Sunday morning

When I went home Saturday night, I felt tired and revved up at the same time. I couldn’t get Rebecca out of my mind as I worried for her and her family. I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do as an adventure.

I talked with Sarah about the day as we drove home, and she was also shaken up by it, but she seemed able to keep it more at arm's length. The exercise where we yelled at each other had stirred up more emotions in her than in me, but she was angry with them for making her go to such an emotional place. I dropped Sarah off and drove home. After talking with Greg and his mom for a bit about the day, I realized I hadn’t eaten since lunch. I didn’t feel very hungry, but I ate something small and tried to go to sleep early. I ended up staying up to tell Greg everything that had happened at the seminar and I didn’t get to sleep until around midnight or maybe 1am.

Again, I was up at 6am to shower and pick up Sarah so we could be back downtown at 8am. From the moment I woke up, I felt terrible. I was completely exhausted, my head hurt, and I felt sick to my stomach. I felt hungover. More than that, I woke up thinking about the events of the weekend in a completely different way. I began to think very skeptically about everything that happened. It started with our nightly adventures. What if they don’t even care what kind of adventure we go on, I thought. What if the whole point of the adventure is to keep us awake longer so we will be tired and our defenses will be down? And what if they make us get up and dance so that we would be even more tired and worn out—-not just to clear our heads in between lectures? As I showered and left, I decided to bring up my thoughts with Sarah and tell her that I didn’t want to stay the whole day on Sunday.

The car ride into the city turned into a long debriefing. Sarah completely agreed with me and had many of her own suspicions about what was really going on under the guise of helping us. We talked about the creepiness of everyone lined up outside as we left. I said, “I’ll bet if we try to leave early today, someone will try to physically stop us from leaving.”

We arrived on time and the room was again back to normal with three rows of chairs in front of the stage and a small number of people milling around. Sarah and my attitude about the day had totally changed. We were on a reconnaissance mission.

We met up in our small groups first thing and I waited eagerly to hear Rebecca’s story. Thank goodness, she hadn’t had the talk she was planning to have with her husband. She told him they needed to talk, but he left the house and didn’t come back until after she was in bed. She was sure he was avoiding what he knew was going to happen, but no matter. She would leave him tonight instead.

And the big news was that Alia had already signed up for the program before Sunday even started. The team leaders were ecstatic. Alia was nervous. “I have 72 hours to cancel,” she told us. “My husband is going to be so mad at me. He thinks I make so many irrational decisions and he’s going to say we can’t afford it.” I nodded my head at her as vigorously as I could from the other side of the circle. Yes! I wanted to shout. Your husband is right. You can’t afford it. But Maryann and Marge were on her. “Oh, but you need this for yourself,” they told her. “How many times do you do something this important just for you?”

We gathered together to tell our stories. I said I had gone home to talk to my husband about the weekend and we had had a good talk but it wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done anyway. “Honestly, I was so tired, I didn’t do much. I’ve hardly gotten any sleep,” I said. Maryann, who looked like she was on the verge of tears just as she did every single time I saw her, waved me away. “The team leaders were here until 2am,” she said. Still, Maryann and Marge were encouraging. “That’s great that you connected with your husband. Did you bring proof?” Oops—I forgot about that.

“Oh, no, I didn’t bring any proof,” I answered.

“Well, you need proof,” they answered flatly. Time to move on.

It turns out that Rebecca actually did have the presence of mind to record the imminent break up of her family for the purposes of the exercise. She took a picture of the note she taped to her bathroom mirror informing her husband that they would be talking soon. The combination of her compelling story and her proof was enough to send her over the top. She won.

So Rebecca headed up to the stage with 9 others to tell their stories. Every single story up there was gut wrenching, starting with Rebecca’s. They all had torn relationships that they were trying to mend. They grew up without fathers, without mothers, had been abused as kids, had recently lost a parent. It was impossible not to cry at all the pain represented on the stage.

The line of stories ended, just like Saturday, with Maury and Amy. This time Amy went first and bawled so hard that she could hardly speak. What words I could understand made absolutely no sense. I did get that her adventure was that she told her mom that she had contacted her dad. But past that, she went on a rambling, exhausting tirade about making mistakes, how she doesn’t like anyone, how she looks at all of us and thinks we’re shit and we should all be people, you know? You know?? No, I didn’t know. I didn’t have any clue.

Amy was rambling so much and taking so much time, that Adolph actually had to chime in from the sidelines to try to get her to move on. And I don’t think we were supposed to know that he was in the room.

The last one was Maury, who also started his speech crying. He talked about his two businesses, one of which wasn’t going well. His adventure was that he admitted to his business partner that he wasn’t pulling his weight around work. His partner accepted his confession with open arms and Maury was incredibly moved by that and vowed to himself, his partner, and all of us that he was going to work harder. His story was moving and compelling and, best of all, coherent. It was very clear that Maury was going to win.

We voted by applause as before, and I realized that the marketing director and the guy who was acting as emcee for the contest were not looking at the audience when we voted. They were looking at Adolph, who stood in the corner and signaled to them when a contestant was going to leave the stage. We (read: Adolph) whittled the group down to Maury and Amy and the applause was definitely for Maury. He won a free personal consultation with the leaders themselves (a $500 value).

Once I saw how much the people running the show were looking to our esteemed leader for every single move they made, I started watching everyone in the room except the audience members. I was struck by how orchestrated the whole show was. Imelda came onstage and announced that Sunday was going to be an amazing day because today we were going to get in touch with our feelings. I thought, REALLY?! You mean we haven’t been in touch with our feelings before now?! Because some of us are ready to crawl into a fetal position and it’s not even 10am.

