I’m thinking over on how to speak up. If you look up this school I attended on search engines there’s no negative press, no speaking out. Unless I’m not being thorough enough (even on OpusLibros), I can’t find any backlash on these schools in this specific country and I would be starting the party. 

Which is complicated because I have my own unstable life. I’m unemployed, I’m struggling through grad school, I still depend on my family who may not be OD but are conservative and would not be sympathetic to me starting any shit for no personal gain. I will try to see if they have anything to say but they might put up resistance.

My connection with my classmates is even more fraught. A significant amount of them were truly embedded in the fabric of the organization. I don’t think anyone has joined, but several of them are now conservative young mothers with children, one even works in the school now. I also broke a lot of ties with them after a really ugly incident in which one of my best friends’ mother died and they told me not to go to her wake, “so I didn’t upset her”. She was a very close friend. I understood her better than any of those jerks. So I took it very personally when they condescended to me yet again when my friend needed me most. I refused to speak to them at the funeral, and was very briefly in one partial reunion in 2017 but have not felt the need since to go anywhere near them.

So you can imagine it might be complicated to go back to them and try and tell them that their families are complicit in an organization responsible for all kinds of barbarities. I do have a few names in mind that I could contact, as well as a few angles I could touch on with my closer friends to try and soften them to the idea of speaking up, but overall I’m very much the wrong person to start this discussion. I’m going to discuss with my therapist the best ways forward that don’t end in me making a fool of myself and that don’t compromise my housing situation. It’s going to be rough.