I finally figure out what's wrong with me

"Don't just stand there like a robot! Are you stupid?! Answer me! Why don't you answer me?!"

My senior was apoplectic, fists clenched, stamping her feet, red in the face.

And I was paralysed. My brain had shut down, and I was incapable of coherent thought. And so I just stood there, mute. I don't remember what I'd done to send her into such a rage, but clearly I'd bungled something.

To my relief, she finally released me to go scrub floors.

The thing is, I liked her. When she had convinced me to come back on staff after my unfortunate run-in with a Sea Org recruiter, I was pregnant, and she had taken very good care of me. Every day after lunch, she would hand me the keys to her apartment and say, "Go rest for an hour. You're pregnant. You have to look after yourself." She'd fussed over me like a mother hen, making sure I ate well, got enough sleep, and didn't stay past the end of my day.

And she and her husband had gone to bat for me once when I got in trouble with the executive director for not following an order she gave me. But she had no business issuing that order in the first place, and my senior was quick to point that out. When it looked like the executive director was going to be intractable, my senior's husband threatened to go on strike until she gave it up. He carried a lot of clout, and that was the end of it. I was grateful to both of them.

And so, because she'd been good to me, and because I liked her, and because I wanted to do my job well and help clear the planet, it always saddened me when I disappointed her - again

I was a perpetual disappointment to my seniors for as long as I can remember. They seemed to think I was bright and capable, so they promoted me. But I never lived up to their expectations, so they demoted me. I suspect it only happened a few times, but it seemed like an endless cycle.

Truth be told, I just never "got it". I felt out of place, a misfit. It seemed everyone else - well, almost everyone else - understood something I didn't. And I had no idea what it was. It was like walking into a old boys' club and not getting the in jokes. I was perpetually puzzled, bewildered, and confused, which made it damned difficult to muster a "fixed, dedicated glare."

The problem was that I was "reasonable" and "open minded."And in Scientology, there's nothing worse. Those are highly pejorative terms. It means you're not serious, and you're just making excuses. But no matter how many times I looked them up in the dictionary and cleared every definition, I remained reasonable and open-minded.

And then, many years out, I discovered a term that explained what was wrong with me:

Cognitive dissonance - the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time, performs an action that is contradictory to one or more beliefs, ideas or values, or is confronted by new information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas, or values.

And so as much as I wanted to embrace Scientology in its totality, there was a part of me that just couldn't do it. I was miserable if I did and miserable if I didn't. Of course, all of this was going on in the background, uninspected by me. Hence - stress. Lots of stress.

I've seen pictures of myself shortly after I left: black circles under my eyes, gaunt, pale, unhealthy. It was so bad that, 15 years later, I looked younger than I had in those earlier pictures.

And yet, at the time I left, I'd only been on staff full-time for 2 years.

And as dazed and confused as I was on staff, it set me up perfectly for my eventual exit.