Sherry Hudson

I was born and raised inside a cult up until I was 12 years old. This place, often called the Meeting Hall, had no official name. Regardless, the Meeting Hall existed across the United states with locations in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, California, Virginia, and Maryland. Mexico City; Lima, Peru; and Newfoundland, Canada were just a few locations outside of the United States. Within the Meeting Hall, girls were taught from an early age to become home makers for their future husbands. Women never went to college or acquired outside jobs. Elders forbade them from marriage outside of the congregation as well as banned them from any voiced opinion during the meetings. In addition, wives were expected to serve their husbands faithfully even to the extent of enduring abuse for the sake of their marriage. If a man raped a woman, it was repeatedly overlooked by the community. If the victim was a girl and confided in her parents, it was doubtful that they believed her.
Our congregation believed themselves to be the only place left on Earth, where we truly served God as a Christian should. Because it was God's holy place, few recognized the underlying darkness of oppression involved. The Meeting Hall was my world and the only place I knew of as a child. I never dreamed I'd be applying to college or make it past the age of 17 when my mother married a man 10 years her senior. I could not escape my physical world built by hundreds of rules Elders established, so I found asylum in literature. I read almost everything I could get my hands on. My mother even began smuggling fiction books past my father so that I could read them. Reading any source of material other than the Bible or those containing historical significance was often frowned upon. Books became my new life. Naturally, the only effective form of discipline from my parents involved taking those books away. When I couldn't read, I wrote stories of my own.
I was homeschooled for most of my life until sophomore year of high school. At that time, I attended a small private school called Nazarene Christian Academy. It was there that I took my first psychology class. Going to a private school brought several adjustment challenges. Students were surprised that I had never celebrated Christmas, gone to the movies, had no social media, and virtually no ties to the extended family we had to leave behind at the Meeting Hall. I had never been to a pep rally or school dance. While these things were my normal, it took time to understand why it seemed so strange to outsiders. My first Psychology class opened my eyes to the "why" of my situation; why cults are formed, why religion is so easily used to oppress, and why "normal" is always subjective. That class was also the first place I could freely raise my hand as a woman, ask a million questions, and have every one of them answered. I believed psychology to be a source of power. It was knowledge given without limitations and freedom from the black and white reasoning I was previously taught.
In that class, I realized my desire to defy the future the Meeting Hall had planned for me. I wanted to acquire all the knowledge that a man could as well as understand why people think the way they do. I always had little tolerance for shallow speech. With every new person I met, I wanted to discuss subjects that mattered. Topics that had a lasting impact on life. The Meeting Hall's stigma that a woman's voice was not as valuable as a man's, drove me to find my own voice and use it. For the rest of my life, I want to understand people and help them understand themselves. My mother gave up her future in order to provide one of my own as selflessly as she smuggled the books that fostered my imagination. Because of her, I am the first woman in our family to ever pursue my own career.