I ticked all the boxes in high school. Ironic-but-not-really fascist, incel, anti-LGBT, anti-abortion, pick a reaction, really. Now I’m happily married, father, Kinsey-1, reading theory, with growing class consciousness and looking to build solidarity with those people that a worse version of myself once dismissed as lesser or ungodly. It took leaving home, developing positive and loving male-male friendships, and being told that I was good enough and worth love irrespective of my accomplishments for me to start to develop the capacity to love others in the same way. Those who have traveled a similar path, what did it take for you?
I won’t get into the hows and why’s but I almost croaked a few years ago and that experience lead to a sort of demystification of death as this separate, otherworldly force. It made it clear to me that death and suffering was a result of worldly conditions and that eventually lead me into leftism for obvious reasons. Before that I was a pacifistic libdem who surrounded myself with normie/reactionary leaning people because of internalized bigotry.