We weren't meant to know this much about each other

I chose this picture because I decided to write this while I was at work. This document started as a brief about a village selling rain barrels.

I haven't written in a while. Depression does that to you. Shit's lonely, but it's better to be alone than around other people.

It was around 2019 that I decided I wouldn't put up with conservatives that I wasn't being paid to put up with. That decision came when my otherwise patient, relatively kind and overwhelmingly normal aunt decided to start posting her undying love and admiration for Donald Trump publicly. Along with that came the racism and transphobia anyone who regularly deals with conservatives is used to.

Don't get me wrong: My aunt wasn't a saint before. Something was always a little off, because something would have to be off to think marrying my uncle was a good idea. My uncle, a pastor at an evangelical church, has long been known as a criminal grifter who simply grew up enough to understand pretending to be a man of God was the easiest con. He's the kind of funny uncle I'm amazed my parents ever left me alone with. Their kids, all a little older than me, were some of my closest friends growing up.

I could ask what has changed, but I'm not entirely sure anything has. The real change is we (as in, me, my family, and unfortunately for her, their eldest adult child, who didn't think she'd get expelled from her immediate family for coming out as nonbinary) got exposed to their real views. We had no way of knowing what was going on inside that church, what was on their TV, or what was playing on their radio when we weren't around. We didn't know. We didn't have to know. Facebook didn't exist. It wasn't the main source of communication in our small town.

Because it became such a vital source of information, it became the place where we all met. Suddenly, quickly, I knew my aunt's and uncle's every thought, it seemed.

We weren't meant to know what everyone around us thinks. I'm glad I know, I think, because I don't want anything to do with conservatives at all, but I don't think my life is better for knowing. I don't think anyone's life is better for knowing. The constant stream of bullshit has mostly exposed us to our extended family's and fringe friends' worst impulses. What was often left in the home was now out for everyone to see.

The famous "don't invent the torment nexus" tweet was much funnier when it wasn't becoming clear that the endless scroll was the torment nexus. I don't need to know any of this. Stop making me know this.