Back when I was a kid, my dad used to tell me that on "Judgment Day," everyone who ever lived was going to come together in a giant movie theater, and one by one, everyone's entire life from start to finish would be played on the big screen for all to see.

He said that EVERYTHING we ever did in life would then be revealed to everyone. (All the good things we ever did, all the bad things we ever did, and everything in between.)

But what scared me most about this scenario as a kid was actually the "everything in between" part.

I mean, I had never committed any of the major sins like murder, adultery, or blasphemy, and I went to church on Sundays and paid my tithing like I was supposed to. But there were a lot of things that I did on a daily basis that I would be embarrassed to do in front of other people. (Much less in front of everyone who ever lived!)

So during my childhood, whenever I would use the bathroom, change my clothes, or bathe, I would turn the lights off and do them in the dark. That way, when my life was shown on "Judgment Day," everyone wouldn't be able to see me naked and, well, "judge" me.

Because of this belief, I developed such a bad phobia of people seeing me naked, that when my grandpa had to be moved into an assisted living facility due to his health getting so bad that he could no longer use the bathroom, change his clothes, or bathe without having someone there to help him, I instantly became the "health nut" in my family because of how paranoid I was of ending up like that someday!

My parents named me "Bow", and belive it or not, I had a twin brother who they actually named "Arrow", but he died shortly after we were born.

They say that nobody can remember before they were born, but whenever I find myself in a situation where I have to be alone with someone in a small space and there is awkward silence (like when you are with a stranger in an elevator) I feel like I can remember the nine months of awkward silence that I endured while sharing a womb with someone and neither of us was able to say anything.

I was raised by parents who were deeply religious (they were Mormons to be specific) and they went out of their way to shelter me from a lot of things during my childhood.

We had a TV when I was a kid, but we only had the PBS channel, so the only TV shows I ever saw as a kid were family-friendly ones like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.

We also owned a small library of movies on VHS tapes, but the only movies that were allowed in our house were G-rated ones like Disney movies.

And before I could actually watch a movie, my parents would watch it by themselves first, and if there was anything even remotely sexual or vulgar in it, they would censor it by setting up two VCRs and putting the original film in one VCR and a blank tape in the other, and then they would make an edited copy with all of the "bad parts" that they didn't want me to see left out, and they would then burn the original film.

We lived on a farm that was way out in the country, where neighbors lived miles apart from each other, and other than going to church on Sundays, we almost never left the farm. (My dad was good at building and fixing things, my mom was good at cooking and sewing, and we grew most of our own food.)

My parents also homeschooled me because they didn't agree with a lot of the things taught in public schools, and because they worried that non-Mormon kids would have a bad influence on me.

So I didn't have any friends growing up, but I actually loved growing up the way that I did! Our property had over 1,000 acres of forests that I was free to explore, and I was too scared to meet new people anyway, so I was happy to spend my childhood deep in nature and isolated from strangers, and I imagined that I would stay on the farm for the rest of my life.

My parents even said that they named me Bow because they wanted me to grow up to be a great hunter and to stay on the farm once I became an adult so that I could carry on the family tradition of living like our Mormon pilgrim ancestors did, and be so self-sufficient that I would never even have to leave the farm and go out into society for anything, and I honestly couldn't imagine a better future than that.

One day a mysterious black car started driving up our driveway.

Our house was on a big hill and our driveway was eight miles long, and it was an unpaved dirt road full of holes and dangerous steep hills. So, it was extremely rare that someone would just show up at our house unexpectedly.

It would always terrify me to see an unknown car slowly coming up our long and treacherous driveway because anyone who would dare to drive up it would almost have to be a crazy person!

And because we were living so deep in the middle of nowhere, it would take the police at least an hour just to get to our house if we ever had to call them, and my dad would actually get his shotgun whenever we heard the sound of a car coming up our driveway just to be on the safe side.

So an unknown car coming up our driveway was the ultimate "stranger danger" for me as a kid!

