Chapter 2: In Media Res
TW: This series includes conversations about trauma, abuse, neglect, domestic violence, religious abuse and cults, addiction, disordered eating, and suicidal ideation at various times.
In the Ancient epics I spent half a lifetime studying (imagining I’d be more of a poet-professor-priest than marketing consultant) this is how the poets begin their tales. In media res—it means right in the middle of the action.
The story starts already in the middle of things.
Battles underway.
The gods in their own flurry of unfolding drama.
Domestic disputes tearing families apart.
Domestic celebrations weaving families together.
Large and small scale cultural narratives playing in the background.
A whole cosmos of activity taking place from the very first line, without too much explanation.
Because of course—this is the nature of life. Our stories unfold, without clear beginnings and endings. We are spiders weaving interconnected webs begun generations ago, not titans of industry laying linear track for methodical machinery.
As with all stories that start in the middle of things, the beginning is only ever a beginning.
There’s always another thread you can tug, a detail in the background that you could bring forward, another line of context that could add new dimensions and offer up yet another possible beginning. I’ve thought of no less than a hundred for this story.
In one sense, it doesn’t matter—you have to start somewhere, so might as well pick a point and get the story out.
…except maybe it does matter?
Of all the beginnings, it feels important for us to start here—or at least visit here. At the moment I decided to become a really great marketer. Because it wasn’t in an MBA. (I studied the relationship between Ancient Greek tragedies and American Southern novels, and never took a single college business course).
It wasn’t at any of the jobs in copywriting, social media, and marketing that I networked myself into.
It wasn’t even in my early childhood games of entrepreneurial pretend or crafty side hustles.
I decided to be a great marketer for really shit reasons.
You see, my first clients were my deeply dysfunctional, but desperate to be seen as perfect, parents. The next runner up was the cult they joined and forced my sister and I into when I was 5.
And for 21 years, I was really damn good at my job.
I took pride in it really. It felt like magic, that I could bat my eyelashes and rattle off facts and spin my little dress and all these supposedly competent adults around me would eat up how brilliantly perfect my entire family was, despite every piece of evidence pointing to the contrary. We were endlessly loved, delightfully cherished, brilliantly educated, and perfectly cared for. Or so the story went.
It didn’t matter if we rolled up to church a mere 13 minutes after my dad had threatened my mom’s life, or my mom had beaten my sister black and blue in front of me, or if my parents hadn’t spoken a word to each other beyond exasperated curses since last night’s blow out…
It didn’t matter that my parents had insisted on homeschooling us, but then quit the “schooling” part by the time I was in the 5th grade, spending hours carefully coaching us on how to avoid CPS and truancy calls through deception and manipulation. (Can you imagine if they’d spent half that much time coaching us through *school*?)
It didn’t matter the reality of the situation…
When those minivan doors opened and I stepped out, shook out my dress, and put on my best smile—teeth showing halfway, mouth slightly open, cheeks squinting enough to show the dimples but not too much, dad hates it when I smile too much—we were perfect. Our family was perfect, their love was perfect, I was perfect, everything was perfect.
I sold the story so well, sometimes I could forget it was bullshit. Forgetting felt safe and almost euphoric. Until the ugliness reared its head again. Unfortunately or fortunately, that never took too long.
When faced with profound neglect, abuse, isolation, a high-demand cult, and near daily exposure to what bell hooks terms psychological terrorism from my dysfunctional-and-not-productively-dealing-with-it-parents, I made a choice:
I went all in on the act.
If they were going to lie and tell me that this abuse was love, I was going to lie to myself and sell it as love, too. I was going to be my own best customer.
It felt like the only way to survive.
If my mom could explain away my dad’s violent outbursts, the near constant sexual and emotional abuse we experienced as girls in our cult community, and the neglect that was handed out as “nurturance” simply by saying she’d found the One True God and the One True Way to get into heaven with Him (of course God was a Him)...
…then this God of hers must be powerful freaking stuff. And I was in need of some power.
I mean our daily life was nothing short of hell on earth.
The “real” hell must be freaking unimaginable if she would willingly subject her kids to this bullshit rather than risk it.
The thought that anything could be that much worse than *this* scared me so bad that I converted then and there. I would be the best, most faithful cult member and the best, most loving daughter. And I didn’t want anyone else to suffer either, so I would sell anyone and everyone I could on the One True Way. Out of love.
Of course, love was confusing in this topsy turvy world.
One year when I was in elementary school, my mother beat my sister every day for an entire year to get her to be “respectful” and “godly.” I was exactly 15 months older than my sister, and my survival strategy involved obsessive observation to prevent dangerous missteps, so I was keeping count. The wooden implement my mother used to hit her had Bible verses about love written on it.
