Hey Kid, There’s Nothing Wrong with You a memoir by Jared Garrett 1 2 Chapter 1 The Beginning, More or Less It all started with a hippie named Catherine. At least for me it did. She was my mother. But I never called her that. I also never called her ‘Mom.’ Instead, I called her Magdalen, which was the second or third name she went by in the cult. Another name she went by early on in her time in the cult was Seraphine. I like that name a lot. This is a story about my life growing up in a weird cult and how I freed myself from it, but there’s lots of other story to tell as part of this. So I’m going to start this thing with Catherine, but then I’ll have to rewind. The story will be linear sometimes, but only when it makes sense. People say you should start a story at the beginning, so here we go. I was born in Chicago in a hospital. I guess the unusual thing—the reason I’m writing this—is the circumstances of my birth. Or rather, the circumstances my parents were in at the time of my birth. In fact, they’d been in those circumstances for quite a while before I was born and remained in those same circumstances for quite a while after. All things considered, I don’t think it’s going to work out for me to start at the beginning. I’m getting off track. You would think that after nearly three decades of telling my story out loud, I’d get better at it. And honestly, I have. I’ve got the short version down to a few sentences—something I could share in a cubicle farm in a large or small company at which I’m slaving away with co-workers. Which I’ve done. More than once. I’ve got the medium version down pretty well too. I share that over lunch or a short dinner. Also with co-workers or folks who host me for speaking and teaching engagements. 3 The long version usually gets told over a few days or about an hour or two of unbroken, me talking time, with my coworkers or fellow church members looking on with some version of agog or aghast on their face. But this is different. This isn’t me telling the story aloud to people who start wondering whether I’m as normal as I look. People who start considering that they work with their backs turned to a former member of a cult that preached the equality and sameness of Jesus Christ and Lucifer. People who, when they Google “The Process Church of the Final Judgment,” which was the first name of the cult back in the 60s, they see Charles Manson associated with it. People who maybe wonder if they should be armed, or at least get one of those mirrors you can attach to your computer monitor so you can see someone coming behind you. No, this isn’t me talking to people and gauging how much I can really say by their reaction. This isn’t me insisting I’m not kidding over a lunch of curry or tacos. This is my story. My story. Something about finally putting those words down after all these years chokes me up a bit. I’ve known for a long time that I should write this thing down. Stop depending on the oral tradition because that’s so three thousand years ago. I have a lot to say. I’ve been swallowing it for a long time, biting back on who I am and how the life I had and have has broken, healed, and remade me. So I’m going to start with this: My whole life, I wanted a family. Something in me knew my childhood was a— I’m sorry for the aside, but this is important to this story. I just had to fight to stop censoring myself. This is my story but I’ve been so worried for so long about how certain people might react. 4 Shut up, scared Jared. Tell the story and tell it right. Type the words. Stick with me please. I promise I’m going somewhere with this. I don’t want to hurt people with what I say. You know what? Before I go further, a word of warning. I’m going to say what’s in my heart. I bear no malice. I do have a bit of anger left and I’m still working through that with prayer and meditation. My intent is not to hurt. My intent is to tell this story the way my voice, the voice that is truest to me, wants me to. I have to say the uncensored words if I want to tell this right. Here we go again. My whole life, I wanted a family. Something in me knew my childhood was a perversion. A betrayal of what I and every child really should have. I accept that not every child has it, for all kinds of reasons. I didn’t have it because of the choices of my parents and the people who screwed them up. By ‘them’ I mean my parents. Yes, the cult knuckleheads screwed them up pretty royally— enough that they didn’t realized how messed up they were. I was born and raised in a cult. My whole life, I knew it was a cult. Only twenty or so years after leaving it did I actually learn most of the truth of it: that the cult was a splinter cult off of Scientology. Yup, that Scientology. I am not going to say I grew up in the cult because I’ll tell you something: I’ve grown up a lot more in the last twenty-plus years, a long time after I left the cult at seventeen, than I did before then. Back on track now, I promise. Catherine was a young hippie in San Francisco. I don’t know a lot of details about her youth, but she was born and raised in Palo Alto, California to a research doctor father and an 5 impressive mother who formed nationwide mothers’ organizations. I have a picture of her at her first wedding. She looks twenty or so and is lovely in her white gown. She has a cigarette in her hand and her hair hangs loosely. She and her husband had a son soon after being married, according to the information I’ve received. A few years later, a cult called The Process Church of the Final Judgment—The Process for short—showed up in Berkeley and enticed this young family to join up. Within a year or so, Catherine (whose name was now Seraphine) was fully dedicated and her husband was fully drummed out of the cult, leaving wife and son behind. Catherine/Seraphine went on to marry one of the British original founders of the Process. His name was John. Catherine became the special handmaiden to the mysterious and megalomaniacal leader of the Process. So now let’s get into this cult. We’ll pick up Seraphine and my story in a bit. The cult started in the UK, at Oxford, in the 60s. It was a time of disaffection, paradigm shifting, and rebellion. Cults were probably proliferating like rabbits in a certain park in Germany that I walked through a few times. There were a lot of rabbits. Seriously. In the case of this cult, a fellow named Robert DeGrimston and a woman named Mary Ann MacLean were at Oxford together. They splintered off Scientology because Robert and Mary Ann were using some machine differently from the way L. Ron Hubbard did, doing something like past life analysis, energy focus, and psychic power development. No, for real. They were essentially forced out of Scientology, but they had several people who agreed with what they were doing, so those folks stuck with Robert and Mary Ann. The cult was called The Process Church of the Final Judgment and they had some funky practices that I encourage you to learn about via Google. 6 Things got strange, then bad in London, and the cult shifted to the USA. I don’t know the timeline of where they were and when they were there, but at some point in the late 60s, during their USA travels, they were in San Francisco. And that’s where they crossed paths with Catherine, and where they first destroyed a family, as I pointed out above. Catherine’s first husband was drummed out. This might have something to do with the cult demanding total fidelity and consecration to it. So if you had money, it went to the cult. If you had a family, you gave it to the cult so you could go around printing and selling magazines, running the cult coffee shops in Chicago, San Francisco, or New Orleans or wherever they were at the time, and raising money on the streets. Whoever was bad at making money or running the coffee shops was left to watch over the kids. In any case, Catherine/Seraphine ended up marrying one of the cult founders, a guy who had taken the name John as part of his membership in the cult. He was a British guy with big, you might say really big, eyebrows, a receding hairline, and a very heavy and royal-sounding accent. I don’t know how much time passed, but they had a baby.