As the unknown car got closer, I ran and hid in the house while my parents went outside to see who it was and what they wanted, and I watched through the window as two men and one woman, all wearing business suits, got out of the car and informed my parents that they could no longer homeschool me.

I remember that the woman seemed really upset at my parents, and that she kept telling them that the way I was being raised was "child abuse", and she asked them how they expected me to ever be able to face the real world someday as an adult if they kept me out of it for my entire childhood.

The strangers eventually got back in their car and left, but before they did, they gave my parents a court order stating that I had to start going to school the following Monday and that if I didn't show up, my parents would both be arrested and they would lose custody of me!

So I had no choice but to start going to school, and because I was already 15 years old, they started me as a freshman in High School.

For my first day of school, my mom suggested that I wear my church clothes to make a really good first impression on all my new classmates. I thought it was a great idea, so I put on some black dress pants, a white dress shirt, and a black tie, and then I walked to the end of the driveway and waited for the school bus.

Because I had never been to school before (except "Sunday school") I imagined that all the other kids at school would be dressed up like that as well. But once the bus came and I got on it, I immediately noticed that all the other kids on the bus were just wearing T-shirts and blue jeans, and they were all staring at me like I was from another planet.

I felt so embarrassed and nervous that I didn't dare to make eye contact with anyone, and I just looked for a quiet place to sit down.

The seats on the bus were built so that two kids could sit in each seat, and all of the seats already had at least one kid in them except for one. So I sat in the one empty seat and just looked out the window while trying to ignore the feeling that everyone was looking at me and judging me.

About 10 minutes later, the bus made another stop, and a big teenage boy who was wearing a football jersey got on the bus and sat in the seat with me.

I nervously smiled and said hello to him, and luckily, he smiled and said hello back to me. (Although, when he smiled, he looked like he was struggling not to laugh about the way I was dressed.)

Because he was bigger than everyone else on the bus, I thought to myself that it would be really smart to have him as a friend, because nobody would want to be mean to me if they knew he liked me. So I tried to think of a way to strike up a friendly conversation with him...

I noticed that he had a book in his hand, so I pointed at it and casually asked him what book it was, and he told me that it was just a book that he had to read and do a book report on about the Native American Indians. Then he handed me the book so I could look at it.

The cover of the book featured a drawing of some Indians sitting in a circle around a campfire, and the first thing I noticed was that the Indians weren't wearing any shirts. (Which technically wasn't immoral because all of the Indians in the picture were males.) But because the Indians all had long hair (which I had always been told that only women were allowed to have) and because they were also wearing loincloths (which looked just like skirts to me) I thought that they might be women with no shirts on!

My eyes almost bulged out of my head, and I was so shocked by what I was looking at that my heart started pounding out of control, and I started shaking wildly and wasn't sure if I should look away or give into the devil's temptation and keep looking...

The big kid noticed that something was wrong, so he asked me, "Are you OK Man?" and I pointed at the drawing of the Indians and nervously whispered to him, "Are those girls?"

He then burst out laughing and turned to the kids sitting behind us, held up the book and said, "Hey, this new kid saw this book cover and was like, 'Oh my God, are those topless girls?'" and everyone started laughing.

Then a boy who was sitting behind us leaned his head over the seat to look at me, and he said, "Hey man, can I ask you a serious question?" So I said, "Yes" and he asked me, "Have you ever seen a pair of boobs before?" and because of my incredibly wholesome upbringing, I had never even heard the word "boobs" before, so I got really confused and asked him, "What are those?" which made everyone burst out laughing even harder!

By the time we got to school, everyone on the bus had laughed about the incident (including the old man who was driving the bus) and by the end of my first day of school, everyone at school was referring to me as "The New Virgin."

When I went to church the following Sunday, the president of my church ("Brother Smith") came up to me after church and said, "So I hear that you are going to a public school now." and then he asked me, "How do you like it so far?"

I put on a fake smile and just told him, "It's OK." But I guess that it was obvious to him that I didn't mean it, because he put his hands on his hips, frowned, and said, "Tell me the truth."

