How I Almost Became A Scientologist 😲
The true story of how I narrowly avoided joining one of the world’s most notorious cults 🌎.
On a warm afternoon in May 2011, I was walking down Tottenham Court Road in London. I had passed through the wide, open grassy squares of Bloomsbury and Holborn, filled with corporate people enjoying the late spring sun. Now, I was surrounded by the streets of fried chicken joints and tourist souvenir shops packed with people as I headed to catch a double-decker bus home.
At 16 years old, navigating London was nothing new to me. I had been taking the bus home from school since I was about 12. Still, this afternoon was slightly different. I was feeling curious, inspired, and contemplative. My school had just taken us out on a Maths conference field day. As I passed cars, lorries, and buses stuck in traffic, my mind zoomed, imagining all the possibilities of what I might study at university and beyond.
I was mid-bustle when I saw a sign propped up on the pavement. It read, “Free Personality Tests.”
A short woman approached me from the shop.
“Hello!” she called out, “Would you like to take a personality test?”
Much like the men selling Paddington Bears, Union Jacks, and keyrings, she seemed to be selling her wares. I almost didn’t turn around because I had already passed the shop. Yet I distinctly remember thinking, as I stood a couple of steps ahead of her, that maybe I should be more open-minded! A personality test sounded intriguing. My school activities were over for the day. I had nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. I thought to myself: why not?
“Sure, I’ll take a personality test,” I said to her, turning around.
“Amazing. Follow me,” she said, “There’s plenty for you to discover.”
I went with her into the narrow shop front. The space was quite small and bright, with a kind of beige old office feel to it. The hardwood wall had some kind of giant inscription written on it, and the floor was a faux marble with light brown-green speckles. There was a staircase with a glass, silver-handled railing. She took me down a short corridor, passed rows of books and pamphlets on shelves, into a small back room with low-walled cubicles.
She showed me to the cubicle where I was going to take my personality test, and I sat down on a scratchy, cushioned office chair with a round back. There were a couple of other people in there, flipping through pages of questions on small packets of white A4 paper that had been stapled together. I would have heard the scratching of their pencils on the pages, but there was a buzz of background noise and chatter throughout the place. She soon handed me a packet of questions. I wrote my name and my date of birth at the top of the page and got to work.
I didn’t feel particularly scared there; I was just curious. I was still at the age where I believed that most people were well-intentioned in the world, and I would just be able to leave any place, including this stuffy office room if I felt like it. If anything, my friends and I were the ones actively breaking the law, getting ourselves into less-than-ideal situations, and running away from the police. We’d pay homeless men to buy alcohol for us from the local newsagents. We’d bribe the guy at the corner shop to sell us cheap Egyptian cigarettes. Even if one of us was caught smoking a splif (a rolled mixture of weed and tobacco) in the park, we usually found a way to speak posh with our private school accents and talk the constable out of calling our parents.
I kept a steady pace through the questions, quite like the multiple-choice verbal reasoning tests I’d had to take for my entrance exams into secondary school. It had probably 30 pages of questions.
Did I get angry sometimes? How often did I feel misunderstood? Did random coincidences happen sometimes that I couldn’t explain? Did I ever talk about someone, and then they’d appear later that same day? Did I ever feel very excited but also very bored? Yes. No. Very often. Often. Sometimes. Rarely. Never. Strongly Agree. Agree. Neutral. Disagree. Strongly Disagree.
Gosh, that questionnaire was long. After at least about 20 minutes, I really hoped the personality test would be over soon. I was desperate to get the results. Was I a particularly angry person, with unacceptable levels of rage, getting angrier more than most? I thought about leaving the stuffy office, but now I had put so much into the first 25 pages of this thing that my time was such a sunk cost. Couldn’t someone just tell me what type of personality I had?
When I finally finished the questionnaire, the woman instructed me,
“Now, you’re going to watch this video where you can learn about the different personality types as we assess your results. You’ll know soon.”
Thank god, I thought to myself. This better be good.
