For three years, starting in tenth grade, I attended a Christian based performing arts school. Up until that point in my life I had been homeschooled.

At one point, I thought those three years were and would always be the best years of my life. During those three years I also thought I was crazy, spiritually enlightened, and on the brink of doom all at once.

T. was our principal, the founder of the school, our English teacher, and choir director. Almost half of the employees at the school were his relatives. When I interviewed to be accepted to the school, T. told me, “The only thing we don’t do here is goth. Our children walk in the light of Jesus.”

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An excerpt from:

Miss Burden’s World
Biography of a Cult Poster Child

I wondered if my mother’s annoyance over my preoccupation with my animals was what accounted for her increasing moodiness. She peered at me from beneath the rim of her parasol sprinkled with yellow daisies one day, more like a gargoyle from under a cornice than a former debutant.

“I had premonitions last night about the series of cataclysms that will take place on our planet. Wars, fires and terrible storms. You must prepare yourself for the day when a flame-flecked cloudbank overhangs our horizon…

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When I was 18 years old, living with my then-boyfriend in Washington, DC, we were on a spiritual search. He dragged me to a variety of high demand groups before settling on the one he thought was the “highest.” 

We moved into their ashram, but he was kidnapped and deprogrammed by one of several deprogramming companies that were popular in the 1970s and 80s, and I was stuck with nowhere to go.

I stayed for 10 years.

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