It could always be worse, though I wouldn’t choose to live here if it weren’t for my boyfriend. As a kid, I used to dream of leaving the South for good. And I managed to pull it off by getting a job at a company in Silicon Valley just before the pandemic.

But dating in that part of the US is hard if you’re a techie who’s not a queer Communist poly furry, so I became open to long-distance dating. To be clear, my values and beliefs are radically leftist when compared to the value system that the government and religious authorities (basically the same thing in TN, lol) try to cram down kids’ throats. But I’ve endured enough brainwashing attempts to be extremely skeptical of any belief system that claims that it’s the one true way and all other beliefs/systems are <insert absolutist hyperbolic ways of saying “bad” here>.