There are all kinds of reasons people end up fairly sheltered teenagers, young adults, or full grown adults. Some are raised in religious families, others might have been entangled in cults, and still more might just have had parents who want to live off the grid for one reason or another.

These 16 people all came from different backgrounds, but they have one thing in common – there were things about the real world that came as a true surprise.

16. You can do anything.

For me, it was a complete culture shock. People could do anything . Women could treat men as equals, not always defer to them. People treat other people with more respect– adults are treated like adults. People could talk about s*x and bodily functions like periods without being ashamed. People weren’t afraid of living their lives in a way that made them happy.

In the first few months of being out of my parents’ home, I learned so many new words and things I didn’t know existed 😂 I watched a lot of movies that would have been considered wickedly sinful in my former home. I had to relearn how to talk and act with people. Outside of the church, people do everything different, and the people you can and can’t trust are different. I felt like I had the IQ of a normal 8 year old in the real world.

15. What’s a boundary?

That it’s actually healthy to have boundaries.

This one is still so hard because i dont recognize different things as being a “boundaries” thing at all. It feels so contextual so its not something i can try to implement across the board.

It’s hard to know when people are being untrustworthy and just ambiguating it with words or gestures.

14. A foul-mouthed Yoda.

“I had to relearn how to talk and act with people. Outside of the church, people do everything different, and the people you can and can’t trust are different. I felt like I had the IQ of a normal 8 year old in the real world.”

Oh man, that reminds me of a friend I made in college who grew up Mormon. He was learning to say bad words for the first time and got it all wrong. Like instead of saying, “it’s f*#%ing cold outside” he’d say, “f*#%ing… it’s cold outside” like some foul mouthed yoda. Ha! So adorable!

13. To be authentic.

The greatest thing to me is what it felt like to be authentic. When you grow up in a fundamentalist cult, your life is not your own. Everything is planned out for you, every worldview is shaped by your religion.

Leaving that all behind and being my own, genuine person was the best and least expected blessings of leaving the Mormon cult.

Yes, s^x and drugs (esp psychedelics) were amazing too, but I love being my own person so much.

12. Left behind.

“End is nigh!” Oh I’m waiting! “Christo Viene” I wish he would. “You’ve been left behind” … yep. To suffer like the rest of us.

Grew up in a rapture-centric evangelical household. Parts of it were loads of fun, some just straight up trauma porn. Y2K was a hoot in my house, we definitely believed it could all end, given all of the televangelists hopping on the doom train.

The part that shocked me the most, or affected me the most is that you don’t realize until you are older that you really did believe the world would end, well, soon-ish…

The idea of getting old, worrying about retirement, whether my aspirations would materialize, most of those things seemed more far fetched than the apocalypse did…

11. No one is paying that much attention.

How normal people aren’t thinking about you/judging you all the time, and even if they are- you can’t do anything about it anyway, some will judge no matter what you do.

We (women, anyway) were raised to obsess over what we are wearing, how modest it is, and will it make men stumble? My breasts are too small for one man but too large for all men, despite being what God gave me. My body is both too thin to bear children but somehow also too fat, and proof that I am a glutton.

We were taught how to modulate our voices into a soft pleasant pitch, how to serve God with every breath, and how we’re living literally every single moment on a precarious cliff of falling into sin.

The moment I realized that my hair colour, my clothes, my makeup was more an expression of myself than a reflection of other’s desires was the moment I finally let go. I don’t dress for men, I don’t dress for women- I dress for myself.

10. Actual privacy.

The complete and total lack of privacy in the church vs actually having privacy.

Besides being roomed with all my siblings and cousin. Daily body inspections, spankings, potty time.

Also being treated like a toddler pretty much 24/7. God forbid we did something without permission. We didn’t address adults as sir or ma’am, calling our parents Mommy and Daddy into our teenage years, having a bedtime, knowing how to do chores but not really knowing why.

Getting to the real world. I knew how wash clothes. I didn’t know why I was washing clothes. I knew how to wash dishes, I didn’t know why I was. If I wasn’t told to do something I would just stand there hopeless.

9. Sadly…

Where is all the s^x and drugs?! I was promised wanton lascivious f**king in the streets.

