Read more on my blog here: https://www.artstardust.com/i-fled-the-united-states/

Hi Substack!

I have more people subscribed here on Substack than I have on my new blog, but I don’t post here!

If you didn’t receive my latest blog post earlier this morning, you are probably not subscribed.

If you’d like to continue getting my writings, please subscribe here.

I’ve been working on a collection of resources for a long time. The idea is that the Internet is full of poison - misinformation, disinformation, algorithms, pipelines. I am offering an alternative way to navigate around that. It’s not perfect and I’m going to keep working on it.

Here’s the latest post.

Please note: If you think you’re already subscribed, you might not be.

We’re All Statistics (And That’s Okay)

Logic Class Vs. Debate, Part 2: A Reflection on Shame

I have almost twice as many subscribers here on Substack as I do on my new site.

But I don’t post full writings on here anymore!

Please go follow me on my actual blog.

Here is a link to my latest post.

Everybody has multiple sources of income, and they aren’t adding up for the vast majority of us.

I’ve written about this on my new blog in two parts: Part 1 - Part 2

Please subscribe over there if you want to continue to receive my writings. I will close my Substack very soon.

When I stopped writing last year, I was severely burned out. There were a lot of reasons for this, but 2025 brought few means for rejuvenation. Before Trump’s second term had even begun, so much had changed on the Internet. We thought we were going to lose access to TikTok. Meta changed their terms and conditions to fully support fascism. Things were bleak looking out at the world, and that’s not even looking in at my own life.

I have spent this year picking up the pieces as much as possible. I started Physical Therapy again in January, and made significant progress with my physical strength and balance. I saw a talk therapist consistently. I sought psychiatric medical care, too. I also got good care from my primary doctor and a collection of specialists to address my chronic pain, poor sleep, and other symptoms. It may sound boring, but I’m so grateful to the people who have stayed with me over on Patreon to help me with keeping rent paid while I take care of myself.

I didn’t intend for my hiatus to last more than a year. I would have been so distraught to think that far ahead. I wasn’t having a tropical vacation or something. All this time, I’ve been using my limited energy to do what I could to hold myself together, perhaps getting a bit more energy to work with. Only a few months ago, I finally felt like I could return to writing, but only to start drafting and journaling. I wasn’t ready to return to sharing my thoughts with all of you just yet.

I’m in college again! I started an online program this semester to pursue a degree in sociology. I’m fascinated with psychology and human societies, perhaps because I observe these things as an outsider. My upbringing in an isolated world made me curious about how socializing really works, and how social systems can be improved upon for greater efficacy.

Whether you’re new here or you’ve been following me for years, I want to announce that I’ve been working on a new blog! This one has all my old writings on it, imported from my old blog and Substack. I am working on getting away from Substack because it SUCKS. If you still support me here on Substack, I will send you a personal email soon to work out the details, but you are not being charged anymore.

I’ve always said that supporting me is optional, not obligatory. I do rely heavily on my readers for my basic needs, so if you are interested in helping, anything is appreciated. My linktree has a variety of ways to send tips, or you can offer recurring support with a monthly or annual pledge on my new blog. Check it out: ArtStardust.com

Thank you all for everything you’ve helped me with over the years!

I have not written much of anything since shortly after the election last year. The tradition of writing reflections on my birthday seems as good a time as any to try once again to post a piece of writing.

For me, birthdays invite introspection. Not because I must be self-centered, but because they are so ordinary and arbitrary. The earth had been traversing around the sun long before I occupied it, and for that matter will likely continue long after it becomes hostile to all life, so to be a passenger “making trips” in orbit around our local star is hardly unique or even very interesting. I’m just along for a ride that I was never asked if I wanted to be on anyway.

I am 33 today. This age has always felt intimidating. Although the bible itself never mentions the age of Jesus (not that I believe it’s anywhere close to being a factual account), there’s a cultural mythology around the idea that he was crucified at the age of 33.

