How to Make Friends After Leaving Your Cult

Deconstruct your faith, leave your fundamentalist Christian cult, and quit your religiously-affiliated job. Move to a city three-thousand miles from your former cult and find employment as a copy editor at a small cryptocurrency news site. Tell no one of your past.

Garner a reputation as The Quiet Girl at work, but secretly adore your colleagues, most of whom are queer. Do not suspect that you, too, are queer. Wait six months to have an inkling that you are an obscure variety of queer, a seed buried in the plus sign of LGBTQ+ about to germinate and poke up through the soil in search of its own name. 

In the meantime, hesitate to use the word “queer” in conversation at work, unsure whether it will exit your mouth as a bullet or a song. It brightens your ears and tastes good to your mouth, but does it belong to you? Fret over the homophobic language you inherited, afraid an indiscrete word choice could open your new peers’ old wounds. 

Recall how the god of your former cult hated having his words questioned or decisions challenged. Wonder if you can love your body enough to interrogate its power. Make this an open question as you navigate the brave new world beyond the narrow definition of love you grew up with.

Stick mostly to your desk and keep your mouth shut unless your co-workers ask you a question. Laugh nervously when, a few weeks into your new job, they say you’re cool even though they initially suspected you were “uber-conservative and homophobic” and silently judging them behind your cubicle wall. Why, whatever could’ve given them that impression?

See in retrospect that your clothes were doing nothing to contradict your friends’ notion that you were still a member of a misogynistic religious sect. Remember that dark teal mid-calf-length dress you bought because you thought it would highlight your figure, recalling suddenly the major red flag you missed: Amazon’s description of the item as a “work/church dress.” 

Do a mental facepalm and wonder why this dress didn’t register as inconsistent with your desired new self-branding. When you get home, try on the teal dress and realize you’re the spitting image of Serena Waterford from The Handmaid’s Tale. Grimace and roll your eyes at the mirror. Mutter “Blessed be the fruit” to the doppelgänger from your not-so-distant past.

Hang your head. Sigh. Ask your reflection why it’s so hard to make friends after extricating yourself from a toxic, patriarchal, phallocentric, homophobic cult. Wince as your double answers: “Because you’ve got to somehow convince people that you’re normal. And we both know you’re not.”

Buy your doppelgänger’s words. Believe it’s the only reasonable explanation for why everything you want to say aloud requires footnotes, caveats, intricate maps of the other parts of your multiverse. Why else would your every word feel like an exercise in the translation of your own tongue into an unknown lexicon and grammar?

Drag yourself into work each morning with the same religious fervor with which you used to go to church. Tell yourself it will get easier in time, that you will acclimate to life outside. If we’re all born naked, you can change these clothes.

“Don’t count on it,” spits your double.

Carry on in spite of them. Sit shyly in your workstation. Keep laughing at people’s jokes. Pray to the god you’ve abandoned that you’re not giving off the wrong vibes. Who, you? No, of course, you didn’t spend the first twenty-seven years of your life in a cult only to emerge last week as a gorgeous but deeply-traumatized butterfly.

Meanwhile, listen to your newfound friends make effortlessly normal conversation in the adjacent cubicles on the topic of circumcision as genital mutilation. Remain tongue-tied as they wax eloquent about the ethics of non-consensual surgery, unable to handle how your brain is going in seven million different directions.

Surrender to the part of your brain that zooms toward a Bible story where god shows up in Moses’ hotel room to assassinate him for not circumcising his son. Let your gray matter fixate on that gratuitous image of Zipporah (Moses’ wife) performing an impromptu circumcision on their son and then touching Moses’ genitals with the bloody foreskin while uttering the extremely perplexing and borderline kinky sentence: “You are a bridegroom of blood to me.”

In an adjacent chamber of your mind palace, remember that fifteen-year-old you wrote a worship song called Bridegroom of Blood, back when you still believed in that bloodthirsty version of god you grew up with. 

Start to gag as the threads of memory twist around your neck. Remember it all: The years of hearing pastors and teachers and parents talk about how god had to crucify Jesus to save you from your evil self. How god was so angry at your sin, he had to fuck someone up, but instead of nailing you to a cross, he decided to nail Jesus up instead. Jesus the Real Man™ in place of you: the fake, the unruly double.

