She milks cows, gives birth naturally, and even breastfeeds at beauty pageants. But is this lifestyle truly empowering, or does it conceal deeper issues of coercion and control? My journey from a similar environment reveals the potential dangers behind this seemingly perfect facade.

Hannah Neeleman, adored by her nine million followers as Ballerina Farm, epitomizes the tradwife ideal with her picturesque farm life and family of eight children. But what is a tradwife? A tradwife, or “traditional wife,” embraces conventional gender roles, often staying at home to focus on domestic duties. While Neeleman’s life may seem charming, it reminds me of my own upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian environment. As awareness of coercive control grows, it’s crucial to explore the hidden dangers of idealizing such lifestyles and share my story of escape — even if I didn’t know I wanted it until I was forced into it.

On the outside, Hannah Neeleman’s life looks picture-perfect. She’s got eight sweet children, a beautiful farm, and millions of followers who adore her traditional values. The image of a devoted wife and mother, living self-sufficiently on a picturesque farm, appeals to many as a simpler, more fulfilling way of life. However, this portrayal often glosses over the restrictive and oppressive elements that can accompany such roles.

Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family with eight siblings, our lives revolved around strict religious teachings and homeschooling. Just like Neeleman’s children, my reading materials were limited to wholesome, old-fashioned books like “Little House on the Prairie.” While these stories were meant to instill traditional values, they also reinforced the idea that a woman’s place was in the home, subservient to her husband. I loved this lifestyle. I spent my days baking, making corncob dolls, and organizing trips to the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Wisconsin. But my idyllic world turned dystopian when, at eight years old, my father and another ‘leading Brother’ in our church sat me down to tell me I was a Jezebel.

At first glance, the tradwife lifestyle can seem warm and wonderful, filled with family closeness and joy. But the pressure to maintain this facade and the immense workload can lead to significant mental health challenges. In my family, these pressures eventually caused my mother to burn out and experience severe mental health issues. My father began living a double life, and our family went bankrupt and lost our home in Connecticut. We were split apart and shunned by the cult we had devoted our lives to. Like many commentators on Neeleman’s story suggest, leaving such an environment often means losing everything you’ve ever known.

I was raised to be a good ‘second mother’ to my siblings, much like the older children in Neeleman’s family are described. When our family disintegrated, I had to build my identity from scratch. Ironically, it was my involvement in professional-level athletics — an area Julliard-trained ballerina Neeleman left behind — that provided me an escape from the very prison she seems to embrace.

Religious and social conditioning can deeply influence individuals’ choices, often limiting their perceived options. For Neeleman, her Mormon beliefs and upbringing likely played a significant role in shaping her lifestyle. Growing up in a non-denominational fundamentalist Christian community, I faced similar pressures. Our world emphasized absolute obedience and subservience, creating an environment where questioning or deviating from the norm was not tolerated. This conditioning instills a deep sense of obligation and fear, making it incredibly challenging to break free.

I vividly remember the indoctrination sessions, where our leader’s voice boomed through the room, telling us that anyone who left our community would face divine wrath. This fear was a powerful tool to keep us in line, much like the constraints Neeleman or other tradwives may face even subconsciously within their tightly controlled environments. And for daughters like me, the adults’ lack of critical thinking about idealistic choices can have lifelong effects.

Coercive control involves a pattern of behavior that seeks to take away the victim’s liberty or freedom, strip away their sense of self, and make them dependent on the perpetrator. This can include isolation from friends and family, strict regulations on daily activities, financial control, and emotional manipulation. In my experience, these forms of control were disguised as religious and familial duty, making it even harder to recognize and escape from them.

Social media influencers like Neeleman present a curated version of their lives, which can be misleading and potentially harmful. Followers may feel pressured to emulate these idealized lifestyles without understanding the full context or the sacrifices involved. The glossy images of domestic bliss often hide the more troubling realities of control and subservience. In my own journey, the facade of a perfect family often masked the emotional and psychological turmoil we experienced.

Reflecting on my own journey, I’ve learned the importance of critical thinking and questioning the narratives presented by influential figures. Escaping the confines of a restrictive environment required courage and the support of those who understood my struggles. It’s crucial to recognize the signs of coercive control and to seek help if you find yourself in a similar situation. My victory in a New England track championship, despite the oppressive environment, for me, everyday, symbolizes the resilience and strength required to break free and reclaim one’s identity.

While it’s essential to acknowledge Neeleman’s right to enjoy her chosen lifestyle, it’s equally important to highlight the potential risks and pressures associated with it. Many commentators on Neeleman’s story suggest that leaving such an environment often means losing everything you’ve ever known.

This is not merely a hypothetical scenario; it is a reality I lived through.

Idealizing traditional lifestyles without critical examination can be dangerous. By understanding the underlying issues and recognizing the signs of coercive control, we can make informed choices and support those in need. Let’s prioritize well-being and autonomy and create a future where everyone can thrive on their own terms — by making sure we are truly thinking for ourselves, on our own, from our core self.

❤ Let’s connect and continue the conversation on reclaiming our stories and building a future where everyone can thrive on their own terms. ❤

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As I read these stories of Harvey Weinstein’s assaults on women and the culture of complicity and intimidation that enabled a predator, my heart rejoices. Not because I am a sadist but because I can see the shift. The world will move on soon to the next salacious story, yes. But western civilization’s dialogue around abuse and systems of coercion and control, indeed the overall conversation has been and is continuing to shift, irrevocably, for the better.

Such cycles infect every aspect of society, but the focus on their direct effect on women is a crucial place to start. The old 1950’s-esque line “she’s emotional, irrational, hysterical,” is becoming more and more clear for what it is: victim-blaming and responsibility-shifting.

I know this world of destructive coercion all too well. I was raised in a cult that put women behind and beneath men in every way. Our futures were pre-ordained: no birth-control, constant child-rearing, endless reminders of our inferiority and God’s command to submit.

And then there was me: a square peg where there were only round holes. The negative narrative and character assassination started early. At the age of eight I was sat down for a meeting by concerned ‘Brothers’ and accused of being a flirt because I spoke loudly and made eye contact. As a teenager the cult openly referred to me as ‘a Jezebel’ and other teens were advised to avoid me. When I came home for a brief visit after I’d left the cult, a ‘Brother’ joked with me, in my parents’ kitchen, about my new job at the United Nations: “Maybe you can get those other countries to listen to us. It’s like talking to a woman: you never get anywhere!”

I wish I could share a more uplifting story of ‘life after the escape.’ But the cycles, unconfronted, continued to thrive and even grow. That’s why I tell my story here, now, because I must unearth and reveal their rotten morbidity: perhaps, my eternal optimism reminds me, the truth can exhume them, wash the stink away.