I really believed back then that Brother Smith had the power to read minds because he was the president of the church, and unlike the president of the United States (who gets elected by human voters), the president of the Mormon church was supposedly chosen by God himself.

The president of the church is also in constant communication with God because he needs God's advice and approval before making any important decisions about the church, so I felt that it was impossible to keep secrets from Brother Smith since he was always talking to God and since God knew everything. So I confessed to him that I was actually having a lot of difficulties at school.

I told him that even though there were almost 1,000 kids at my school, I was the only Mormon there, and then I told him about how the other kids at school were making fun of me because I was still a virgin.

Brother Smith seemed very concerned about what I was telling him, and he said that he wanted to have a meeting with me in his office the following Sunday after church.

Normally, whenever Brother Smith wanted to have a meeting with me in his office, it was because he wanted to talk to me about going on a mission.

Once a Mormon boy became an adult, he was expected to devote two years of his life to the Lord by serving as a missionary for the church.

When you become a Mormon missionary, the church will send you to a location of their choosing (possibly even to a foreign country), and for the next two years, your job will be to go around knocking on doors and trying to convert non-Mormons into Mormons.

Due to all of the social phobias that I had, I didn't want to go on a mission. But Brother Smith had been putting an unbelievable amount of pressure on me to do it.

Because I had never been to school before and was so used to working on the farm from sunrise to sunset, it was difficult for me to sit still for several hours a day at school.

The confinement of the classroom made me so fidgety that I started taking a pencil and scribbling on paper during class just to release some of the pent-up energy that I had. But these mindless scribbles eventually evolved into crude faces, and then into highly detailed, bizarre art, and I found that I enjoyed drawing so much that I started doing it any chance I could at school.

For example, one time in history class we had to take a test about World War II, and when the teacher passed out the test papers, I left all of the answers blank and simply turned the test paper over to the blank side, and then I drew a picture of a bunch of senile old people at Walmart opening boxes of soap, and I called this art piece, "Old People Opening Boxes Of Soap Just To See If There Is Really Soap In Them."

I had to take a reading and writing course at school, and I found that I enjoyed writing just as much as I enjoyed drawing, and below are three short stories that I wrote for school way back when I was a teenager...

I am very easily startled, and anyone who knows me knows that if they want to approach me they have to do it very carefully, because I am so introverted that the slightest external disturbance (such as a knock at the door or a tap on the shoulder) when I am in the middle of daydreaming or talking to myself can cause me to react the same way that a normal person would react if they got a small electrical shock!

And because of how easy it was to scare me, kids would get a big kick out of scaring me at school.

Before I started going to school, I had always been told that God created the Earth about 6,000 years ago and that the dinosaurs were mythical creatures that never actually existed.

But once I started taking science class at school, I found out that there were gigantic dinosaur skeletons in museums all around the world. (Which seemed to prove that the dinosaurs did exist!) And according to my science teacher, these dinosaur bones were estimated to be MILLIONS of years old!

So I got really confused and told Brother Smith at church about the dinosaur bones that I was learning about in science class, and he assured me that they were fake. And when I told him that I saw some actual pictures of dinosaur bones in my science book, he said that when God created the Earth, he put fake dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith in him.

I was extremely gullible back then, but even I wanted to cringe when he said that to me because of how ridiculous it sounded.

But the thought that the church might not be true and that God might not even exist was way too scary for me at the time. So I tried to come up with a way to make the idea of God putting fake dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith in him sound less ridiculous, and I came up with the following scientific theory about the dinosaurs...

As I got more and more into art, I borrowed my mom's sewing kit and started making strange T-shirts, and one day, I showed up to school wearing a homemade shirt that said, "I DON'T BELIEVE IN MILK" on the back.

I had hoped that this shirt would get a lot of strange looks, but I had no idea that it would get the kind of attention that it did.

