Hotel Cult: You Can Check Out But You Can Never Leave

This Could Be Heaven or This Could Be Hell

Apr 28, 2025

TNWWY(ATNW) exists to advocate for the recognition and full access to the original wholeness that is our birthright, no matter what we have faced. This space is here to deconstruct everything that stands in the way. Support this post.

Testimony

No one knows that whenever I am driving alone in my car, and no one else can see or hear me, I tune the radio to Christian pop music and blast it as loud as it will go. If the weather permits, I open the sunroof.
And I always sing along at the top of my lungs.
I am not a Christian, but there’s something about the music that takes me home.

My mother was my sun. Her light filled my eyes. Her happiness made my world.

Mothers are world makers. I was six when mine shattered. Something broke inside, not when my mother told me to lie to the school about the black eye she’d given me, if they asked, but when she asked if I had — and I said yes — and she rose in fury from the head of the table (we were eating dinner, all seven of us): “Why did you lie?”

Later, dinner on a tray in my room. An ice-cream pie.

Are mothers gods?

I had an imaginary friend, my mother said. And I’m not sure if I did, or if my mother just said so. But I have a vague memory of him. He was called “Timmy.” For some reason, when I think of him, I remember a little boy hiding under the kitchen sink, and that I shut the cupboard door on him.

When I was five, I gave up dolls. But my mother was persuasive. She cajoled me into accepting a boy doll, and we named him “David.” I still remember his rubber head and the texture of the little corduroy trousers she sewed for him.

Once, when my mother seemed to favor my brother, who came after me in birth order, the first boy after three tries and three girls, I set out to eliminate the competition. In the middle of the night, I led him to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and left him there. She found him, curled up asleep in the hallway, sometime that morning. I remember the idea was to get him in trouble. I don’t think I meant to harm him.

She thought it was adorable. He was her blue-eyed son.

I had lots of accidents as a girl. The coffee pot fell on me, and I got third-degree burns on my arm. A bee stung me in the eye, and I had to go to the eye doctor to get the stinger removed. Playing softball in the cemetery across the street with cousins and siblings, I ran into a tombstone and needed stitches. Once, the neighbor’s Airedale leapt over our fence and attacked me and the kitten I was feeding on the back porch.

My mother warned me not to rock back in my chair at breakfast. I didn’t listen. I fell back, stabbed myself in the throat with a spoon, and there’s still a thin scar beneath my chin. I used to stroke it with my finger, but now it’s so faded I can’t feel it and must lift my head to look. Yes. It’s still there, faint and white.

“I told you,” she said.

On the way home from first grade, a boy once threw a piece of glass at my shin. I bled. Another boy walked me home, and she sent him away for his brown skin. Another time, a potato chip went down the wrong way, and I choked up blood. My body kept the record, even when no one else did.

I want to go back and let Timmy out of the cupboard.

My mother, it is said, loved me best of all her children. It is true that I was precocious, good with the Bible, quick to see what pleased her. I could turn David and Goliath and the verses on men and false gold into testimonies by ten; her wish for me that I be a preacher-a sister worker, as they were known as in the cult I was born and raised in. This may have made me a writer instead.

And when I turned from everything she wanted for me, she was still my sun, though I found myself on its dark side. Still, she looked at me as if the stars had birthed me, and I felt their dust in my mouth turn into a voice that carried all the dreams she tried to keep from me. For women, dreams are dangerous, and she loved me too much. But I dreamed them anyway — for her. That was our secret bond. Her unlived life, a fire inside me.

The religious cult sprang up out of Ireland around the turn of the century, though it was taught it had no founders and came from the beginning, from Jesus’ time. One hot summer night in the 1930s, my paternal grandmother, Ollie, and her eldest daughter, Hallie, attended meetings in a revivalist tent in Northern Illinois. Every week, they would have gone to hear these itinerant men preach the gospel. The air stifling, fireflies winking outside, the children chasing and making rings of them, rings of light they wrapped around their fingers as the people sang, “What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear.”

My grandmother stood up — the last night the workers would call for souls. She rose in a warm tent under the Illinois stars and gave her life to Jesus. Her oldest daughter, knees shaking, stood up beside her. The final two verses tested the meeting, drawing forth those whose hearts had been stirred, those ready to surrender to the Spirit. I can feel it even now: the heavy sweetness of the night air, the tent swelling with voices, the hush before the final verses, the gathering power of the refrain — the moment when the called would rise and stand for Jesus.

