Ramona Morris

I’ve always hated my middle name. In school, it was hard to pronounce. My middle name was reduced to C as many failed to give my name the respect it deserved. Growing up, my name had become a heavy weight, making me the target of jokes and mean spirited jabs about how funny it was compared to the cutesy, girly-pop, aesthetic and cool names most girls in my secondary school had.

he importance of hands. As a young child while drawing during my art classes, I always struggled to draw realistic digits on the characters I grew in my sketchpads. Hands often failed me no matter how hard I tried to draw them. To gift ten digits to the often-cheerful characters in my drawings seemed to be the most unattainable task.

When I was a little girl, my mom sat me down and shared one of the most impactful tidbits of knowledge with me. “If your father or I cannot provide, don’t ask for it.”

A couple years back, after dipping my toes back in the dating pond following the death of my grandmother, I encountered a young man...

When I was first introduced to the gospel, I approached it with the doe-eyed enthusiasm of someone who had been searching to find a drink of spiritual nourishment after a long, faithless drought.

Somewhere in LDS culture, it has been ingrained into the minds of young single adult women that our lives never truly start until we get married. Until then, it appears that we are to live in a perpetual state of limbo, jealously seething from the sidelines as friends, foes and floozies run off to the temple at the speed of light.

Some would like to believe that representation doesn’t matter. They try to reduce the sense of belonging so many crave to be a carnal, selfish or even naive request. Why should we want to see people who look like us when we already know that we are a worldwide church?