When I left the cult, the covid lockdown was just starting. I had moved from New Windsor, New York to Brunswick, Maryland where I didn’t know anyone except my family.

I didn’t have any friends. I had already lost contact with my old, pre-church friends, and I had just cut off everyone from the church as well.

Besides, I didn’t consider people from church my “friends,” because of a lecture I had heard shortly after being baptized, teaching members that we shouldn’t have friends in the church. Church was supposed to be only about our relationship with God.

So essentially, it had been almost a decade since I had had a real friend in my life. And I couldn’t really do anything about it, like go out and meet people, due to the covid lockdown.

I also thought that by my age, most people already had their friend groups and it was unlikely I would be able to meet new people with similar interests and compatible personalities.

Even though I’m an introvert, complete isolation is not my jam. So I turned to the internet as a place to socialize.

There were people I chatted with on Discord, but I longed for true friendship. Online friends didn’t seem “real” to me. It isn’t safe to disclose too much about oneself online, and you can never really know who you’re talking to.

The only people I really spoke with during that time were my therapists. (I went through one after another trying to find one that I felt compatible with.) I felt pathetic, thinking that I had to pay someone just to talk to me.

I did make one friend on Discord that seemed like a true friend. But because I hadn’t processed the trauma that I had been through, the friendship ended up taking on unhealthy undertones.