Once N and I resumed our friendship, things took off from there. We broke a school rule and we were still alive! I felt emboldened. We started calling other people we knew who had left and gathered a small group together and started talking about our experiences with each other. This sharing with others was the first step for all of us towards healing. We started meeting on Thursday nights at my house for informal conversations. We kept finding new people. Someone would meet someone in a store and talk to them about leaving school and they would. People called other people. We tried to let people know that there were people able and willing to help them on the outside hoping that would lessen the fear of leaving.
Talking with friends who were also outside the influence of school has been one of the most helpful things since I left. I remember listening to a woman explain how she had sat in class and felt like an apostate because she could not understand what Sharon was saying. She kept thinking: “What the hell is she talking about?” How often had I sat there in class and listened to Sharon or someone else speak and think “What the hell are they talking about?” I sat for many years and thought that many times but I hid my thoughts and I lied about them, I never stood up and asked the question and I never asked the question in private to my friends. We all had to maintain the illusion that not only did we always understand what was going on but that we were there and awake and truly sincerely striving to become like those people who frequently never made any sense to me. It was all hiding and lying because I never stood up and questioned anything and because I internalized it all and only sought their approval and love. I learned how to stuff myself way down deep where no one could find me least of all myself. It was all mechanical and now I was free to share these feelings with others without the fear of reprisals. Knowing that others had felt the same way about helped me feel solidarity with and compassion for so many others.
Of course, there were always dreams. My husband and I still have school dreams and others do as well. I remember walking down a street in Florence some years ago and noticing the thoughts in my mind, I wondered if I would ever get beyond their influence. There is a whole language and culture to school that is outside most of the norms of our society. I still cringe when my husband uses a school word or refers to a school concept. I remember a dream where I was still in my house in New York and people from school came to help me do some work on it. They started digging in the basement and kept going down and down and down, many floors below street level on and on ceaselessly and I started to wonder if I was ever going to get them out. They were so deeply embedded.
My healing has taken many stages and there may still be more places I need to go. In some ways, there is a part of me that will always be entangled with school because it was my life for so many years. It is a part of me but I want that part to be in the light not in the darkness. I do not want to be in fear of school anymore. I don't actually want to live in fear of anything.
That first year out, we decided to have a non-school Christmas party where no one had to do anything! We had a great time and a lot of people came - from both the younger and older classes in Boston and from New York. I did it for a few years until I felt like I didn't have to do it anymore. The Thursday night evenings stopped after awhile as well. I had done a lot of reading of books about cults at that point. We were always passing books back and forth to each other. I took all my school books and donated them to the library book sale. I sold some of the rare ones on eBay. Each step was important.
The next step was writing about the group on the internet and the next was to tell the truth to my family and friends and the next was this blog.
I had read a number of blogs on the internet written by former members of what is sometimes called "high demand groups" instead of more common nomenclature of "cults". I felt that I needed to write and reach out to others via the internet in a similar way that others had from other groups. I wrote and posted the website www.esotericfreedom.com
Not being much of a computer geek, I found a website named Homestead that was easy to navigate and would allow me to write and post websites easily. Soon after, I received a letter from Eric M Lieberman of the law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman. I was surprised because Leonard Boudin had been a noted civil liberties attorney and left-wing activist who represented Daniel Ellsberg and Dr. Benjamin Spock among others. A quick search of the internet revealed that Eric Lieberman was actually an attorney that represented Scientology. Homestead immediately caved into their demands and threatened to remove my website.
With the help of a friend from school who was a computer geek, I moved the website to an offshore server where it has been ever since. I also started a now defunct blog at esoteric freedom.blogspot.com. The blog was a great resource for many people. The conversations were interesting and informative. A lot of people left school because of that blog. I was beginning to feel that I was too tied to it and wanted to move on with my life. A friend who had recently left school offered to take it over and I consented, glad to be out of the day-to-day running of a blog. Eventually, my friend wrote and posted a series of "Dossiers" on different people in school.
One of those persons who had a dossier written about them, sued me to take down the blog. The blog was taken down without my consent and my Blogger account was removed as well and a lot of valuable information was lost. I eventually had five lawsuits started against me that originated from people in school. Thus began over three years (and still counting) of litigation with the cult that is still not finished. It's been a very sleazy and sordid war that is being waged against me and I don't think that they yet understand that I have no intention of backing down. Might does not make right.
Mr. Twitch always told us: "Do not fear to hate the odious." I don't.
Three have now been settled (hopefully) but there are still two that are ongoing. At some point, I will write a history of the litigation against me. It has been a very difficult time for me but I also have some very good friends who have stood beside me, people who continually thank me for being brave enough to stand up against the group and helped them get free of the cult. Also, I now have a dynamite attorney who I am eternally grateful to. I feel no need to stop fighting against them.
"No one is free until we are all free."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
You can listen to my new favorite song here:
