Teleprompter 2026 18 10 13 50 51: Did your patriarchal blessing sound anything like mine? Now Kristen, our father in heaven is well aware of you, and you are a choice daughter of our Heavenly Father. You were held in reserve to come forth in the latter days so that you would be here upon the earth to help establish the kingdom of God. When I got that blessing, those things made me feel really good. But looking back now, I think that feeling special, feeling chosen can actually be a problem. And today we're gonna talk about why.
Teleprompter 2026 18 10 14 18 39: Hello friends, welcome to Mormon to Muse Podcast. I'm Kristen Martneau. And today we're going to talk about why feeling special can be a problem. It sounds like it's just high standards or we just want to do things well. But if you look closer at what special actually means, it means that you're set apart. You're above average. you are better than people in some way. Special is a ranking and a ranking has two requirements. It needs comparison to someone else and it needs someone outside of you to do the ranking. If you grow up being told that you were chosen, that you were set apart or saved for something important, you were trained from childhood to measure your worth by how different you were from everyone else. You were told that you had the truth, and people who didn't have it need you to impart it to them. So losing the belief that you are God's chosen can be really disorienting. You believed that you knew who you were, where you came from, and where you were going. And now you're not even sure what all of this means or if your life even matters at all. If that's you, here's what's happening. You didn't just lose a belief. You lost an entire meaning structure. Those big questions are still there and the old answers no longer apply. That's why it feels existential, not just sad. I wanna be clear here that an existential crisis and depression can look alike, but they are not the same. So if you felt low for most days for more than two weeks, if your sleep or your appetite has changed If you're struggling to function, you feel hopeless, or you're having thoughts of hurting yourself or others, please reach out to a therapist or a psychiatrist or a qualified professional, ideally one who understands religious trauma. If you don't think you're depressed, but you are feeling that existential crisis and wondering what's the point of all this, then here are nine ways to build a life. That means something on your own terms. The first thing is allow yourself to grieve. Feeling chosen feels good. It's okay to miss that even if you would never go back. Skipping that grief is how a lot of women end up grabbing onto the next thing that promises to make them feel chosen again. Whether it's another belief system or a person, you need to go through that process. So you're not constantly reaching for meaning from Something outside of you. Number two is separate specialness from significance. Specialness says that your life matters because you rank above others. You're better than them somehow. Significance means that your life matters because you're in it. The people you love, what you notice, the things you create, the things that you give. The thought I'm not special so my life doesn't matter is just a thought. It's not a fact. For some of you, letting go of feeling special doesn't feel freeing. It feels like falling.
Teleprompter 2026 18 10 14 29 04: Number three, build meaning from the ground up. Meaning was handed to you, already packaged. Now you get to build it. I feel like this is truly one of the most fun things about letting go of a belief system that was just handed to you. You get to decide what really matters to you. And it doesn't have to be big. You don't have to figure it out all at once. Start small. Think of one way that you can contribute, one thing that you can create. You truly just get to decide what has meaning for you and why. Sometimes when I say that, people say, Well, aren't you just being delusional? And my answer is sure. But you were delusional before. You actually never knew the truth. You just thought you did. So you can believe whatever makes you feel good, whatever helps you. Operate in a way that brings joy into your life. It doesn't have to be like big serious meaning. It can literally just be because something is fun. Number four is learn to be okay with ambiguity. This isn't something you have to solve right away. In fact, you are never going to solve it. So just learn to be okay with not knowing. Number five is go find some awe. Stand in front of the mountains, look at the night sky, sit with a piece of music or art that moves you. Awe makes you feel small, but in a way that connects you to the universe around you. It's the experience of being part of something without needing to be special within it. Number six is find your people. If your family relationships are strained, it can be extra hard. You're going through this existential crisis and the people that you would normally rely on in a time like this can't be present with you in the same way that they used to. So it's really important that you connect with people who get it. You can just search Facebook groups for ex-Mormons, Reddit, you'll find them everywhere. For me, connection with people, with the world around me, with nature is really what brings meaning to my life. Before I think I felt like I was kind of above being super excited. about a team or an event or being like a big super fan of a musician or something. I felt like none of that really mattered. That wasn't really what was important and it was kind of immature to get super into stuff like that. Now I feel like celebrating things, being excited