Love, I surmised, must be something very different than what I thought it was.
My love didn’t understand this.
My love couldn’t do this.
My love didn’t feel like this.
The implication was obvious: I needed to quit saying what I felt was true, and start selling (myself and others) what they told me was true. My feelings must be very unreliable narrators. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it?” was the Bible verse that I quoted like a compulsive mantra, trying to explain away the dissonance.
My heart must be very wicked, I assumed. Because my heart did not instinctively believe what they told me was true.
I wasn’t sure what love was, but I knew love would never wish something worse than this on anyone. Not even your worst enemies.
And so, I learned to market inside the confines of a deeply misogynistic, patriarchal, capitalist, racist, imperialist cult, against my own best interests, and while silencing my own authentic voice.
The products I sold were eternal salvation, something like belonging inside of an insular community, and the protection of the status quo through the carefully rehearsed assertion that everything over here is just fine. I was pretty successful.
For 21 years of my life, I carefully polished my scripts, played my part, and went all in on trying to prove that my abusers and the cult they subscribed to really weren’t all that bad, and meet my marketing quotas.
And for 21 years, people listened, and often believed me. Sometimes at a very high cost to me. Sometimes at a very high cost to them.
But when I turned 21, things changed rapidly.
I’d gotten myself a full ride to my university of choice, which although astonishingly conservative, was completely outside of the religious norms of my childhood cult. It was the beginning of my liberation. I moved too far away to attend services with the cult community, and when my mom died I dropped out of the cult altogether.
Then I got pregnant, unplanned. I’d gotten married as a teenager, a frighteningly normalized—if not demanded—occurrence inside the cult.
Through some intervention of grace, getting pregnant accelerated my liberation. I’d watched my mom hand me and my sister over to my dad’s abuses, then pile on her own, in the name of her cult’s God and patriarchy.
There was no way I was going to do the same thing. I could sell myself out to belong inside their world.
But I couldn't sell out my kid.
When my daughter was just a couple of weeks old, I walked myself to my first therapy appointment and began my now decade long path of recovery.
When she was 1, I graduated from college at the top of my class, and tried to start a career. By the time June rolled around I’d come to terms with the reality: even the Director of Digital Communications job I’d been offered for a regional nonprofit didn’t pay enough to cover rent and daycare. I couldn’t afford to be financially independent and work for someone else as a single mom. And I knew I was going to be a single mom.
When she was 2, I began planning how I could finance the exit from my abusive marriage, and founded a marketing company to make that happen while putting the skill set I'd learned in my cultish upbringing—positioning, messaging, market research, behavioral psychology—to work helping people.
When she was 3, I filed for divorce and bought a house in a different county than my ex-husband.
I felt free.
And oh, I was so much freer than I’d ever been.
…but the thing about learning to market for dysfunctional parents inside of a high-demand kyriarchy-aligned cult?
I’m a magnet—and target—for high-demand groups. And I don’t always catch the signs. After all, the extreme high-demand control and abuse I experienced inside my childhood cult community was so intense that many harmful high-demand groups seem positively lovely in contrast.
And all those demands, all those red flags… they feel familiar.
It’s part of the human tragedy that we can mistake familiar for “safe” even when we know for certain we are nowhere close to safe.
That’s how I woke up one day and realized that I’d been sucked back into cult dynamics.
This time, it was the cult of the online business darling, progressive “feminist” capitalism… which is really just a deceptive marketing ploy in pink fair trade labeled clothing.
I never saw it coming until it was way too late, and it felt like my whole life was all wrapped up in marketing something that I had believed was good, only to realize something was very wrong. The more self-aware I became and the deeper into recovery I got, the more the red flags I saw prickled my spine and sent me into confusion.
Believing it was all for the greater good, and I must just be missing the plot was so tempting. Please just let me be crazy.
Surely this wasn’t happening. Surely I hadn't signed on to something harmful.
Again.
F*ck.
That's the recovery journey that I was in the middle of when I went to Cape Cod.
I went to Cape Cod, unplugged from the world of online business, and saw how much this pink-labeled capitalism was screwing me over with its insatiable demands that I produce more, grow more, build more, want more.
How much I was signing up to work on behalf of my oppressor, this time for the seductively promised reward of wealth and power.
Good thing I had a little practice with jailbreaking myself out of oppressive systems by this point.
The 111 work day year isn’t an online business strategy I concocted to maximize revenue. It’s an intentional rebellion against a series of oppressive systems that were, once again, suffocating my voice and siphoning off my authenticity.
In Chapter 3, I’ll share what a rebellion’s like in which the hero… well, she does not go willingly into that good night, but she shows up to fight anyways.
But that’s for another time.