She also reiterated a previous announcement that there wouldn’t be a natural break in the curriculum until 2-3pm so unless we brought our own food, we wouldn’t be able to eat until then. But the good news was that they would be providing lunch for everyone. Sure there isn’t a “natural” break, I thought. And of course they would offer free food. Now a lot of people who might have left early are going to stay until at least mid-afternoon. That’s plenty of time to break their minds. I was suspicious of everything.

Imelda was back on the routine quickly. But I wasn’t having any of it. I barely held up my hand to answer anything. When we got up to dance, sure, I danced. But I didn’t spin. I saved my energy. When she had us turn to our neighbor to talk, I hardly registered what I was being asked. I was too busy looking around the room. The room was filled with “team leaders.” There were many, many more team leaders than there were the other two days. Leaders outnumbered attendees probably two to one. And unlike the other two days, we didn’t get the chance to choose our own partners. A team leader cut in every single time to pair up with an attendee. One time I acted very quickly and grabbed another attendee to be my partner as soon as I could. Two seconds later, a team leader tapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, can I join, too? We can make this a threesome.”

I kept glancing over at Sarah. We had already planned on the car ride in that we would not stay the whole day, but I was ready to leave as soon as we could. After one of the exercises, I got up to get a drink of water from the dispenser in the back, which realized I had not done a single time the whole weekend. I wondered if I would be stopped on my way to get a drink of water. I wasn’t.

On my way back to the seat, I noticed that Sarah’s chair was empty. I looked around the room and I didn’t see her, so I hoped she was in the bathroom. I scooted out the door and past the one woman who stood in the hallway. I ran to the bathroom.

Sarah was there and we were the only two in the bathroom. We still felt like we had to whisper and I was pretty convinced that the room was bugged. “How are we going to get out of here?” I asked her. “Well, you could say that you have an emergency with your daughter,” she said. “And you’re my ride.” That sounded good. “But what if they offer you a ride? I’ll bet they are going to say that someone can give you a ride home,” I answered.” “Well, I could say that I have to help a friend who is in trouble,” Sarah said. “Yeah, and I could say I have to drive you because it’s my car.” I answered. It sounded better.

We toyed with the idea of staying until lunch, but we quickly decided not to. We were too creeped out. We decided to leave right away. We walked back to the room and sat back in our chairs. I immediately started pawing through my backpack, putting my notebook in and gathering my stuff. Marge was sitting next to me and leaned in and asked me if she could borrow a pen. A pen? Why would she need a pen now? Is this some tactic so that if I give her a pen I will feel the need to wait for her to use it and thus be held captive a little longer? I didn’t care. She could keep the pen.

Sarah had left with her stuff, but I still wanted to give Alia my number and hopefully talk to her before she gave these people her money. I wrote my number and email on a piece of paper and leaned over. “I have to go, my friend has an emergency. Here’s my number, let’s get together sometime.” Alia wrote her number out as well and handed it to me. Maryann was sitting next to Alia and got up to walk me out. I knew she would.

“You have 24 hours to take advantage of the discount, so call us if you want to do it,” Maryann said. “And if you have a speaker on your phone, you can call in and listen to the stuff going on this afternoon. It’s such great stuff.”

“Okay, great, thanks, I gotta meet my friend.” Sarah was nowhere in sight.

Maryann took me by the shoulders. “And just know that you are an amazing woman and don’t take your dad’s issues with women on yourself, just know that you are beautiful and wonderful and amazing.” She was in tears again, practically daring me not to cry with her. Mainly I was amazed that she understood what I said to her during that exercise.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. We hugged and I left through the stairwell door.

As soon as I was in the stairwell, I bumped into Sarah who was talking with her team leader. “If you have a speaker on your phone, you can listen in on the afternoon,” her team leader was saying.

“Oh, I don’t,” she said.

Her team leader was very reluctant to let us go and she blocked the stairwell a bit, throwing out a few attempts to get us to stay. We were hearing none of it. At one point she asked us both if we planned to join.

"No," I said. "I don't have $6,000 to spend right now." She looked at me flabbergasted.

"How do you know how much it is?" she asked. Something was wrong. I wasn't supposed to know. The rocker chick had told me how much it was on Saturday, though I'm not sure how she knew.

"Oh, someone told me," I answered vaguely. The team leader stared at me, making me more eager than ever to get out of there. “I know we gotta go, I’m ready, I hope we can get there soon...” I stammered.

We bolted down the stairs and onto the street.

“We left just in time,” Sarah said when we got a few blocks away. “Did you see what they were bringing into the room in baskets as we were leaving?”

“No, what?” I asked.

“Blindfolds.”

“WHAT?!” I yelled. We looked behind us, convinced someone from the group was following us. Blindfolds?! Now they're going to combine a crippling sense of shame and self-loathing with blindfolds?!? I was so glad to be out of there.

We drove home and compared notes. By the time we got home, I was so paranoid that I was sure they had bugged my phone, drugged the water I had drunk from the dispenser, laced the pretzel that someone offered me with PCP, piped nitrous oxide into the room through the bizarre-looking vents that came out of the walls, or all of the above. I felt like someone had reached into my head and scrambled my brain....

And that’s the gist of what happened that weekend. I’ll write more about how I felt afterward, which was at the very least strange. I’ll just say for now that it took me three days to feel normal again. How much of that was the tactics they used during the seminar and how much was my reaction or overreaction to the weekend I am not sure.