about those small things is really what makes life so fun. My sixteen year old is really good at this. She just loves all the things. She sings at the top of her lungs in the car. She wears whatever the heck she wants. She's sentimental about things like carpool. She loves carpool and she was so sad when we stopped doing it. I wasn't. I've learned to just start embracing those small things. For example, when the Broadway musical The Lost Boys album came out, which is the best Broadway show ever, you have to see it. We had a listening party, we went to the store and we got all the vampire-related snacks that we could think of. We moved the coffee table and we laid out a bunch of blankets and turned out the lights. And just laid there and listened to the entire album. And it was so fun. On Michael Jackson's birthday, we got a birthday cake that said, Happy birthday, Michael Jackson, written by a teenage boy. I'll show it to you here. He asked if I wanted him to redo it, and I said, Absolutely not. It's perfect. But anyway, we had the birthday cake and we listened to Michael Jackson's albums. On vinyl. We don't know why we are here, but we have right now, and we might as well celebrate the heck out of it. Even the small things, even the things that seem silly. Number seven is join the human race. I want to tell you what happened when I let go of needing to be special. I expected it to feel like a loss, and sometimes it did. But in a lot of ways it didn't. The first thing that I noticed was that I really felt more a part of the human race. For most of my life I'd been standing slightly apart from everyone, above, if I'm honest, because I was God's chosen. But when I stopped thinking that way, thinking that I was special, I was able to stand among people instead. That's where belonging lives. You can't belong to a group. You're quietly trying to rank higher than. Not long after we left the church, my husband and I were at a John Mayer concert, and being in that crowd with all the people singing, Being in a situation like that that wasn't a church thing, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was just one of these humans, having a shared emotional experience of what it's like to be a human, the struggles, the joy, the pain. And I was connecting with these people in a way that I was never able to do when I believed that I had the truth and they didn't. Another thing that happened was I wasn't so afraid of people anymore. I didn't think of people as other. I didn't think of people who didn't have the truth as less enlightened than I was. When I let that go, people just became people and I wasn't so afraid of them. At that John Mayer concert, there was a woman standing next to me and she was wearing this beautiful sequence top that was open in the back and had, you know, like a single little tie, very immodest according to Mormon standards. And I had this like weird love for her. Before I would have been annoyed that she was wearing that and that my husband had to see that. And I probably would have been a little jealous or threatened by her, but I just wasn't at all. My husband can manage himself and truly she looked beautiful. And I just thought, you go girl, you look amazing. Enjoy that. It was such a freeing experience for me. Another thing that changed when I just decided I was part of the human race was I realized that I'm not above the problems that other people have. Relationships can be hard sometimes. Kids struggle, money gets tight, plans fall apart. When I believed I was God's chosen, problems like that felt like failure. Like if I'm faithful enough, I won't have these kinds of problems. But now when something goes wrong, I don't read it as a verdict. It's just something that happens to all of us humans. And I'm human. Welcome to the club. That single shift took an enormous amount of shame off of my life. Problems stopped being evidence against me, and they just became experiences that I could actually deal with. Number eight is recognize the difference between special and specific. So if you don't need to be special, what are you? Here's the distinction I want you to keep. You are not special. Or you're just as special as anyone else. You aren't more important or more chosen than anyone else. You are important because you are specific. Specific means that there is no one else like you. Nobody else has your history, no one thinks quite the way you do. You are important to the people around you. Your hands, your eyes. the way that you see the world the way that you experiencing things. When you're chasing special, you're always looking outward to check how you're doing. When you're living in a specific mindset, you're paying attention to what's in front of you and responding honestly. That's inner authority. And that is the ground that everything else gets built on. Your relationships, your decisions, and your creative life. Number nine is practice. Creative expression is the best way to do this. Not because you need to become an artist, but because creative expression is one of the quickest, one of the safest places to practice being specific instead of special. Let me explain what I mean. When you make something, the specialness thought usually will show up right away. If it's not good, why even bother? That thought will come up before you sing in the car, when there's someone listening, before you try something new, before you post the photo or sign up for the class, or wear the outfit that you actually love. That makes creativity a perfect training ground. The stakes are low, but the payoff is huge. Every time you make something and let it be ordinary, you're teaching your brain that your worth doesn't depend on being exceptional. That