Throughout my twenties I struggled to survive alone while also helping my seven younger siblings when I could. I helped my brother closest in age, including giving him a place to live, but was dismayed and confused when he began to regularly and publicly accuse me of being ‘bipolar,’ ‘psycho’ and ‘manic.’ I am many things, but these are not some of them. Another brother threatened to kill me, and another regularly calls me a ‘witch’ (in the Puritan sense).

When I told my sisters they said, “But this doesn’t happen except when you’re around. It’s always been you. People just don’t like you.”

I tried to turn to my mother for support only to realize she wanted my family to think these things of me. It took the attention off her and our physically and emotionally abusive childhood. “You have so much work to do on yourself, Heidi,” she said, her eyes brimming over with pity so gooey it disguised the malice beneath to everyone but me. “Maybe it’s better if you just go away.”

So I tried to turn to my father. Always a ‘daddy’s girl,’ I’d done anything he ever wanted or needed to support our family and stand behind him. Now I realized he’d just been using me and that he couldn’t relate to, or even stand to be around a self-actualized, full-grown woman. He had nothing for me but criticisms of my character and vanilla platitudes from the Bible. All his advice rang empty at best — ‘things will get better!’ — and abuser-enabling at worst, with lines like Jesus’ ‘turn the other cheek.’

When I ran away from the cult in Connecticut, I drove across the country and lived in Los Angeles for the next ten years. All my jobs were in the entertainment industry. I have Weinstein-esque stories that could fill a full-length manuscript: many of them with celebrity names tagged on.

I have little hope for my situation with my own family. I know the cult, thriving today, will not hear or learn from my story. They will only label me bitter and attention-seeking, as they already do and have. But after this Weinstein expose I do have hope for a future of less character-assassination, more soul-survival. Story by story, ‘me too’ by ‘me too,’ the gender imbalances and cultures of complicity that enable abusers and predators are being shaken to their core.

The simple truth is that I, and other people with stories like me, have done nothing ‘to deserve this.’ We’ve only tried to survive in a world with cards stacked against us. In a world where the existing order thrives on power imbalances, a world where might or numbers makes right it’s just more convenient and time-saving to call the victim the bad guy.

Other little girls will not have to grow up like me, because the sheer ridiculousness of such upbringings are now more obvious than ever. Other young women like I was will have less chance of being challenged and shamed over their stories and very selves because the language of victim-blaming is now more recognizable. Abusers will not be able to deliver their character assassinations and soul-destroying designations as blithely as before.

Because now, it’s becoming safe to say something. And that, small step as it may be, is a huge leap for victims everywhere.

If you like what you read be sure to wave — as a writer it keeps me going!

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Harvey’s Cult of Complicity, Like Mine was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

THE BAFFLING, UNAPOLOGETIC, arrogant white-blackness of Rachel Dolezal (or do I call her Nkechi Amare Diallo now?) captivated the nation from day one.

But my fascination with her story goes beyond the usual reasons.

I’m certainly curious about bigger questions around race and identity. I’ve scrolled through the insightful comments in various articles, trying to understand the difference between race and gender fluidity, the white supremacy of black appropriation. But beneath the socio-cultural rubber-necking, for me, lies a deeper draw.

It’s that I see myself in her.

I am a white woman too. I’ve been in several serious relationships with black men. At one point, not so long ago, I was the sole white female sprinter on a college sports team and all my friends were black. My nicknames were ‘ABG,’ (Albino Black Girl), and ‘Ho Girl’ (not for the reasons you might think. It’s my last name, hello!). It was a little embarrassing, but it still felt good to belong. I felt accepted, and like color could run more than skin deep. But the similarities go back further.

I was also homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family in the Midwest. Like Rachel, I broke away, and rejected that upbringing (or was it my upbringing who rejected me, because I wore pants instead of skirts and was therefore forever destined for hell?). Either way, ever since I’ve been stuck in contrarian-rebel mode while also searching for an identity, a role, a place to fit in, a who am I really?

Closed-off, cultic upbringings will do that to you.

And as you begin to brokenly navigate mainstream society, there’s nothing you identify with more than other misfits, the ones who have been forgotten, overlooked, stigmatized, and generally stereotyped too. When you fight to rise above that, you find a certain strength that only others from similar challenges, can also know. And so I agree with Rachel: blackness, as an experience of disenfranchisement, and I’m going to get in trouble for this, can run more than skin deep. Just not quite like she says it does.

I’ve observed the cycle in more than myself and Rachel.

Let’s take my sister, for example, four years younger. We share the same background. And as she and I leaned on each other to survive in an unknown mainstream society after our parents and former group rejected us for our ‘worldliness,’ I watched her latch on to the black-identity wagon, too.

It evolved naturally when my parents sent her to a ‘Job Corp.’ reform-type school after she dropped out of high school. All her peers there were inner-city youth who also, as tends to be the case, came from disenfranchised minority backgrounds. So my sister started dating only black men. Then she got tight braids in her blonde hair and started wearing Apple Bottom Jeans on her tiny little white girl butt. She, same Little House on the Prairie upbringing as me, started using the ‘habitual be’ as a ‘helper verb’ like, “We be going now.” Her black boyfriend got busted stealing shower razors for her, and she got out of it by crying until the store manager felt bad for the white girl in the bad situation with the black guy. She started appropriating all the most ghetto aspects of black culture, and she told my Creole boyfriend, once, that he “wasn’t really black,” because he acted like a hipster and listened to white sixties musicians.

Then she turned her blue eyes on me. I got accused of being racist for reasons like being disgusted when her black boyfriend’s five brothers passed the blunt over me and refused to make eye contact or use my name while derogatorily referring to bitches they fucked in hotels. I got accused of “not getting the struggle” when I was appalled at her for putting her race as ‘Hispanic’ on applications when she was trying to start a modeling career.

I found the whole situation as embarrassing as my one-time college nicknames. But worse, I was watching my sister denigrate herself and reduce her chances in life in an attempt to fit in somewhere. And worst of all, in a very genuine and sweet attempt to align herself with a disenfranchised population she found certain struggle-commonalities with, she was unconsciously perpetuating ghetto stereotypes. Nothing about her empathy and compassion for her black boyfriends’ struggles (and how very, very real and unfair and heartbreaking they were) was doing anything to help change those situations. If anything, it was setting them back further.

And I couldn’t even talk to her about it. Because if I tried, no matter what I said, I was impinging on her platform. This was her new identity, which meant she was an authority, which made her unassailable, and me ignorant. Just like Rachel Dolezal in her recent damning interview with Ijeoma Oluo, the one everyone’s referring to as the ‘last article you need to read on Rachel’ (don’t stop reading this one, though!).