This shirt ended up confusing people so much that I actually got called to the principal's office about it, and I was told that I had to turn it inside out because one of the teachers (an old lady named Mrs. Patterson who was my social studies teacher and who was deeply religious) actually got scared and thought that the shirt might be some kind of satanic message!

I couldn't believe that someone would actually think that, and it wasn't until someone accused something that I personally made of being satanic that I realized how often things that other people made would get accused of being satanic at church.

Brother Smith would often warn me and the other young boys at church about satanic music like Metallica, satanic books like Harry Potter, and satanic movies like Back to the Future. And because I had never actually heard, read, or watched any of these things before (and wasn't allowed to for that matter) combined with the fact that Brother Smith was the president of the church, I had always just taken whatever he said as the gospel truth and believed that all of these things were "satanic".

But this incident made me think that perhaps Brother Smith had never actually heard, read, or watched any of the music, books, or movies that he claimed were satanic either. And that maybe people can have an irrational fear of anything that they don't understand. (Or anything that might contradict their religious beliefs.)

Shortly after this incident, I started to learn about something in science class called "evolution" which seemed to contradict so much of what the church was teaching and preaching that as soon as I got home from school, I tried to look up the word "evolution" in our family home dictionary to learn more about it. But the page that it would have been on was mysteriously missing (which meant that my parents likely tore it out because they didn't want me to know about evolution).

At that point, I started to realize that a lot of information had been hidden from me my whole life, and that it was because it contradicted the church. And instead of just feeling fearful of things that contradicted the church, I started to feel a bit curious about them as well.

I ended up failing my first year of public schooling, and because I was acting so weird at school, the principal eventually called my house and told my parents that I was showing the symptoms of A.D.D. (Attention Deficit Disorder) and he said that I couldn't return to school until I saw a doctor about it.

So my parents took me to go see a doctor, and without even doing any tests on me (and without even looking at me) the doctor just walked in the room while looking down at his clipboard and writing on it as he said, "So I hear that you're having trouble paying attention at school," and before I could even respond to him, he looked up at my parents instead of me, handed them a prescription for a drug called Ritalin, and he told them that it should fix my problem.

But when we picked up my prescription at the drug store, there was a long list of scary side effects listed on the bottle like frequent urination, loose stools, and vomiting, and my mind became flooded with embarrassing scenarios that could happen to me at school if I took the drug. So whenever my parents would tell me that it was time for me to take the pill, I would secretly hide it under my tongue and spit it back out as soon as they weren't looking, and I never did take it.

There was also a boy at my school named Brandon who started his own heavy metal band and played the drums. He had wild spiky hair and would always wear black shirts with the names of heavy metal bands that he liked on them. And during classes, he would often have two pencils in his hands and be air drumming and headbanging instead of paying attention to the teachers.

Brandon's parents also got a phone call from the principal saying that their son was showing the symptoms of A.D.D., and he also ended up with a prescription for Ritalin. And within a week of taking it, he actually started to calm down and sit still in class.

After taking Ritalin for a month, Brandon started combing his spiky hair down and stopped wearing heavy black metal T-shirts. And a few weeks later he actually stopped playing the drums and started telling everyone that his heavy metal drumming days were just an embarrassing "goth phase" that he went through.

Whenever the principal would see the "new and improved" version of Brandon, he would put his arm around him and say that he was proud of him. And it made me feel grateful that I never took the drug, because I could tell that what the principal was really proud of was the fact that he was able to tame a wild beast!

For someone like Brandon, being forced to sit still and listen to boring lectures for several hours a day at school instead of being able to play the drums and create the high-energy music that he loved was like taking a wild animal out of the jungle and forcing it to live in a small cage.

And not only was the restless behavior that Brandon had been exhibiting in class similar to the restless behavior that wild animals exhibit when they are forced to live in cages, but the sedation that Brandon was now exhibiting was like the sedation that wild animals exhibit after getting shot with a tranquilizer.

I later found out that my school was actually getting a big bonus each year for each student they put on Ritalin, and it became obvious that the principal was determined to make an example of me like he did with Brandon.

