADHD coach and writer living in Arizona with my husband and a lively household including six sons, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson. I spent many years trying to be reverent, organized, and less distracting, and now I write about executive function, faith, deconstruction, and rebuilding identity with a different kind of brain. My work explores neurodivergence, belonging, and the slow process of learning to trust yourself. You can find more of my writing at exmoadhdcoach.substack.com
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