8. It’s mesmerizing.

Many years ago, I worked in a warehouse with a guy who had gotten married right out of High School, and subsequently joined a “church” in which every member was related to his wife, except him.

It was basically a group of inbred weirdos who followed the insane orders of their crusty grandpa.

My coworker was in his mid 30’s (this was in the 1990’s) when I knew him, so he’d been in the cult for well over a decade by then.

He wasn’t allowed to own or watch TV, or any movies. He couldn’t listen to any secular music. He had a telephone, but he could only accept incoming calls, and wasn’t allowed to call anyone. When he was sick, his wife would come in and report it in person.

His home was a single-wide trailer in a trailer park largely populated by others of his sect. His living room was bare except for a sofa and an upright piano. He often talked about how he’d play piano all evening, as it was his only form of entertainment.

None of our other coworkers like to do deliveries with him because, frankly, he was a weirdo, and more importantly, he wouldn’t allow the truck’s radio to be played, nor would he tolerate smoking.

I didn’t smoke, and could entertain myself, so I was his de facto partner.

On those rides, he’d often ask me weird, random questions, like “is ‘The Smurfs’ still on?” or “what’s Night Ranger doing these days?”. Keep in mind this was the mid 1990’s, so the answers were “no” and “who the f**k is Night Ranger”, respectively.

He’d also ask me things like, “do a bunch of black guys still play basketball?” I don’t really know what that meant.

Sometimes, when we’d go to places like Best Buy, where there was a wall of TVs, he’d get almost mesmerized, and I’d have to keep a close eye on him or he’d be lost for an hour.

Around the warehouse, he’d often stop coworkers from describing the movie of show that they’d seen over the weekend, as he “wasn’t allowed to know about that stuff”.

One time a coworker found his phone number, called his house, then held their phone up to the TV, and flipped through the channels. He freaked out, and reported it to management. Fortunately, it was the ’90’s, so he was told to shut up and to get back to work.

Ours was a meager living, and as such, it was not uncommon for my colleagues and I to face financial trouble. It was such an occurrence that led to his piano being repossessed. This caused him to have a near mental breakdown. My mother was a music teacher and church pianist, so she always knew somebody who was trying to get rid of an old piano. I offered to help him find one, and to help move it to his trailer. He refused on the grounds that he wasn’t allowed to accept charity.

7. It’s weird.

Nothing as major as here but my wife’s family is extremely religious, her grandfather was even a cult leader a few books written about him. Can’t get into details for sake of privacy, but it stands out to me and it blows my mind how ignorant her whole family is.

And I don’t mean to sound like a jerk, but ignorance in the way of the most basic social cues and interactions and even words in conversation. I’ll be talking to her aunts and uncles in their sixties and they’ll have so many things they’ve never heard of it blows my mind.

She has two aunts who actually took classes to learn how to have normal conversations because they were so odd. It’s weird. Even my wife is still learning and growing vocabulary and she’s 39.

6. Or your shoulders.

Guys don’t give a s**t if they can see my knees. – An ex Mormon

5. Completely normal.

That I’m not gonna go to hell for jerking it and it’s completely normal to feel the urge to self pleasure and release on your own terms.

4. No one is fazed.

That most of the world has never even heard of and doesn’t give two s**ts about mormonism.

Growing up, I thought it was Mormons vs Anti Mormons with very few people in between. Realizing that the mormon cult is like, 0.1% of the population, and that people generally don’t care to learn about it, was crazy.

And also, just realizing that most people who do know about the church are just really lukewarm about it and not at all fazed or interested.

3. Thank goodness for that.

Not raised religious, but raised by an incredibly sheltering parent: Turns out I *won’t* be raped, mugged, and murdered for simply existing in a city setting without a male escort.

2. It’s a thing.

That people can be good without being religious

As Rust said on True Detective: “ If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of sh*t. “

1. No hoop jumping required.

How people can just… Make decisions.

You don’t need to jump through hoops, meditate all night, read the bible, and pray, just because you want to buy a certain dress.

You can just.. Buy it. You can make that decision. I can make that decision.

Freedom was extremely surreal at first. It still sort of is.

 

It’s definitely a different way of looking at the world.

Always interesting to pull back the curtain a bit on other points of view, right?