He told me that he was going to see to it personally that I graduated from high school and went to college, and he even banned me from drawing during class and forced me to start doing all of my assignments.

So I started studying and my grades started to improve, but school stopped being fun for me, and I looked around and realized that a lot of kids start school as promising young artists, but that most of them have their artistic side systematically squeezed out of them by the time they graduate, and I just wanted to get through my forced years of schooling with my inner child still intact.

Once I started going to school, I was exposed to all of the bad words that my parents did such a good job of keeping me from hearing up until that point. And when I looked these bad words up in a dictionary to find out what they meant, I laughed and thought that swearing was the funniest thing ever!

One of the reasons that people use swear words is for shock value, and because of how strictly I was raised, swear words had about 100 times more shock value to me than they did to kids who grew up hearing their own parents use language like that regularly.

And because I had been raised to believe in things based on faith alone and had been taught not to question things, I tended to take things a lot more literally than other people due to not developing enough skepticism in my early youth to understand things like sarcasm.

For example, when someone would say something sarcastic to me like, "Hey, that's a nice shirt you're wearing, buddy," when there was a big mustard stain on it, I would take it as a sincere compliment and would then wonder why everyone would laugh when I said, "Thank you."

And if I overheard someone say a sarcastic joke like, "It's so cold outside that I saw a bear wearing a jacket," I would have just enough critical thinking in me to think that maybe the person was drunk or on drugs at the time, and maybe that's why they saw a bear wearing a jacket.

So instead of understanding that swear words were just used to help express strong emotions, I would think about the actual dictionary definitions of these words. And if you look up the actual dictionary definitions of most swear words, I think that you'll agree that it really makes no sense to shout one of these words when you stub your toe or can't find your keys.

So for me personally, swear words were so shocking and so nonsensical that I couldn't help but want to laugh whenever I would hear kids at school say them!

But as funny as it was to me to hear people swearing at school, I worried that someday I would be with my deeply religious parents in public and someone would start swearing like that in front of us. (And I knew that it would be the most embarrassing thing ever if that ever happened!)

I'm not racist, but... a lot of my family members are. (Especially my older relatives.)

I think this is because everyone in my family is a Mormon and because the Mormon church used to preach that black people were the descendants of Cain.

Fortunately, my parents didn't hate black people. (But it was painfully obvious at times that they were scared of them.)

We lived way out in the country where the population was 100% white, so the only time I ever saw black people in real life as a kid was in the rare times when my parents and I would go to visit my grandparents who lived in the city where the population was a bit more diverse.

I never participated in "Gym Class" because it was mandatory that everyone went into the locker room and changed into gym shorts or sweat pants at the beginning of class, and I was simply too uncomfortable to take my pants off in front of anyone.

So I always got a 0% in gym class and the gym teacher (Mr. Ashley) would make me sit in the bleachers and watch all of the other kids play.

I actually enjoyed gym class though and would laugh a lot because Mr. Ashley was a really old man, who looked and sounded startlingly like Tom Anderson from the cartoon Beavis and Butt-Head. Mr. Ashley had a short fuse and would cuss a lot, and I thought it was funny how angry he would get over a "game". (Which by definition is supposed to be fun.)

He would frequently get so mad that he would throw down his clip board or kick over a trash can and look like he was going to have a heart attack just because one of the kids made a bad play.

One of the boys in class lived next door to Mr. Ashley and said that the police would actually get called to Mr. Ashley's house during Ohio State football games because he would literally start tearing up his own house whenever Ohio State was losing!

Mr. Ashley was really patriotic and would make everyone stand up and recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of class, and he would often start to tear up and cry during the pledge as he proudly looked up at the American flag. (Which was funny to me because although he claimed to love America, the truth was that he hated 49 out of the 50 states because of their football teams.)