Stifle your gag with a series of coughs. Hope to pass off your ailment as nothing more than a mild sore throat instead of a queasy stomach sloshing with grief and shame at how long it took you to name your religious trauma as trauma.

Feel relieved when your friends fail to notice that you’re fakely hacking up a lung. They can’t see your face behind the office partition and are still deeply engrossed in penis-talk. Don’t resist as your thinker latches onto that word penis. Recall how, as a kid, you were scared that you’d accidentally and suddenly stand up in church one day—smack-dab in the middle of the sermon—and shout something scandalous and obscene like “Penis! Vagina! Boobs!”

Grip your stress ball like it’s a handhold on a rollercoaster as your memories start to explode. Screw your eyes shut as your past balloons into a mass of nonlinear scenes and images, your mental associations playing concurrently like a dozen distant cousins at the bottom of a dysfunctional family tree.

Remember oddly gratifying trivia tidbits from your Bible college classes, like the fact that the Greek word for circumcision (peritemnō) consists of the preposition peri (around) and the verb témnō (to cut).

Think about how the penis-bearing people in your household were circumcised because your father is Jewish and, for a hot minute, your family went to a Baptist church on Sundays and a Messianic Jewish congregation on Fridays and Saturdays, leaving you with a very confused religious and social identity. 

Remember that your baby brother peed on the rabbi’s face during his bris and that your grandma gave the baby a napkin dipped in wine to distract him from the snipping action taking place between his thighs. 

Think of your older brother’s obsession with the Jewish Wassup Whitefish commercial parodying the Budweiser Wassup commercials, featuring a bris, a bar mitzvah, a funeral, and a delivery of fresh fish.

And as your mind explodes, think about the fact that it’s exploding and how you’re just sitting there, demure and observant, like the good girl you’ve been taught to be.

Wish that you could just open your mouth and engage. The worlds rattling inside you are too much to share, you know this. You can’t risk letting your friends see inside your religion-soaked head that’s spinning and confused and embarrassed that you didn’t get out of your patriarchal, homophobic cult sooner. The little quad of cubicles in a cryptocurrency newsroom is no place to air the shame that’s keeping you bound and gagged for fear of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, being the wrong thing. Penis-talk, yes. Trauma-talk, no.

Fantasize about sharing anyway, if only a faint glimpse of the reels whirring in your brain. Imagine it’s safe to tell your friends you know a thing or two about circumcision. Factoids only, nothing personal. Maybe you’ll even impress them with your niche understanding of the vast symbolic world revolving around the metaphor of circumcision.

Take a deep breath and a sip of water from the mason jar on your desk. Tell yourself you got this. Believe you can keep up the charade of normalcy and still hint at the idea that you’re a tad more astute than the average bear. Clear your throat, wait for an opening in the conversation, and then go for it. 

“You know, there’s a fun story in the Bible where a king demands a bride price of one hundred enemy foreskins from his prospective son-in-law. But the future son-in-law goes a little overboard and comes back with two hundred foreskins. So it’s kind of like he was saying: ‘I’ll show you how big my dick is by giving you double the severed dicks you asked for. That way, you’ll know my dick is big enough to marry your daughter.’”

Feel your stomach drop as your words are met with silence from behind the cubicle wall. Mutter an inaudible curse as the seconds crawl by. Admit you’ve said too much, but it’s too late to retract your statement. Attempt to remedy the situation by adding further commentary. “It’s like the ancient, gorier and more intense equivalent of a dick pic. Except you’re sending the dick pic to your date’s dad instead of your date.”

Feel their stares through the carpeted partitioning. “Nice job,” quips your double. “Goal accomplished. Your colleagues now know that you’re 100 percent normal. Make that 200 percent.”

Try to ignore your double. Fail. Put a hand to your throbbing head. 

Cringe when your cubicle mate pops her head around the corner. Wait for the barrage of sarcasm. 

Feel your heart flutter as her face lights up. 

“Really?” she smiles and leans in. “That’s fascinating. Tell me more.”

Rebekah M. Devine (she/her) is a white, queer writer residing in Reno, Nevada. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in P-Queue, Rust and Moth, Rejection Letters, and FERAL, among others. She holds an MLitt in Theology, Imagination, and the Arts, and an MA in Biblical Exegesis. She is an MFA student in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women.