It's hello again, actually, though I haven't been on this site for about 4 years. I sent an update in to the Journeys page a couple of days ago and that will be up when the administrator gets through the backlog, he tells me.

I had so much to process, after the scales fell from my eyes back in '01, that I took the easy way out and stopped my EPO visits. They'd get me so emotionally agitated. They still do, only maybe they're filtered with the kind of detachment 4 years of no Rawat/no EPO can give you.

I still find it difficult to refocus my self image, to now include this person who I am who supported such a basically flawed character as Rawat for such a long, long time. I have had a strange and unrealistic idealism about love, and, without wishing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I've been working on putting more realism into my feelings, through these years.

I don't like this image I get, of being so emotionally vulnerable. I want to be tough, cool and cynical. But here I am, as is.

I want to be detached, but it just isn't working out. My hurt has, as has been noted in the "stages after leaving a cult," turned into anger. Some of the anger steers toward Rawat, but a great deal of it is toward myself. Yow, was I a sucker.