Ijeoma couldn’t talk to Rachel, not really, because this was Rachel’s identity now. As the article made clear, her identity has little if anything to do with the actual black experience, not really. Rachel clung to her bylines fiercely, repeating the same soundbites from her new memoir, demonstrating a defensive lock-in to tunnel-vision neural pathways she’s decided make her her, and what she is, now.

And that’s where Rachel’s Midwestern Christian fundamentalist, homeschooled background comes into the same play as my sister and my coming-of-age stories. There is an innate need in the human psyche, to categorize both oneself and others.

I fit here, she fits there, we fit in here, they fit over there. Now all is well with the world and I feel safe.

It’s tribal and primal and survivalist and makes sense when someone the next cave over might want part of your saber-tooth tiger kill but there’s only enough for you and yours. If you break the cave-code, you’re exiled, because this is survival. In Christian fundamentalism, it’s always this kind of survival, because the apocalypse is just around the corner, and you’d better only have The Chosen around you when Jesus comes back.

And so, when exile happens to a Christian-cult kid, you don’t know who you are or where you fit in anymore. Your past is gone and your future no longer has roots from which to grow. You’re a walking diaspora. You are — and this is not to presume a shared experience with a physical sufferer of the following — an immigrant, a displaced person, a refugee, a stranger in your own land, even if it’s just from within. And who is left that understands? Others like you. Those scattershot, minority Others who too have been disenfranchised, made nomadic, used and spit out, the ones whose identities were decided for them when they were born, and who have had to labor under those stereotyped expectations ever since, even if and when their own culture is also stripped from them.

Rachel Dolezal tried to explain, weakly, in her book and recent interview, that having to work for everything growing up made her a slave of sorts. But what I think she can’t or hasn’t yet faced, is that her sense of chattel started with being homeschooled in Christian fundamentalism. Such a world is black and white, a locked-down situation where your identity, especially from a gender standpoint, is predetermined and you have two options: heaven, our way, or hell, and exile. There is no in-between in extremism. You are good or bad, male or female, heaven or hell. It’s the ultimate black or white thinking, and it creates, in impressionable developing minds, a need to categorize even beyond the natural human propensity.

Rachel Dolezal’s turning, like my sister’s, to an African American identity in the void of self, community and family that she found herself in, suggests to me, a natural adult reaction to identity fragmentation in early psychosocial development. As such, I believe there are many more Rachel’s out there who could benefit from less scrutiny and categorization, and more recognition of the identity crisis of adults emerging from religiously extreme childhoods.

Rachel Dolezal (Nkechi Amare Diallo?!) appears to me, perhaps not in the racial light in which she desires to be seen, but more like someone hurt and confused, defensive and begging to be let alone in the culture in which she has, finally, found a place to call home. It’s a shame that her need to lie about it, instead of see and frame it according to her own background needs, has the effect of perpetuating the very black and white divisions that clearly brought her to this place today.

❤ Please ❤ if you think more people might benefit from reading this. ❤

For more on religion, politics and healing, check out a HuffPo post on Trump and cults or follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/heidstar

Why Rachel Dolezal’s Issues go back to her Cultic Childhood (imho) was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This blog is for and about real cult survivors. In Trump ‘cult’ure though, that might mean all of us.

P1130179.mp4

THIS IS LIFE, lived full-on. Zooming solo down a two-lane highway, into a clean, tropical breeze. The motorbike I’m driving is attached to a rattling cart. I can transport everything from jungle greens to water buffalo calves, if I wanted to.

It is spring in Southeast Asia. The rice paddies glow like emeralds. There’s a rainbow. No, really.

Then a small bug lands in my mouth.

“Protein,” my farm host Hans said brightly, like an annoying dad, when I was on back of a motorcycle with him last time.

My unwanted protein is too far back in my throat to spit out. I swallow it and enjoy the ride.

Going with the flow, accepting what happens, including bug meals, I’m learning, is the path to freedom. And as I am about to be reminded, synchronicity — where things happen in a natural flow, as if by magic — is one of the clues along the way, that you are on that path.

IT TURNS OUT that Plai, the beautiful woman who visited the permaculture farm I live on , is some kind of superstar entrepreneur, with her own resort. Her own home is a two-story, white stone villa, with teal shutters and giant wooden doors.

When I rattle into the white-gravel driveway in my farmer’s cart, she’s teaching yoga in front of sparkling saltwater pool waterfalls to a man with wavy, silver-hair from The Netherlands, who looks like a Lord of the Rings elf. So I tiptoe by and go in the organic, vegan restaurant.

Another man who looks like a model greets me, glowing with health and height, lean muscles and cut cheekbones.

Why is everyone so good-looking? I can’t take much more of this! Actually, I can. Forever.

“Hi, I’m Caspar,” says the young man, in a Russian accent. His tan feet are bare and he’s wearing royal-blue Japanese-style harem pants. He seems nervous, like he’s straining to appear professional. “Shall I show you around?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I say. “I’m Heidi. Where are you from?”

“Estonia,” he says.

“Oh! I’ve been there!” I say, eagerly. “Tallin.”

“That’s my city!” he says, warming to me.

“Aitah!” I say, which is ‘thank you,’ the only word I know.

“Aite,” he corrects me, pronouncing the end with a soft e.

“I got a little high before I came here,” I volunteer. “I’m just kind of excited to see all this. This is super luxury!”

Caspar smiles, delighted that I not only am I not another western guest with a list of demands and complaints, but that I might know where to get weed. He offers me a fresh coconut with a bendy straw, and our friendship begins.

BY THE END OF my first visit to Plai’s resort, I have discovered Caspar is an aspiring filmmaker, has a drone, and is willing to film me for the documentary I’m making back in the states. Ah, synchronicity. You’re looking good right now.

Caspar, twenty-seven, six foot three, face like one of those guys with no shirt and an open fur coat on a giant billboard in New York, is one of those frat-boy types, a former gym rat and serial ladies man. Then he watched a bunch of conspiracy videos on YouTube. He quit cigarettes, went vegan, and moved to Southeast Asia, in a bid to be a better person and ‘wake up.’ I marvel again at the varieties of ‘how I got here’s’ I hear from everyone I meet. Caspar, it becomes clear, truly has a child’s beautiful and insightful, honest and clear, if naïve, heart of gold.

Over the next few days, I end up with the most epic footage imaginable.

BACK AT THE resort, I grow closer with Plai and learn that Caspar is the man she’s so hung up on. He’d mentioned to me that he doesn’t believe in marriage but I can’t bring myself to tell Ploy this. In the past I would have, girl-code, but when she talks abouthim I can see already that, deep down, she knows this. It is for her to admit to herself, in her time.

I bat away mosquitoes and a fair amount of envy that all the men I find attractive are circling her like these bugs now. At the same time, she looks so beautiful and vulnerable in a white eyelet lace top and wraparound sarong I kind of want to hug her. I suggest we get behind some netted doors and have a glass of wine.

