Part 2: Leaving One Cage and Walking Into Another

After my grandparents were gone, whatever thin layer of normalcy they’d provided went with them. My parents severed ties with anyone who didn’t share their beliefs. The house became its own sealed system—no friends, no extended family, no outside world except the fringe teachings they followed. What they couldn’t control through doctrine, they controlled through fear.

By middle school, I was working full time in the family insurance business. “Homeschooling” was more a justification than an education. I answered phones, handled paperwork, dealt with customers—long before I was legally employable. I wasn’t a child; I was labor.

At fourteen, I finally started receiving wages. “Receiving” is a generous word. I was paid between $400 and $600 a month for full-time work, and almost all of it was controlled by my parents under the excuse of “room and board.” Saving money wasn’t permitted. Independence wasn’t permitted. Every dollar I earned was another reminder that my life belonged to them.

As I got older, the contradictions started pushing cracks into the structure I’d been raised in. The preaching about righteousness didn’t match the cruelty. The obsession with obedience didn’t match the manipulation. I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for coercive control or spiritual abuse, but I understood the core truth: this was wrong, and staying meant disappearing.

Leaving required calculation. My world had been engineered to prevent it. When I finally made the decision in my early twenties, my parents didn’t cut me off immediately—that would come later. At the time, they even handed down my grandmother’s furniture, the only stable thing I owned.

But they didn’t let me walk away clean. They forced me to work a six-month notice at the business before they would “release” me. I couldn’t afford to wait. So while I served out that notice, I took two more jobs. Three jobs total, barely sleeping, just trying to piece together enough money to get out and stay out.

When I finally moved into my own apartment, it wasn’t freedom—it was a vacuum. I had no model for healthy relationships, no sense of what safety actually looked like, and no ability to interpret red flags for what they were.

So when the first man I ever dated showed interest in me, I mistook attention for stability. I didn’t see the danger; I’d been trained my entire life to normalize danger. Within about two weeks of leaving my parents’ home, I moved in with him. I had no idea I was trading one form of abuse for another. I only knew that I needed to keep moving forward, and he was the only direction available to me at the time.

It wasn’t freedom. It was the next chapter of survival.