Escaping Polygamy's Yolanda Barlow thought that getting away from the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be the hardest thing she'd ever endure. But this week on Escaping Polygamy: After The Escape, she reveals that what followed proved even more difficult.
This week's special episode sees Barlow 16 months after she left the church. When viewers first saw Barlow, she admitted to swimming fully clothed because she wasn't comfortable in a bathing suit. Having lived her entire life in the FLDS, she didn't have a TV in her house, never wore makeup, was reserved and shy, and had only ever worn the long, floor-skimming dresses dictated by the group. Upon leaving, Barlow admits that it was a complete shock.
Barlow says that it took her longer than expected to do everyday things like find a job and socialize. Now that she's living outside of the religion, she is dressing more conventionally, though she does say that it took some time to acclimate to the outside world. Fellow cast mate Andrea Brewer caught up with Barlow and noted that the changes she saw were drastic, but welcome.
"When I got out, I kind of thought it'd be real easy — I'd just get a job, go to school, get all my stuff together real quick, get a car," Barlow says in a clip posted by Us Weekly. "But it's a lot harder than I thought. Over the course of about a month, I probably applied to about 32 different places trying to get a job, and my social skills weren't where they needed to be. It's so hard for me to just go up to a stranger and start talking to them because all my life I was raised, 'Don't ever talk to anybody out of the religion.'"
The preview shows Barlow clocking into her new job, so it seems she eventually managed to integrate herself into society outside of the FLDS. Check out the clip, below.