Inside the organic restaurant’s lounge area, we end up in close conversation with two other women and begin speaking easily, naturally, of the very topics I came here to work through. Self-love, and bitterness.

Alice is young, French, married, still squeals when her phone buzzes with a call from her husband. Her ‘come to Thailand moment’ was when she realized, in her wild desire to have a child, an addiction to the trap of ‘a perfect life.’ She began challenging her ideals, quit her financier job and now runs a successful tea company out of Singapore. She’s considering adoption. Her personal jewel, her talisman, if you will, is ‘freedom’ and she keeps repeating the word, like a treasure, to me, the more emphatically, as she learns more about my own story of struggle with bitterness and determination to write my cult-memoir.

Stella, is a Venezuelan model, because of course. She has powerful energy, the venerable, expansive kind that broadcasts her, even while seated, as a mover and shaker. She moved to Thailand after civil war in her country, and talks of the nonprofit she is forming for the disenfranchised.

Both Stella and Alice are here now, as part of an all-woman’s entrepreneurial network, for a ‘goddess week.’ They add me to a secret Facebook group for “Chiang Mai Nomad Girls,” and I feel like I just got a ticket to Burning Man, only real life.

Plai brings me a dish of black rice grown on her own farm. It has the heft and consistency of tiny pieces of buttery steak. It might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but then she brings me Khao Soy, a northern Thailand yellow curry with potato, noodles and mushrooms, and I decide that’s best, but that’s before I had the sweet potato in coconut cream dessert.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING I came here to tackle within myself comes up in the conversation with Plai, Alice and Stella that night. We talk of bitterness, non-attachment, their own difficult family stories, the strengths they’ve found within, the freedom that has been each of our own biggest lessons.

I’ve been more locked to my identity as a family member and a big sister than I’d realized. Without the ‘but I love my family and do anything for them, no matter how much they abuse me’ identity, what will I present to the world? I thought I was fairly independent already, but I’m realizing I’ve been scared to be seen as ‘just me.’ I’m beginning to realize how good feeling free feels. I’m starting to accept that I have no choice, for now, but to totally detach from my family upon returning. Our current dynamic is perpetually toxic, and helping no one.

My new friends encourage me to continue to walk my own path and to accept that it is not my family I can help with my work, like I once thought. They remind me to watch as synchronistic events continue to unfold, that that is a reminder that one is on the right path, and that that path, my book, can and will help the ones who seek it.

We marvel at the vortex of Chiang Mai, this place that seems to draw likeminded souls from around the world.

“Come back,” Ploy invites me. “There’s a new yoga retreat starting tomorrow. You can just drop in. We’ll be doing the herbal steam sauna on Saturday.”

Heaven.

And then, because God, and jokes, and more lessons, always more lessons, of course, the sky falls. Next entry.

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

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THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #1
• Entry #2
• Entry #3
• Entry #4
• This one is #5

Silver linings before the Storm was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world, that definition just might apply to all of us. A little background: http://bit.ly/2mh4ci0

Yesterday, whilst leaving my sister’s Brooklyn apartment to catch a plane from JFK to Thailand, I suddenly realized, as I stumbled over a curb and into a mud puddle, that I was literally dragging my past baggage with me. My gigantic, rickety suitcase was jammed full of notebooks, old diaries, childhood photos, and rag-tag, rolled-up storyboards sketched out on butcher paper. It was so heavy that a kind Dominican in Flatbush had to help me carry it down the subway stairs and my Uber driver from Guyana asked me how far I was from home.

See, here’s why I’m dragging this stuff from place to place: I don’t have a home. No really, my childhood home was foreclosed after I was raised in a cult that then excommunicated my whole broken family. No roots, no base, no ‘Oh Heidi’s from there.’ It’s why I’m off to my next adventure — Thailand this time. Constantly moving makes me feel more in control of my instability. I’m pretty sure that’s what a psychotherapist would say, anyway. By subletting my room in Vermont, my latest questionable attempt at roots where I’m on an off-term in grad school, I can afford a whole month on a permaculture farm in the jungle province of Chiang Mai and work on my memoir.

So yes, I need these archives for research. But it also felt, in the moment when I noticed the living metaphor of my literal baggage, like I had found an elaborate excuse to stay attached to the pain and bitterness of my past: endlessly lugging around and delving into it.

I thought writing my story would be cathartic but I’m getting more and more afraid it’s making me bitter. Like, bitter, bitter. Since the onslaught of the holidays, and trying to navigate complicated present family relationships while delving into awful past ones, I’ve felt resentment festering, bitterness tightening its cold, iron grip on my soul and hurt constricting my heart like winding poison ivy with fangs.

Let’s see what the dictionary says about bitterness.

1. sharpness of taste; lack of sweetness.

2. anger and disappointment at being treated unfairly; resentment.

Yep. That’s how I feel.

Here’s the thing: I’ve read the self-help books. Right now I’m on the can’t-recommend-it-enough “The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame.” I practice gratitude. I pray. I do creative things every day and sometimes I even journal morning pages. I take Omega 3’s, and most days, I get some leafy greens in. I even have a ‘sparkle’ tattoo to remind me to ‘keep the glow’ (I lived in southern Cali for awhile so that’s my excuse). All around I think I’m doing a pretty good job at following a generally reassuring mash-up of scientific and spiritual advice on the pursuit of happiness.

But what about when you’ve bought into the assurance that ‘writing your story’ will bring catharsis, only it’s taking ten years to write it? What about when ‘loving yourself’ is at odds with ‘forgiveness’ (both highly recommended, it seems, by maddeningly well-adjusted people on Ted Talk type forums who appear to have transcended: what’s taking me so long?!). Back home I’m finding it hard to put up clear boundaries while seeking love and support from my abusive, traumatized family and delving into creative work that all just happen to be, literally, related.

How hard can you work on yourself before something gives? Why do I keep reliving on-the-edge drama no matter how much I try to make good decisions? Why does my family treat me like garbage for even trying, when I love them so much and have only ever loved them so much?

And so, I run again, dragging these issues behind me in a literal suitcase. My bitterness feels at a boiling point and my heart feels like it might cave in on itself. This can’t be good. What do you do when it feels like bitterness might win out?

I hope you’ll come along with me as I blog about my creative journey and hopeful defeat of the beckoning dark side, starting with this month-long move to Thailand.

For more on religion, politics and healing, follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/heidstar

This blog is for and about real cult survivors. In Trump ‘cult’ure though, that might mean all of us.

THIS IS LIFE, lived full-on. Zooming solo down a two-lane highway, into a clean, tropical breeze. The motorbike I’m driving is attached to a rattling cart. I can transport everything from jungle greens to water buffalo calves, if I wanted to.

