How I Learned to Be Vulnerable After Growing Up in a Religious Cult

After being bullied as a child for being different, as a woman in my forties I’ve finally embraced what makes me unique

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

by Ariel Anderssen

I’m eight years old, crying onto the fuzzy beige fabric covering of our car’s backseat. I’d been invited to tea by a girl at my new school, who’d phoned up the week before and asked my mum if I’d be allowed to come. Today, we’d driven there, as asked, for four p.m.. There, we discovered I hadn’t been invited, after all. Neither she nor her mother had been expecting me. Because of course this popular student in the year above mine had never wanted me, the new, weird, religious girl in homemade clothes, to come to her house.

Some other girl, probably from my class, probably with the whispered, giggling support of a group of friends, had phoned us as a hoax. And tomorrow at school, everyone will know that I’d believed it; that I’d gone there, hoping for friendship. “You’re never going back to that school,” says my mother from the front seat. Perhaps she is as hurt and humiliated as I am.

But I know that I will have to go back. We’ve just moved to the village, and this is the only school. In any case, it won’t be different anywhere else. I’ll still be the girl with the wrong clothes, standing outside during school assemblies, not permitted to go to birthday parties or the school disco, visibly, conspicuously, embarrassingly different.

At my previous school, it’d been the same. “I am your friend,” Alice had said, “but not at school. If anyone here asks me, I’ll say I’m not. Okay?” Alice doesn’t want to be infected by my unpopularity. I understand; neither do I. I long to be normal. I can’t be normal, but I can be quiet. I'll go back to school, and I’ll be quieter, I think. Maybe that will keep me safe. Maybe there will be no more hoax calls.

I’m eleven years old, wishing school break times didn’t exist. Still a religious cult member, still in homemade clothes, but now, apparently, a snob, too. Boys from the other, hated class, sing the opening phrase from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony when they see me on the playground, and the girls put one hand on their hips, stick their noses in the air, and pass me with a model’s walk and affected sneer. This is meant to replicate how I walk, the music that I like. I don’t like Beethoven, but I’m not allowed pop music or TV so I’m cut off from the sea of popular culture they swim in.

From this, other children infer that I must be an eleven-year-old culture snob who’s looking down on them. I’m not. I want to be anyone but myself—different, weird, and too sensitive to hide my feelings when their mockery hurts me. I can’t change, so instead, I shrink; I become less visible. I hide.

I’m thirteen, in ballet class. I’m not the one being mocked today. It’s the new student. “Why’s she doing that with her face?” sniggers Natasha, loudly, to the others. The new student is expressing the music, not just with her body but with all of herself. That’s what we are all meant to do. But as I listen to the others, and watch her dancing, I know that I don’t want to be laughed at like this for loving the music too much, for showing emotions through my performance. Not now that I know it’s wrong. Now that I know it’s “gay” to be expressive. I don’t want to be gay as well as posh, as well as religious. I practice an expressionless face, as the months go by, and the ballet steps we dance become more advanced, more beautiful. I learn to dance from the neck down, blank-faced, as though not hearing the emotion of the music. I dance on, loving every step, every class, but scared to show any of that on my face. It’s cooler to dance the steps like they mean nothing. Between us, we make them mean nothing, because safety from mockery is more valuable to us than art. I don’t shine; it’s safer to be dim.

I’m fifteen; English literature. We are reading a Shakespeare play aloud. By common consent, we read as badly as possible. No inflections, no characterization. Dulled, blank, reciting of the words as though they’re strings of random numbers. No one is allowed to like Shakespeare. It’s my turn to read; I turn my voice flat and dead. I snigger along with everyone else at words I pretend not to be able to pronounce. It’s better to be dull than to be correct. It’s better to hate the play, the class, the teacher, than it is to appear to be learning, or worse, enjoying learning. I’m not being bullied so much an more. I wear ugly, baggy knock-off designer clothes like the others. My trainers are Reebok. I wear my hair in careful copy of the other girls: scraped back, lacquered and stiff. I’m finally just about invisible enough to be left alone. I hate who I’m pretending to be, who I’m becoming. But I’m safer—it’s safer to conform, to be stiff and lacquered.

“Sad” is an insult. “It’s so sad.” “She’s so sad.” It means “pathetic.” It means “loser.” The opposite of sad isn’t happy. The opposite of sad is bored, because bored is cool. I’m bored. Shrunken, sullen, blunted, cynical, dimmed, bored, and safer.

Not everyone is safe. The girl with the shiny dark hair, two years below me, whose father brings her to school on his bicycle. People laugh at them for being weird, and old-fashioned. They call him a pedophile. It sickens me, but I say nothing, because I no longer show kindness. I think about how her father is perhaps too poor for a car, but loves his daughter enough to give her a ride to school every day anyway, rather than let her walk alone through this hostile town full of teenagers who’re so talented at hate. It makes me want to cry, but I don’t cry now—not at school. It makes me want to tell her not to be ashamed, but I don’t. I don’t want to be infected by her unpopularity. I understand now, that’s how it works. I’m not kind anymore. It is safer not to be kind.

