Why I Don't Want to Live in Utah (if I can help it)

I was born in Texas.

I lived in the suburbs of Chicago from age 2-8.

I lived in the suburbs of Western Massachusetts from age 8-15, 16-17, and one semester when I was 20.

I lived in France when I was 15-16.

I lived in Utah from age 17-23, with the exceptions of that semester in MA and a total of 6 months in Jordan.

We lived in the suburbs of Houston, Texas from age 23-25? and now the suburbs of Des Moines from age 25-32.


The longest I've lived in one place has been Massachusetts, but not by a lot. In about a year, Iowa will be the place I've lived the longest.


I loved my years in Utah.

I love the state of Utah: I LOVE the mountains there, the incredible nature that is so close. I love the temperature there, the humidity (ahem, lack thereof!), and many things about the weather (except for the inversions that happen too often in the valley).

I love Utah history. I love my family's connection to Utah history as early latter-day saint pioneers. I love the historical sites and totally geek out whenever I get the chance to go to them. While living in Utah, I focused all of my family history efforts on learning about my rich latter-day saint heritage. It is fascinating. There is a TON to discover there in libraries, archives, historical sites, etc.

I love Familysearch. I love Ancestry. I love the Family History Library. These are all HQed in Utah.

I love my family. Most of my family lives in the Inter-mountain West, mostly in Utah County. Mostly in Provo/Orem.

I really love BYU. It's a fantastic school.

I really love being a latter-day saint. I love my faith. I love associating with others of my faith. I love talking about my faith and will be so happy to do so. My favorite, most interesting conversations have to do with spirituality. Spiritual and philosophical questions are deep and deeply interesting to me, even more so than questions about language and language learning (though there's a lot of overlap). I crave these conversations.

I love skiing. It's pure, exhilarating joy, speeding down a slope in the fresh powder. It doesn't matter if you're with someone or alone, it's just PURE fun!

So far, I've only said things that I really love about Utah. Why do I hope we will not live there?

My experience is that every place you could ever find yourself living has plenty of pros and cons, and it's really up to you to decide to be happy where you are.

I think some places would be easier than others for me to be happy. From my experience, I really think that Utah is not the ideal place for me to live. Here's why.

I didn't grow up where the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is big. There are aspects about living in a place where that is the prominent and predominant culture that are deeply weird to me in distasteful, off-putting ways.

I don't like the flavor of the political discourse in deeply red states. It grates on my nerves. Western Massachusetts is actually pretty conservative - as are most areas in the United States outside of cities - but I did most of my growing up within the bluest blue bubble in all of bluedom because of where I went to school. I'm used to, and even comfortable, with the idea of being the only latter-day saint in the room. Beyond that, I'm used to being the only Christian in the room. Even, the only person of faith at all in the room. I wasn't, of course, but it was *quite often* the way I felt and perceived things to be in that little blue bubble. Leaving the blue bubble and going to an alternative red bubble was both really exciting and really painful in some ways. It was really nice to be able to figure out what things defined me that were not my faith. It was really disappointing to find out that a lot of good, nice people have no idea what it's like to live on the outside of the red bubble.

But I've been feeling like that to some extent or another about everybody who surrounds me ever since spending a school year abroad in Europe. I am fairly used to the idea of being the stranger. I really enjoy learning about, observing, and interacting with "different from me." It fills me with joy to find the "but also the same as me." If this were something I knew how to systematically describe and catalogue, I'd be an ethnographer. But instead I focused on learning languages, the communication tools, as well as how to teach them to others.

Even at school, in my major, I had to be exceptional, different, weird. I think that is something inextricably connected to Kateness. I was studying Arabic but I eventually figured out I wanted to teach it. I became one of 11(?) teachers of K-12 Arabic in the entire state. It was really fun to be exceptional.

If I were to live in Utah in my current role as a devout latter-day saint stay at home mom with five young children and no outside employer, where would my special otherness come from? In Katy we turned heads when we entered a room because of the ridiculously close spacing of our children and the ratio of my age to the age of other people with my shared interests (genealogy, quilting, gardening). In Utah there would be many others with even more children and ridiculous baby bunching stats and even more passion for genealogy. Every year I grow older as the average age of people interested in genealogy grows younger. These things would not make me stand out, but blend in or find a nichey group.

I worry that I would feel rebellious.

I know this because I've both experienced it living in Utah as well as living in wards surrounded by Utah women in my friend groups. I enjoy playing devil's advocate. I enjoy asking irritating questions. I enjoy challenging assumptions. Most women don't react very well to that kind of communication. I think that I would struggle a lot with friend making in Utah. I already struggle with it here - it's easy to be friendly, it's easy to have conversations. It's really difficult to find people in real life with whom I can converse freely about my nerdy interests - but even more than that, with whom I can be a little bit contrarian, a little bit...edgy? A little tiny bit controversial. I think that I might end up offending the women around me in Utah by challenging the consensus views. This extends to unimportant things like views on "the Greatest Showman" to important things like where do guns belong, to crucial things like differentiating church doctrine from church culture and trying to do an effective job eliminating the sexist crud which really does exist in the latter. Kinda hard to do that when you're viewed as blasphemous for even suggesting that it could exist. I worry that I'd feel that way in Utah.

Or worse, I'd find the others who already feel that way, and to make myself special I would have to stand up for my deeply held values against women who should know better and share them with me. It can be depressing to learn about, observe, and interact with "same as me, yet still so utterly different." I like cross cultural connection, not intra-cultural division. I worry - perhaps unnecessarily - about feeling steeped in the latter if we lived in Utah.

I worry that it would be so easy for me to conflate church culture with church doctrine and that I might make a mistake and end up criticizing church doctrine, which is maybe one tiny baby step down from adultery in my personal value system. Honoring my personal core beliefs is extremely important to me. I can't stand the idea of being tempted to do otherwise.

I'd probably end up hanging out with people outside of my age group to try to avoid that, and I'd probably be just fine.

One final note about Utah: I am not a material girl unless the material in question is books. There is a lot of materialism and focus on physical appearance by stay at home moms ages 25-35 in Utah. This is an observation made by multiple women who have moved from Utah to Iowa, by the way. It is also my perception when I go visit there and hang out with my family. I love my family and don't tend to get this vibe from them directly, but it does come sometimes from how they talk about the people around them. I think I'd be able to deal with this ok because I'm on the outer edge of this 25-35 range; I care less and less about how I'm viewed by the collective and more and more about how specific people I care about view me. I am not going to dye my hair blonde, live in my gym clothes, and sell x trendy MLM product on Facebook. I'm not really into Instagramming my contouring and (non-existent) perfectly styled home. I don't want a dog. I don't want a pedicure. Etc.

I thought my growing up experience was great. I want a similar path for my children because it's known. I don't know how or who I'd be in Utah. Danny says, "Yeah, that sums up my own reasons for not wanting to move to Utah: fear of the unknown."

There's a high probability we will someday end up there. I would never write this kind of a post while living there, by the way. I long ago discovered that complaining about where you live is a path to nowhere (that I want to go, at least). This post is not about criticizing Utah or my weird church culture, it's about exploring shakily grounded worries about non-existent potentials, and what it is about me that I feel isn't an ideal match for Utah. If I actually lived there, I'd be focused on the positive things, and there are many abundant, positive reasons why Utah is a great place to live and raise kids, the majority of which I am sure I don't even know about at all.