For so much of my life, this age has seemed distant. Old, even, to the child who was both afraid of and curious about my own martyrdom. Jesus got to live more life than I’d known before he was killed. He didn’t preach for very long, according to accepted tradition, before his death.

Part of me is disgusted that I am still so deeply affected by something I no longer believe to be the truth. Another part of me cannot neglect to mention this dark part of my past and present.

Ah, trauma: the gift that keeps on giving. As a reward for surviving horrors, life continues to struggle to survive, now haunted by memories of those horrors.

The concoction of experiences I’ve had, with the way I’ve done my best to cope, are a gigantic knot that seems impossible to untangle. Each strand loosened tightens another.

Speaking up about my trauma over ten years ago had impacts that I could not have predicted. I stand by the fact that I told the truth. It was the Jesus of the bible that said “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” but this was not my experience. I told the truth with total naivete. It was used against me in hundreds of ways. Predators got a whiff of my blood because I did not conceal my wounds.

I wanted to tell my story. I wanted to be understood, to connect. Alas, my connection to the outside world was from within a fishbowl. And what is a fish in a bowl to those outside of it, except entertainment? I did not know how to get to know people. What followed was the lopsided parasocial connection that follows so many of us who’ve poured ourselves out on the internet to be consumed.

I received many kind messages from people. They said things like “What I went through wasn’t as extreme as what you experienced, but your writing spoke to me.”

In time, I would realize that, although hopefully well-intentioned, these people were not seeing me as a complex person, but as a broken thing to compare themselves to. They perceived themselves as not as broken as I. This comparison made them feel better about themselves.

I promised myself and everyone else that I would write a book about my experiences. And I tried very hard to do that. But every attempt threatened my very will to live. Those traumatic experiences were so painful that recollecting the details sent me into spirals I struggled to recover from.

Writing was how I attempted to reach out. Writing became a way to stay afloat. Writing was also threatening to drown me.

Capitalism is the rule of exploit: whatever costs the least and delivers the most profits receives the investors. The exploited are exploited repeatedly. Get exploited and abused as a child in the entertainment industry, then twenty years later, you can get exploited again as you try to tell your story in a tell-all memoir or documentary. These courageous attempts to speak up became clickbait. They did not serve to halt the abuse itself.

And people would click, gathering in the comment sections to ogle us like animals in zoos. They wanted perfect conclusions. Success stories. Tell us you survived and you’re better now. Nobody wants to see a “victim mindset,” after all. They want to be reassured that the worst is over, and that real life has happy endings.

Finally, I stopped trying. I did what seemed impossibly selfish: I began to take care of myself. This was a last resort. My first abusers, my parents, were already behind me. But another predator took advantage of my woundedness, and I was in an abusive relationship for the last five years of my twenties.

For the past year, I’ve been doing my best to just take care of myself. I see my therapist twice a week. I go to physical therapy twice a week. I see doctors and specialists for my physical illnesses and chronic pain. I take my medications for my pain and my mental illnesses and to help me manage my ADHD. My recovery has been slow, but I understand that no quick fix lasts.

I wish I could say that in the end, writing my story brought the healing and connection I sought. My anger and devastation did not allow me to think clearly about what would happen if I told the truth to anyone who would listen. Telling the truth was not freeing, because it was no way to establish the community and support I so desperately needed. It was a way to make myself into a spectacle. Observers would see my pain and feel briefly entertained in some way, perhaps even reassured.

Some connections did last. I am grateful for those who are close to me now. My partner is so supportive. The people who support me financially have been amazing. I still keep up with many people I met through writing, who do appreciate what I have to say. These people have been supportive, and have steadily encouraged me to take care of myself since before I knew how. I am still learning how.

For these past several months, I have been recalibrating. Working on myself. Going to appointments. Learning everything all over, including how to properly eat and sleep. I did not do these things for an audience. I did them for me. This feels strange, even now. It is also a paradox to write about it for others to see now.

