* * *

—

By 2013, the message board I’d found back in 2005 had moved to a Facebook group.

Listen, there are innumerable reasons to bash social media, to worry our brains are being rewired to crave likes and retweets like fucking junkies. And like the junkies we’ve become, we lack the attention span to even read the many well-deserved critiques on social media.

   In any case, sure, social media’s unraveling our very social fabric. But for cult babies scattered around the globe, not to mention queer kids in Amarillo, social media’s allowed us to reach out beyond our little worlds, to talk to others who might understand, to hear voices besides those around us and those in our heads that fill us with shame.

I’d only intended to find a few couches to surf. But in doing so, I found people who understood where I’d been. All that time hiding my past, lying about it to nearly everyone, I’d been constructing a completely false narrative about who I was. With the cult babies, I dropped the pretense entirely. I didn’t need them to think I was a good Systemite. I didn’t need to pretend I caught that pop culture reference from 1989. I didn’t need them to think I was happy. I didn’t need them to believe anything at all about me. I could simply tell them the truth. And the truth was, I was completely fucking lost.

I was thirty-six years old and didn’t have the first clue how to function as an adult. My dating history was only useful as a cautionary tale. I was stuck in a dead-end, soul-and joint-crushing job in the dying cable industry. And every night, as I sat in traffic on the Wilson Bridge, staring at the spot where she’d proposed to me, I had to fight the urge to floor it into the Potomac.

I couldn’t begin to find my identity, much less heal, until it was safe to excavate it from all I’d piled on to hide it. Coming out as gay was easy once I left the military. It was the early aughts; gays were everywhere. I could and did move to a city with a massive gay population, where the shame I felt about my sexuality could be danced away in a sea of others like me.

   Cult baby was a little harder. Like I said, I didn’t know any. And seeing as how we tend to find any groups suspect, I don’t see a cult-pride parade being organized anytime soon. I became adept at blending in, surviving in hostile territory. If someone asked about my childhood, if I couldn’t change the subject, I’d claim my parents were hippies. I’d tell stories that were truth adjacent. I really was in Chile under Pinochet, but I’d say my parents were missionaries. I really was near Berlin when the Wall fell, but I’d tell you that I was at boarding school. I just couldn’t bring myself to say the real reasons why I knew what I knew. It’s a little difficult to connect with other people when you’re hiding. But logging into the Facebook group for cult babies was like chatting on Gay.com when I was still in the military. I could be out. I could be me. But it wasn’t enough. I needed to feel real offline too.

* * *

—

I landed in Zurich, rented a car, and drove down to Italy, along the sea to Nice. Then I flew to Berlin. Berlin was an afterthought, a cheap way to stay in Europe another week. But I wanted to find the flat where I was born, see my old friends, some new friends I’d been talking to online.

It was strange enough leaving the cult, but a lot of kids never learned their own languages, never lived in their home countries. When they got out of the Family, those who could moved to cities where they had a chance of survival. Berlin being Berlin—a city of immigrants, a haven for artists and anarchists and queers, where everyone speaks English and often three other languages, with free education and a cheap cost of living—an inordinate number of cult babies ended up there.

   I’d always loved Berlin, though more in theory than anything else. We left when I was two. But “I’m from Berlin” was a load-bearing part of my story because I couldn’t tell the rest. Turned out I loved that city even more in reality—the graffiti, the history, the Wall, the public drinking, the dogs in bars and restaurants and trains, the sense that no one in this city would ever belong anyplace else.

I was staying with a friend of mine I’d known in that other life, where we lived in a chalet in Switzerland and snuck down to the pantry to stick our hands in the Ovaltine jar reserved for pregnant and nursing moms. We’d lick the sticky, delicious crumbles of sugary chocolate protein powder off our hands, check each other’s faces for evidence, and scramble back to hang laundry before we were caught.

When Jen picked me up from the airport, she looked the same, hair the color of orange Fanta and freckles on her nose, just a little older, maybe a few more freckles.

That afternoon, Jen’s boyfriend, a German DJ named Victor, met us for beers on a footbridge in Kreuzberg. Late summer evening. Everyone in Kreuzberg was out that day, worshipping the sun, everyone carrying an ice cream cone or a beer, or both.

When Jen walked over to the kiosk for more beer, Victor asked me why Berlin. I said I was born in Berlin, and I have friends here. He asked me why I was born here. The first guess is usually military parents. Whatever someone guessed, I’d just half-heartedly nod and change the subject.

   I didn’t know how much he knew. Jen and I hadn’t talked about it. I didn’t want to out her, but I didn’t feel like stretching the truth too far. So I told him, “My parents were missionaries.” It’s like the pronoun game, for cult babies.