About Me – Tasha Seegmiller

Short Bio:

Tasha Seegmiller writes about womanhood, faith, mental wellness, and families. A graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program, Tasha teaches English at a regional university and lives with her husband in the high-mountain desert of southern Utah where she raised her three children.

The Rest of the Story:

When I was two years old, my parents had read me The Animals of Farmer Jones so many times that I could recite the words and turn the pages, making it look like I could read. We have pictures of me in elementary sitting in a tree with a book. During the summers, I would check out the max number of books from the library (eight at the time) and read most of them twice before we went back two weeks later. I’ve loved books for a long, long time.

When I look back on it, I can see I’ve always been an advocate of feminism even if I didn’t have the words for it. During elementary, I did my historical figure reports on Amelia Earhart and Susan B. Anthony — I used to daydream conversations between Susan and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and secretly hoped they were friends with the mom in Mary Poppins.

I am the oldest of five children and grew up a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My family was active in our religious community through youth leadership roles and regular Sunday meeting attendance. I can say without hesitation that I have always been a spiritual person – and interested in the ways other people practice their spirituality. As a high school teacher, I had my students research a world religion with the caveat they couldn’t present on one they had practiced. Why and how people stay centered and grounded, particularly as this world continues to feel unsettled, is of great interest to me.

I can’t really recall when I became an LGBTQ ally. I know my naivety in high school (Class of ’96) put me in a place where I didn’t really know about or have the ability to see the queer people among me. But when I took my place back in the rooms of the high school I had graduated from, I saw students. One of the greatest honors of my entire life was as a high school writing teacher because students trusted me enough to share profoundly personal, often heartbreaking, sometimes soul-healing stories with me. As I have been able to learn more about gender and sexual identity, my allyship has gotten more fierce, more firm. I also have the distinct honor to be an LGBTQ mom.

In 2016, I felt like my life had been thrown a massive curveball when I couldn’t shake a sorrowful weight and decided to see a doctor about what I suspected to be depression. I was in therapy for several months before I saw I had anxiety. For a long time, I thought these were illnesses that came with a midlife onset, but now I can see it’s something I’ve had my whole life. I didn’t have an awareness that what I was thinking and feeling wasn’t typical among people around me. I didn’t understand my thoughts and emotions in a way that let me articulate them to anyone, including myself. Now, I see a therapist and a psychologist to assist my navigation of treatment-resistant depression and generalized anxiety disorder with accompanying panic attacks, and I help some of my kids navigate life with different forms of ADHD.

When I was growing up, my neighborhood was slowly being developed. I was around seven years old when I met a boy from school who had just moved into the neighborhood. He was a year older than me, but for a while, we went to church together (LDS congregations are organized by geographic location). I have distinct memories of water balloon fights, and of a group of boys finding garden snakes and then chasing me and my girlfriends with them. He played the trumpet, I played the clarinet, so even with the grade difference, we ended up spending time together. We sang in a church choir, navigated the halls of the high schools (each of us taking turns doing so with crutches for different reasons), I helped him ask some girls to dances (we were doing promposals even then). He always made me laugh, but we shared some really great conversations. And six weeks after I turned 21, I married Enoch. Finding the exact right one for me the first time is a fortunate honor I do not take lightly.

After five pregnancies, Enoch and I have three thriving children who are fantastically different but share a dedication toward understanding people, being kind and honest, and welcoming with love and boundaries. Will would be a brilliant coder and a brilliant therapist. They are a delight in my life. Ellie is experiencing her childhood dream of being a proud member of the United States Marine Corp. She is determination personified and an inspiration in my life. Catie is finishing up high school, immersing herself in friendships, music, art, and capturing beauty. She is kind and hilarious, a warmth in my life.