On the Internet, we feel seen by each other without actually seeing each other at all.

In the end, our screens are more often mirrors than windows.

I was seven years old when my family prepared for Y2K. I remember being terrified about what my conservative parents told me would happen: all the computers would crash, and everything we depended on technology for would no longer work.

I was under the impression that all the criminals in prisons would be released because the locks and security also depended upon computers. The basement of our little house in Minnesota was stocked with lots of dry goods, and we even filled extra buckets with water in case the plumbing went down.

My family had a tradition of eating a piece of pickled herring on a saltine right at midnight. It was apparently to honor our Swedish heritage. I remember standing around the kitchen table, counting down the last minute to midnight, and feeling dread about how much life as we knew it was about to change. We simultaneously crunched our fish and crackers and waited for the lights to go out.

The lights didn’t go out. Nothing changed at all, except that we had a lot of prepper supplies to go through over the next several years.

This new year feels like bracing for the worst. I wish I could say differently. I want to say we’re imagining a new future for ourselves, but it seems like we’re being propelled at lightning speed toward a situation nobody wants. I am struggling to hold onto hope.

This new year doesn’t seem new and fresh. It feels like the same old thing, being repackaged and marketed to the masses as revitalizing. The fact is that we are tired!

Americans are tired of being slapped with inescapable amounts of debt whenever we experience medical emergencies. We’re tired of the way insurance companies in our country are literally adding insult to injury.

And being denied free, quality healthcare is the tip of the iceberg.

Our housing market is so terrible, people my age don’t expect to ever own homes. Food prices are rising, and our incoming president certainly isn’t going to make that any better. I mean, he was president already, so we know how terrible he is. In less than three weeks, we’re going to be dealing with more of the same old shit that got us here.

Since I was seven years old, my understanding of what constitutes doomsday-level thinking has changed a great deal. I can laugh in particular about how drastically my view of the prison system has shifted. As a kid, I was afraid of criminals. Now, I fully support prison abolition. I realize that the system targets the poor and marginalized, and profits on their labor and suffering in the prison-industrial complex. If I knew then what I know now, I’d be glad to expect the mass release of imprisoned people.

While it’s important that the year 2000 did not lead to the types of crashes predicted, I remember a different world than the one I know now. Climate change is upon us. My childhood had rainier springs and heavier winters. There used to be so many splattered insects on windshields, we’d have to scrub them frequently to see clearly. That is no longer true. Each year, our planet gets warmer and another collection of species goes extinct.

I don’t think it’s useful to fearmonger about instantaneous changes. However, I have seen a lot of change in my young life. Is my trepidation a lingering fear from 25 years ago? I don’t think so.

I no longer expect that the stroke of midnight on a new year will break a magical spell, so to speak. I no longer do extensive prepping for an impending apocalypse. Still, the changes of the past quarter century point to an undeniable shift toward a hotter climate and greater inequality.

Note: I haven’t been posting on any platforms in the past two months or so because it’s been painful for me to type due to a case of carpal tunnel. I had to drop several projects in November, and I’m slowly getting back into creating. Thank you all for your patience and support!

Artemis Stardust writes about escaping and recovering from a fundamentalist upbringing in a large family. They are non-binary and disabled, and their writings reflect on changing perspectives surrounding mental health, trauma, politics, and the existential. Subscribe below if you’d like (paying for bonus content is optional)!

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My inner world is full of broken promises. I have ideas about what I will do, but reality has other plans. Often, I have entire to-do lists in my head, then the first thing on the list is overwhelming for me. This is partially because I deal with chronic pain and mental health barriers. It’s also because since I was a child, more has been expected of me than was realistic. Every day, I tell myself that I am capable of more than I actually am.

It’s frustrating to realize I can’t do what I set out to do.

The disabled community often utilizes Spoon Theory to explain our limitations to able-bodied and neurotypical people. While it has been helpful in communicating how we don’t have as much energy as others, it’s also worth noting that we don’t have the same number of spoons from day to day.

