33. It wasn't all a waste of time

There is a narrative that many of us carry after leaving: I wasted my life. The years inside were lost. I have nothing to show for it.

I understand why that narrative forms. When you look at the education you were denied, the career you did not build, the relationships you were prevented from having, the experiences you missed, the financial ground you lost, it is easy to conclude that the time inside produced nothing of value. And the grief about lost time is real. I don’t want to minimise that.

But I want to challenge one part of the narrative, because I think it is incomplete.

You developed real skills inside that system. Not despite it being harmful, but because of the demands it placed on you. And those skills are yours. The context in which they were built was wrong, but the abilities themselves are real and have genuine utility.

Think about what the organisation actually required of you. Public speaking, often from a young age. The ability to approach strangers and hold a conversation. The discipline to study complex material regularly. Community coordination. Event planning. The capacity to absorb, retain, and communicate large volumes of information. Perseverance under social pressure.

These are not trivial abilities. In the outside world, people pay significant money to develop some of them. You got them just through living life, albeit at a price you did not agree to.

“I can smell gaslighting and cult behaviour from a mile away now.”

That respondent points to something important. Your experience inside a coercive system gave you a finely calibrated detector for manipulation, control, and insincerity.

What’s more, the courage and tenacity it takes to examine your entire worldview and change it when you realise it’s wrong is a huge strength in itself, never mind having to experience traumatic consequences for doing so but still choosing authenticity despite that.

Most people have never had their fundamental beliefs shattered. They have never discovered that an entire worldview they staked their life on was built on fabrication, never had to pay for their freedom with their entire social support structure.

You have. And surviving that gives you something that cannot be taught in a classroom: the lived knowledge that just because something feels true, or because everyone around you insists it is true, does not make it so.

Here is something that changed how I think about this.

The people around you who seem to have it together, the ones with the careers and the savings and the life plans, did not build those things from a standing start either. They had scaffolding: parents who modelled financial planning, schools that taught them to think about the future, a culture that rewarded ambition. They were handed a blueprint and told to build. You were handed a blueprint and told the building was pointless because the demolition was already scheduled.

The difference is not intelligence or discipline. The difference is that you were operating inside a system that actively prevented the development of the very skills it now shames you for lacking. And the fact that you can see this, that you can trace the cause accurately rather than blaming yourself, is itself a skill most people never develop. They accept their programming without examining it. You examined yours under conditions that made examination terrifying, and you acted on what you found.

That is an education most people need but never receive.

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying though: None of this erases the harm. None of it compensates for the relationships lost, the years taken, the education denied. The grief about what was stolen is legitimate and it does not need to be swapped out wholesale for gratitude, and it would be a form of spiritual bypassing to try and force that shift prematurely.

But it’s not an “either / or” issue - grief and gratitude can coexist.

The narrative “I have nothing” is neither accurate nor useful. You have skills that are transferable, a sensitivity to manipulation that is protective, and a demonstrated capacity to question, to leave, and to rebuild. Those are not nothing, those are the raw materials that give you a unique advantage for whatever you decide to build going forward.