And it took me until this very year to seriously consider (thank you to my very astute, very funny, very observant sweetheart) that I might in fact be smarter than them. Unbelievable sudden clarity. What a life

Eventually, gently debunking a random conservative chain mail is what got me disowned at 22. Was somehow shocked at the violence of that response too. Amusingly, I’ve since grown into the very thing they feared I was before I knew what that was or why they feared it: a gay socialist artist

The naïveté of this is mortifying in retrospect. But I could not draw a logical line from what I’d said to the incredible unified anger of their response, esp. accusations about thinking I was smarter than them: I was a terminally confused, closeted teen convinced I was the stupidest cretin on earth

I didn’t even begin to form a political identity until after college. Likely being on the autism spectrum made this worse: I thought I was being reassuring & helpful when I fact checked fake news stories, etc.—that it would make them feel better to learn the things they were scared of weren’t true

Ofc at 36 I now understand that they saw me as some insane liberal interlocutor bent on humiliating them, but as a kid I was just mystified by my inability to say anything, ever, w/o a dogpile ensuing. I was so sheltered & ignorant & dissociated from real life, I didn’t even know what a liberal was