It is spring in Southeast Asia. The rice paddies glow like emeralds. There’s a rainbow. No, really.

Then a small bug lands in my mouth.

“Protein,” Hans said brightly, like an annoying dad, when I was on back of a motorcycle with him last time.

P1130179.mp4

My unwanted protein is too far back in my throat to spit out. I swallow it and enjoy the ride.

Going with the flow, accepting what happens, including bug meals, I’m learning, is the path to freedom. And as I am about to be reminded, synchronicity — where things happen in a natural flow, as if by magic — is one of the clues along the way, that you are on that path.

IT TURNS OUT that Plai, the beautiful woman who visited the permaculture farm I live on recently, is some kind of superstar entrepreneur, with her own resort. Her own home is a two-story, white stone villa, with teal shutters and giant wooden doors.

When I rattle into the white-gravel driveway in my farmer’s cart, she’s teaching yoga in front of sparkling saltwater pool waterfalls to a man with wavy, silver-hair from The Netherlands, who looks like a Lord of the Rings elf. So I tiptoe by and go in the organic, vegan restaurant.

Another man who looks like a model greets me, glowing with health and height, lean muscles and cut cheekbones.

Why is everyone so good-looking? I can’t take much more of this! Actually, I can. Forever.

“Hi, I’m Caspar,” says the young man, in a Russian accent. His tan feet are bare and he’s wearing royal-blue Japanese-style harem pants. He seems nervous, like he’s straining to appear professional. “Shall I show you around?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I say. “I’m Heidi. Where are you from?”

“Estonia,” he says.

“Oh! I’ve been there!” I say, eagerly. “Tallin.”

“That’s my city!” he says, warming to me.

“Aitah!” I say, which is ‘thank you,’ the only word I know.

“Aite,” he corrects me, pronouncing the end with a soft e.

“I got a little high before I came here,” I volunteer. “I’m just kind of excited to see all this. This is super luxury!”

Caspar smiles, delighted that I not only am I not another western guest with a list of demands and complaints, but that I might know where to get weed. He offers me a fresh coconut with a bendy straw, and our friendship begins.

BY THE END OF my first visit to Plai’s resort, I have discovered Caspar is an aspiring filmmaker, has a drone, and is willing to film me for the documentary I’m making back in the states. Ah, synchronicity. You’re looking good right now.

Caspar, twenty-seven, six foot three, face like one of those guys with no shirt and an open fur coat on a giant billboard in New York, is one of those frat-boy types, a former gym rat and serial ladies man. Then he watched a bunch of conspiracy videos on YouTube. He quit cigarettes, went vegan, and moved to Southeast Asia, in a bid to be a better person and ‘wake up.’ I marvel again at the varieties of ‘how I got here’s’ I hear from everyone I meet. Caspar, it becomes clear, truly has a child’s beautiful and insightful, honest and clear, if naïve, heart of gold.

Over the next few days, I end up with the most epic footage imaginable.

One morning Caspar and I head to a mountaintop Buddhist temple to catch the sunrise. I walk towards the edge of the pinnacle, a gigantic temple behind me. His drone zooms out from there to show the whole panorama of the surrounding northern Thailand.

Caspar heads back to Estonia to renew his passport and we make plans to continue working together on my film.

BACK AT THE resort, I grow closer with Plai and learn that Caspar is the man she’s so hung up on. He’d mentioned to me that he doesn’t believe in marriage but I can’t bring myself to tell Ploy this. In the past I would have, girl-code, but when she talks abouthim I can see already that, deep down, she knows this. It is for her to admit to herself, in her time.

I bat away mosquitoes and a fair amount of envy that all the men I find attractive are circling her like these bugs now. At the same time, she looks so beautiful and vulnerable in a white eyelet lace top and wraparound sarong I kind of want to hug her. I suggest we get behind some netted doors and have a glass of wine.

Inside the organic restaurant’s lounge area, we end up in close conversation with two other women and begin speaking easily, naturally, of the very topics I came here to work through. Self-love, and bitterness.

Alice is young, French, married, still squeals when her phone buzzes with a call from her husband. Her ‘come to Thailand moment’ was when she realized, in her wild desire to have a child, an addiction to the trap of ‘a perfect life.’ She began challenging her ideals, quit her financier job and now runs a successful tea company out of Singapore. She’s considering adoption. Her personal jewel, her talisman, if you will, is ‘freedom’ and she keeps repeating the word, like a treasure, to me, the more emphatically, as she learns more about my own story of struggle with bitterness and determination to write my cult-memoir.

Stella, is a Venezuelan model, because of course. She has powerful energy, the venerable, expansive kind that broadcasts her, even while seated, as a mover and shaker. She moved to Thailand after civil war in her country, and talks of the nonprofit she is forming for the disenfranchised.

Both Stella and Alice are here now, as part of an all-woman’s entrepreneurial network, for a ‘goddess week.’ They add me to a secret Facebook group for “Chiang Mai Nomad Girls,” and I feel like I just got a ticket to Burning Man, only real life.

Plai brings me a dish of black rice grown on her own farm. It has the heft and consistency of tiny pieces of buttery steak. It might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten, but then she brings me Khao Soy, a northern Thailand yellow curry with potato, noodles and mushrooms, and I decide that’s best, but that’s before I had the sweet potato in coconut cream dessert.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING I came here to tackle within myself comes up in the conversation with Plai, Alice and Stella that night. We talk of bitterness, non-attachment, their own difficult family stories, the strengths they’ve found within, the freedom that has been each of our own biggest lessons.

I’ve been more locked to my identity as a family member and a big sister than I’d realized. Without the ‘but I love my family and do anything for them, no matter how much they abuse me’ identity, what will I present to the world? I thought I was fairly independent already, but I’m realizing I’ve been scared to be seen as ‘just me.’ I’m beginning to realize how good feeling free feels. I’m starting to accept that I have no choice, for now, but to totally detach from my family upon returning. Our current dynamic is perpetually toxic, and helping no one.

My new friends encourage me to continue to walk my own path and to accept that it is not my family I can help with my work, like I once thought. They remind me to watch as synchronistic events continue to unfold, that that is a reminder that one is on the right path, and that that path, my book, can and will help the ones who seek it.

We marvel at the vortex of Chiang Mai, this place that seems to draw likeminded souls from around the world.

“Come back,” Ploy invites me. “There’s a new yoga retreat starting tomorrow. You can just drop in. We’ll be doing the herbal steam sauna on Saturday.”

Heaven.

And then, because God, and jokes, and more lessons, always more lessons, of course, the sky falls. Next entry.

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

Keep in touch: follow me here on Medium and on Twitter

THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #1
• Entry #2
• Entry #3
• Entry #4
• This one is #5

Silver linings before the big storm was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world, that definition just might apply to all of us.