will follow you into your conversations, into your future decisions, into your relationships, and into your life. Here's how it shows up for me. When I started painting seriously, I had a question running in my mind constantly. Is this good or not? And how can I ever stand out as an artist? How can I be special? That way of thinking made painting so stressful and not enjoyable at all. I realized I don't have to be an exceptional artist. I just have to paint. What comes out of my paintbrush might not make me the next fan go, but it doesn't need to. It just needs to be an honest expression of the joy I find in creating, and no one else. Can duplicate that. I don't have to be a better artist than anyone else. My painting doesn't have to be amazing. It just has to be mine. Your life works the same way. You don't find yourself by trying to be special. You find yourself by showing up, making things, doing things, letting most of those things be ordinary. So I have a therapeutic art prompt That will help you practice this. It's called an awe study. So it's pretty simple. You just go for a walk outside, pay close attention to what's around you. Notice a pretty leaf or a rock or a flower, and gather maybe five to ten things that speak to you. Or that stand out to you. Bring them home and arrange them on a piece of paper. And then I want you to answer these questions. For each one, I want you to write why you chose this specific one. Out of all the rocks you saw, why did you pick up this one? Why did you pick this specific flower or this specific leaf? And then answer the question out of all the humans in the world, what is specific about you? I know it can be kind of hard to remember these therapeutic art prompts just from me saying them. So I created the Muse Library. It has every therapeutic art prompt that goes along with the podcast. You can just sign up for it in the link. I add to it every week, and it is a treasure trove of self-discovery and identity work. So if you want that, be sure to sign up and I will send it to you. When I stopped needing to be special, I didn't become any less. I became more a part of something. I am one specific person among billions, and we are all just trying to figure it out, all getting it wrong sometimes, all having this universal human experience. That freedom is what makes it possible to try new things, to make things. and to build a life that actually belongs to me. You don't have to be special. You just get to be you and that was always enough. Okay my friends, that is all for today. I just want to remind you, if you're listening to this, the podcast is now on YouTube at Mormon To Views. So if you like more of a visual experience, go check that out. Please like and subscribe to the channel and share it with someone that you think could use it. I love you so much. Take care.
Teleprompter 2026 18 10 14 18 39: Hello friends, welcome to Mormon to Muse Podcast. I'm Kristen Martneau. And today we're going to talk about why feeling special can be a problem. It sounds like it's just high standards or we just want to do things well. But if you look closer at what special actually means, it means that you're set apart. You're above average. you are better than people in some way. Special is a ranking and a ranking has two requirements. It needs comparison to someone else and it needs someone outside of you to do the ranking. If you grow up being told that you were chosen, that you were set apart or saved for something important, you were trained from childhood to measure your worth by how different you were from everyone else. You were told that you had the truth, and people who didn't have it need you to impart it to them. So losing the belief that you are God's chosen can be really disorienting. You believed that you knew who you were, where you came from, and where you were going. And now you're not even sure what all of this means or if your life even matters at all. If that's you, here's what's happening. You didn't just lose a belief. You lost an entire meaning structure. Those big questions are still there and the old answers no longer apply. That's why it feels existential, not just sad. I wanna be clear here that an existential crisis and depression can look alike, but they are not the same. So if you felt low for most days for more than two weeks, if your sleep or your appetite has changed If you're struggling to function, you feel hopeless, or you're having thoughts of hurting yourself or others, please reach out to a therapist or a psychiatrist or a qualified professional, ideally one who understands religious trauma. If you don't think you're depressed, but you are feeling that existential crisis and wondering what's the point of all this, then here are nine ways to build a life. That means something on your own terms. The first thing is allow yourself to grieve. Feeling chosen feels good. It's okay to miss that even if you would never go back. Skipping that grief is how a lot of women end up grabbing onto the next thing that promises to make them feel chosen again. Whether it's another belief system or a person, you need to go through that process. So you're not constantly reaching for meaning from Something outside of you. Number two is separate specialness from significance. Specialness says that your life matters because you rank above others. You're better than them somehow. Significance means that your life matters because you're in it. The people you love, what you notice, the things you create, the things that you give. The thought I'm not special so my life doesn't matter is just a thought. It's not a fact. For some of you, letting go of feeling special doesn't feel freeing. It feels like falling.
