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I just wrapped the last recording session for the video game I'm lending my voice to and I can't wait until I can share more details with y'all! It's a beautiful and timely game and I just know you're going to love it :)
I also finished writing the script for my next youtube video and will be recording the first draft in the coming days. I'm really proud of it but also a little nervous to share my story because, ya know, the internet is brutal, man.
Here's a little sneak peek of what's to come:
Was I In A Cult?
Have you ever looked back on something years after that fact and thought “wait- was that….”
You know that feeling you get when you’re explaining an experience to someone and you actually hear yourself talking and then some realizations start hitting you like a ton of bricks?
Maybe your date asks about your religious beliefs and you explain you’re not really spiritual anymore even though you grew up driving 30 minutes every Sunday to attend a 50 person church in the more rural part of the city you lived in and you had to follow a very specific set of cherry picked rules and weren’t allowed to close your bedroom door at any point in your life and you weren’t allowed to move out of your home until you were married, and you realized nothing you owned was actually in your name at the age of 26 and the people who did have their name on all of it were talking about buying a really big piece of property and moving all of your family and friends onto it and as you’re saying all of this outloud you realize for the first time exactly what it sounds like.
When most people hear the word “cult” they think about groups like The People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate.
Or maybe you think of groups like The Remnant, Love Has Won, or even The Duggars.
Sometimes it’s easy to tell when something is a cult. But other times it can be tough.
Part of this has to do with trying to define what is and isn’t a cult, mostly because nobody can really seem to agree on a definition. Is it just an unorthodox religion? A fandom? A group run by a charismatic leader who controls the members for their own benefit - and to the detriment of their followers?
For years I’ve been trying to figure out if what I experienced from childhood until about 26 years old would be considered a cult or just a series of very unfortunate events with some bad people who were in positions of authority.
However you want to define it, I eventually got out. And a lot of what helped me leave was simply the fact that I went to a public school.
You would think that someone who owned every Dr. Dobson book, read The Left Behind Series like it was the Bible part 2, and believed Focus on the Family was going to save America would have insisted on the kids being homeschooled but lucky for me (zoom in) I was annoying. And the last thing my family wanted to do was spend more time with me than they had to, so for a few hours a day from Monday through Friday I was exposed to something outside of the small echo chamber I was usually confined in.
It was at school that I listened to American Idiot for the first time in 6th grade on a burned cd that a girl in my English class made for me. I went to Hot Topic with middle school friends instead of to C28 with the girls I knew from church. I borrowed the forbidden Devil worshiping Harry Potter books from another girl, covered them with a bible jacket, and read them right at the dinner table in front of my family. I watched The Boondocks on my improv captain’s laptop in our high school drama department’s green room and cried over the movie Frida at a slumber party before we sang along to Tegan and Sara albums for the rest of the night.
But all of that involved a lot of sneaking around and more often than not, I would go to school, come home, and be under supervision. The only time this wasn’t the case was during the summer when everyone was at work.
Back then, the tv in my house had parental control locks and it took me a little while to figure it out but eventually I was able to determine the passcode on the remote based on which buttons had the most wear on them.
And every summer while I was locked in the house all day, I would watch movies and tv shows I’d find on cable channels. This was how I saw A Dirty Shame for the first time.
More updates coming soon!
~ Tawny
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