“You’re ugly, aren’t you? Why are you so fucking ugly?” says Robert, to Catherine. We’re waiting for the school bus; Catherine has done nothing to deserve this attack from nowhere. She looks down, wretched. I want to smash Robert’s face into the chain-link fence we’re standing by. I want to tell him that his cruelty disgusts me—that he deserves to be alone forever. I want to curse him with being alone forever. But half a year ago, it was me being called ugly, and I can’t bear to have that happen again. I stand next to Catherine, silent like her, ashamed like her. So angry that I want to scream and never stop. Thirty years later, I’m still angry. Angry with him, angry with sixteen-year-old me, for valuing invisibility over chivalry.

“That’s the boy who shat himself when Russell beat him up.” It’d happened two years before, and people are still pointing him out. I’m disgusted. Not by the boy who’d defecated in a simple animal fear response, but by Russell, the big, confident, loud bully in my year who’d scared a younger boy that badly, on purpose, for fun. I want him to know what it’s like to be afraid, and ashamed, and to try to be invisible because only that is safe. But I don’t want him to notice me. I never speak to him, and wear my carefully constructed camouflage. I’m quiet, and dull, and small. It’s safer to be invisible than angry.

I’m eighteen, at drama school in London. Everything is beautifully, shockingly different here. In play-reading class, we read with every emotion we feel, and when that isn’t enough, we manufacture more. We cry, performing Shakespearian monologues; we attempt accents, we share our bad memories. If any student laughs at, or is unsupportive of, another’s performance, they’re made to leave the class. We strip naked, we applaud each other for sharing more, and learn not to judge ourselves for anything except being inhibited. It’s safe here; we’re meant to be sensitive. Vulnerability is an actor’s obligation. If we don’t emote sufficiently, we risk being removed from the course. I notice how the mature students aren’t embarrassed to show vulnerability, and the way our overseas students aren’t scared to be seen to work hard. I feel myself begin to unfurl. I stop calling things “sad.” I begin to want to be seen. My voice gets louder, and I start to want to be heard again. I begin to want to be kind again.

I’m twenty-five, striding down a catwalk at London Fashion Week. Hand on hip, nose in the air, like those long-ago girls on the playground. Perhaps they were prophesying. I am a model now, and a professional actor. I sometimes work nude; I find freedom in the vulnerability. I discover the BDSM scene, and it becomes home. I model for bondage photographers; expressing pain, and pleasure, and arousal, and every emotion, is how I make a living. There is nowhere to hide, and when I begin to pay my mortgage by bondage modelling, I know my conformity is in the past. I don’t hide, and I’m not quiet, and I’m no longer invisible.

Now, I’m forty-six, and I wonder how many of us spend our adulthoods trying to unlearn what the cruelty of other children taught us—to conform, to shrink, to hide our passions and manufacture disdain for anything that might touch our hearts? I have unlearned, because it’s been necessary for my job. Having done so, I’ve discovered its value in the forging of real friendships too. The act of growing older has felt like archaeology, cautiously uncovering my innate kindness, my natural enthusiasms. Discovering the things I love, and what makes me cry. It’s been an act of daring to let other people see these things clearly, and thus see me. To be known, all the way through, is such a privilege, and I wish for it for us all. Be kind, we admonish each other, but many of us learned young that it’s safer not to be kind, least of all to ourselves.

Now, I know who I am—who I always was. I am a little strange; formative years spent in a religious cult will do that, and I accept my strangeness. I do walk with my back straight and my head up; that’s what ten years of ballet gave me and I don’t try to hide its influence. I do love reading Shakespeare aloud, and I like to express my emotions without inhibition. I want the people around me to know how I’m feeling, as I want to understand their feelings in return. Perhaps growing up, growing up well, always involves the unlearning of the strategies we used to stay safe, when we were surrounded by people who hadn’t learned compassion or tolerance yet. Perhaps it takes some of us many years to rediscover the qualities that our uncynical, childhood selves had in abundance.

What my bullies taught me, eventually, is that they were wrong. Being quiet, small, dim, invisible, cynical, and unenthusiastic isn’t living, and safety is ’t happiness. If happiness is to be found, it’s in the vulnerability we once didn’t know that we should hide. I believe it’s worth seeking out.

Ariel Anderssen is a BDSM model with a lifetime’s interest in submission and masochism and author of Playing to Lose: How a Jehovah's Witness Became a Submissive BDSM Model. The daughter of a nuclear physicist, Ariel was brought up as Jehovah’s Witness by her devoutly religious mother, and to a lesser extent by her father, who was busy with the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the wake of the 1986 disaster. She has a YouTube channel about “How to be a Really, Really, Really Old Model,” and tweets daily about her kinky life. She lives in Wales with her husband. Her hobbies include dressmaking and collecting antique swords.