Today we’d like to introduce you to Norman.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
In 2012 I started up the page Non-Mormon Norman on Facebook, but due to personal reasons, I closed it down. Then in 2018, I started up again. I grew up in the LDS religion, and as a kid, I remembered reading stories (in the church magazines) about Mormon kids and their friend “Non-Mormon Norman”.
These stories would portray Non-Mormon Norman as someone who led Mormon children astray, or a friend who didn’t know how to make good choices because of their Non-Mormon status. I had many Mormon and Non-Mormon friends growing up and was not allowed to spend as much time with the Non-Mormon ones. I decided to name the page after the Non-Mormon in the Friend Magazine, and share more about the church.
I create memes and share church news, but mainly it is a community for Ex-Mormons. As a member of the church, you have an entire community to support you, but if you leave you to lose that community almost instantly. I wanted to create a place for those that had lost their community, and provide support, comfort, and some laughs.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. As I noted earlier, The page would have a long history had we not decided to close it down in 2012 due to personal life events. It can be difficult to post consistently, and we receive messages from angry Mormons quite often. We try to approach those with kindness.
It can also be hard to keep up with posting consistently when life gets busy. Building your audience and keeping up with the current events in the church requires time and effort. I ended up adding another admin to the page to help me manage, and we try to keep up with it together.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We are both educators and have worked in the field of education for nearly ten years. We love working with our kiddos and supporting their educational success. We strive to make learning fun and engaging, and most build relationships with students to help them succeed.
We’d love to hear what you think about risk-taking.
I would say that we are not quite risk-takers. We’ve thought about going public with our identities, but for now, we are staying anonymous due to several reasons.
There is definitely a risk in exposing our identities to the public, as we have family members in the church. Keeping our names private helps protect us. We have a small audience but hope to continue building it and growing our page.
There are several Ex-Mormon community pages out there, however, so we will see where it takes us.
Contact Info:
- Instagram:Instagram.com/nonmormonnorman
- Facebook:www.faceboook.com/NonMormonNorman
