PART ONE OF TWO | Trigger warnings: Emotional abuse, suicidal ideation
Morgan sits down with Lindsay Lion Lord — neurodivergent, legally blind visual artist and recent MFA graduate in Fibres and Material Practices from Concordia University in Montreal — for a conversation that is raw, funny, and fiercely honest.
Lindsay opens up about receiving her diagnosis of retinitis pigmentosa just as she was finishing her MFA in visual art — a degree she spent years fighting to pursue after growing up in a hyper-religious, evangelical household that told her the art world was 'dark' and not to be pursued. From the time she was a little girl teaching herself to draw from Highlights magazines, art was the one area in which no one could criticize her. In a home where her feelings were too big, her personality too much, and her light constantly being dimmed, her exceptional talent in drawing became her refuge.
After high school, and without a clear path forward, Lindsay joined Teen Mania Ministries — an internship program she now identifies as an abusive psychological cult, later documented in season two of Shiny Happy People on Amazon. She describes what life inside looked like: ten days of sleep deprivation and isolation from family during something called Gauntlet Week, six people to a tiny dorm room with no privacy, constant self-policing and peer surveillance, and deeply misogynistic \"relationship advice\" delivered to rooms full of 18-year-old women by male leadership. She also opens up about the secret boyfriend who was abusive, the 'trial' before the Honor Council where even her own advocate turned on her, and the split-second decision — at 19 years old, alone in a room full of people telling her she was wicked — to trust herself anyway. She orchestrated her own dismissal, packed her things in the night, and left the next day. What followed was being shunned by roughly a thousand peers and staff members overnight, coming home to Kansas, and then being kicked out by her parents.
Morgan and Lindsay dig into why cult dynamics aren't as far outside of everyday life as we'd like to believe — the parallels between authoritarian religion, dysfunctional family systems, Greek life, and other institutional structures that use isolation, sleep deprivation, and self-policing to maintain control. They talk about what it means to stop doing the work of your oppressors for them, why telling your story is necessary, and the ongoing unglamorous work of therapy, inner child healing, and learning — slowly, imperfectly — to take up the space you were always meant to occupy.
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