This page was last updated March 2022.
My name is Artemis Evren Stardust.
I was raised in a cult of sorts. I’m the third oldest of sixteen kids, and my parents believed God wanted them to avoid birth control. I was to marry young and become a baby-making handmaiden myself, after being a sister-mom to my younger siblings from childhood.
I believed in being happy, counting my blessings, and being a helpful fairy that would dry toddler tears and wash mounds of dishes. I was a servant of Christ, after all, and as a very logical homeschooled debate kid, I would have insisted to you that this was the life I wanted, and my parents had presented all other kinds of life to me, but this kind of Christianity was the only true way.
I was fortunate enough to see through the cracks in the reality I’d known for my first twenty-something years. I was able to question what I’d been taught to believe before I could get married off, as many friends of mine were.
I’m passionate about justice, about empowering and including people with invisible illnesses like me, about telling the untold stories about real, effective, anti-establishment ways to change the world.
This is not a “where are they now” blog by a Reality TV kid. It’s also not the bright-eyed but naive musings of the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It’s the revolutionary and anti-colonist thoughts of a pansexual, non-binary millennial who’s pretty fucking pissed about the injustice my country inflicts on its citizens, its immigrants, and the rest of the world.
You can dig for me online, but I don’t accept friend requests from strangers, sorry. I lurk, though – I’ve been spotted in the wild surfing on forums or tag groups from time to time.
In March 2019, I was published in Huffington Post Personal. If you’d like to read the 2,500-word version of my story, click here to read.
Want to support my writing?
You can pledge to support me on a monthly basis over on Patreon.
If you’d rather send a one-time gift, I also accept the following:
Venmo: @ArtStardust
Or you can scan one of the following PayPal or CashApp QR codes with your phone:
