You Can’t Gaslight the Free

Seven years out of the cult, and she still thinks fear works. This time, I answered back

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Mercury's Back. So Is the Past.
Healing isn't always soft. Sometimes it's a public confrontation in Walmart.

Mercury in retrograde strikes again dragging ghosts from the past and throwing them into the light like they never left.

Seven years out of the cult. Seven years of building a new life brick by brick. And yet, there I was, cornered by the past in the most mundane place imaginable: Walmart. Right between the frozen peas and toothpaste, I ran into my biological stranger, the woman who shares my blood but not my soul. My sister. Her husband. Her two kids, my niece and nephew, strangers to me. Just more people carrying the weight of generational trauma they don’t even recognize.

It wasn’t random. The universe has a cruel sense of humor and perfect timing.

After her verbal attacks on Canada Day (yes, the same woman who weaponized her words against my child, read that here), the universe gave me one rare gift: the chance to finally say something I never thought I’d be brave enough to say out loud.

So I did. In the middle of Walmart. No filter. No flinch.

“Don’t you ever come after my kid again.”

She blinked and then came unhinged. The attacks came fast. Familiar. Tired. Predictable.

“Your mom is disgusting, perverted and demented.”
It’s your mom too, sweetheart. Selective memory or shared delusion?

“All you do is lie.”
Right, because choosing truth over indoctrination is always threatening to those still shackled by belief.

“My conversation about your son was private.”
Private? You mean the one where you labeled and degraded my child? That crossed a line. Mama bear doesn’t do private when it comes to protection.

“What happened to you?”
Simple. Freedom happened. Choice happened. I stopped living someone else’s version of salvation.

“Do I look like I’m in a cult?”
Yes. Yes, you do. Cults aren’t robes and tambourines. They’re systems of control dressed up as righteousness. You wear it proudly.

“Your boyfriend is disgusting.”
Your opinion doesn’t pay my bills, raise my kids, or touch my peace. But I appreciate the unsolicited projection.

“You’re gonna find out one day!”
It’s 2025. Still no sky daddy. Still no rapture. Still waiting while your life wastes away in holy delusion.

And I didn’t move. I didn’t shrink. I didn’t spiral. I stood there, anchored, present. I could feel healing happening in real time. Not the quiet, journaling kind. The kind where your throat unlocks and your voice rises from the ashes of years of silence.

This was a moment. A breaking. A gift.

To my biological stranger: thank you.
Thank you for reminding me why I left.
Thank you for proving once again that religion doesn't sanctify people, it shelters them.
Thank you for being the walking, talking billboard for exactly what I escaped.

And thank you for making it so damn easy to never look back.

I didn’t just survive the cult, I torched the blueprint and built something real.
You stayed. I grew teeth.

This is the reckoning you prayed would never come.

And I’m not done.