To the girl who thought the world was ending.
In a dateless journal I kept at seventeen, I wrote the following entry.
I am starting to think none of this matters. None of it. Depression is no longer an issue. It is a spiritual matter that counseling cannot overcome. And it is irrelevant, made so in light of the imminent coming of Jesus.
Yes, I said he’s coming.
My parents are talking in earnest about going to live in the country; about owning chickens and goats, and farming. About stocking up clothes for [sister] and [brother] for the next several years, and storing food like rice and beans. Survival buckets and well-diggers. That kind of thing. They say the time is drawing near, and I believe they’re right.
It’s all we’ve talked of since Dad came home from North Carolina. Amazing how this changes the context of everything so drastically. Depression is not an issue. To think of cutting would be ridiculous. And I don’t really want to die. Not yet. Perhaps I will never know what it’s like to die — how ironic. But then — perhaps I will. But this way, perhaps I will die for the name of the Lord, instead of my own foolish, selfish notions.
If we make it seven years from now, I will have lived to the age of 24. Three years, and I will be 20. One of these two numbers could possibly be the most I will ever see of this life. Almost certainly, I won’t make it to 30.
I suspect 21 will be my final year.
As I transcribe my softly-penciled words here and let them move through me, my entire body feels their pain and shakes with it. I’m thirty-two years old now — who would have imagined? But I remember so clearly what I felt as I wrote this entry. And I remember the day, five years ago, when I sat in my therapist’s office and it finally hit me that none of it had been real. The world had never ended, and it wasn’t going to.
It was the first time I truly believed I had a future to plan for.
I was homeschooled and relatively isolated in a family cult of five. It prioritized my father’s emotional volatility and preoccupation with the End Times over all else. At night, Dad would come home from work, pour himself a glass of Mogen David, and start in on the diatribe: hours of ranting about the state of the world, the horrors of the Obama administration, the Illuminati and New World Order and secret cabals of baby-eating Satanists. It was all certain to set off the seven years of tribulation before the second coming of Jesus — if we weren’t already in it.
My mom would quietly clean the kitchen and nod along, while I would lie on the couch and listen with a mixture of fascination and fear as he told of nationwide collapse, concentration camps, and Christians slaughtered because they wouldn’t renounce their belief in God. He was never happier than these times.
The older I got, the more I would engage in the discussion. If I won points for being like him and believing his every word, maybe his hair-trigger temper would direct itself toward me less.
I became addicted to the rush of anxiety and adrenaline that these discussions would bring, and I would soak them in as if knowing more about the calamities to come could comfort me. (I imagine this is the same feeling my father would get from listening to Alex Jones.)
My parents were both ex-Seventh Day Adventists. I’d been hearing about the end of the world since I was seven. I had fully drunk the Flavor-aid.
But nobody knew any of that but us.
I think we seemed pretty normal on the surface. People knew my dad was a little nutty and I wore black all the time, but we had two internationally-adopted kids, and we played in the church band. That went a long way for our image as a good Christian family.
They couldn’t have known of my father’s constant End Times indoctrination, like a cult leader broadcasting sermons across the compound night after night. I lived it, and I didn’t know. I counted myself lucky that we were one of the few chosen families who would be prepared. No one could have known that I expected to die at twenty-one in an Obama-era concentration camp.
I stumbled my way through the dark years of my teens alone, waiting for the world to collapse so I could finally be at peace.
In a way, I didn’t live past twenty-one. At least, that version of me did not. I turned twenty-two on a trip to Denver, where I moved three months later and started a new life, far from the Apocalypse ravings and the constant stream of Infowars and conservative talk radio and the off-grid farm that my parents live on to this day.
Consciously, I didn’t know that I needed to get away from those things for my well-being.
But I think there was something in me that knew leaving would save me. Or at least, get me to a place where I could figure out how to save myself.
When I was twenty-three, my dad wrote to me. He told me things were looking grim, and I should be prepared to drop everything and drive home at a moment’s notice. Otherwise, I risked getting locked down in a big city with no way out when shit hit the fan.
I stowed a hundred dollars in a secret compartment in my car and packed an emergency bag. But I also wasn’t sure I believed him.
His prophesies had never come true, and spending a year outside the family cult had done wonders for my mental health. I had friends. I was no longer depressed. I had finally kicked the last vestiges of my eating disorder to the curb, and I hadn’t self-harmed in years. Escaping to a world where no one ever brought up the Illuminati, except to joke, and even my new church didn’t talk about the Apocalypse, had helped the dark clouds in my mind give way. The Colorado sun shone through. And the world didn’t seem so frightening anymore.
I still had hurdles to overcome. When a flock of black helicopters raced across the sky, a little bit of me would wonder if this was it. I would have nightmares of bombs dropping, cities burning, and running with nowhere to escape to. I would wonder if I’d been foolish to stop paying attention to the signs.
But the years kept on, and nothing happened. Nothing, except that I went to therapy, figured out some shit about my family of origin, deconstructed their religion, and placed very strict boundaries around what they’re allowed to talk to me about. I connected online with other people who had stories like mine. I even survived a pandemic that had my nervous system in an all-out panic.
I finally started to heal.
I’m healing still.
To the girl who thought the world was ending when she was seventeen years old: I wish I could tell you that it wasn’t, and it won’t. It’s just so easy to believe it will, because every day you live under emotional abuse is a day that the world ends a little bit more.
But you will get out. You’ll go on to be twenty, and twenty-four, and thirty-two, and you’ll grow into a self and a life that would sound too good to be true if I told you about them now. The world is more beautiful, more complex and marvelous and bittersweet than you can imagine outside of your father’s delusions, and you have a future in that world that’s worth the pain it will take to reach it.
I wish I could tell you that reality is nothing like what you’ve been taught, and there is so much to look forward to. That one day you’ll find yourself happier than you’re aware you can be, able to trust in yourself and the family you choose to be surrounded by.
You will be safe, you will be loved, and you will remember how to hope again.
Believe me. It’s closer than you think.
