I still visited family frequently, desperately trying to reach my siblings. I stood up for them and for the first time in my life I accused my parents of injustice. For most of my childhood, I didn't defend my siblings because I had nothing to compare our experiences to and I couldn't understand that it was abnormal or fair.
The tension grew as I continued to ask questions and began to remind my siblings of the times when we were all taught to forgive and forget—how we always had impossible expectations and responsibilities. But I no longer lived there, and my mother could always come and put things in order in the thoughts of a doubting child. She did the same for me for the first 19 years of my life.
Soon my parents forbade me to talk to my brothers and sisters without their supervision. Then I received a terrible phone call from my father: an ultimatum that I could either go to Christian counseling with them – and endure more controlling, emotionally destructive attempts to subjugate me – or I would lose full access to my family.
I had to let my siblings go and it is by far the hardest decision I have ever made in my life. As soon as they called me and informed me that I had lost access to my brothers and sisters, I started writing on my blog about being abused by your parents. The best evidence to support the allegations of abuse that I have detailed in these blog posts is my father's attempt to save face. The day after my first post, he released a podcast blaming my delusions on my mental illness and left the mic open for my siblings to respond to what I wrote. My father deleted the podcast within hours. I reported the child abuse to local authorities, as did my therapist. I don't know if there was an investigation, but the following year, six of my siblings were enrolled in a local charter school, and today the youngest eight are in school.
In 2015, I moved from Colorado to Seattle in search of a new life. A year later I became homeless. Having no higher education and limited education, I was only eligible for jobs that involved manual labor. I worked at a grocery store but slept in my car. I showered at the gym and changed into my uniform in the restrooms of other grocery stores. While I was living out of my car, I lost my entire blog and hundreds of posts I had published because I couldn't afford to pay for a web hosting renewal.
Last year, my partner, whom I met through mutual friends in 2016, and I found a community in Olympia, Washington. Here we are among those who have been excluded due to extreme religions, most of us are LGBTQ+, and we have faced poverty and chronic homelessness. We exist to fight patriarchy and colonial capitalism, and to embrace our lives and loves without the guilt that our families and the church have imposed on us for so many years. Thanks to the help of many friends and strangers from around the world, my blog archives have been restored and I have some financial support from online patrons of my work.
I suffer from chronic pain and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). I don't have a car. I can no longer work on my feet because my body was badly damaged by overwork as a child, so I write. I write between therapy and the constant discomfort of poverty. I write about trauma and recovery, about poverty and injustice, about what I know now.
Twelve years ago, my family's lifestyle became an entertainment spectacle along with many controversial shows on the Learning Channel. I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a child, so while my peers were exposed to fourth-wall-breaking humor through comedies that satirized the genre, such as ,me and my siblings felt insecure in front of the film crew. We were not educated enough, we were not noticed due to the large number of us, and the older children raised the younger ones, while simultaneously satisfying our parents' every whim.
I haven't spoken to my parents for three years. I was told that their “door was open” and that they were willing to welcome me back if I could give up everything that makes me who I am today. I never had the opportunity to admit to them that I was bisexual. For my adult siblings, most people assume that our shared experiences will bring us closer together, but that is not the case. Even deeper than the religious element of our upbringing was the emphasis on work ethic as a “good asset”—and that’s what developed between my sisters and me in recent years. When I was homeless, my two older sisters blamed me for my poverty. My parents' trap had always been our brothers and sisters, and Lydia couldn't bear to lose them. In our last conversation, she told me that she had gone back to our parents' advice—my father's financial advice and my mother's essential oil advice for her own unvaccinated children.
Four of my adult siblings are still part of the Quiverfull movement. My parents' main idea is that people should have more children, and my siblings are also on their way to having larger broods. Sometimes one of my brothers calls me, but the gap between what I believe now and what they believe makes communication almost impossible. I miss them and hope that someday I can build a relationship with them that is not based on following my parents' beliefs. Although misled people with nefarious intentions still rule the world beyond the one I eventually escaped, my Pyrrhic victory is that I no longer need to deceive myself.
Note. The author changed his name in March 2022 and this article has been updated accordingly.
Artemis Stardust writes nonfiction about his experiences growing up in a large fundamentalist evangelical family. They blog about economic recovery and inequality and are working on a memoir. Their writing and illustrations can be found on Patreon, and their website and other links can be found on Link tree. They live in Washington state with their partner and two cats.
This article was supported Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in 2019 and updated in March 2022. We're now publishing it as one of BuzzFeed readers' favorite personal essays.
