AMA Question: what was your reaction to the outside world after you got out?

It sucked, really. Everyone, even me, thought that the second I left, it was going to be like heaven. But it was honestly more like that scene in The Shawshank Redemption where the older man doesn't actually want to leave the prison by the end, and when he gets out the world really scares him. Obviously it was on a less intense scale than spending 20 years in prison, but I think that movie nailed the very real idea of being "institutionalized".

Institutionalization becomes like a weird comfort blanket after a while, as backwards as that sounds. You are in a horrible place and hate it, but your entire life, the people you have been with for years, the schedule you are used to, the "system" that you have finally come to accept, all of those things have replaced everything else that you knew before.

Once you get out, everyone you were with (for years) disappear overnight. And they are still locked up so you have no possible way to get in touch (besides letters). But that happens overnight. You basically wake up with a crazy amount of freedom and you literally have no idea what to do with it and it becomes scary. All of a sudden I can use the bathroom without needed to "bring up" (an entire process in Elan that involved multiple people), and stuff like that amuses you, but then again, you have nobody around you that you can share that with.

When I got out, I looked up old friends and I found myself trying to relate to them but it was like hitting a brick wall. Like they were all aliens. I couldn't be like "yeah man, it is awesome that I can just, you know, go to the bathroom now". They would be like "uhhh, wut?"

So you are in this really shitty middle place. Everything behind you is gone, years of what was "normal". And because that became normal, everything that is actually normal is now really fucking strange and you are not used to it all. And you have been bumped back somehow, because now things that you learned before through trial-and-error, you are starting from scratch again. Like talking to girls for example, Between 12 and 16 I learned how to do that,. After two years in Elan, I was basically an 19 year old with the social skills of an 11 year old again (in that aspect) but of course, everyone else had actually spent that time getting better at it.

And that is just one example, I noticed countless other things that had simply been wiped away. Like I had an "experience" meter and it started draining away while everyone else's got better.

I remember a friend of mine took me to a party. And it was okay for a while, and then he left to go talk to someone else and I was just kind of standing there, and then I had this massive panic attack. And I basically ended up literally scurrying off into the backyard, finding a large plant, and then kneeling down behind it to hide from everybody. Like it was all too much somehow.

Going into restaurants would freak me out. Elan was this constant loudness of people, and too many bodies crammed into too small of a space, and the walls dripping with the sweat of too many people, and again, always so loud, but loud with humans (a different kind of noise). So anything like that, a party, club, busy restaurant, subway, bus, etc... all freaked me the fuck out.

And finally, to put the cherry on top, as much as I resisted the brainwashing, a fucking lot of it did manage to enter into my brain. I would say crazy ass shit to people, all the time. And the only thing that saved me was that I was always super aware of people's reactions. Because people were not like "Dude, WTF are you saying, you nut!", they were more like nodding along, and saying "yeah" "uh huh" and then trying to get out of the conversation as soon as possible. Stuff like that. I finally started to notice a pattern. Then time itself started allowing me to look back and be like "wait... why was I saying that, maybe that only makes sense in Elan", or "wait, damn, maybe Elan really fucked my head up, maybe that doesn't make sense at all".

Lucky for me, I am very inquisitive, like crazy into researching things. Like if I even like a song, I will spend hours on wikipedia looking up the producers, songwriters, history of the band, the album, anything related, stuff like that. So this part of my nature kicked in when I left Elan and I started to really, really dig into what Elan was, where it came from, the history of the man who started it (Joe Ricci) and luckily, the more I did that, the more extremely fucked up things were revealed to me about it.

And I could always hedge that against knowing that what was in my head was a product of Elan. It gave me some ability to reflect. Many of my Elan peers never had that, they never were able to add context. But the more context you learn about what Elan was, the more you really, undeniably, have to accept that this was a bad place run by bad people with bad intentions.

That made it easier to question things in my head. Things that I had truly been convince of while Elan had a complete monopoly on my ability to interpret information. But once I was "free", they no longer had that.

And seriously, I was in Elan for under 3 years and that may not seem like a lot when you look at real prison sentences. But the thing that almost nobody understands until it happens to you, is that "doing time" changes how you interpret time. And especially in a place like Elan that is so uniquely crazy, where every single day is like being on an alien planet, that time really slows down. If I had no scale of time, I would think I was there at least 5 years, maybe more. Because in my over 30 years of life, that is how long that time felt compared to the rest. I know it wasn't five years, but maybe it was "experience-wise".

So yeah, that time really, really fucked me up. And even a couple years after Elan when I was like "damn, I was totally brainwashed when I got out"... five years after that I was like "damn, I was still pretty damn brainwashed when I was thinking that after two years I was passed the brainwashing"... and those kinds of realizations have really never stopped happening.

So yeah, getting out was kind of like being sent to Elan again. In that it was like getting kidnapped in the night and thrown into a different world that I had no escape from and had to just learn to eventually live within. But of course, I much, much, much prefer this side of it. Now. But at first, man it was scary.