Just now my heart longs for things that probably don't exist

It's wild that you don't necessarily need to even be abused to have childhood trauma. Like just having an excessively negative, spiteful, toxic and mean-spirited parent is enough, even if they never do it at you, or on purpose. Imagine being a doctor and explaining that to a parent.

"Hey you know how you don't have any friends because people find you unpleasant to be around? Well it turns out that your child is also a person, and finds you unpleasant to be around. Growing up in an environment where they are constantly subjected to your opinions technically counts as torture, since the situation was both continuously distressing and inescapable. You are literally so annoying that you gave your child brain damage."

“I had a room to myself as a kid, but my mother was always quick to point out that it wasn’t my room, it was her room and I was merely permitted to occupy it. Her point, of course, was that my parents had earned everything and I was merely borrowing the space, and while this is technically true I cannot help but marvel at the singular damage of this dark idea: That my existence as a child was a kind of debt and nothing, no matter how small, was mine. That no space was truly private; anything of mine could be forfeited at someone else’s whim.”  ― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

gotta love how christians on tumblr will see us being like 'I would fight god in a parking lot' 'christianity ruined my life' '*extensive post about all the ways the church traumatized you*' and think 'wow surely these people seem like people who would love to hear about christ. it really seems like if i say "god loves you" or, worse, if i offend them and tell them to repent they WILL convert'. like, my guy, what's not clicking here.

when you’re a kid in a cult, you grow up fast and slow at the same time.

i grew up fast. i was knocking on doors since i could speak, giving presentations in front of 600 people from age 10, engaging with literature well above my age level, having discussions with adults about what happens when we die since age 6.

but i grew up slow. i didn’t have a friend who showed me unconditional love until i went to high school, i didn’t know what my own body parts were called until i was well into puberty, i didnt know how to talk or connect to people my own age at all.

you grow up fast and slow under a cult, and it feels impossible to accept that both can be true at the same time.

My hot take is that it's cartoonishly evil how one of the core pillars of christianity is that their goal is to convert the entire world & they explicitly state this very frequently & everybody's just like yeah that's normal

It bothers me when I say I was in a cult and people go "oh you went to a cult-like church!"

No. It was a cult. I'm very intentional with that word.

Don't diminish my experiences.

Many lgbt teenagers and young adults growing up on the internet today have socially conservative beliefs that they voice at all times that they got from their conservative parents which they’ve never challenged because they think the life experience of being gay or trans makes them politically progressive

This is why I hate it when people say something homophobic and then go “so you’re really accusing me, a whole ass lesbian, of being homophobic 🙄” like yeah

There's a model of culture that I like to cite for this idea, called the Iceberg Model:

The LGBT youth (and young atheists, too) will cut off the stuff "above the water" but not really examine the stuff down below that line that they have as part of their upbringing.

So you get young LGBT people making comments like OP cited, or young atheists acting with an Evangelical persecution complex, and going, "Don't call me Culturally Christian!"

I have trouble sympathizing with "what remote learning is doing to our children!" when the old way of doing things was literally infamous for inducing a lifetimes worth of nightmares

Both are bad and children should be homeschooled.

as someone who got homescholled for my high school years, homeschool also bad and there is no one size fits all solution to education