An ex JW trying to make it through the world

if there's a task, especially a recurring one, that you find difficult to do and that you keep avoiding, check whether you're in pain or physical discomfort.

For a long time I would avoid doing tasks like showering because they nebulously made me feel 'bad' or i just instinctively felt like avoiding them. It wasn't until I got a shower chair that I realised standing to shower was causing me pain. My bodymind knew that on some level but didn't tell the conscious me.

Similarly with sensory aversions (things you don't like). Before I got kitchen gloves, I did the dishes but it took me a long time and I never wanted to. Afterward, it got a lot easier to motivate myself.

"But how can you not know you're in pain/uncomfortabke?" Extremely easily if your brain is wired a specific way or if you were taught, intentionally or not, to downplay your own experiences or distance yourself from your body.

We need to do what we can to protect the Internet Archive. Here is a petition that you can sign.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

These days I feel very sad. Like sad in I'm actually crying sometimes. Just cried a few moments ago btw

Sooo how to explain in a clear enough way....

Firstly I already talked about this but I was brought up as a JW which fucked up lots of things in my life. Left a late-teen now I'm a bit older than 30yo.

What it fucked up in particular is everything about human relations and especially everything related to love and sex.

But also I was abused once by some boys the same age as me when I was very little. Think nursery school.

And soon after I left as a teen, I fell in love with someone and we dated and I really wasn't ready for it. It was too soon, I hadn't process my upbringing at all and so was hurt. He's the only person I dated and when I think about our relationship, even if there were good moments everything is tainted because dubious consent in particular.

So you see I didn't have a really positive and safe experience about love and intimacy.

Then I had a few crushes but it lead to nothing everytime.

Also I have chronic pain for 10 years, anxiety and depression symptoms since my teenage years. Not to mention low confidence, struggles to have friends, fear of something terrible happening while dating because.. men. Well a whole mess you see.

So all this time I choose to be alone because I just don't think I'm lovable enough to be with someone and I didn't think much about all this UNTIL..

About a year ago I started roleplaying on a video game. Something like 2-3 months into it my character and another began some love story. I thought it would be funny. But stuff happened irl on his side and he broke it of. And idk, when he/his character told me I wanted to cry? I didn't have any feelings for him, I don't know the player at all but idk it kinda hurts? and then for a month after I felt bad. Like I cried a bit sometimes and then calmed down. Then he stopped playing and I got better and told myself I won't play another love story with anyone else.

But THEN

A few months later, another player comes around and we start doing a love story which we still play to this day, kinda.

He's younger than me, the age I was when I left the JW, late-teen. Before we started we talked on discord to be clear between us, like, if someone make something that make the other uncomfortable we should talk about it etc. As an older person than him I wanted it to be safe and not weird you know what I mean?

So we talk a bit on discord talking about random stuff and it happened like 2-3 times we talked about sexual deseases, breasts size, virginity and idk and I always talked to him about it in a very "older experienced person teach a younger one" way, in a not creepy/grooming way please. Btw I never talked about my sex life or anything, he has no idea about anything I'm talking about here.

A few month ago he said he didn't want to play anymore and I cried for like 2hours?? I have to say I know the player a bit, we talk sometimes on discord but we aren't in love or anything irl.

So finally I still play daily but he comes play sometimes and we have fun it's ok.

Now here's the thing.

I think roleplaying love stories just makes me think about how lonely I really am and it just makes me cry.

Also the other day I was watching some charity event stream on twitch where the host asked sexual questions to other streamers in a fun and educational way and I was like "Omg if I was there I couldn't answer those questions..." because of shame or bad experiences or no experience at all and I felt idk, envy? jalousy? but mainly sad.

Yesterday I saw a random tweet about a sexual position I didn't know about and I was like "Oh that seems fun... But I have noone to try it...".

And thinking about the player I'm building a love story with our characters who's late-teen, it reminds me of myself at his age when I dated the person I mentionned earlier. We were both virgins discovering sex and... I'd love to relive this kinda experience again? But I'm 30yo now, how am I supposed to find a 30yo virgin dude?

It's experiences you're supposed to live in teenage-years/20yo and I didn't and feels it's too late...

Idk I just feel like I'm missing out and the more nothing is happening, the more nothing will happens. And these days I crave intimacy, having someone being sweet and cute, talking to me softly, kisses, cuddling gnnnnnnnnnnnnnhhnhnhnhn.....

Soooo yeah I'm sorry it's very badly written good luck to understand everything krkrrk

Well one day this asshole who had been kind of tagging along with us asks her why she talks like that because it makes her sound dumb and I still remember her response word for word.

“In Russian I am so intelligent and clear. In English I am like [an] idiot”

They’re speaking your language because you don’t know theirs. That’s not something they should be made fun of, it’s something that should be commended because learning a language is hard fucking work.

I downloaded the PDF to my hard drive and I open it again whenever I'm feeling too suicidal to do much else, but not enough to start booking a ride to the hospital. And every time without fail I only go up to a few pages before backing off and choosing to live another day just because suicide suddenly seems even more unbearable than whatever the hell upset me in the first place.