Teleprompter 2026 18 10 14 29 04: Number three, build meaning from the ground up. Meaning was handed to you, already packaged. Now you get to build it. I feel like this is truly one of the most fun things about letting go of a belief system that was just handed to you. You get to decide what really matters to you. And it doesn't have to be big. You don't have to figure it out all at once. Start small. Think of one way that you can contribute, one thing that you can create. You truly just get to decide what has meaning for you and why. Sometimes when I say that, people say, Well, aren't you just being delusional? And my answer is sure. But you were delusional before. You actually never knew the truth. You just thought you did. So you can believe whatever makes you feel good, whatever helps you. Operate in a way that brings joy into your life. It doesn't have to be like big serious meaning. It can literally just be because something is fun. Number four is learn to be okay with ambiguity. This isn't something you have to solve right away. In fact, you are never going to solve it. So just learn to be okay with not knowing. Number five is go find some awe. Stand in front of the mountains, look at the night sky, sit with a piece of music or art that moves you. Awe makes you feel small, but in a way that connects you to the universe around you. It's the experience of being part of something without needing to be special within it. Number six is find your people. If your family relationships are strained, it can be extra hard. You're going through this existential crisis and the people that you would normally rely on in a time like this can't be present with you in the same way that they used to. So it's really important that you connect with people who get it. You can just search Facebook groups for ex-Mormons, Reddit, you'll find them everywhere. For me, connection with people, with the world around me, with nature is really what brings meaning to my life. Before I think I felt like I was kind of above being super excited. about a team or an event or being like a big super fan of a musician or something. I felt like none of that really mattered. That wasn't really what was important and it was kind of immature to get super into stuff like that. Now I feel like celebrating things, being excited about those small things is really what makes life so fun. My sixteen year old is really good at this. She just loves all the things. She sings at the top of her lungs in the car. She wears whatever the heck she wants. She's sentimental about things like carpool. She loves carpool and she was so sad when we stopped doing it. I wasn't. I've learned to just start embracing those small things. For example, when the Broadway musical The Lost Boys album came out, which is the best Broadway show ever, you have to see it. We had a listening party, we went to the store and we got all the vampire-related snacks that we could think of. We moved the coffee table and we laid out a bunch of blankets and turned out the lights. And just laid there and listened to the entire album. And it was so fun. On Michael Jackson's birthday, we got a birthday cake that said, Happy birthday, Michael Jackson, written by a teenage boy. I'll show it to you here. He asked if I wanted him to redo it, and I said, Absolutely not. It's perfect. But anyway, we had the birthday cake and we listened to Michael Jackson's albums. On vinyl. We don't know why we are here, but we have right now, and we might as well celebrate the heck out of it. Even the small things, even the things that seem silly. Number seven is join the human race. I want to tell you what happened when I let go of needing to be special. I expected it to feel like a loss, and sometimes it did. But in a lot of ways it didn't. The first thing that I noticed was that I really felt more a part of the human race. For most of my life I'd been standing slightly apart from everyone, above, if I'm honest, because I was God's chosen. But when I stopped thinking that way, thinking that I was special, I was able to stand among people instead. That's where belonging lives. You can't belong to a group. You're quietly trying to rank higher than. Not long after we left the church, my husband and I were at a John Mayer concert, and being in that crowd with all the people singing, Being in a situation like that that wasn't a church thing, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was just one of these humans, having a shared emotional experience of what it's like to be a human, the struggles, the joy, the pain. And I was connecting with these people in a way that I was never able to do when I believed that I had the truth and they didn't. Another thing that happened was I wasn't so afraid of people anymore. I didn't think of people as other. I didn't think of people who didn't have the truth as less enlightened than I was. When I let that go, people just became people and I wasn't so afraid of them. At that John Mayer concert, there was a woman standing next to me and she was wearing this beautiful sequence top that was open in the back and had, you know, like a single little tie, very immodest according to Mormon standards. And I had this like weird love for her. Before I would have been annoyed that she was wearing that and that my husband had to see that. And I probably would have been a little jealous or threatened by her, but I just wasn't at all. My husband can