Confessions of Atlas

[Astatine]

When I was 13, I came out as gay to my only friend in school back then via message, hating myself for it, and the next day a friend of hers took her phone and read our chat history telling half of the Year I'm into boys. Sucked. Reactions were not too bad tho, could've been much worse.

My Georgian grandma doesn't know anything about politics, since I was 12 she kinda managed to get mail in ballots and urged me to vote for her cuz I know more than she does.

[Astatine]

When I was 13, I came out as gay to my only friend in school back then via message, hating myself for it, and the next day a friend of hers took her phone and read our chat history telling half of the Year I'm into boys. Sucked. Reactions were not too bad tho, could've been much worse.

This is why I made sure to specifically wait until school was over for me before telling my best friend I was gay. Those things always spread like wildfire in that environment. Plus, I guess it helped that I wasn't really sure of it until the age of 16, when I was definitely more mature than at 13.

I guess I was kinda early on, but at the age of 11 I already realized I was gay and just kept either avoiding the thought of it or pretending something that was just some malarkey (like "crushing on girls" with straight male teenie friends).

Was kinda relieving to tell it but after two years of constant anxieties this was a nightmare first, but actually, most people were quite chills with it. Quite ofc, not fully.

Another confession:
At age 15, a my English teacher assigned the boys to write a text about their dream girl and the girls to write a text about their dream boy. I wrote "I'm sorry, I couldn't do the homework because I'm gay" into my textbook and gave it to my teacher. Still have it at home somewhere.
Next day in class I she said I could have been "a little bit more flexible" to which I responded that if a maths teacher assigns me with calculating a saddle point of a function I couldn't just calculate the inflection point because I am not able to do the former.

The comparison is kinda mediocre, but what I heard from a younger friend who still goes to that school is that she has become more open and less heteronormative.
Like, it might be those little things like a homework who contribute to LGBT people questioning themselves (especially at that age) to be put in a role of "Just because you're a man, you have to like girls".

[Astatine]

I am tripping on acid right now, spent one hour reading on this forum straight while listening to Yugoslav war music and olawakandi's posts made so much more sense.

Edit: and it scares the hell out of me that Joe Biden's Instagram feed has exactly 666 posts at this moment.

Edit edit: gerrymandering is one whole level next on spookiness. Did anyone ever stare at gerrymandered districts on acid?

[Astatine]

Okay, I am calming down right down more and more from my pretty good trip and as I do not want to lose what I experienced about this forum, I decided to write it down. Will see whether I'll regret it but I sincerely would regret not to write this now.

I legit checked almost all of my old posts I did here since, and that was a very strengthening experience because my boyfriend and me both have tripped together, while we were watching cartoons before, he decided to play on his laptop and I checked in - how I refer to it - "my politics forum".
It made me realize what time has passed by since we met each other and how often it happened - especially during lockdown - that we were chilling and I was just scrolling on Atlas. So every post is like connected to things that happened. And I really realized how often I smirked when I saw OC's posts.

So to whomever reads this, I want to thank y'all for having turned this forum to an important part of my daily life. I lived through happy and bad moments while being on here in the past 9 months.

I do hope this is somewhat understandable I know I am just typing gibberish, ough.

[Astatine]

2 years ago, when I just started to become more interested into US politics and had a weird fetish for #moderates and bipartisanship, I wrote several US politicians e-mails to thank them for their efforts to reach across the aisle and asking for a signed autograph. In retrospect it doesn't even make sense to whom I wrote those e-mails and it's really embarrassing.

Well, ofc, I got no replies.

1 year later, I actually received an autograph saying "Best wishes, Jan".

Signed by Rick Scott.

So whenever you think you might have done something stupid, you should know that there is a random German guy who received a signed autograph of Voldemo... Rick Scott as response to an e-mail praising him for being bipartisan.

Yep..

[Astatine]

When I first heard of "Jim Crow laws", I thought for a while that Jim Crow was an influential Southern Democrat politician (idk, I always thought he might have been Governor of Mississippi?) who imposed many segregationist laws that were then copied by other Southern states. I was let in that belief until I googled "Who was Jim Crow".

[Astatine]

From 2008 (when I learned to form some basic sentences in English) on I legitimately believed that a certain spikey animal is called "hedgedog" and not "hedgehog". Nobody ever corrected me until last year, when my view of the world inevitably collapsed.