As a matter of fact, the boy who lived next door to Mr. Ashley said that one time a car pulled into Mr. Ashley's driveway, and two men got out and knocked on his door claiming that they were lost and needed directions. But when Mr. Ashley asked the two men where they were from, they said, "Michigan", and because of the rivalry between the Ohio State and Michigan State football teams, he told them that they had ten seconds to get off his property before he shot them for "trespassing"! So they quickly got back in their car, and as they were backing out of his driveway, Mr. Ashley came running outside with a shotgun and started shooting it wildly in the air to scare them away!

Looking at Mr. Ashley, you might get the impression that he really loved his home state of Ohio. (There would always be an "Ohio State" football logo on his hat, his shirt, his jacket, his sweatpants, and I'm assuming on his underwear too.) But the truth was that he hated all of the neighboring cities in Ohio because they competed against our high school football team. (Which he coached.)

So his proclaimed love for his country and his state seemed very ironic to me.

Because my parents were married in the Mormon temple, they wore special underwear known as "Mormon temple garments" to serve as a reminder of their sacred wedding vows.

In the past, Mormons actually believed that this underwear was a form of protective armor. (Like a bulletproof vest!)

In fact, when the founder of the Mormon church (Joseph Smith) died in a shootout back in 1844, his autopsy revealed that he wasn't wearing any underwear when he was shot, and many Mormons back then claimed that if he had been wearing his underwear that day he wouldn't have died.

Nowadays, most Mormons don't actually believe that this underwear offers that kind of physical protection. (Although, every once in a while, you will hear a story about a Mormon being in a car wreck and claiming that their underwear is the reason they didn't get badly hurt.)

This special underwear is VERY large (it covers more than half of the body) and it is going to look really strange to any non-Mormon who sees it. So the protection that this underwear actually does provide is in keeping married Mormons too embarrassed to wear revealing clothing in public. (Because if they did, their strange underwear would be showing, and it would result in a lot of strange looks.)

I'm guessing that this underwear has even prevented some married Mormon men from having an affair when they suddenly found themselves alone with a non-Mormon woman and there was a mutual desire to do something, because they knew that once the clothes started to come off, the woman would get weirded out by their underwear. (So they probably just told the woman something like, "I'm sorry, but I can't sleep with you because I'm married, and it would be wrong.")

I was about to turn 16 years old, and I still didn't know how to swim.

I had never been to a swimming pool before, and although there was a big pond on our property, I was too afraid to go swimming in it because snakes and other things that could bite would go swimming in it as well.

But there was a beautiful lake that my parents and I would drive past every Sunday on our way to church, and people would often go there to swim. So my dad told me that for my 16th birthday, we could go to the lake and he would finally give me some swimming lessons.

I was really excited about going to the lake, but on the day that we went, there were a lot of other people there swimming and having cookouts. (Which made me nervous, because it meant that a bunch of strangers were going to be watching me learn how to swim.

I was also way too shy to take my shirt off or wear shorts in public, and I imagined that everyone was going to be laughing at me for swimming with a shirt and pants on.

My dad, however, wasn't shy at all, so he went to the bathroom to change into his swimming clothes, and he told me that while he was changing I should try to find a nice spot for us to have our swimming lessons. So I started walking along the lake and looking for a quiet spot where we could have our swimming lessons without a lot of eyes on us. But then I turned back around and saw my dad coming out of the bathroom wearing a small pair of swimming shorts that only covered about 1/4 of his Mormon underwear. (Which meant that the other 3/4 were completely exposed!)

I got so embarrassed that I hid behind a tree so nobody would know that he was my dad. And because he didn't see me anywhere, he got concerned and started shouting my name loudly (which of course made everyone look at him) and it made me feel so embarrassed that I secretly ran back to the car.

My dad had no idea where I was, and I knew that I was probably going to get in a lot of trouble for going back to the car without even telling him. But there was no way that I could go back out there and face him with all those people around.

So I ended up just waiting inside the car until he eventually returned to the car about 20 minutes later.

As soon as he saw that I was in the car, he looked so happy and relieved to know that I was OK. But then he got really mad and started shouting...

