Diana Bellows

The next year, I signed up for the San Francisco Exchange.Again. This time I decided to be brave—or cheap—and signed up for housing with a local. I was placed with a very nice woman named April, who had generously opened her home to several dancers. Unfortunately, she had invited more dancers than she had square…

Exchanges became addictive. The dance scene at home was no longer enough. The music sets were too repetitive. The leads less surprising. The community too small.I loved my little scene—don’t get me wrong. It was a small, sweaty, affectionate group. I knew almost everyone by name. But sometimes you don’t want your dealer. You want…

I have a lot of dance stories to tell, but this is where stories start to get harder to organize. They don’t neatly slot into the previous arcs. They just… happen. Sporadically. Like emotional pop quizzes. These stories revolve around something called an Exchange, which were irregular, multi-day dance events that dotted my life at…

My breasts had done a lot of heavy lifting in my life.They opened doors.They started conversations.They explained things about me before I ever got the chance to. People assumed confidence. Sexuality. Availability.People talked to them. About them. Around them.Sometimes past me—like I was just the coat check. For years, I leaned into this.I treated my…

As a kid, I took a lot of pictures. I had a little point-and-shoot, and when I’d finished a roll of twenty-four or thirty-six exposures, my mom would take the film to get developed. A few days later, I’d discover that every photo was blurry, or had my finger in the shot. I once took…

Of all the life changes I’ve made, moving forty-five minutes away is not that impressive a feat. I wanted to be brave.I wanted to move to Portland. Or Seattle. Or Denver.Somewhere with good food, liberal people, and a coffee scene that could double as a personality. But I wasn’t that brave. I love my family.…

You may choose not to believe it, but there was a time in my life when I wanted to play the part of hostess. I threw parties. I was living at Grandma’s house, which meant I had space. Actual square footage. Rooms with doors. A basement that could absorb noise without alerting the entire neighborhood…

As you may have gathered, I have a lot of allergies.I don’t think of them as conditions.I think of them as betrayals. My body does not gently signal discomfort. It panics. It overreacts. It calls the authorities. If something is even mildly suspicious, my immune system treats it like an active threat and deploys every…

After I lost my payroll job, I did what any responsible adult does when their life collapses: I immediately began looking for another job. Skylar got me hired where he was working, with the peddlers of essential oils—the pinnacle of Utah MLMs. The pay and benefits were much better than what I’d been making before,…

Jason and Estela invited me on a trip to New York. New York City. The New York I had been promised by movies and television. The You’ve Got Mail New York, where Meg Ryan owns a charming bookstore and Tom Hanks falls in love with her, and somehow the IRS never intervenes.The Sex and the…

Speaking of unattached—that was also true of my relationship status. I was standing by my car, waiting for my gas tank to fill, mentally hypnotized by the tick tick tick of the meter, when I noticed a man walking toward me. Instinctively, I tightened my grip on my purse and adjusted my stance. You know.…

The LDS Church has a very clear stance on homosexuality: don’t be it. Marriage, they taught, was ordained of God—but only the kind involving one man, one woman, and a very specific instruction manual. Anything else wasn’t just discouraged; it was framed as a threat. To families. To children. To society. To God’s entire organizational…

It was November. I was still working at RC Willey. And I was smugly gloating that I would not be working the obscene Black Friday sale as a cashier. I had been assigned a dream shift: four easy hours, manning the door, checking receipts as people left through the flooring department exit. Four hours. Standing.…

I was back to being single.Which meant I was back to re-evaluating my rules about relationships. When you’ve been wrong that many times, curiosity stops feeling like rebellion and starts feeling like due diligence. Not What do I believe? but What actually works—for anyone? I wasn’t trying to be edgy. I was troubleshooting. It was…

So, I decided to find out what happened when I stopped trying to be good—and started doing whatever the hell I wanted. I mean, everyone else seemed to be doing whatever they wanted and thriving. Why not me? Maybe I’d missed a memo. Everyone else seemed to be lying and cheating. Maybe adultery came with…

I decided to try dating.A cursed idea, in retrospect. The problem was I had almost no experience. I didn’t know the rules. Or the order of operations. Or whether there were rules, or if everyone else had just agreed not to tell me. Dating seemed complicated and alien—like those whacky bird dances on National Geographic.…

During all of this upheaval and resettling, I went back to swing dancing.I had missed it.I had missed me. When I was dancing I felt most myself—before I learned to apologize for taking up space. On the dance floor, joy was not suspicious. Joy was the point. You showed up, you spun, you laughed when…

Living at Grandma’s house was the first time I had ever lived alone.No roommates. No companion. No spouse.Just me and my thoughts—who were not supervised. It was Diana’s house—which my brothers immediately renamed Griana’s House, because they cannot see a perfectly good naming opportunity and let it go to waste.It felt right. It stuck. Living…

The new housing I had acquired was my grandma Leona’s house. The one with the Beauty Shop in the basement. Dad’s friend Clair had a son who had been renting it, but he had just bought his own home and moved out. And Dad told me I could move in. The price was right –…

