Where to Go Once You’ve Escaped a Cult
Consider that you have put some distance between yourself and the Cult of Likability. You have an inkling that your wholeness is not conditional. Materials outside of the cult’s brainwashing have re-dirtied your plastic mind. Where do you go now? In what direction do you point your dazed and flashing eyes?
This is a nascent state. A blankness may reign, or perhaps a magnet of original feeling, a compass pointing home. You are on an adventure now. The ground is flat and dry. You sit to plot your course and a harbinger of death, a dusty crow, alights.
Dear, recently escaped pilgrim, he telepaths to your porous brain, a scary conceit is at hand. The same qualities that got you in to your recent bind, are just the ones you need at present.
Your openness, your curiosity, your willingness to believe. Your trust, your faith, your tender, meaty heart. You roll your eyes, exhausted. Might I be permitted to clam up for a minute? Might I lick my wounds and close the gates, you ask?
The crow, bedraggled but clear, wears the face of someone who has looked the nature of things square in their volcanic faces for a billion years.
Yes, he answers. Take a moment, a breath, a unit of the second hand’s tick-tock currency. Take your time. But don’t waste. As your life is always now.
You can bare it. To be moved by faith again. Accompanied by her fraternal twin, rational thinking. As you have sweat over the extraction of rancid myths from your breast, now there is ample space for regeneration. It’s a badass tender leap to choose continued sensitivity when you wear wrinkles born of mishandled training. Forgive the bastard systems that shrunk you from yourself and ready your heart to explore the brilliant desert at hand.
Stand up. Receive a deeper breathe. Have a chuckle. It’s ridiculous, this sandy march, when you could be struck down at any time, and stunning. Hope to be bowled over by the beauty, speechless and paralyzed in awe. The crow takes flight, just a mundane miracle pointing the way.