She led me down the staircase with the glass railing into another smaller, slightly darker, stuffy office room. She sat me down in a similar low cubicle. There were a couple of other people in there, including a mother with her young boy, who was playing on the floor.
The woman handed me a round, cheap headset with a small black muffler at each earlobe, quite like the ones we got on planes at the time. The monitor was an ugly grey color. She put the DVD into the desktop computer and started the video.
I remember the video starting with bright yellow, gold, and orange sunsets and a man and a woman in hiking gear sitting there with their heads in their hands or running in slow motion up a hill.
“Do you get angry sometimes? Do you often feel misunderstood by the people around you, even your closest friends and family? Do random coincidences happen sometimes that you can’t explain? All this depends on your personality, and we’re here to give you the tools so that you can navigate your life and thrive. Our guides are here to assist you.”
I sat on my hands, praying that the whole questionnaire had been worth it. This was just starting to get good. About five minutes in, mid-video, the woman quickly came up to my cubicle and pressed stop on the video. She seemed huffed and bothered slightly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “We can't help you. We hope you have a great day—”
I interjected,
“But I just spent 20 minutes filling out that questionnaire. You can’t tell me anything?”
“No. Sorry.”
Without much of an explanation, she hurried me upstairs. I noticed that most of the people upstairs had gone, possibly to a meeting or to watch videos with their guides and get the answers to their personality tests. She hurried me outside and shut the door behind me. Their white shopfront now looked sleepy and vacant.
I stood there for a moment, grumbling to myself, before I continued down Tottenham Court Road to the bus stop. What they had promised sounded kind of amazing, but it had all ended up being a waste of time when I could have been outside, enjoying the late spring afternoon. I regretted going in there only to have my expectations crushed. Why hadn’t she been able to give me any answers?
Well, it’s now 14 years later, and the hilarious thing is that the place still exists. I had entered the “Dianetics & Scientology Life Improvement Centre,” an active “non-profit” organization with a whopping 4.4 stars on Google Maps and 291 reviews, offering “courses and counseling to help you improve your life and reach your full potential.” Just wow.
I now know, thanks to this news article, that the questionnaire I took was probably their 200-question “Oxford Capacity Analysis.” The article says,
“The Scientology “personality test” is described by various Internet sources as a Scientology recruitment tool used worldwide on Scientology websites, in Scientology churches, and in public settings such as fairs and festivals. It also has been criticized by psychologists as not a bonafide personality test...Young people under age 18 are asked to have a parent or guardian sign the questionnaire.”
So, there you have it. Years later, I finally know why I was instructed to leave: I was underaged and alone. In that woman’s mind, once she saw my date of birth, I quickly morphed from a fresh, juicy recruit into a potential legal nightmare.
I wish I could tell you that I saw it coming or that in the moment, alarm bells went off in my head, and I walked out disgusted, vowing never to return to any cult-like place. But that is far from what happened. Sure, I left that place feeling puzzled and disappointed. Yet, it was only with the benefit of hindsight that I see now how lucky I was to be a minor at the time, without one of my parents nearby to sign my waiver.
The truth is that even if I considered myself smart or well-educated at the time, I only narrowly avoided joining one of the largest and most notorious cults in the world because of an even greater factor: the rule of law. Part of being shameless is accepting in a light-hearted way that even if we think we’ve got it all together, we can still make mistakes. We can still be wrong, very wrong. Especially as young people, sometimes we need an external force like the law to save us from ourselves.
When we acknowledge our mistakes shamelessly and do not pretend that we are above other people, having this perspective on life is surprisingly freeing. We’ve fully come to terms with our foibles and failures, and there’s not much in the way of other people that can tarnish us if we hold ourselves in high esteem. We might make a mistake, but that does not mean we are a mistake. Indeed, sometimes, making a mistake may riddle us with deep shame and embarrassment, and that’s something we can work through. Then, we have other mistakes that may simply become a funny story that we can share 14 years later.
Have you ever been duped? Did you ever almost join a cult? Tell us about your experience in the comments!
Join us on our mission to help the world be shamelessly sexy!
Love,
Tash
💌 ✍️
