It’s important for me to assert my agency in all of this. I was not brainwashed. I was not coerced. Of course, the more that I insist that I was not brainwashed, the more it is used as evidence against me now that I was. But I do not see myself as a victim or a dupe, and I never once felt like one at the time. I chose to engage and believe and participate in these meetings and the conversations that occurred therein. There was a genuine climate of care, compassion, and intellectual inquiry at work in Howard and Jo’s home. I felt trusted and heard. I think all of that has been lost in the reporting of the events that followed. This, in no way, is meant to dismiss the serious allegations that have since emerged about Howard, and which are before the courts at the time of my writing this. But speaking from my lived experience alone, the house on Sequoia Crescent felt like a refuge for a group of well-meaning, hard-working, and exhausted people who were just doing their best to get to the bottom of their own suffering.

Quite apart from the sense of community, one of the key things the meetings gave me was a pride of purpose. They restored an element of dignity to my life. I was done with being fucked up. I was done with being wrong. I was done with being a patient. I actually started keeping a journal during this period, which I will spare you the details of—it’s all rather solipsistic and quotidian—but what I was struck by, when re-reading it for the purposes of this book, was how lucid my writing was at the time. It was not the chaotic rambling I expected it to be. It was methodical, considered, and measured. I didn’t hurl myself into the embrace of the group in some unthinking, unguarded way; I retained all my usual cynicism and skepticism, and really wrestled with how vulnerable to make myself, how much to expose, how much to let in. It was incremental. Contrary to how Paul may have seen or thought of me I was, recognizably, myself through it all. As I read the diary, I took comfort in that.