I started blogging over a decade ago, and I’ve always written about my beliefs and how they’ve changed. In one of my early posts, “When the Heart Forces a Smile,” I talked about how my mom taught me forced smiling when I felt upsetting, intense emotions. I didn’t identify this as a form of controlling… Continue reading Non-toxic Positivity
I struggle a great deal with being human. For many years, I bristled at people who said to me, “you’re a human,” wondering what on earth they meant. People go through life with a wide range of definitions for humanness. As a young child, I was taught that to be human was to be flawed.… Continue reading Doing Enough
I entered adulthood wholly uneducated and unprepared for life. I was homeschooled until I was 19. When I tried attending a local university while living with my parents, I had no time to study. I also had no respect for academia. In my mind, my own ignorant Christian beliefs were superior to whatever I might… Continue reading Close Clarity
You take my handAnd you say you’ve changedBut boy you know your begging don’t fool meBecause to you it’s just a game(You know it’s just too little too late) I was youngAnd in loveI gave you everythingBut it wasn’t enoughAnd now you wanna communicate(You know it’s just too little too late) Go find someone elseI’m… Continue reading Groomed
In Christian homeschool speech and debate, we were told that we were learning logic and critical thinking. What we learned was a kind of feigned intellectualism, one that behaves under the pretense that the most reasonable reaction to anything is no reaction at all. Almost without fail, the winning competitors were charismatic and attractive, smooth… Continue reading Heartlessness and Hate, Part 2
The one episode of reality TV that featured my family was a much smaller thing than we thought. Shared delusions are central to relationships with abusers, and the chance to soak up the spotlight was no exception for my parents. The show itself was embarrassingly bad – the production quality was abysmal, and we had… Continue reading False Fame
I was taught primarily for religious and political purposes, not to prepare me for independence in adulthood. My high school transcript, and the fact that I wrote it myself, demonstrates how little I was taught. For me, being homeschooled meant that my access to information was severely limited by what my parents thought was true.… Continue reading My Homeschool Transcript
I’m going to keep this short because 2020 has been so chaotic and exhausting, it’s taken me several hours to come up with those two words to describe it. First, of course, I want to thank everyone for everything you did to help us get through last year. I left my retail job in March… Continue reading A Year Spent Surviving
From what I have read about trauma recovery, the process can take a lifetime. The damage done over decades cannot be overwritten in a few years. I’m looking to the future with cautious hope. While a new year may not be a magical reset, I am reflecting on my priorities. I want to improve my… Continue reading Future Focus
The older I get, the more I realize how inadequate my education was. My writing, my strongest skill, is littered with grammatical errors. I am passionate about the injustices I’ve discovered in the years since I’ve started educating myself, instead of relying on my parents to inform me about the world. When two people are… Continue reading What I Do and Don’t Know