ONE MORNING, AMIDST rooster crows and jungle birdcalls, I stumble out to the open kitchen in a dusty daishiki and Crocs to find Hans, my Swedish crush, deep in conversation with a Thai woman. She’s about my age, wearing a long, sculpted, black dress with sexy, triangle cutouts. Luckily, I’m over him. I swear.

“You two need to team up!” says Hans, by way of introduction. “You are so similar it’s crazy!”

If he means physically, this means I am gorgeous. The Thai woman’s name, I learn, is Plai. She has dark hair, shoulder-length on one side, shaved on the other, and a strikingly sculpted, beautiful face, like a model. She is also, I learn, a ‘white metal monkey,’ like me. Apparently this is rare in Chinese astrology.

“Yes, come see my herbal pool and yoga retreat,” Plai says, with a wide smile. “I’m your neighbor.”

“Oh boy,” trills Hans in his clipped, precise Swedish accent. “Watch out, world.”

MY FIRST FEW DAYS on a permaculture farm in Thailand, Hans my host and I like-liked each other (Blog Entry #2). The next few days, we kind of hated each other (Blog Entry #3). Thin line stuff, that kinda thing. Now we’re on our way to a real and lasting friendship.

Sure, maybe I went zig-zag- deep with a practical stranger pretty quickly. But hey, I’m a cult kid (Blog Entry #1). We have boundary issues. It happens. And at this point I’m so used to ‘letting myself down,’ no matter how much I try to retain life lessons that I’m willing to shrug off my ‘coulda’ done betters’ for ‘getting better all the time!’ I didn’t get into a relationship with Hans and move to Thailand for good until things went sour and I found myself stranded in a foreign country (not the first time). Progress.

I might make fun of the hippie lifestyle, but I also welcome it. I grew up like this, traveling the world, communal-living, wood-fires, dogs, sage smoke. Hans and I have watched the sun come up over farm-grown coffee, cooked up rice and bones over open fires in sooty black kettles to feed the ducks and dogs, hunted down nest-eggs behind woodpiles, watered papaya trees and the dark, moist mushroom hut — lambs ear, chanterelle, portabello — built fires in little pottery rocket stoves as the stars come out, fanning the smoke to shoo away mosquitoes, and through it all discovered our mutual desire for simplicity and realness, our disdain for the trite and evasive. What better way to get to know someone?

And what I’ve realized is Hans is currently incompatible with the world most of us live in. He is going through an intense personal rebirth, and this journey has him on a special and unique wavelength. He has clarity around insights it’s easy to look past while plodding through plain old 3D.

Culty or not, corny assumptive-spirituality as it may be, that observation Hans abruptly made on day one about my ‘monkey mind’ continues to hit home when it comes to the bitterness I feel in my heart and soul. By churning the sources round and round in my mind I am keeping the pain alive. By revisiting it time and again, like a celebrity gossip site or ‘just one more’ round of a video game, I am refilling the battery pack, letting it live to spew another day.

But when you realize this is what you’re doing and you still feel the pain, no matter how much you try to shut those churning thoughts down, what then? A quote in a book I recently read on forgiveness:

“She who can’t find a constructive release for her anger may live in bitterness prickled by an anger which can only smolder in prolonged bouts of hostile self-criticism. The most expeditious way to get past an unpleasant emotional experience is to embrace it and to fully feel and express it.”

Hans has taught me a meditation for bitterness. It has changed everything, already.

It goes like this. Hold the object you have strong feelings towards, or need to forgive, in your mind’s eye. Picture them like a black and white egg, yolk white, egg white, black. The white yolk is who the person truly is. Potential and purity. The black border surrounding it is all the memories, impressions, and experiences laid over that core essence. Breathing in deeply, turn your head to the right and breathe in the white essence of that person. Then, while exhaling, turn your head to the left, breathing out the blackness.

“It’s like energy hygiene,” Hans says. “Instead of re-tweeting what you’re doing back to yourself, 24–7.”

OVER PASSIONFRUIT COCONUT smoothies in the outdoor kitchen, Plai, the beautiful Thai woman, Hans and I talk about freedom and what it truly means, how few people, especially in the west access it, how scary non-attachment seems until you are living it, and then how liberating it can be. We talk about changing an undesirable action starting with noticing the thought pattern that surrounds it. Then, if you’re experiencing perpetual pain around it, pay attention to the things in it that trigger you. The triggers are powerful reverse-talismans for growth and learning.

I tell a story of feeling trapped years ago, hung up over an ex-boyfriend whom, equally, would not let me go.

“You’re corded to your ex,” Cynthia and Rio, two Vermont healers had told me when I came to them, desperate to be free of my obsession, and they performed a ritual that cut the psychic cords.

Plai seems mostly focused on Hans, and his attention. But her soft, dark eyes turn to me, wide and attentive when I tell the next part, where I went home after the ritual. I was laid out flat sick for two days, and woke up completely over my ex, after four years of being torturously attached.

“And you were free from him?” she asked, longingly. “It really worked?”

Whatever it was, it worked, I say. And I had tried everything. I’ve been considering going back to them for my current family drama, the root of my feelings of hurt and rejection, the branches of my bitterness. But something in that feels like cheating. It feels a little dark to go there with my family ties. I’ve lain low, hoping to find a maybe-better way.

“Plai’s trying to get over someone right now,” Hans says. “She’s stuck on him but he is not so available.”

After Plai leaves I ask Hans if she’s talking about him and he laughs and says no, but admits yes, they did once have a thing.

I decide it’s time to learn to drive a motorbike. I find I want to know more about Plai. What is an herbal pool and, more importantly, how does she have a resort, at my age?

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

Keep in touch: follow me here on Medium and on Twitter

THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #1
• Entry #2
• Entry #3
• This one is #4

Sweet Farm Life, the Antidote to Bitterness. was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world that definition just might apply to us all.

“WE LIKE IT natural around here,” Hans my hot Swedish farm-host says when I arrive at the permaculture commune in Thailand where I’ve come to write my cult-memoir.

I not so subtly sniff my armpit. “Sounds good to me,” I say, but I know he means more than just greasy hair and bare feet.

As the days begin to pass I start to fold into the feelings, releasing my heart’s resistance, just a little. I can feel the suggestion of a thaw in the bitterness that’s been grabbing hold. Just a creak-crack, like a hairline split on an icy pond’s surface back at my sublet in Vermont.

THE DAY AFTER I arrive in Thailand Buni, the village tribe Akha woman who owns the farm heads out to a day-long temple ceremony with Cameron, her wry, young farmhand volunteer.