Before I was disabled, I could generally expect that I’d wake up each morning with the capacity to shower, make breakfast, prepare for a full day of work, etc., unless I woke up sniffly or something.

This is not what it’s like to be disabled.

Chronic illness is literally being varying degrees of sick all the time. Some days we can do more than other days, but we don’t always know where our limit is until we’ve smacked into it. It can look like being physically stuck, forced to sit down in the middle of a task due to pain or exhaustion.

This often happens to me when I’m doing the dishes: I unload the dishwasher, rinse and load up the dirty dishes, and as I’m washing the pots and pans, I suddenly get terrible shooting pain that begins in my lower back and turns to cramping down my legs. If I don’t sit down within a minute or so, the pain builds until it’s unbearable.

Usually when I’m explaining this to an able-bodied person, this is the part where the unsolicited advice begins: have I seen a doctor? What about a physical therapist? Am I on medications for the pain? Do I exercise and stretch? Have I tried yoga?

The answer to every one of these questions is yes.

Nonetheless, I have chronic pain that is difficult to manage.

It wasn’t always like this. I used to be able to work on my feet for full shifts. I used to be able to keep busy throughout the day. I was not born with a chronic illness, it came about within the past several years and was officially diagnosed in 2020. Diagnosis is not instant. Physical therapy and yoga have been helpful, but even those wouldn’t be possible most of the time without medication for the pain. It doesn’t make the pain go away altogether, either. The meds just bring the pain down to a more manageable level…mostly.

Anyway, I say all this to explain that my mind is often busy with unrealistic plans. I think about what I want to do, but I am unable to follow through, despite the best intentions and willingness. There are some things that help me get around the mental barriers, like psychiatric medication and mindset shifts. Overall, however, the main barrier is a physical one: my body does not cooperate.

The frustration of being disabled is that I seldom have the capacity for a basic set of tasks. What I used to be able to accomplish in one day, I’m now lucky to get done in a week. I can’t do what I expect myself to do. I am learning how to give myself compassion and adjust my expectations and goals accordingly.

It is also important to explain this because it helps people who are striving to understand. If you are one of those people, I appreciate you.

Artemis Stardust writes about escaping and recovering from a fundamentalist upbringing in a large family. They are non-binary and disabled, and their writings reflect on changing perspectives surrounding mental health, trauma, politics, and the existential. Subscribe below if you’d like (paying for bonus content is optional)!

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Writing is not like following a recipe. It is more like slowly building an informed intuition. It takes practice, and not everything is going to be good.

I must not be afraid to make bad art, and writing is an art.

Each day when I sit down to write, I do not know what will happen. I simply know that I must attempt to form my words into something. It might be good, but it is more likely to be mediocre or bad. The quality will not be determinable before the piece itself exists.

What is on my mind this morning? Yesterday I read an article about intuition and making art. It said that creating for an audience, emphasizing quantity over quality to keep up with internet trends, is no way to create. It stifles creativity and chokes intuition.

I like writing well enough. It is habit, and I’ve always liked the sound of typing, and I spent a good amount of time years ago on improving my typing skills because I used to make a lot of typing mistakes. Now I can trust for the most part that I’m typing accurately, even if I can’t see the screen. I like the process, the feel of writing, even without knowing what words I will put together.

As for the process of composure, I find that more difficult. I try to take bigger bites than I can chew, thinking everything needs to be a lengthy and thorough essay. This also stifles my creativity, because it’s overwhelming and perfectionistic.

Trusting myself will take practice and balancing. Balance is not static, it is constant readjustment.

I am learning how to be compassionate with myself, and this is not perfect, either.

So…today I reflect on my writing, and I adjust my balance slightly in the direction of being easier on myself. I do not fall too far in that direction – I am not assuming that I do not have to practice at all. I still have to show up.