After moving in with Jason, I kept going to church with Estela. For a little while. It didn’t last. I still had doubts left over from my mission, and after the last year and a half of asking for help that never came, my trust in leadership had quietly evaporated. Faith is harder to maintain…

My marriage had ended, in part, because I had a problem with pornography. To be clear: he wanted to look at it, and I had a problem with that. This difference in perspective would eventually be described by others as “something you could have worked through.” I disagree. My marriage is the other reason I…

We drove across the country, found an apartment, and life… continued.I stayed home and cooked and cleaned.He made messes and stayed up half the night looking at porn. This was not an equal division of labor. The next bishop—new state, same God—told me I needed to keep monitoring his computer. For accountability.Why did these men…

We eventually made it to Albuquerque. I don’t remember much about that time, which feels telling. Trauma has a way of editing for brevity. What I do remember is learning how to spell ALBUQUERQUE, which feels like something I should get a merit badge for. Possibly a patch. What I didn’t realize at first was…

We survived the honeymoon, went back to Utah, and moved into our new apartment. We had somehow managed to sign a lease at the only truly terrifying apartment complex in Provo—2.5 stars on Yelp, dirt-cheap rent, and a resident population made up almost entirely of drug dealers and people who screamed at streetlights.We fit right…

When I finally caved and agreed to marry TJ, everything accelerated like a runaway shopping cart—loud, wobbly, and pointed directly at a disaster, and I had no way to steer. First, he insisted I get a diamond ring. I didn’t like the idea of wearing a big, sparkly “I’M GETTING MARRIED!” sign on my hand…

Meanwhile, my slow, clumsy extraction from the church was not going well. I didn’t not believe—but I didn’t not not believe either. Which sounds ridiculous until you’ve lived inside a system designed to make certainty mandatory and doubt punishable. My trust in the institution was shaky, the rules seemed a little silly, and I was…

I threw out all the old, overused, yellow armpit-stained polyester missionary wardrobe and started trying to put my closet—and my life—back together. About a week after I got home, I was out shopping with Mom. We went to a Sally’s to get supplies for the beauty shop – mom was still working at Grandma’s, and…

We headed south. We stopped in Gilroy and laughed about the aggressive stench of garlic. I got some much-needed new shoes and we ate at In and Out Burger – a particularly Californian experience at the time. We drove out to Sequoia National Park.Then back to the coast.Then down Highway 1, soaking in the scenery.I…

I did, in fact, leave my mission early—but only by one day. My parents had driven to San Jose to pick me up, but instead of going to the hotel they’d booked, Dad drove straight to the mission president’s house, where I was supposed to spend my last night. He parked the van out front,…

My mission is one reason I have decided that I can survive anything for a year and a half. My memory of that time is a little like a badly copied VHS tape—blurry images, missing chunks, and a cheerful soundtrack dubbed loudly over whatever I was actually feeling. When I look through the few photos…

On the scheduled day, my parents drove me to Provo, stoic and silent. We sat through a short program together—an inspirational video about how we were going to save the world, a song, a prayer—and then came the instructions: missionaries out the back, parents out the front. I gave my mom and dad light, careful…

I bought six indestructible polyester dresses, two pairs of sensible shoes, new scriptures, and every other item on the missionary shopping list.And a pile of brand-new bras—I had gone up yet another cup size. The size was hard to find, so I had to be well supplied.The Lord provides. Sometimes in bulk. Next on my…

I moved back home with Mom and Dad. I kept swing dancing as often as my schedule allowed—usually once or twice a week. Sometimes I’d even make the forty-minute drive up to Salt Lake to dance with the swing club at the U, because apparently gasoline and sleep were optional when jitterbugging was involved. I…

I had spent the whole day packing for my return to Idaho—second semester at Ricks, everything lined up like a row of dominoes. My classes were set. My grant money had been deposited. Cami was catching a ride with me in the morning, so I even had companionship built in for the drive. Everything was…

I had no roadmap, no guidebook, no inherited wisdom for navigating college. Mom never went. Dad took a couple semesters, but based on his stories, the only thing he majored in was Not Getting Caught Street Racing. Alan and Jason each tried the community college but quit when they realized they knew more about computers…

Since we’ve reached the part of my tale where I believed it was time to search—in earnest—for my eternal mate, we need to review my romantic resume. Spoiler: it’s short. You already know about the “kissing girl” fiasco from the playground. So, no early success there. In the so-called gifted program, there was a boy…

One of the problems in writing out forty-five years of embarrassment is not knowing where to start. If I immediately dive into the good stories, you’ll have no motivation to keep going. No, no—you don’t get the pizza party orgy story on page one. You have to earn that. And I don’t need to unload…

A proper Mormon child gets baptized the moment they turn eight and officially become liable for their sins—which, in my case, included fighting with my older brothers, coveting the neighbor’s Barbie Dream House, and one particularly scandalous crime: washing myself “down there” in the bathtub without a washcloth. My mother caught me mid-suds and reacted…