On Daniella Mestyanek Young’s first day of military training, she stands among her fellow recruits holding a duffle bag high in one arm above her head. As she ponders the other bodies lined up in her peripheral vision, all struggling to maintain the same pose, it gradually occurs to her that this feeling — of being owned, coerced, programmed — seems unsettlingly familiar: “Have I just joined another cult?”
This sense of suspicion forms a pattern in Mestyanek Young’s life, which she documents with remarkable insight in her memoir, Uncultured, exploring the systems of control in which toxicity can thrive.
