How These Letters Began

Five months after a breakup, a Buddhist nun told me something I was not ready to hear.

She said I had been inside a cult.

My first reaction wasn’t relief.

It was resistance.

Because if she was right, then something much more important would also be wrong; the story I had spent months believing about myself.

For months, I believed I was the problem.

So I started writing letters.

Not to publish.
Just to understand what had happened — to the relationship, to myself, and to the strange system that had slowly formed around us.

Those letters eventually became this newsletter.

Here you’ll find:

• letters written during the story
• essays about love, belief, and coercive control
• reflections written afterwards, with more distance

I’m currently writing from a Buddhist temple in the mountains.

I came here thinking I needed to be corrected.

I stayed long enough to begin telling the story in my own voice.

Emotionally yours,

Suinny

New letters every week.