manage himself and truly she looked beautiful. And I just thought, you go girl, you look amazing. Enjoy that. It was such a freeing experience for me. Another thing that changed when I just decided I was part of the human race was I realized that I'm not above the problems that other people have. Relationships can be hard sometimes. Kids struggle, money gets tight, plans fall apart. When I believed I was God's chosen, problems like that felt like failure. Like if I'm faithful enough, I won't have these kinds of problems. But now when something goes wrong, I don't read it as a verdict. It's just something that happens to all of us humans. And I'm human. Welcome to the club. That single shift took an enormous amount of shame off of my life. Problems stopped being evidence against me, and they just became experiences that I could actually deal with. Number eight is recognize the difference between special and specific. So if you don't need to be special, what are you? Here's the distinction I want you to keep. You are not special. Or you're just as special as anyone else. You aren't more important or more chosen than anyone else. You are important because you are specific. Specific means that there is no one else like you. Nobody else has your history, no one thinks quite the way you do. You are important to the people around you. Your hands, your eyes. the way that you see the world the way that you experiencing things. When you're chasing special, you're always looking outward to check how you're doing. When you're living in a specific mindset, you're paying attention to what's in front of you and responding honestly. That's inner authority. And that is the ground that everything else gets built on. Your relationships, your decisions, and your creative life. Number nine is practice. Creative expression is the best way to do this. Not because you need to become an artist, but because creative expression is one of the quickest, one of the safest places to practice being specific instead of special. Let me explain what I mean. When you make something, the specialness thought usually will show up right away. If it's not good, why even bother? That thought will come up before you sing in the car, when there's someone listening, before you try something new, before you post the photo or sign up for the class, or wear the outfit that you actually love. That makes creativity a perfect training ground. The stakes are low, but the payoff is huge. Every time you make something and let it be ordinary, you're teaching your brain that your worth doesn't depend on being exceptional. That will follow you into your conversations, into your future decisions, into your relationships, and into your life. Here's how it shows up for me. When I started painting seriously, I had a question running in my mind constantly. Is this good or not? And how can I ever stand out as an artist? How can I be special? That way of thinking made painting so stressful and not enjoyable at all. I realized I don't have to be an exceptional artist. I just have to paint. What comes out of my paintbrush might not make me the next fan go, but it doesn't need to. It just needs to be an honest expression of the joy I find in creating, and no one else. Can duplicate that. I don't have to be a better artist than anyone else. My painting doesn't have to be amazing. It just has to be mine. Your life works the same way. You don't find yourself by trying to be special. You find yourself by showing up, making things, doing things, letting most of those things be ordinary. So I have a therapeutic art prompt That will help you practice this. It's called an awe study. So it's pretty simple. You just go for a walk outside, pay close attention to what's around you. Notice a pretty leaf or a rock or a flower, and gather maybe five to ten things that speak to you. Or that stand out to you. Bring them home and arrange them on a piece of paper. And then I want you to answer these questions. For each one, I want you to write why you chose this specific one. Out of all the rocks you saw, why did you pick up this one? Why did you pick this specific flower or this specific leaf? And then answer the question out of all the humans in the world, what is specific about you? I know it can be kind of hard to remember these therapeutic art prompts just from me saying them. So I created the Muse Library. It has every therapeutic art prompt that goes along with the podcast. You can just sign up for it in the link. I add to it every week, and it is a treasure trove of self-discovery and identity work. So if you want that, be sure to sign up and I will send it to you. When I stopped needing to be special, I didn't become any less. I became more a part of something. I am one specific person among billions, and we are all just trying to figure it out, all getting it wrong sometimes, all having this universal human experience. That freedom is what makes it possible to try new things, to make things. and to build a life that actually belongs to me. You don't have to be special. You just get to be you and that was always enough. Okay my friends, that is all for today. I just want to remind you, if you're listening to this, the podcast is now on YouTube at Mormon To Views. So if you like more of a visual experience, go check that out. Please like and subscribe to the channel and share it with someone that you think could use it. I love you so much. Take care.
