Defying Gravity

There are songs that arrive at the right moment and then never quite leave. They become part of the furniture of your interior life. You pull them out when a specific feeling needs a name, or when you're trying to explain something to yourself that words alone haven't been able to reach.

Defying Gravity from the musical Wicked is one of those songs for me.

I heard it for the first time nearly 20 years ago. Little did I know the way it would become so integral for me.

I keep coming back to it. Not just because I have the show practically memorized or because I'm a former theater nerd, but because it captures something about life after leaving the church that I haven't found articulated better anywhere else.

For anyone who hasn't encountered it: Wicked is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz as a kind of prequel. You get to see Elphaba and Glinda — the Wicked Witch and the Good Witch — before they were those things. They were classmates. Rivals, then roommates, then very dear friends. The song Defying Gravity is the Act One finale. Elphaba has seen behind the curtain. She knows the Wizard is not what he appears to be. She's seen the corruption, identified the engineer behind it, recognized the system for what it is. It seems like Glinda sees it too, but chooses to work within it. Elphaba takes a different path.

"I Don't Want It"

Glinda begs Elphaba to step back, apologize, try to make amends. To stay in the system and work toward the vision they shared for Oz together.

Elphaba pushes back: "I don't want it. No, I can't want it anymore."

That line is the one that sends chills up my spine almost every time I'm paying attention to it.

Few things in leaving the church hurt like leaving a faith you were actually committed to. If you're like me, you tried. You tried hard. You tried to keep the commandments. You tried to be consistent with your scripture study. You tried to stay in contact with Heavenly Father through prayer. You talked to your bishops. You went through the worthiness interviews. You tried to sustain belief when the flaws became cracks, the cracks became holes, and eventually the whole structure fell to the ground.

The holes in the fjord finally became too many to plug with your fingers and you've been washed away.

And somewhere in that process, something shifts. You reach a moment where you realize that your efforts have been futile. More than that, what you once wanted is no longer in your capacity to desire. It's not that you stopped wanting the right things. It's that your perspective has shifted so fundamentally that the wanting itself changed shape.

That's not a decision. It's not a choice. It's a reckoning.

Trusting Your Own Instincts

Elphaba goes on to say how she can't play by the rules of someone else's game anymore. She needs to trust her instincts, close her eyes, and leap.

Leaving faith is leaving the certainty you used to be surrounded by. You had confidence in the inspiration claimed by the leaders of the church — both local and at the top. You were sure that following them was the safest course. After all, you might have grown up singing, "Follow the prophet, follow the prophet, don't go astray... Follow the prophet, he knows the way." Or "We Thank Thee, O God, For A Prophet."

Each repetition etched a little deeper, became a little more permanent.

When you step away from that, you don't have a lot to fall back on immediately. You might have some friends or family you can talk to. But for so many, you lose your entire social structure. The community you built your life inside. The weekly rituals, the shared language, the unspoken understanding of who you are, why you're there, and where you belong.

And here's the thing that doesn't get said enough: those requirements, as suffocating as they can become, were also organizing. The church tells you who you are. What you can do. Who to talk to and how. What to do and what not to do on Sunday. Read your scriptures. Pay 10% of your income. Commit your time, talents, and efforts. Not to God, but to the Church. Not to a Heavenly Father, but to an organization. It tells you how to dress, what media to consume, what books to read.

Some people thrive in that kind of structure. For others, it becomes a cage. But even a cage tells you where the walls are. When the cage disappears, you have to learn to navigate open space. And that's disorienting in ways no one warns you about. A bird let out after a lifetime indoors quickly gets lost if it gets outside.

When you're the only person you're left to rely on, it very much feels like stepping forward into the dark, not knowing if even the ground beneath your feet will hold.

And that is exactly what Defying Gravity describes. Closing your eyes. Leaping. Trusting the instincts that the church spent years telling you were subordinate to prophetic and parental authority.

"And If I'm Flying Solo, at Least I'm Flying Free"

The pain of that loneliness, and the feeling of liberation, are both present in a single lyric: "And if I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free."

Being the one that walks away, especially if you're the first in your family or community to do it, there is absolutely a feeling of flying solo. You feel the testimony meetings you're no longer part of. You remember the linger-longers after church or the neighborhood potlucks. The sense that everyone around you has a place and a people and you're now orbiting from the outside.

But in that isolation, there is also a chance to find something that is truly yours.

There are no whispered testimonies shaping your experience. No televised General Conference shaping your theology. No hymns embedding certainty at a level below conscious thought. Whatever you find, wherever you find it, you find because it makes sense to you because you did the work. Because it survived your own scrutiny instead of being handed to you pre-assembled.

That's not nothing. That's actually something quite extraordinary.

I Hope It Brings You Bliss

There's an exchange near the end of the song where Glinda and Elphaba sing to each other:

"I hope it brings you bliss. I really hope you get it and you don't live to regret it. I hope you're happy in the end."

They're parting ways. Their shared vision for Oz hasn't changed, but how they intend to pursue it has. And despite that, they genuinely wish each other well.

I think that's more honest than so much of what I often experience having walked away. I'm seen as a project. I'm someone who needs to come back. I'm someone being pulled away by doubt or sin or the philosophies of men. The framing is almost never about two people choosing different paths with mutual respect.

I wish bliss to those who remain in the church. I genuinely hope they can find what they're looking for, that the good they experience outweighs the harm that too often runs alongside it. But I can't stand in that fire because I've been burned too much by it.

The "I hope you're happy" in Defying Gravity isn't sarcastic. It's not a parting shot. It's the honest acknowledgment that two people who care about each other can choose divergent paths and that the relationship doesn't have to be a casualty of the difference.

I wish I encountered that more often.

The Through-Line

Here's the thing I didn't fully see until I sat with this song long enough: the real power of the Elphaba and Glinda story isn't just in the parting. It's in what comes after.

They don't stop caring about the problems in Oz. They both keep working on them. Elphaba faces those problems from the outside, from a place where the system can't reach her as easily, where she can speak without the threat of being consumed by the institution she's critiquing. Glinda works from within, trying to influence from a position that requires her to be acceptable to the very power she's questioning.

Different approaches. Shared goal. Enduring relationship.

That parallel maps onto the landscape of Mormon deconstruction in ways I find genuinely useful. There are people who see the flaws in the church and try to change it from within. The work is important. The cost is real because there's always the risk that if you push too hard, they'll remove you. The history of people being disciplined or excommunicated for asking the wrong questions or saying certain changes are needed publicly is long.

Then there are those who step away and speak to those flaws from outside, where the institution has less direct leverage. The situation with John Dehlin — a multi-hundred-billion-dollar organization going after a two-person nonprofit — is something I want to explore in its own post. But it's a vivid illustration of what the church is willing to do when it feels threatened from outside its walls.

Neither approach is wrong. Both carry costs.

And maybe what Defying Gravity is really saying. What it's always been saying: is that the goal isn't to find the safe path. It's to find the honest one.

Whatever that looks like for you.

Close your eyes. Leap.