I Thought Leaving Would Destroy Me

Opening

Journal entry, May 7, 2025:

“I will be more alone than ever before. I will look back on my choice and think: I left too soon. I was rash. I was afraid at the moment I should have had courage. I am rejecting initiation. This failure will lead to the next and the next. I’ll be powerless, trapped and powerless — forever.”

I wrote these words two weeks before leaving a high-control group —and I was convinced I was making the biggest mistake of my life.

I was paralyzed. Crippled with doubt. Unsure if anything I was seeing was real. 

I was terrified to act.

What I didn’t know then — what I couldn’t see — was that the fear in those words wasn’t evidence that I was wrong about the group.

It was evidence of how completely it had gotten inside me.

Why Leaving Felt Like Losing Reality

High-control systems don’t just replace beliefs. They gradually replace external reality as your reference point.

Your sense of what’s important, what’s true, what counts as a problem — all of it gets quietly reorganized around the internal structure of the group.

It’s a process I’ve called perspectival rebinding. And when it’s complete, the thought of leaving doesn’t feel like walking out a door.

It feels like stepping off a cliff.

Because the system has become your epistemology. You can only ever think about your power in terms of the system. Every time I thought about leaving — because of the dysfunction, the mounting betrayals, the blatant corruption — I immediately thought of something else I hadn’t tried yet. Within the system.

It’s like when someone in a bad marriage considers giving couples therapy a fourth try.

Or when someone in a toxic work environment considers pursuing another HR process.

What makes these moments hard is that sometimes you do need to have another conversation. Or examine your own reactions. 

But when you can only ever imagine freedom inside the system — that’s when you know you’re trapped.

The Mistake

I did everything I could think of to get clarity before I acted.

I analyzed. I journaled. I spoke with friends. I read.

None of it worked. I remained as confused and anxious as before.

It’s not that analysis is useless, but I had already been inside this thing for eleven years. I wasn’t just a participant. I was a leader. I had about as complete a picture of this organization as any person was going to get.

None of it was helping anymore. Because I wasn’t analyzing to learn. I was analyzing because I was transfixed.

The question had stopped being: Is this a good organization or a bad one?

It had become: Am I going to act on what I already know — or am I going to abandon myself?

That was my moment. And I almost missed it, because I kept waiting to feel ready.

Acting While Terrified

I wanted my fear to change first. Then I would act.

But it was the other way around. I had to act while terrified. Then my feelings followed.

The first step was resigning my role in the organization. I took it while gripped with total fear, convinced there was no ground on the other side.

The backlash was immediate.

Someone I thought was a friend showed up at my door to seize my bank card and ask me not to come around anymore.

A month earlier, I think I would have been destroyed by that. The shame of it.

By the time it happened, the shame wasn’t mine. 

But I was struck even more by the clarity that moment brought. 

What I had desperately wanted from months of reflection and analysis arrived on my doorstep the moment I made them react to me. What I feared would break reality actually revealed it.

I could see, suddenly and cleanly, exactly what kind of people I was dealing with—and it was worse than I thought.

The hall of mirrors cracked. And that prompted me to go further.

The Complaint and CC

Shortly after stepping down, I submitted a detailed complaint to the head of the group in the United States. 

The complaint described multiple serious incidents of organizational dysfunction — documented, specific, illustrated with the offending individuals’ own words. I filed it because I felt I owed the top leadership one final opportunity to see what I had seen and respond to it. But coming as it did on the heels of my stepping down, it was highly inconvenient for them.

My greatest fear was that they would take three months, hem and haw, and come back with something morally ambiguous. That was their pattern. 

So imagine my surprise when they came back in 9 days and said they found no evidence of wrongdoing. 

At the very least, I thought they would pull some people aside to clarify standards, maybe update some policy.

Nope! They even cc’d the main person I filed the complaint against!

When can you do? 

I laughed. 

I took ten minutes to write a resignation letter. And I was done.

I would never have expected that to be easy. But I can see now why it was. I had wanted truth and justice from this organization. What I got was something better: clarity that I was never going to find either there.

What I Lost While I Stayed

This is the part that cost the most—and the part I couldn’t see at the time.

Inside systems like this, people fall into roles: Golden Child, scapegoat, hero.
My role was digesting darkness.

I lived in the parts of this organization most people pretended weren’t there. 

I was the one who listened to the victims, spoke on their behalf, and pushed so it could never happen again. I carried the emotional weight of the harm this organization caused, and I told myself that was integrity—that this was strength.

What I didn’t see was the trap.

Making yourself useful to a broken system isn’t integrity.
It’s how the system keeps going.

And it wasn’t just the role I played in the organization. It showed up in my relationships too.

