Who would’ve guessed the Mindless Self Indulgence show that summer would have me taking “mindless self-indulgence” to a whole new level months later…?

Amped up by the techno punk band’s eccentric jams and the crowd’s intensity, I gave in to a wild impulse to make out with the cute guy dancing to my left. Seventeen-year-old me certainly had an outlandish view of what was socially appropriate or romantic.

Nonetheless, we spent the rest of the show on-and-off kissing and rocking out together, and as it all came to an end, I was eager to exchange numbers so we could hang out again.

My heart sank as he told me he was just passing through and would be leaving town the next day. “I travel the country and make money. You should join, it’s really fun.”

I dolefully declined the enticing offer as I had plans to attend college in the Fall, but kept his number just in case. I wanted to believe in fate, that our encounter wasn’t just random, that our destinies were intertwined.

After months of feeling crushed by school and working two jobs, I was left feeling hopeless and lost. In my state of desperation, I texted the mystery man that I was ready to get the hell out of Nebraska. What do you do again?

I knew very little about what I was getting into, just that I’d be traveling and making money. Sounded great! Anywhere and anything seemed better than my simple, boring small-town life, so I agreed to let a complete stranger buy my bus ticket to a town hundreds of miles from home.

After pinning a vague farewell note to the wall of my room, I left home with only my digital camera, Tracfone, and a duffel bag full of clothes.

Utterly sick to my stomach, I found myself sitting in a compact seat of a Greyhound bus, on a twenty-three-hour ride to Lubbock, TX. Just nerves…normal anxiety, I assumed. It didn’t occur to me that intuition somehow knew my impulsivity was leading me down a ruinous path.

Instead, I focused on how I’d soon be in an exciting new place I’d never been, traveling and making money, and reconnecting with my potential soulmate.

The bus arrived late the next night and I waited outside for several minutes, unsure if I’d even be greeted by him, like it was all a messed up prank. But there he was: the quirky-looking, yet unimpressive, vagabond from the MSI show.

The queasiness in my gut intensified and a little voice in the back of my mind whispered that something was very wrong — nevertheless, I got in his rickety old jeep and let him drive me to a run-down motel where one tired-eyed woman and six more disheveled men waited to greet me…

I got out. After the longest three years of my life, I got out of the cultic group that eagerly awaited me that night.

No one moment screamed at me to leave, rather, a series of confusing moments and the festering impact of abuse that urged me to pack my things and go.

I tried leaving more than once — after the first year and again after the second. Hundreds of miles from home with very few resources, I was always convinced to stay because I left home for a reason and there is no bright future for me if I go back.

Leading into year three, as we traveled through the Midwest, my mind and body began to shut down. I wasn’t selling anything because most of my days were filled with panic attacks or tearful mental breakdowns. There was no excuse for weakness or negativity, and no sales meant no privileges until I got my shit together.

But I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried. My body was trying to tell me it was exhausted from all the chaos and years of roaming around with very little rest and no time to sit and think about it all.

Still a month away from visiting my hometown, I hoped and prayed the entire time that they wouldn’t skip my area altogether. I did my best to not make anyone think I wouldn’t come back and used my last drops of mental energy to organize myself enough to hit quota a few times.

We stopped in Council Bluffs, Iowa, but it would be a shorter-than-usual stay. Luckily, I was allowed to visit my family and friends for a couple of days. Despite them always wishing I’d leave the road and come back, the disconnect between their words and actions left me feeling uncertain and alone. You left for a reason, no one really wants you back. They say they do, then ignore you when you’re here.

Deep down I knew it was time to leave the crew, but fear continued yanking me back in their direction. There’s nothing for you at home. Home is where your suitcase is. The only way to be truly successful is on the mag crew, not as a dumb, miserable Jones in the middle of nowhere.

An hour before I was expected back at the motel, I drove around the gravel roads, bouncing anxiously between staying and going. Give me a sign! I desperately needed something, anything, to tell me what to do, as if the choice wasn’t even mine.

Just then, a little frog jumped across the road ahead of me, nearly getting smashed by my tires. Rather than ignoring the simplicity of it, I took that quick and trivial moment as the sign I needed. When I stopped by my parent’s house and looked up its meaning, I knew it was time…

“A symbol of transition and transformation, the frog supports us in times of change.”

It sounds insane to say, but a reckless road-hopping frog helped push me to decide to get out.

For the first year after leaving, I believed and said my time on the road was the best time of my life, filled entirely with adventure and excitement. For the following several years, I would try erasing that period from my memory forever.

It felt easier to see it in a positive light rather than for what it really was: an abusive labor trafficking sales cult. It seemed easier to simply forget, rather than to confront and dissect the experience, and make sense of the excruciating and long-lasting psychological effects.

And now, despite being physically free from that life for more than a decade, my mind has continued to remain trapped there, loosely glued to their ways of life and haunted by dreams of being lured in and helpless once again.

I sometimes ask myself: did I really get out?

My formative years as a young adult were ripped away from me. Rather than spending that time creating and discovering my true sense of self, I was bent and pressed into the compliant, deceptive monster that they needed me to be.

As an inexperienced, impressionable, people-pleasing eighteen-year-old girl, I was someone they could easily manipulate and control; someone they could coerce and train to lie so well that thousands of people would buy overpriced magazines for a nonexistent cause.

I was merely a pawn, created to perform in their endless games and make them money, while I, and so many others, cracked and crumbled in silence.

My innocence, my compassion, my individuality — all of me — torn to pieces as a result of their abuse, and then buried and forgotten deep within the angry and anxious alcoholic I became there.

For so long I’ve assumed this is just who I am and who I will always be, but now I sit and wonder who I could have been if I was given the chance to simply find myself and be me.

From those three years in a labor trafficking cult to five years in a soul-crushing relationship — a cult of one — the real Amanda has yet to be known to the outside world, nor even to me.

But she’s in there somewhere and has been attempting to escape for years, only flashing glimpses of her true nature.

Now it’s time to reach deep down to find her…and get her out.

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