I joined a cult last week.

I decided thinking for myself was no longer a viable option for the way I intend on living my life. I’d much rather have all of my life’s decisions made for me. I mean that sincerely. Thinking is overrated. From the moment we wake up until the time we return to our little mini deaths that we call “sleep,” we’re forced to make decisions: 

What’s for breakfast? 

What should I wear? 

Which route should I take to work?

How much work should I actually get done today?

What’s for lunch?

Should I shut Paula in accounting up now or let her ramble on for longer?

How early can I leave work?

Should I workout my arms or legs today?

What’s for dinner?

Which pjs should I wear?

When should I go to bed?

It’s all so exhausting which is why I left this silly world of freedom and decision-making behind and joined a cult. 

You’re probably wondering how one even goes about finding a cult these days. This isn’t the 60s. The days of stumbling upon a group of white people with overgrown body hair flailing their arms wildly in dashikis in a field somewhere chanting about psychedelics, henna, and veganism are long gone. It actually isn’t as hard as one might think. If you peruse your local Craigslist or flyers taped to telephone poles at crosswalks thoroughly you’re bound to come across at least three to seven cults under the guise of “social meetups,” “self-help,” or “religious groups.” Attend one of the meetings, give them your personal contact information, and congratulations! You are now a member of a cult. 

Err on the side of caution when vetting a potential cult. Only share your personal contact information when you have decided this is the cult you want to join because once they have your contact info, you will be harassed for life. If they aren’t calling just to check in because they “haven’t seen ya in a while” then they’re mailing you some of their propaganda. It is a level of stalker you have never known and yet it will touch a part of your heart that you have been yearning to fill for a while. You will find it internally conflicting.

There’s a method to the madness. Cults need people to exist. Otherwise, it’s just some depraved individual who is too upper level to be able to hold a layman’s job and has made their way onto a no-fly list shouting questionable opinions into the abyss. Cults require people to join that depraved genius and say, “hey, this guy knows what he’s talking about. I don’t quite understand it, but that’s because I’m not on his level yet but I’m so gosh darn tired I’m willing to stop thinking long enough to get there!” That’s how cults work you see. They offer the love and acceptance you aren’t receiving in other areas of your life all for the simple price of your mind. And if you aren’t going to use it, someone else should. Darryl says, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste on yourself.”

The first day in the cult was invigoratingly liberating. I was asked to remove every follicle of hair from my body. 

Every. 

Single. 

Follicle. 

The exact instructions were to be “Whoopi Goldberg in the face, Bruce Willis on the dome, Barbie doll everywhere else.” Apparently, our cult leader, Darryl, has a thing about hair. 

Told you this isn’t the 60s. 

Everything is hairless here. Even the animals. Darryl says we’re born hairless so we should exist as hairless beings. This isn’t entirely true since most babies are born with hair and a good bit of animals as well. Not to mention, it is 100% natural and sprouts out of us no matter what. I started to correct Darryl on this anatomical inaccuracy then I remembered– cult. So I just nodded vigorously and lathered up the Nair. 

We don’t bathe in the cult. It washes away our essential oils. Bathing here consists of taking the family sized communal bottle of Nair that Darryl steals from Walmart (“money is a tool of the oppressed”) and removing your dirty hair follicles. I’ve developed a slightly concerning amount of adult acne as a result of the lack of bathing but Darryl says acne is just a map of the stars existing on our faces and if we trace the pimples, we can find our own individual constellations in the night sky. I connected all of my face constellations/pimples and discovered they made a cylinder. Sure enough, I looked up in the sky and saw… a cylinder! Any doubts I had about Darryl and the cult were gone. My belief was cemented in that very moment. Darryl said I should call it “Majoris Paralysis.”  