My father—her son—and my mother, her daughter-in-law, followed soon after. I was a year old when they professed. In a rented hall somewhere the wandering preachers had found to spread the gospel, my father too stood up, and my mother with him, and professed “to serve the Lord,” shortly after a death in the family. Gene—my father’s nephew, who was his age and more like a brother than a nephew—had a massive heart attack one night after a family picnic, while lying in bed next to his frightened young wife. He was twenty-seven. He left her a widow and their four children fatherless, all close in age to me and my siblings. My father and Gene’s brother, the story went, had been wild; they had rebelled against the religion, which my grandmother had come to when they were all in their late teens. Their conversion, upon Gene’s death, became family lore. Mythic.

I wonder if it was a way to assuage my grandmother’s grief—and her daughter’s, Gene’s mother. I wonder why my father and Gene’s brother felt obligated to make up for his death. Though they told the story like his death made them see a need for salvation, it seems they felt responsible somehow. They would spend their lives making up for his loss.

Gene, Bobby, and my dad were very close, and I heard stories about their escapades. There was always a charge of scandal in them. And then there were stories of my paternal great-grandmother, who was allegedly a witch and read their tea leaves. She refused to read Gene’s. She looked away. Instead, she gave them a silk scarf and told them to place kernels of corn inside it, to bury it under the light of the full moon.

I can see them crouched in the dark, the moonlight the only illumination, the three boys earnestly digging the dirt with a spoon, taking turns, and then burying the scarf with the corn inside, the remedy.

But they lost Gene anyway.

My father was backward, a country boy, from my mother’s family’s perspective. They never understood what she saw in him, but I did. He was handsome with a shy, crooked grin and Sinatra eyes. He was quiet. He could play piano, fiddle, guitar by ear. He came from a large, close-knit family with roots in Kentucky.

She was vivacious, pretty, with a big laugh, and came from a family marked by alcoholism, though it was a deep secret.

After they professed, she lost her easy smile, her bold prettiness, as she conformed to the women’s ways — to be modest and godly.

He stayed handsome.

Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings throughout my childhood. Never missed. Though I left, the pattern stayed the same.

My parents, now gone, attended faithfully all their lives. Missing meeting was not an option. There was no occasion great enough to miss a meeting for — not a child’s concert, school event, graduation. Not even a birth or a death could keep them from fellowship with God’s chosen.

We sat in living rooms, our own and others, on wooden folding chairs. We knelt before them to pray. The women wore their uncut hair in buns, tucked their longish, awkwardly modest dresses beneath their knees. The men pulled their dress pants up at the thighs to kneel, wore starched shirts and ties. Cowlicks slicked down with hair cream.

I think of my mother, in her nineties, getting down on her knees. She grew frail and moved with difficulty. I imagine her kneeling in the meetings until the end. I can’t imagine anything else. I know the look on her face — determined. The difficulty it would take, impossible for her to pull herself back up. She would do it anyway.

Now deceased, she finished the race — eternally faithful.

Some of the men wore shirts of rayon, opaque white nylon, ribbed cotton undershirts beneath. Occasionally, a pale blue — that blue I associate with the workers, men who sold all they had to follow Jesus, to preach the gospel; traveling preachers, homeless in a church without a name or building, a church called meeting, held in homes.

Only the wicked met in church buildings.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to realize what you were born into: a cult.
It hurts to say the word. It feels too easy, like it explains or dismisses it. Erases the love — and the people. Takes away all the good.

This was my family. There was good.
First, there was belonging. There was a “we.” An “us.”
We belonged to the “friends.” We were “the professing.” There was a reason we were set apart; we were different.
In that sense, I knew who I was. Everyone else was an outsider. I was not that.

Those outside “the truth” were pitied at best, sadly condemned. Their homes were dark. Their lives were lost. We were the chosen.

I was a slight girl at ten, thin and quick, my dark blond hair pulled back from my face in a long ponytail, and the hymn they sang the day I stood up was:
“Lord Jesus, teach me how to choose; a thousand choices bar my way.
In each, I see a destiny. Lord Jesus, teach me how to choose, I pray.”
The Psalm of Youth, they called it.

I was baptized in a river, which a group of us waded into one by one, fully clothed, to be dipped back by the servant of the Lord waiting for us midstream, along with the Holy Dove. We held our noses between our fingers, closed our eyes as the worker dunked us in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Gasping, cold as it was early morning though summer, soaked to the skin, water dripping down our faces, we waded back to the shore where our families stood by with blankets.

