The Predictability of Chicken Nuggets

Finding courage beyond the familiar plate

“Why Did You Stay?”

It’s the question people love to ask survivors.
Not to understand, but to distance themselves.
“I would never.”
“That could never be me.”

But I stayed.
I stayed in the marriage. I stayed in the cult.

And I know why.

We don’t ask why someone chooses sweatpants over jeans.
We don’t ask why we rewatch the same show repeatedly, even when we know how it ends.
We don’t ask why our kids want chicken nuggets and fries at a restaurant with cloth napkins.

We know the answer:
Because it’s familiar.
Because it’s predictable.
Because it’s safe - or at least, feels safer than the unknown.

I was born into the William Branham cult.
We didn’t call it that, of course. We called it “The Message.”
We believed we were the chosen few, the only ones who had “the full truth.”
It was extremist, evangelical, and wrapped in just enough scripture to keep us obedient and afraid.
God had already written the beginning and the end. All I had to do was fall in line.

I wasn’t raised to question. I was raised to submit.
To authority. To men. To fear.
We didn’t watch TV. We didn’t cut our hair. We didn’t wear makeup.
Women were vessels. Men were gods, and hell was always just one mistake away.

So when I married an abusive man, it didn’t feel like a departure.
It felt like the logical next step.

I stayed because it was what I was trained to do.
Because I had been groomed to believe that suffering was spiritual, silence was strength, and obedience was love.

You don’t know what you don’t know.
And when the entire grocery store of life terrifies you,
You stay in your aisle.
You grab what you recognize - chicken fingers, shame, submission, and convince yourself it’s a meal.

As humans, we judge what we’ve never had to survive.

So please don’t ask why I stayed.
Ask what it cost me to leave.
Ask what it took to unlearn God.
Ask what it feels like to raise children outside of the only world I ever knew.
Ask how terrifying it is to rewire your brain in your 30s while trying to keep everyone fed and emotionally safe.

I didn’t stay because I liked it.
I stayed because I was taught that freedom was rebellion and rebellion was satanic.
I stayed because surviving sometimes means clinging to what hurts just so you don’t drown in what you can’t yet understand.

But I left.
And now I write, telling the truth because silence is where abuse breeds, and I will never be silent again.