hmm, this ones gonna be a long thread about some Juicy Olli Lore

uhh content warnings for slurs and queerphobia and racism and suicide/mental health https://twitter.com/historyofarmani/status/1290484329580130306

grew up in an upper middle class family, and as such had always attended private christian and catholic schools as a kid

the internet was my first exposure to a world outside of wealthy shitheads, and i began to pick up on the vague idea that, something was up

come 8th grade, I had both: started to realize I was queer, and started to find Science Documentaries (nova and such) which went completely against the creationism i was taught

and while I felt like I was betraying god and hated myself immensely for watching those things, there was a hidden fascination with it that I couldn't get over, and so I kept watching them

I was living in the south and surrounded by fundie Christians and Catholics, and fully believed in it all, which uh, was Not A Great Place for being queer

my family thought I was possessed by a demon and I thought so too (they didnt know about me being queer, but i did and that along with the fascination with the science documentaries i was watching only further proved that i was possessed to me)

which added onto already immense self hatred and suicidal ideation /self harm i had from being a Burdensome Autistic Embarrassment (abusive parents are /fun/), but, also a vague sense of unfairness to it all

Some of the kids i went to school with and was friends with were the kids of local politicians, and well, seeing the things they and their kids would say behind closed doors was shocking to me, even at that age and in the context of the world I was raised in

like looking back they were straight up fascists (constantly talking about how we "need to nuke the middle east," and when i would say anything, for instance, "what about the kids?" they would say they were "just terrorists in the making" and "threats to god and america,"

and at one point even just straight up said that they werent human), and that was a very early experience of beginning to learn what dog whistles were

I was at a weird crossroads in my life where i hated myself and thought I was betraying god, but also I had seen just a bit too much of a world outside, and desperately wanted to see what it was

This was also at the time that everything in Ferguson happened. I didnt have a tv and mostly stayed in my room, so instead of watching the news like my family did, I, well, went to twitter, and watched what was happening from people tweeting on the ground

that, was a massive step in radicalizing me against the idea of police (along with growing up with several family friend cops and seeing how, shitty they were to people), and in showing me how entrenched racism was in our everyday systems, but I didnt know of any alternatives

Dom, an instructor for improv and theater stuff I did, helped guide that shit, introduced me to the black panthers and a lot of the world of 60s radicalism, and helped to hone down those feelings from general "somethings wrong here" to seeing what was wrong

I still, didnt have an answer though

I eventually managed to convince my parents to allow me to do my highschool in public school

While I didnt talk to anybody there really, there was one close friend I made a few months in, and he was great

he had very bad lung issues, however, and one day I learned that, his family hadnt been eating much and that they were close to losing their home, because he had to have surgery performed and medication to keep him alive

this was, completely baffling to me, and I didnt understand how a situation like his could even be allowed in our world

I asked my parents if we could give him money, and they told me he was just "trying to scam us out of our money"

this is the same attitude they had towards homeless folks whenever we would visit cities, though I would always give them money anyways when I was sure my parents werent looking

like 70% of the people in that school had a story of not having money to really survive, all through different issues, but all with the same outcome of poverty, and i just couldnt understand how this was happening to people who obviously did nothing to deserve it other than live

at this school as well, well it was in the rural south still, and this was in 2015-16, which, means this was the time the Bathroom Bills were all the public, or at least the folks where I lived, talked about for months (and later, trump)

(cw slurs)
any walk down the hallway or being in the cafeteria or i mean just being anywhere where anybody was, everyone was talking, at worst, about how "if those fucking fags / trannies come into this town, I swear to god im gonna kill them"

(which would always be met with resounding agreement and jokes about, the ways they would do it, how they would torture them and how the person would struggle, which of their guns they would use or how they would be hung, in, very graphic detail)

and at best, the closest that resembled a left in that school was center-right christian terfs, who would talk about how trans people are rapists constantly and how they should be arrested for being trans, again to resounding agreement

I had literally never heard a positive thing said about trans people in my life at that point, and just 2 neutral things ever said about gay people

this was also the time that I started to get dysphoria really bad and started to realize I might be trans after looking into my dysphoria on the internet, which I also barely had access to but luckily i found and old ass web 1.0 blog while at school (way better internet there)

which i read at home, discussing dysphoria that my internet could actually load. due to, all of the above, I kinda just had internalized how that even more proved I was possessed by a demon and was of the worst vermin to exist on the earth,

that I was rightfully hated by god, etc etc, I was very suicidal and hated myself so much. I also tried to just, push gender feelings away and tell myself they were fake. Despite all of that, hidden underneath it was still this, small, desperate feeling that this was unfair

So being queer in this situation mixed with seeing the horrible ways my friend and his family were being failed for simply being alive mixed with seeing cops horribly brutalizing black people for existing, made it very clear to me that something was horribly wrong

It would be a few years though, before I started to have folks on twitter begin to build a vague idea of socialism in my mind as an answer (i had slowly followed artists and music folks I liked, who happened to not be incredibly right wing), though it was still very scattered

it took until i was 17, when a friend would introduce me to anarchism, in online community that for the first time i had ever met people who, were cool with me as i was, who i could talk to and were okay with my autism

(and the fact that at that point, I still did not know how to mask at /all/), who introduced me to just the world of leftism and theory in general, i started reading a ton of it and a ton about leftist history

I started getting money from parents for things and then giving that money to friends who needed it, and my hatred of their capitalist, racist asses grew exponentially over time

and also their abuse continued to get more and more, intense, similar to when i was a younger kid, but im not gonna get into detail on that here

I finally managed to move away from them at the beginning of this year as it was seeming more and more like something, very bad would have happened if i stayed there

and then covid happened and im probably now gonna be homeless andddd here we are

(end of thread)