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[baby-dips-into-the-taboo]

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So, what is it that I'm doing here, sitting on the periphery of things, the edge of ideologies?

This is a special and, honestly, difficult day. It is a reminder of someone whom I loved very much. I know too much about grief and loss for someone who hasn't seen as much literal death as many people have; particularly, in this moment.

Many feelings and experiences seem to lie at the heart of the cult escapee's experience, including this familiar feeling of severing - of losing people who are very much living, who occupy space and time in a manner that is intimately acquainted to you, or that you're used to being very familiar with. Knowing you'll never see several people again, that your paths will diverge now, that like a coin flip you're eventually an enemy... In a way, it's a lot of break ups happening all at once. So much love lost - what can be done with this love? Possibly similar to experiencing a string of deaths in one's family (an experience that is, in fact, known to me), but with the added injury of having self-inflicted this pain with an eye to healing.

In some ways, leaving a cult, particularly for someone raised in it, is as radical an experience as the act of entering one for someone who wasn't raised in it. There is a symmetry to these things: the parent, grandparent, or ancestor completely leaves their understanding of reality and gains a lease on life, a sense of purpose, a community by adopting a new set of beliefs and leaving their old lifestyle behind. Similarly, their child or grandchild abandons the set of beliefs they are raised with to experience life in a completely different way - to completely rewrite their understanding of normal. Both child and ancestor are engaging in acts of curiosity and hope: they are rewriting how they transact with the world, how they relate to others, and so, in a lacunary fashion, leaving a cult or movement actually brings the younger generation closer to the parents who entered it even if proximity is removed or attachment is severed by leaving.

Interestingly, then, these multi-generational churches and movements, are stuck becoming a duopoly: they have to, of course, continue their current recruitment efforts, and they have to cater to an audience that has never been initiated from any other reality - that has never experienced the intensity, clarity, certainty, or euphoria around entering this space. There is no door for the latter audience to walk through, except out. How can they be kept sated - how can they be convinced that they have it so good that they never want to leave, or how can they be fed such despair about ordinary reality that it seems discolored and lacking any allure?

There are reasons why I wonder all this; reasons having to do with someone I've loved a lot, who is no longer accessible to me. It has been my choice to pull away from her, and now it seems that there is no going back - she was deeply hurt. Knowing her past breakups, she adheres to No Contact no matter what. Leave it to someone raised in a cult to understand how to go cold turkey serially, no matter the history or the true emotional cost.

I am living that 20s theme where some of us find ourselves consecutively severing relationships, becoming increasingly untethered, as the gaps in our lives and hearts are left unfilled. I find comfort in the memory of movies like Sleeping Beauty by Julia Leigh, even if I don't rewatch them because of the shame, the degradation.

Some of these losses feel like a gain: I am porous, elastic, like a sponge full of blood vessels and with eyes, free to stretch, bend, breathe in ways that weren't possible when I had fixed myself to accommodate things that didn't totally fit, and I couldn't admit it, thinking sometimes that I was just the worse for wear or unrested... Why is it, anyway, that sometimes a little bit of rest, a little bit of love, can make us anew?

And then there are times when the losses just leave this emptiness... Like a white noise machine at the top of its lungs, sucking us into the void with its O-gape scream. In times like those, I'm moving towards a siren barefoot, too saturated with dread to register the metallic chill of the rocks in this hypothermic air. So magnetized by the moment, I lose sight of the future and of myself.

This is the act of intentionally numbing yourself - something we never quite realize is taking a lot of effort and investment... How cycles or spiraling trick us into thinking they're effortless just because they have aced the short circuit. I brought you to a checkout line so quick and you do not remember how you got here instead of on that social media page for the ex you were initially planning to cyberstalk. "This doesn't exhaust you", the Devil always manages to say, unearthing some supernatural energy that cannot be found in routine.

(If Facebook were a family of functions, it would be mapping every human feeling or experience to an array of products, based on location, class, etc too of course. Any feelings you have, any connections you have, can be redirected towards shopping. Sometimes, I do wonder if cults work kind of the same: sublimate/repress what isn't useful for the cult's self preservation or proliferation, and the rest of feeling and connection can be subsumed to things within the cult. How much more of ourselves, of life, we can experience by metaphorically amputating some parts of ourselves. And, who knows, maybe sometimes it actually is a reasonable deal for some people: I'm sure some gain more than they lose.)

Anyhow, the promise of access to these hidden reserves of supernatural energy is part of what's, well, exhilarating about alternative lifestyles and religions. There is something about the humdrum of life, of routine, that makes us feel like we're not enough. Somebody or something seems to want more of us than we feel like we have, more of us than we can reasonably manage - at least not without some tailoring of our fundamental realities.

In America, our jobs are very good at this; frankly, in any economy that isn't developed it is common to break your back, but in America it's continually surprising because things will always be like this, no matter how developed or wealthy America gets to be.

There are too many ways to feel deficient, fractured, especially once you're already closely acquainted with this feeling because of the gift of history, of a continu: things were broken at the root, and don't people who know me, don't past memories, all love to remind me of this? Rites of passage swirl with all the bad stuff, so how can you forget? They are embedded in the reference points of your existence.

Personally, I could never be enough for my parents' egos - how could I possibly compensate for their insecurities, their proclaimed losses from choosing to birth, raise, and abuse me? And still, I haven't fallen into a single cult or movement, but chronically find myself in close proximity to cult members or recent/budding escapees. Where does this repeat proximity come from? Why are both parties magnetized by each other?

In any case, when it comes to her (the one whom I am recalling today), whether it be a kindness or a laziness, goodbye it is.