Hans and I are alone. I am starting to feel uncomfortable. I came here to write and, let’s admit it, caress and toy with my bitterness, like one of those yin-yang balls that come in a box. Take it out, play with it, polish it, put it back, go lay in the sun, come back to my hut, take it out again …

But Hans’ presence is intense, dominating. He really does feel like the yang to my yin, and it’s all I can do not to be swept up in the rush of intensity around two strong members of the opposite sex. I don’t know yet what I’m feeling, but it’s definitely attraction and also something akin to peer pressure.

And there is nothing more intense than hippie peer pressure, because it’s about how cool your soul is. Constant, unsolicited, judgmental advice is delivered, rapid-fire, with a calm, placid smile, a knowing and self-righteous gaze of superiority, the gentle reminder that if you do not agree, you are not as ‘awake’ as said hippie on the enlightenment scale.

Oh you don’t smoke weed? Hmm. Very uptight. You should learn to relax.

Oh, no, I do smoke weed I just …

Running off to your hut is so western, so closed-off. You need to connect with what is around you and relax.

I am relaxed! Feels self-conscious in one’s bright red harem pants. Stands up, vigorously.

Wow. See what I mean? Graciously re-proffers spliff.

You hit the damn thing and try not to cough because, wait is this high school? Of course it is. Everything is high school.

BUINI THE FARM OWNER and Cameron the Brit stay gone for another day and I go ahead and get high on Thai bud and white sage spliffs for the next two days, which is actually great and just what Dr. Terrence McKenna would have ordered. Hans and I trade rapid-fire philosophy, shooting to the furthest reaches of the cosmos and zooming back into the core of the atom in between hits and European-style high fives (you keep your arm and hand high and stiff). I vacillate between defensive indulging, because oh, I can go there, I could be an energy master if I wanted! and irritation that I came here to write about being raised in a cult and am being subjected to a new one instead. By the umpteenth person who doesn’t know what they’re playing with because they weren’t raised in a cult.

Hans, I come to realize, is one of those exhausting old sports, Gatsby style, who did a psychedelic Oaxaca ceremony in Peru, became one with Mother Gaia, quit their gypsy-hustle, in his case professional poker player, and reordered their entire life around distributing their new insights to the commoners usually via the dream world so they can lock-in somewhere off-grid. These people freak me out, and for some reason, I meet them all the time.

Here’s one reason they freak me out: I am distrustful of psychedelic experiences. I call them ‘fast-food spirituality.’ There’s great stuff there, sure, but in my opinion they open your eyes — and dangerous portals — to things you might not have been ready to know. Better to come across them on the more natural and guarded pick-a-flower life path. Also, when the doors of perception are flung open like banging shutters in a snowstorm, what you remember from under the table with a blanket over your head will not likely linger as true lessons or real sustenance. Instead, you’ll just be running around somewhere like Thailand with stars like sticky jam between your fingertips and electric sparks in your eyes, ready to blow a fuse right through your crown chakra at any moment.

So how did I find this place?

It wasn’t a lucid dream. It wasn’t even a mystical mutual friend, although we’ve already discovered we have more than one of those.

This is just what I thought was a regular rental on AirBnB.

I had been to Thailand once before, Pataya, a beachy party city, that’s a whole ‘nother story, and I wanted to go back. I had heard the Chiang Mai province was the jungly, mountainous, hot springy retreat of the more spiritually and bohemian-minded westerner. One day in December on a whim during a snow-storm, I typed Chiang Mai into AirBnB. This place I found was described as a permaculture commune farmstay, with three organic meals a day and your own hut. There was a crazy discount if you booked a full month. So here I am. Talking relentlessly about the power of silence with a hot Swedish guy who seems to feel the need to tell me ‘well here’s what you should do’ as the opposite of whatever it is I say, no matter what it is.

Me: I’m tired. Him: You should really try to be more awake.

Me: Wow, look at that flower! Him: But did you notice the leaf?

Me: I’m feeling attacked and criticized. Him: Ah, but there you see! I have brought you to your awareness of your own monkey mind behavior! Me: Oh. Ugh. Thanks?

Hans and I have, it seems, a lot to prove to each other. I think we’ll get there. I hope. Or I’m gonna spend this trip horny by night and angry by day. And what about this side of bitterness I’m hauling around? Stew it? Brew it? Insert it into our talk soup?

I’m trying to keep it at bay.

Meanwhile, it’s impossible to ignore how many things there are to be thankful for, here. The soft, warm amber light that infuses every crack and angle of your open-windowed hut, from an outside lantern. It reminds me of the cozy, ‘you’re home’ colors of my woodstove, back home, but its own brand of golden light.

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

Keep in touch: follow me here on Medium and on Twitter

THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #1
• Entry #2
• This one is #3
• Entry #4

Escaping my Childhood Cult Issues in Thailand: Day Three was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world that definition just might apply to us all.

“What year were you born?” asks the unexpectedly attractive Swedish farmer-host who meets me and my exhausting baggage in the little Thai town of Doi Saket in the Chiang Mai province. Exact coordinates: “the Tesco Lotus next to the big hill where the taxi drivers hang out under the tamarind tree.”

“What year were you born?” before we’ve even reached the car. This is not the first question a mid-30’s woman usually gets back in America from a stranger.

Hans, because, of course, is tall, built like a soccer player turned hippie. He’s tan, with bright blue eyes, long, spiky lashes and shoulder length, wavy blonde hair pulled back in a neck-nape man bun. I feel like I just left Brooklyn and found an actual real hipster. And by real I mean he uses a machete, has taught me a juditsu move called ‘the jaguar crawl’ within a couple hours of arrival, and keeps a Carlos Castaneda book on ‘The Power of Silence’ tucked under one arm because again, of course.

I tell Hans my birth year, 1980, and he laughs, it seems triumphantly. He turns to his mother, whom, impressively, appears to have joined him for her retirement on this permaculture farm and, also impressively, to me, is driving us from the right side of the car, in the left lane of a dirt road. Or would be, if this dirt road had two lanes.

A moped with what appears to be an entire family on it veers past us, the youngest ones turning to gap-toothed stare-smile.

“1980! Another metal monkey!” Hans crows, to his mother. “Three at the farm, now!” He turns back to me. “This is very rare. But unsurprising,” he says. “What month?”

Oh. Chinese astrology. Okay. “September.”

“Oosh!” he exhales, and raises his eyebrows. “A white metal monkey.”

“What?” I ask, worried. “Is that okay?”

“Oh you’re okay, other than that monkey mind,” he laughs. “But the question is, are those around you?!”

At this, I have to laugh. This guy might have me pegged, already. I’ve come to Thailand — or run away, that remains to be seen— to recalibrate. I need to find myself again, after working way too hard on a memoir about being raised in a cult, and then freaking out over this Trump nightmare. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been that great to be around, of late.

