Vivienne, who was assigned male at birth, was then living in Monterey, California, a bucolic valley that served as the setting for John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. Growing up there in the 1980s, her life might have seemed similarly ideal: she was a high school football player and strong student from a well-off family. But as adolescence wore on, Vivienne began to realize that the person inside her refused to line up with the person she was expected to turn into. She preferred long evenings spent cooking dinner with the women in her family to fishing trips with the men. At football games, she longed to run off the field and shed her bulky pads. When someone remarked how broad her shoulders were getting, she nearly burst into tears. Who asked for this? she thought. At night, she imagined herself dying in horrific ways, being beat up or held underwater by anonymous strangers.

After high school, Vivienne reluctantly enrolled in college, where she was crushed by the weight of expectations she felt unable to live up to. She felt her father expected her to somehow become both a Nobel Prize winner and an NFL kicker. Just a few weeks into her freshman year, she became too depressed to attend classes. She made a nest of pillows and blankets in her closet and virtually moved in, spending all her time reading in the dark hideaway. She felt bad, but she also felt bad about feeling bad: she was supposed to be a great athlete and student, but she was letting all that potential wither away. And she wasn’t quite sure why.

When her college expelled her for not attending classes, Vivienne moved into her Chevy Suburban, which she parked in the lot behind an old industrial center in Mountain View. For a year, she lived out of the back of the car, friendless and adrift.

One night, Vivienne got hold of a gun, and in the throes of self-loathing, determined it was pointless to continue living. She would shoot herself, she decided.

Alex, Part I

A few years ago, another young Californian I spoke with, Alex Grady, was starting to seriously question his religion. This was, in part, because his church leaders were sending him to a place where almost no one else shared it.

By the time Alex was in college, he had been preparing to go on his Mormon mission for over a decade. Most devout Mormon men go on one. During their mission, young Mormons take a break from college in order to live in foreign countries, do good works, and attempt to convert other people to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

After Alex submitted his paperwork, he was told he would be sent to the Mormon mission in Sofia, Bulgaria. Though he didn’t get a say in his destination, he was thrilled at the prospect of a foreign adventure.