It’s hard to know where to start. Life was life, and to me mine was normal, and others were strange. It never felt like something I would be writing about 20 years later, because it was all I knew. My parents split when I was two-years-old, and my mum joined the cult not long after. I guess she was looking for community, and a feeling of meaning to life. I get that; I think we all are in one way or another.
Life became as I remember: chaotic, dramatic, and terrifying, on a frequent basis. Again though, I thought that was completely normal. Even after we left, I used to make jokes about things that went on and other kids would listen with expressions of either discomfort and awkwardness, or just plain horror. It wasn’t until long after we left and I was used to hanging out with people who had experienced a more ‘conventional’ upbringing - coupled with the cracks of the disfunction I had endured beginning to show - that I gradually became aware of just how traumatic my upbringing had been.
Inside our community there was a broad spectrum of characters: those who should be in prison, to those in need of treatment for severe mental ill health, and those who were like my mum - sweet, kind, a little naive, and just searching for a sense of belonging. The kids were an add-on: an inconvenience to be silenced or used in some way. Never a precious and vulnerable little being. If you stepped out of line you tended to be punished with everybody's favourite tool - shame.
I remember once being publicly shamed in front of hundreds of people at a convergence (as they called it, where people from countries all over the world gathered at the HQ in Arizona). I woke up underneath my mum’s chair, five-years-old, to hear the female leader speaking about how disgusting and dysfunctional I and my mother were for my having short hair and wanting to be a boy at that time. I remember feeling such deep shame. I was wrong. A wrong human. Something in me was intrinsically faulty and disgusting. I was convinced of that. I carried that feeling for a very long time.
‘De-shackling’ from shame has taken a lot of work and, as far as I know, it doesn’t just disappear, you just do your best at healing what you can and you learn your triggers. I’m sure many will relate to that.
We left when I was about 10 or 11-years-old. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time because there was so much going on back then. I don’t remember it being a big dramatic exit, we just moved back to Bristol, and that was it. At that point music had already started to play a big role in my life where escape was concerned. I played the clarinet and sang from a young age, and I listened to legends like Elvis, Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon, incessantly.
As I got older I became inspired by female singer-songwriters like Tracy Chapman, Joni Mitchell, Lauryn Hill, India Arie (the list is vast!) and that’s when I began writing properly and realised that it was my tool for living. Things got pretty dark, and writing kept the light coming in. I felt that however bad things got, if I wrote a song, there was meaning. There was a point to it all. I still feel that way. Songwriting has been a lifeline.
Oddly though, my relationship with making and listening to music can be up and down. Sometimes I want to switch off so much that I can’t bear the sound of music because it instantly connects me to myself and the world. I make myself fight through that though because I know how much music is always a tool for good - both making it, and listening to it.
I think I express everything - every moment endured back then, subsequent pains, and subsequent joys - through music. Singing is the most incredible way to feel and express what's going on inside of your body. I can't recommend it enough to anyone reading this and feeling the need to 'purge' in some way. If you have that feeling, try using your voice. The vibrations you create when you open your mouth and sing move mountains inside of you.
I’m very grateful for what music has gifted me, and what I know it has gifted others. I hope I can give a little of what I've received from it to the world too.