I like to imagine our immersion was followed by hot cocoa and friendship in the dining hall, but I think I’m making that up. I don’t remember what happened after.

For a little while longer, I still belonged.

I still belonged, and that was worth the ridicule and teasing I faced most days at school for looking and being different. I wore homemade dresses my mother sewed, my hair stringently combed into braids or slicked back from my large forehead with Dippity-do green hair gel into ponytails, bobby pins in place to hold back stray hairs just in case. One trick my mother used, which mimicked many of the friends’ hairstyles, was to make a part at the front of my hairline and then twist and push it into what was supposed to be a decorative curl, but only emphasized my freakishly out-of-style appearance. We put pink foam curlers in my hair overnight and then, since my hair was fine and stick-straight, brushed it into a single curl made stiff with gel and Aqua Net hairspray in the morning.

In 1967, when I was thirteen, my peers were wearing GoGo boots, babydoll mini dresses, flipped bobs, pixie cuts, or perfect Cher hair, long, ironed straight, and worn down. I wasn’t allowed to wear my waist-length, uneven, and untrimmed hair hanging free. In contrast, I wore dresses my mother tried to make more stylish by using an empire waistline, but the hems hit the middle of my knees—or, as I grew, just above, at most.

My rebellion started with rolling up my skirts. It escalated to running away from home, more than once, including once to a commune.
It was the late sixties. I discovered drugs. I got pregnant at sixteen.

They said I had chosen hell — gone against their teaching — but the choice between heaven and hell never felt like a real choice to me.

What kind of God rigs the game like that, I wondered.

Something was missing.
Not allowed to question, I was left to live it out on my own.

It seems to me that I always felt alone, but if I ever belonged, if I fit anywhere, it was in the cult with my family.

There was a strange and perfect beauty there.

I believed that when I left, I had lost out, just as they taught me, and that God was exclusive to them. I was outside - in the world, which they’d warned against.
Until I learned that the God they said could only be found inside their belief had been inside me all along — and no church, religion, or doctrine could contain it.

There was no inside or outside.
And never had been.

All my mother’s children, all five of us, left the cult. In her old age, she used to threaten not to die until we had all come back.
She’s gone now.
If only I could have.
There’s no way back, but alone in my car, decades and a lifetime later, the radio blaring, the Christian music takes me back to the child I was, the one who, even at ten, felt fate, as dense and dark as gravity, pulling her away.
For a moment, wind blowing my once-again long hair, I can feel the hard bench beneath my bones, hear the voices of the friends swell in song around me as though from another galaxy, and I am both at home and as far from home as I will ever be.

On Repeat

One Thing

In The OA, Prairie remembers that she is an “Original Angel” - not someone new, but someone she had always been, beneath the forgetting. That’s the heart of what I share with There’s Nothing Wrong With You (And There Never Was). Your original wholeness is intact, never lost, no matter what you’ve lived through.

There’s an Original Angel inside every one of us ready to be uncovered.

Movement Practice (5 minutes, no structure): Once a week (or whenever you feel it),

*Play a piece of music that moves something ancient inside you (no lyrics or very spare ones — ambient, instrumental, ritual, or whatever feels mythic to you.)
*Close your eyes.
*Let your body move however it wants. No choreography, no correctness.
*If you don’t move physically, let you breath move. Let your internal body move.

(This is not dancing. This is remembering.)

It’s the OA movement, but without memorized gestures, it’s the movement your own soul needs to make to stay awake, to remember.

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Shout Out

Molly Booker is an author, songwriter, and advocate for self-discovery and authenticity. Her book, Magic in the Mess, explores the beauty found in life’s chaos, while her song “No More Boxes,” recorded in Nashville’s legendary Blackbird Studio, challenges societal expectations around identity. I discovered Molly when she shared ‘No More Boxes” with me in response to one of my posts, and now I listen to it on repeat!

Passionate about storytelling, personal growth, and meaningful connection, she strives to inspire others to embrace their truth, slow down, and recognize the internal nudges that guide them. You can find Molly at Magic in the Mess Substack, a space for raw honesty, personal growth, and storytelling, where identity, love, and the untangling of life’s complexities meet. 🌿📖

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TNWWY exists to advocate for the recognition and full access to the original wholeness that is our birthright, no matter what we have faced. This space is here to deconstruct everything that stands in the way.

If you’re into imperfect healing, questionable decisions, and laughing at the whole beautiful mess, you’re in the right place.