Bek Condello > Quotes

“Whatever small sense of self I had was slipping away, replaced by an all-consuming desperate need to fix, to please, to sacrifice, just like I had when I was a child.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“It sounds so dramatic now, but imagine craving attention and love so desperately as a child that death felt like the only time you would receive it.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“My entire foundation, the faith I had built my life on, crumbled beneath me in a matter of seconds.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“Within this insular environment, a dangerous sense of superiority can take root, where some feel above the law and unbound by the rules of the outside world.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“People often assume the difference between a church and a cult is obvious, but it rarely is. A church, at its best, offers community, meaning and a space to wrestle with belief. A cult offers those things too, but only as bait. Its warmth is conditional. Its certainty is absolute.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“He was the key to a locked door, far away from my parents, that I’d been staring at for years. And I took my chance with both arms wide open.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“Faith became a constant cycle of anxiety and self-scrutiny, a relentless battle to ensure I was good enough,”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“Whatever the divine is, I trust it can handle the truth. Not a polished fake or forced version, but the real, messy, beautiful truth of who we all are.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“the cost of belonging is your ability to think autonomously.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“I often wondered if we had ever truly been in love, or if we had simply been two strangers clinging to an idea of what our lives should look like.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“It’s hard to reconcile the idea of a loving god with the authoritarian cruelty I experienced.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“I mourned the childhood I was robbed of, one that should have been filled with discovery and joy but was instead carved out by fear.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“In my late twenties I came to understand that spirituality, if it exists, must be sought personally and authentically, not handed down in dogmatic decrees by self-appointed apostles and their followers.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.

“As an adult, I can still feel that instinct rise when I am stressed or anxious. My first impulse is to clean, to organise, to go to the gym, to restore some sense of order and control.”
― Bek Condello, Can You Handle a Girl Like Me?: She left the cult that raised her. Then she had to learn how to live.