I am an active member of Toastmasters International. I find that it has helped me to be polished and professional when dealing with my employers’ clients, many of whom are mid to high ranking US Air Force officers and upper level NY/ NJ State Government people.
I occasionally use the Toastmasters forum to educate people about cults. Toastmaster clubs are typically made up of local industry, technology, business and local government leaders and professionals. For this speech I was working on "How To Say It" and the effective use of metaphors.
I wanted to share my latest speech with you. I presented this to an audience of about 30 local professional last Monday at our last meeting.
What Was Your Rabbit Hole?
What was your rabbit hole? You know, that place, that narrow gate that you squeezed through for your own personal salvation? And when and how did you Cross your Rubicon?
I entered the rabbit hole in 1981 when I started EE classes at the NH Technical Institute, the feeder school for the UNH School of Engineering, in Concord, NH. I was 28 years old.
Education was the mechanism which enabled me to escape the mind numbing, intellectually suffocating Religious Kult my parents joined in 1958 when I was just 5 yrs old. In 1981 I forced my mind and body through the rabbit hole expecting praise from family and friends for the will to start and the courage to finish that grueling two year curricula of pre-engineering classes. Instead I found myself alone, in a strange new world of understanding and new found critical thinking abilities, bewildered and wondering "What Now?" I found myself, like Alice, at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
These days I enjoy the performing arts, especially music, and playing blues and classic rock on the guitar. These things have replaced living a double life of going to 5 cult meetings a week, selling their magazines door to door on weekends, and hanging out with my "thug wannabe" friends in HS and downtown after school, looking and acting tough, scooping and making out with the pretty girls, and trying desperately to fit in with "Normal" kids. It was many years later that I learned the name of the monster that caused me to suffer the crushing melancholy and desperation that gripped me through my teenage years to my early 30s. Its name was Cognitive Dissonance.
Some times I wonder what ever became of that "Other" me, you know, the tuff kid that hung out on the street corners of downtown Penacook, NH in the late 60’s and early 70’s with my delinquent buddies. Today I am probably reading a book of poetry, or history while many of them are dead, two killed in the Vietnam War, one killed in street violence, one killed in a high speed car crash, and some others serving hard time for drug related crimes.
And I wonder sometimes what ever happened to that "Other" other me, the one that sat through all those religious sales meetings and pedaled their literature from door to door. Today I am probably playing a Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray tune at a jam, reading a book about the history of the Christian church or attending classes at the local colleges. Some of my friends from that life are dead also, victims of literal self fratricide; unable to slay the monster named "Cognitive Dissonance", they were consumed by it. The rest of them are my age, in menial dead end jobs, no savings, no retirement, no education, desperately holding on to all they have left, the cult, having sacrificed their vitality, their will, and their choices to a book publishing empire masquerading as a religion.
I was lucky I didn’t get caught or killed from doing something stupid in my other life, the one on the street. I was also lucky to get out of my "Other" other life, the one in the cult, with my sanity and soul relatively intact.
One day back then I wrote a poem for a girl I had a crush on but could never have. I realized then that I knew nothing about grammar or syntax so I took an English class at a local community college. That was when I realized the rabbit hole was there. That was the beginning of the beginning.
It is somewhat disorienting to educate yourself away from your past. Like steam off of hot asphalt after a summer afternoon shower I gradually felt much of the cognitive dissonance that plagued me evaporate away. I believe that Education saved my life, but it was my own stubbornness, my own self sufficiency, that helped me through those things. It got me to my Rubicon. I crossed my Rubicon when I graduated Summa Cum Laude from SUNY IT in 2003. I was 49 years old.
I still struggle with the transitions I have made in my life. My relationship with my family was bled out on the altar of that cult. I find that many of the survival mechanisms I developed during those times are now handicaps to further progress in my life. Letting them go is price of admission to the next level. My self reliance, which served me so well then, now needs to be tempered. I need to let down some walls, and I still need to scale others.
What was your rabbit hole? When and how did you cross your Rubicon?
Mr. Toastmaster