Perfection is a myth, and pursuing it is folly. When I’m afraid to be imperfect, I have no room to adjust my balance and cultivate my creative flow.

This month, I am aiming to write more simple entries here on Substack. We’ll see how it goes.

“Social media: it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that wanted to perform. So the market said, ‘here, perform everything to each other all the time for no reason.’ It’s prison. It’s horrific. It is performer and audience melded together.” -Bo Burnham, Make Happy

It feels like it intensifies every day. There’s so many things to keep up with online. A lot of it is very serious, genuine art. A lot of it is satirical or humorous with a dark undertone of powerlessness, also a form of worthwhile art. A lot of it is meaningless, too.

Lately I’ve been watching Vlogbrothers again, and there’s been a lot of discussion about how algorithms control our attention now. Artificial intelligence is being fed information about what we click on and react to, and then it produces a selection of posts that match up our attention with advertisers. In this way, our attention is being bought and sold, tugging at our compulsions in ways we often can’t control. John Green explains it really well in this video: My Consciousness. Their Capital.

At the same time, we are performing on these platforms. Here on Substack, I’ve got five other tabs open from writers I really respect, whose articles I want to read, whose voices I even think are far more informed and important than my own. I probably won’t get to all of them, though, because I’m overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content there is to process. And that’s just Substack! I can’t possibly keep up with every post on every platform, even though I very much want to keep track of the people I want to support with my attention and reshares.

And for the most part, we’re broke. I know a lot of people who put in a lot of effort on various platforms, creating regularly to entertain and inform their audiences, and they’re getting paid next to nothing for it.

The poor are expected to come up with money to pay for places to live, food to eat, to keep the lights on. But the workers are not being paid enough to make that happen, so everyone is expected to monetize every bit of time outside of regular work. If you’re too disabled to work a regular job, you’re likely creating content or monetizing your hobbies, too. I know I am.

We’re running frantically in circles to perform for scraps, and then we’re expected to turn around and use those scraps to pay landlords, food price gougers, and utilities companies that control the prices of things that should be free.

How is it that I’m seen as the weird one for saying these things should be free?

My purpose for writing has changed a great deal. I used to think it was a way to influence thoughts and minds in a big way, something that would make waves in the world.

I don’t think that anymore.

I have been struggling to figure out what my purpose is.

Right now I’m trying to practice not overextending myself. Writing, painting, needlework…I don’t think one thing is any more important than the others anymore. It’s just…something to bide my time.

Trauma recovery is a delicate thing because my fight/flight/freeze/fawn response was so activated for so long that I remain hypervigilant. I have a hard time relaxing.

When there isn’t urgency, I feel like what I’m doing doesn’t really matter. I keep coming back to that phrase, “really matter.” What does it mean for something to really matter?

I get to define that for myself, but I also have limitations. Those are frustrating, because I fight with reality. A great deal of what I’ve been reading and studying states that emotionally mature people practice acceptance of reality. Fighting against reality is truly exhausting, and it gets me nowhere.

It’s like picking a fight with a brick wall.

But it goes back to the traumatized mind – for so long, I was given futile tasks every damn day while being told that they mattered a lot.

What matters to me is justice, and it seems impossible to fight injustice as one person.

If writing worked, it would have worked thousands of years ago.

I once thought it would be impactful to sacrifice myself as a martyr for the Christian cause. If that worked, it would have worked thousands of years ago, too.

I feel like I’m being told to just disengage from what I can’t control, and focus on my hobbies, living my own little life.

And that is so disheartening, discouraging, and hope-squashing.

I may be good at creating things, but what does it matter?

I don’t know how to accept that I am so small.

I often get asked about whether I’m in touch with my family these days. People are curious about whether there’s been a story development. I think they want to see some kind of closure and a nice conclusion. A couple of questions are related to this: Why do so many of my siblings have different perspectives on what our upbringing was like? And why do some of my siblings seem to be thriving, while I constantly put my struggles on display for the public to see?

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