Hello everyone and welcome to the Girls Camp podcast Patreon, Girls Camp After Dark. It is me,

your host, Haley Rawl. And I did something really big just for you. I delved back into my

mission journals for the first time since I got home for my mission. It has been nine years, almost a decade since I went on a Mormon

mission to Berlin, Germany, and I just haven't had it in me to go back and really read my journals.

But enough time is passed at this point that I feel like I've been able to approach this with curiosity

and it has been so fascinating. I documented almost every single day pretty thoroughly and I'm glad I

did. I am glad I did because at the very least I can prove to my daughters one day how deeply,

deeply Mormon I really was. And that's what surprised me the most, the biggest takeaway from

this was realizing, oh shit, I was really, really deep in it. I was hook, line, and sinker,

drinking the Kool-Aid, Mormon missionary girl. It feels like reading words from a different

person in a lot of ways. And she's in there. Haley's in there. Obviously, a lot of time has

passed, so I've changed and I've grown. But man, the Mormonism was so

present that it almost dwarfed the Haley inside of me. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself,

but I am going to read some of the actual entries from my mission journals. And then I also had you all write in some of

your mission stories, mission thoughts, mission feelings. Never ceases to amaze me the things that go

down on Mormon missions. I'm not glad I went on a mission per se. It was a big part of my life.

I did it. It's done.

Whatever. But if even just for the lore, if even just for the party trick of talking about the Mormon mission, it may have been worth it just for that. The first journal, I started in the

MTC. And I'm not going to get too into MTC stuff.

That's a whole thing of its own and probably should be a whole entire episode of its own.

Missionary Training Center stories and culture is just bizarre, within bizarre, within bizarre.

But this line from my MTC journal is so hilarious I had written

...