“You are focused,” Hans continues analyzing my Chinese monkey self. “Determined, so determined, no?”

Yes.

“You are sharp, like steel, chop, chop,” he says, slicing the air. “Your standards, so high! Your criticism, so deep.

“You are capable of cutting with your words,” he says. “It can be very hard for other people.”

Was this guy in New York with my sister and I for our last conversation where she accused me of exactly all this, before I flew out?! And where I defended myself by saying we live in a Trump world now, which means we have to get tough?

Later in the evening with my new farm friends, over an organic meal of spicy pumpkin soup, banana cake, rice grown on the farm and jungle-foraged salad, Cameron, from the UK, born 1990, jumps in, too.

“Metal monkeys appear strong,” he says. Apparently everyone on this farm is fluent in Chinese astrology. “But their Achilles heel is grief.”

I just raise my eyebrows at him, wide-eyed, and purse my mouth, resignedly. My entire journey here has felt like a last-stand against the frigidity of bitterness, a creeping frost on the windowpane of grief.

Cam continues, nodding knowingly. He’s pale and slight, big-eyed and a little strange, like a wood sprite. He has a way of staring at you firmly, unblinking, with an unsettling placidity. But I’m already realizing that his uncanny, soft-stepped stance is really just that of a person who is present, a person who doesn’t live his life behind screens. “Here is where the coffee grounds are stored for compost,” he said earlier, showing me around the outdoor kitchen while stirring pineapple in a wok over an open fire. “When you prepare them for exfoliation in your shower, you’ll find the avocados in that tree and the honey over here.”

“Metal monkeys appear strong, even impenetrable,” the exceedingly fragile-appearing Cameron continues now, spooning bright-green soup onto sticky rice and squeezing passionfruit over it. “I’m one, too.”

“But they’re like a gong,” fills in Hans, pointing at the bronzed dinner-bell hanging from a nearby banyan tree. “When something hits them, it reverberates on, and on, and on.”

Yep, that’s me. Things happened. Now they’re stuck in me. I came here to write my story, but I also am on a quest to find forgiveness — real forgiveness — because this bitterness is getting way too real. I can physically feel it.

“You have to let it go,” says Cameron, staring right into my eyes even though I still haven’t said anything and I can’t help but start laughing, because this is so intense and so freaking right-on. What is it about travel?! This is why I do this.

“At least you’re not a dragon,” says Cameron, still poker-faced. “They’re so clumsy.” He points at the structure behind him. “We had one land on the roof, once, like he didn’t even know his own weight.” His English accent is droll, dry. “Crashed right through onto a bamboo bench, which broke his fall.”

“And now it’s nothing but a legend, right?” I say. “Except for a few scales left embedded in the bench?”

“Oh so you noticed!” says Cameron, as the table breaks into laughter. He cocks his head at me, half lizard, half Dobby the house elf and blinks, finally. “More dragonfruit?”

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

Keep in touch: follow me here on Medium and on Twitter

THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #1
• This one is #2
• Entry #3
• Entry #4

Cult Recovery in Thailand: Day One was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

PS: This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world, that definition just might apply to all of us.

Yesterday, whilst leaving my sister’s Brooklyn apartment to catch a plane from JFK to Thailand, I suddenly realized, as I stumbled over a curb and into a mud puddle, that I was literally dragging my past baggage with me. My gigantic, rickety suitcase was jammed full of notebooks, old diaries, childhood photos, and rag-tag, rolled-up storyboards sketched out on butcher paper. It was so heavy that a kind Dominican in Flatbush had to help me carry it down the subway stairs and my Uber driver from Guyana asked me how far I was from home.

See, here’s why I’m dragging this stuff from place to place: I don’t have a home. No really, my childhood home was foreclosed after I was raised in a cult that then excommunicated my whole broken family. No roots, no base, no ‘Oh Heidi’s from there.’ It’s why I’m off to my next adventure — Thailand this time. Constantly moving makes me feel more in control of my instability. I’m pretty sure that’s what a psychotherapist would say, anyway. By subletting my room in Vermont, my latest questionable attempt at roots where I’m on an off-term in grad school, I can afford a whole month on a permaculture farm in the jungle province of Chiang Mai and work on my memoir.

So yes, I need these archives for research. But it also felt, in the moment when I noticed the living metaphor of my literal baggage, like I had found an elaborate excuse to stay attached to the pain and bitterness of my past: endlessly lugging around and delving into it.

I thought writing my story would be cathartic but I’m getting more and more afraid it’s making me bitter. Like, bitter, bitter. Since the onslaught of the holidays, and trying to navigate complicated present family relationships while delving into awful past ones, I’ve felt resentment festering, bitterness tightening its cold, iron grip on my soul and hurt constricting my heart like winding poison ivy with fangs.

Let’s see what the dictionary says about bitterness.

1. sharpness of taste; lack of sweetness.

2. anger and disappointment at being treated unfairly; resentment.

Yep. That’s how I feel.

Here’s the thing: I’ve read the self-help books. Right now I’m on the can’t-recommend-it-enough “The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame.” I practice gratitude. I pray. I do creative things every day and sometimes I even journal morning pages. I take Omega 3’s, and most days, I get some leafy greens in. I even have a ‘sparkle’ tattoo to remind me to ‘keep the glow’ (I lived in southern Cali for awhile so that’s my excuse). All around I think I’m doing a pretty good job at following a generally reassuring mash-up of scientific and spiritual advice on the pursuit of happiness.

But what about when you’ve bought into the assurance that ‘writing your story’ will bring catharsis, only it’s taking ten years to write it? What about when ‘loving yourself’ is at odds with ‘forgiveness’ (both highly recommended, it seems, by maddeningly well-adjusted people on Ted Talk type forums who appear to have transcended: what’s taking me so long?!). Back home I’m finding it hard to put up clear boundaries while seeking love and support from my abusive, traumatized family and delving into creative work that all just happen to be, literally, related.

How hard can you work on yourself before something gives? Why do I keep reliving on-the-edge drama no matter how much I try to make good decisions? Why does my family treat me like garbage for even trying, when I love them so much and have only ever loved them so much?

And so, I run again, dragging these issues behind me in a literal suitcase. My bitterness feels at a boiling point and my heart feels like it might cave in on itself. This can’t be good. What do you do when it feels like bitterness might win out?

I hope you’ll come along with me as I blog about my creative journey and hopeful defeat of the beckoning dark side, starting with this month-long move to Thailand.

If you like what you read be sure to ❤ it — as a writer it means the world

Keep in touch: follow me on right here on Medium and on Twitter

THE REST OF MY TRAVEL BLOG:

• Entry #2
• Entry #3
• Entry #4

So I was Raised in a Cult. Now What? was originally published in Bullshit.IST on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.