All who enter the cult are assigned a companion. As a Level One, I was assigned an animal. Once you prove that you are able to tend to an animal, you are then assigned a human companion. Darryl decides if you will receive a man, woman, child, or… Darryl. Don’t get any strange ideas though. We are not treating children inappropriately. It’s all based on the current dynamics of the cult when your ascension time arrives. If we have an excess of children, then you are given a child to rear. If we are short on children, then you are given a member of the opposite sex with the task to procreate and expand our community. You may or may not raise the child(ren) you are tasked with creating. If all children have parental units and we have no need to create additional children, then you are given a member of the same sex as your companion. If you are a woman and Darryl takes a liking to you, then you become one of his wives. He says, “what’s love but a second-hand emotion when we all love each other?” That didn’t make much sense to me and I’m positive he was misquoting a Tina Turner song, but again, cult.

I was given a Sphinx cat Darryl called Alopecia. Darryl said I looked like I ate a lot of tuna in my past life and thus I was paired with a cat. I’ve actually never had tuna because meat that comes in a can frightens me but one mustn’t question Darryl. The cool part about Alopecia is that since he’s a Sphinx, he’s already hairless and I don’t have to give him a weekly Nair bath like some of my comrades do with their naturally hairy animals. Every now and then a hair sprouts up but it’s nothing a little dab of Nair can’t handle. Alopecia feels like a dehydrated tongue, but I love him regardless. Because Darryl told me to.

The hardest part about being in a cult is dealing with your friends and family that think you have absolutely lost your mind in giving up your freedoms and liberties to blindly follow a man named Darryl around the California coast. Everyone wants to know “why are you ruining your life?” or “is there something your father and I could have done differently?” or if you’ll “please stop with this nonsense and just come home? You’re upsetting your mother.” They simply don’t understand the vision. When you were of your thinking body, they forced decision after decision out of you instead of on you. They gave you too much freedom and they have to learn to deal with how that sort of reverse oppression impacted you. Not all of us are thinkers. Some of us are perfectly content being insentient beings.

Darryl has been kind enough to remove every outlet that connects us to the outside world so the frantic calls, emails, and texts have subsided. There was a rather embarrassing moment on day three (or five?) when my family used “Find my iPhone” to discover my last location before Darryl disconnected me. They drove seven hours to our homeland in order to physically remove me from the cult. Police accompanied them and caused an entire scene. Luckily, Darryl is used to the police impeding on his vision as almost everyone here except for the children, of course, have had a “concerned” family or friend show up and attempt to bring them back to the thinking world. 

Since we’re all adults, there isn’t much the police can do, but occasionally they do come prepared with an arrest warrant for Darryl for stealing from Walmart or all of the polygamy. The joke is on them though because Darryl is practically unidentifiable in standard government systems. He burned off his fingerprints so any attempts to fingerprint him result in sad black circles that are as vacant as the souls outside of our homeland. He ate his social security card and birth certificate with the belief that it would destroy the record of his public existence. I’m pretty positive that isn’t how that works, but once again, cult.

On top of all of that, Darryl is blessed with the rare condition of having a completely collapsible skeleton meaning he can squeeze in and out of spaces as long as his head can fit through. Just like a mouse. They try to lock him up in a cell, but he squeezes out every time and due to his hairlessness and extremely oily skin, he’s very slippery making him extremely difficult to catch.

Once the police assessed that I wasn’t being physically harmed save for my hairlessness and considering that I’m legally an adult, they determined they couldn’t force me to leave the homeland. There were a lot of tears from my parents. My mom wept at the loss of a son. My dad wept because he said I looked like a neo-Nazi and that’s even more embarrassing than having a son in a cult who owns a hairless cat and has drawn lines on his face to connect his acne into the shape of a cylinder. They only have themselves to blame for forcing me to make decisions. Well, I made one and it’s to never make another one again!

All in all, I’m very pleased with my decision to join the cult. I can only hope in sharing my journey that you too are now considering finding your purpose and home within a cult. I must cut my testimony short as I am beginning to grow dizzy from lack of blood. Darryl doesn’t like for us to write as it encourages creativity he can’t control so we must use our own blood as ink. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to visit us at the meadow near the Juniper tree that’s 945 paces west and then 378 paces north of the cave. If you pass the barnhouse that was destroyed by the seance or simply just have this unshakeable feeling that you’re going in the wrong direction, you’ve gone too far.