2015 was the year I knew I was out for good. I vividly remember driving home that night after cutting my last tie to the movement and singing I’m free… I’m fucking free!. I already had some new friends outside of that circle and had reconnected with friends from high school. As far as I was concerned, I was already further along in my process than I really was. I was running through plans to cover up the tattoos I no longer wanted. And since I was no longer consumed by the idea of ‘traditional family life’, I may have also been thinking about all the wild sex I could engage in.
My mother was adamant about me finding someone else after I left my partner from the movement, and she brought it up almost daily. What I should have done was pretend I was dating someone, then have one of my male friends turn up to the front door wearing a sexy outfit. The only thing that stopped me was not knowing how she would react to the prank. It’s hard to say whether she would have laughed or considered it extremely inappropriate.
When I was using a dating site, I would go out with someone a few times and often find myself ghosted, rejected, or strung along. What my mother did not see was the internal dialogue that followed whenever a possible relationship did not work out. I seem to be more sensitive to rejection than most people, and I can’t just let everything go overnight, regardless of the length or depth of a relationship. One recurring thought involved returning to the movement, not because I agreed with their objectives, but because my former life was familiar and still comfortable. I would often think, Another rejection… Why did I leave if I was going to run into disappointment over and over again? After being ghosted for the last time, I stopped putting effort into finding a partner and ignored my mother’s advice for a while. That was when I was lucky enough to finally meet someone.
Relationships were not the only area of my life where I struggled with acceptance. I was working in construction at the time, and it was a great job during the years that I did it. However, the culture on the job came with a lot of competition. At times I handled this well, but at other times I really questioned if I could keep up. Having spent years involved in the movement, I saw this job as an opportunity to prove that I could make something better of my life. When I struggled to keep up, I began questioning whether I could ever truly find my place in society again. I learned my lesson the hard way after a near-fatal accident at work in 2018. I was rushing to get the job done and ended up falling off a scaffold. Yes, I was tied off; otherwise, I would not be sitting here writing this article today.
While I was still in shock from the incident, I had an important realization: it was not worth overexerting myself physically or mentally to prove that I belonged in society again. I now value my life more than any sense of acceptance.
Following this incident, I had a conversation with my co-worker, and although I did not believe him at first, he told me that I did not need to prove anything to anyone else. After giving it some thought, I could see that most of the pressure to be a perfect ‘former’ came from the narrative in my own mind. There are absolutely people out there who will say that no one who has ever set foot in that movement will ever be good enough, but they do not speak for everyone. He said that if I hadn't told him about my past, he never would have guessed I had been anywhere near that underground. I took this as a compliment and validation of how much I had changed as a person.
Part of that change has also been learning to see myself differently from the person I once was. A few years ago, I found an old picture of myself from when I was neck-deep in the movement. I told my mom that if I ever dressed or acted like that again, she should just take me outside and shoot me. This was by no means an invitation to literally shoot people who buy into harmful ideologies, but rather a testament to how strongly I felt that I could never see myself returning to that old life.
When I look back on my dating experience outside of the movement and the incident at work, I can see similarities between them: I invested too much of my recovery into those things. There was no way I could rely on my job or potential partner to keep me from returning to my old ways. Ultimately, that responsibility rested with me. I was the same person who used to mock other members in the movement and who kept going while living on the streets just to spite everyone else. If I had the persistence to continue engaging in self-destruction, then I could use that same persistence to move forward.