All the book really does is [I'm pulling a summary from GoodReads here as, again, I've read no more than 5 pages] "discusses the social aspects of suicide, the right to die, anger, loneliness, depression, stress, hopelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, the consequences of a suicide attempt, and how to get help."

But it also starts with the author kindly asking the reader to complete the book before going through with anything, and for some reason I'm compelled to really just try to read it all before finalizing everything. Despite not yet completing it (hopefully never will) I think I can safely say it's saved my life at least a few times now.

I.

this is the first lesson you learn: you are always wrong.

there is no electric hum buzzing through the air. there is no stinging bite to the sweetness of the mango. there is no bitter metallic tang to the water.

there is no cruelty in their laughter, no ambiguity in the instructions, no reason to be upset. there is no bitter aftertaste to your sweet tea, nothing scratchy about your blanket.

the lamps glow steadily. they do not falter.

II.

this is the second lesson you learn: you are never right.

you are childish, gullible, overly prone to tears. you are pedantic, combative, deliberately obtuse. you are lazy, unreliable, never on time.

you’re always making up excuses, rudely interrupting, stepping on people’s shoes. you’re always trying to get attention, never thinking about anyone else, selfish through and through.

it’s you that’s the problem. the lamps are fine.

III.

this is the third lesson you learn: you must always give in.

mother knows best. father knows best. doctor knows best. teacher knows best. this is the proper path. do not go astray.

listen to your elders, respect your betters, accept what’s given to you as your due. bow to the wisdom of experience, the education of the professional, the clarity of an external point of view.

Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.

Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an enemy alien in France — before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when the French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops...

A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place...

The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation...

The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed...

Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia after a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother’s driver’s license.

It’s not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump’s denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.

The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn’t comply.

Lambertz emailed the Foreign Ministry in their country to ask for guidance. “The issue is the subject of tense discussions here at the ministry, and your concerns are absolutely understandable,” the response read, in part. Ordinarily, the Foreign Ministry would suggest asking the U.S. Embassy, but by doing so, as the letter noted, Lambertz “would then ‘out’ yourself to them.”

Trans and nonbinary Germans fear that their country’s incoming conservative government may take its cues from the Trump administration. Far-right parties, ascendant in Germany and other European countries, have made the specter of “gender ideology” a centerpiece of their politics.

“Something has changed,” Heinrich Horwitz, a German choreographer, told me. Horwitz, who is nonbinary, was recently assaulted at the main train station in Vienna. The attacker was demanding to know whether Horwitz was “a girl or a boy.” Before they could make out what the attacker was saying, Horwitz instinctively tucked the Star of David they wear around their neck inside their shirt. “I thought that would be safer.” Horwitz, who was born in Munich in 1984, is the child of a Holocaust survivor. “I grew up with this idea that I could always go to the U.S. if the Nazis came back,” they told me. That no longer seems like an option.

You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.

1. Emotional Preparation and Therapy

Talk About It: Moving out can be a mix of excitement and fear. Therapy can help you process these feelings and build confidence. Having a professional to talk to can make the transition smoother and they can give you advice on how to tell your parents.

Understand that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. You don’t have to have everything figured out right away.

Start building habits like cooking for yourself, doing your own laundry, and managing appointments.

2. Budgeting

Start Saving Now. Open a separate savings account for moving-out expenses. Aim for at least three months’ worth of rent and living costs as a safety net.

Use apps like Mint or a simple spreadsheet to track your income and spending. Knowing where your money goes helps you prioritize necessities. Then you can break down your budget into fixed (rent, utilities) and flexible (food, entertainment) categories. Adjust as needed but prioritize essentials.

3. Finding a Place to Live

Consider roommates. Sharing rent and utilities can significantly cut costs. Look for roommates you trust or use platforms like Roommates.com or community boards. Know the average rent, utilities, and transportation costs in the area you’re moving to.

Your first place doesn’t have to be perfect. Focus on affordability and safety.

4. Food and Living Expenses

Don’t hesitate to use resources like food banks if your budget is tight. Many communities have programs to help those in transition. Cooking is cheaper and healthier than eating out. Start with simple recipes and build your skills over time. Look for sales, buy in bulk, and consider store brands to save money on groceries. Couponing is your friend.

5. Talking to Your Parents

Think about what you want to say and choose a calm time to talk. Focus on your goals and independence, not just your desire to leave. It’s natural for parents to feel emotional about this step. Let them know you value their support and guidance.

Be clear about your plans and ask for their understanding as you take this step.

6. Building Support Networks

Keep in touch with friends and family who support your decision. Moving out can feel isolating, so having a support network is crucial. Check out local organizations for young adults transitioning to independence. They may offer financial aid, housing assistance, or emotional support.

7. Self-Care and Stress Management

Moving out is a big step, but you don’t have to do everything at once. Break tasks into smaller, manageable pieces. Every milestone—saving money, finding a place, learning a new skill—is progress. Acknowledge and celebrate these moments. Whether it’s friends, family, or professionals, don’t be afraid to ask for support when you need it.

"free palestine," he shouted until his last breath. aaron bushnell, we will never forget you.