"WHY DID YOU COME BACK TO THE CAR WITHOUT EVEN TELLING ME??? I THOUGHT THAT YOU COULD HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED OR FALLEN IN THE LAKE AND DROWNED!!!"

I had never seen my dad get that angry before, and I couldn't just tell him the truth (that his underwear was really embarrassing to me) because I knew that to him, his underwear was a sacred symbol of his and my mom's wedding vows.

So I lied and told him that while he was in the bathroom changing, some mean kids wanted to beat me up, and that I had to run back to the car to hide from them.

He then stopped being angry at me and shifted all of his anger towards these mean kids who didn't even exist, and said...

"WELL COME ON BACK TO THE LAKE WITH ME, BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GO HAVE A TALK WITH THEIR PARENTS ABOUT THIS!"

I got scared and started pleading with him, "NO, NO, NO, IT'S OK, DAD, WHY DON'T WE JUST GO HOME AND LET GOD DEAL WITH THEM ON JUDGEMENT DAY?"

But my dad refused to let it go, and he shouted...

"YOU CAN'T LET PEOPLE TREAT YOU LIKE THAT IN LIFE, AND I, AS YOUR FATHER, AM DEFINITELY NOT GOING TO LET ANYONE GET AWAY WITH TREATING YOU LIKE THAT, SO COME ON!"

He then grabbed me by my arm, pulled me out of the car, and started dragging me back to the lake where all the people were!

As he was dragging me towards all the people, I was saying everything that I could think of to get out of this embarrassing situation, like...

"THEY WERE JUST SOME EIGHT-YEAR-OLD KIDS, DAD!"

and

"THEY JUST WANTED TO SQUIRT ME WITH WATER GUNS!"

But it didn't matter... He was determined to turn this situation into a life lesson.

As we got closer to the people, my dad stopped and asked me to point out the kids who were bullying me. So I looked around, acted confused, and said, "That's funny, I don't see them anywhere." Then I said, "I guess that means that they already left and went home, and maybe we should just leave and go home too." But my dad would have none of it, and he just said, "Then we'll ask around and see if anyone here knows who they were!"

He then dragged me over to a family that consisted of a mom, a dad, and a beautiful teenage girl who I instantly recognized from school. (Her name was Laura and she sat next to me in health class.)

As soon as I realized that it was Laura, I panicked, because I had a big crush on her, and I tried to hide behind my dad so that she wouldn't see me and know that my dad wore such strange-looking underwear.

Once we got to Laura and her parents, my dad said to them, "Excuse me, but I'm looking for some eight-year-old kids who were harassing my son with water guns!"

I did my best to hide behind my dad, but he wasn't a big guy, and I was already taller than him, so Laura saw me, and I was so traumatized with embarrassment that Laura's mom got really concerned and said, "Oh my goodness, they must have scared the poor thing half to death, because he's shaking like a leaf!"

Then my dad went on to tell them about how I had locked myself in the car for almost half an hour just to hide from these eight-year-old kids with water guns, and I knew that instead of feeling really excited whenever I saw Laura at school, I was going to feel really embarrassed instead.

We ended up leaving the lake that day without having any swimming lessons, and I had no desire to ever go back after what happened. So I still didn't know how to swim.

When I turned 18, Brother Smith drove me and five other teenage boys from our church in a van all the way to the Holy of Holies, the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Utah so we could perform a special Mormon ritual known as "baptisms for the dead".

Mormons believe that being baptized is necessary for one's salvation in the afterlife, and they also believe that if a person dies without ever being baptized, a living Mormon can actually be baptized for them after they die. (As long as they are the same gender.)

Each of us was going to get baptized for 10 dead people, and Brother Smith kept telling us that while we were getting baptized, the spirits of the dead people who we were being baptized for would be there watching and rejoicing as we saved them.

But there was a big problem...

I never learned how to swim due to my dad's underwear, and I was afraid to get baptized because I would have to go completely underwater and I kept worrying that I might drown. But I was forced to go on the trip anyway.

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