Snippets

The thing about growing up in a cult is you have no idea about what the outside world is like. I recently watched a Netflix series called Unorthodox. It’s about a young girl who grew up in an orthodox Jewish family in New York.

One scene in an episode had her in a club for the first time in her life. She didn’t know the music. She didn’t know how to dance. She’s never drank before. Everything was completely alien to her. Even though she grew up in modern day New York, she had no idea how to behave in any social situation outside of the customs and beliefs she knew.

I could relate so well to this. It’s exactly how I felt when I left the cult I grew up in and experienced life outside for the first time. There were so many unknowns and I still think today how much this has affected my life and choices.

My first trip abroad was three years prior when I was 14.

I went to the UK and, while it was different, it had many similarities to my home in the midwest. This, however, this was truly different. And I loved it.

I loved the complete disconnect from anything that was familiar. Even though my presence in Peru was to assist my father's missionary work - which was loathsome for me - just being in such different surroundings was invigorating. Was this what people meant when they referred to the "travel bug", I asked myself.

My feelings of peace in what to me was chaotic surroundings was interrupted as the rest of my group came through the lobby. I had already lugged down two of the massive suitcases filled with religious literature that we brought with us and my older brother Alex soon appeared with the second two suitcases.

While we had a short rough patch during our early teenage years, Alex and I have always remained extremely close. If it weren't for him I don't think I would have managed to get through many parts of my life. Peru was exciting yet agonizing in many ways, and having Alex there made it all easier.

I put my coke bottle - still over half full and cool to the touch - on the front desk and lugged two of the four heavy suitcases out to our van where our driver awaited.

We had been carrying these suitcases since our departure from home. Through airports, bus stations, trains, hotels, and many times loading and unloading them into different cars, taxis, and vans. Alex and I ruminated amongst ourselves that our father brought us with not to give us a unique experience, but to carry the luggage.

These suitcases were not the expensive, light kind that you might see today at a high-scale luggage boutique. These were heavy-duty Samsonite 1990s suitcases, and the worst kind. They were heavy themselves, only had two wheels on one end that only allowed you to pull them one way, and they were shaped oddly, with sharp angular edges on the top.

How I loathed those suitcases.

I've tried for the past two decades to write down my story, and I've always tried to do it chronologically. I would get through 50 or so pages and then get stuck, trying to remember the exact pieces of the next part of the puzzle.

This never worked well because I always ended up stopping. Looking over my past work, I've started and stopped so many times and have the same thing written - but in a different style - throughout these documents that I realized it's never worked.

Finally I've decided to do something different.

Instead of start to finish, I'll write snippets. Small pieces of my story that I hope will be interesting, can be digested quickly, and might help someone else who is stuck in a cult, is in the process of escaping, or has already left and is trying to figure out what to do.

Hopefully this new format will be easier to write, read, and help me gather my thoughts and emotions as I take this journey down a past that should not be forgotten.