I was afraid to be honest with people close to me—because I knew what it would cost. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew these people.

So I adapted. I filtered myself. I avoided certain topics. I learned where the boundaries were and stayed inside them.

It felt like maturity. Like restraint. Like being someone who could handle complexity.

But all I was doing was suppressing myself to maintain the illusion of connection.

And the system rewarded that.

When I finally did speak honestly—carefully, compassionately—it didn’t preserve anything. The relationships blew up anyway. The backlash was immediate.

So what did all that self-suppression buy me?

Nothing.

It didn’t protect the relationships.
It didn’t preserve my place in the system.
It just cost me 11 years of my own voice.

What Happened When I Left — and What It Meant

The first thing that happened when I left was that the symbolic world just … switched off.

Not gradually. Overnight.

The rituals, the language, the mythology — it was all still there, technically. But it no longer did anything. It didn’t resonate. It didn’t illuminate. I had spent years thinking about this material, writing about it, teaching it, living it. And then, without any process of doubt or deconstruction, it was simply gone. Like a frequency I could no longer hear.

I didn’t understand that at first. I even wondered: did I ever seriously believe any of this?

What I understand now is that this was perspectival rebinding releasing. The system had become the structure through which I organized meaning — what I noticed, what felt significant, what counted as a problem. When I walked out, that structure didn’t slowly loosen. It collapsed. What I had experienced as depth — this rich, interconnected web of significance — was self-referential all the way down. A hall of mirrors. When I stepped outside it, the reflections just stopped.

What was left wasn’t a new interpretation. It was the absence of the entire interpretive structure. And that felt, at first, like nothing. A fertile void. 

Then reality filled the vacuum—in the form of excommunication. 

People I’d been close to distanced themselves. Some mocked me. Some treated my leaving like a personal betrayal. I had anticipated losing some of that. I hadn’t anticipated how quietly and completely it would move through my life.

At the same time, something else was happening that I hadn’t accounted for.

Spaciousness.

Subtle but umistakable. Like I’d been wearing a heavy helmet for eleven years and had finally taken it off. I spent hours walking the city during that period, just letting my mind settle. And as it did, early memories came back differently — the excitement of those first months in the group, how quickly it had faded, how much of the years since had been spent trying to recover something already gone.

There was grief in that. Real grief. Not just for the people, but for what I had believed I was part of.

What I hadn’t expected was the other side of it: that my way of seeing would change this much, this fast. When I imagined leaving, I had thought about what I would lose. I hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to think clearly again.

What Actually Replaced It

In a recent interview, I said that when you leave a high-control group, you’re waiting for yourself on the other side. There’s truth in that, but it can be misleading.

I didn’t find myself immediately. There wasn’t a moment where everything snapped into place. What I found instead was the need to rebuild — deliberately, and over time.

That process has been uneven.

I created a discussion group focused on collaborative inquiry and real dialogue. The kind of space where authenticity, careful thinking, and truth are the actual currency — not status, not degree, not proximity to the right people. The high-control group was where those values went to die. This is where they go to live.

I got back into performance through improv. In the other organization, performance was everywhere — the rituals, the initiations, the elaborate theater of rank and hierarchy. But it wasn’t fun. Every interaction felt predetermined by status. Improv is the exact opposite: collaborative, spontaneous, people genuinely supporting each other in the doing of something. It let me reclaim that part of myself without the cost.

And I’ve been building my voice through these videos — working to say things that are grounded in my own thinking rather than in a framework I inherited.

None of it happened quickly. It’s still ongoing.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: what replaced the system wasn’t a new system.

It was the responsibility — finally, actually mine — to build a life that reflects what I know to be true.

Closing

Before I left, I thought leaving would either solve the problem or create a worse one.

That’s not what happened.

What I found is that action doesn’t just solve or create problems. It defines them in ways that thinking alone cannot.

In my moment of greatest fear, I was trying to solve a problem that was badly framed: Should I stay or should I go?

It wasn’t until I started moving that the real problem came into focus.

It became: Do I act on what I already know — or do I abandon myself?

And when I chose myself, the problem changed again: How do I take responsibility for everything that entails? Not how do I endure what this organization is doing to me — but how do I take back the power I gave these people over my life? Not how do I deal with betrayal — but how do I live now that I actually know what friendship is and isn’t?

Those were always the real problems. I just couldn’t see them before I acted.

So if you’re standing where I was — terrified that you’re making a mistake, certain that you’re about to destroy something irreplaceable —

You might be right that you’re about to lose something.

But what you might be losing, when you look at it clearly, is a version of yourself you built in order to survive a place that was never going to give you what you actually needed.

What’s on the other side isn’t nothing.

It’s you — thinking in a way you’d forgotten was possible.