/lit/ - Literature

I grew up on a rural Christian farming community. My life was full of constant song, work, family, and fellowship. I was never alone, and always surrounded by vital, honest people.

I left when I was 24 when I had a following out with my manager at one of the commune workshops. I moved out, got my own place, a job at the bank and lived by myself. I have had gender problems my whole life and started transitioning to becoming a woman a few months later. I started much too old so I never "passed" and basically looked like a beardless guy with long hair and small breasts. Been rethinking my life a lot lately. Living outside in the World has been so incredibly isolating and alienating. I don't have a single friend that I didn't already have back from the commune, can't relate to people outside, have no one to trust or talk to. I grew up in a place where you didn't have to lock your doors, and people could trust that other's would watch their back. Being outside and seeing how desperate, viscious, and self centered everyone is has been a real trip. I feel like I'm constantly in a den of wolves. There is no beauty in the World, just constant litter, kakophony, and visual blight. I cannot put thought to word on how impoverished and bleak the World is when compared to before.

I've been thinking of calling my father and asking if I can come back, but I don't know if they would take me. I have almost no real connection to the outside, so it would as simple as packing up my belongings and driving home. I've been missing so many funerals of the elders who helped raise me, and missing my young cousins childhoods, and many weddings. The woman I was being pushed to marry.

I guess the main thing holding me back is a lack of genuine faith. I honestly don't believe that Christianity is true, no matter how personally convenient it may be. I feel like this choice would just be the results of "a rational calculus", and would objectively be the right choice to make, only that my internal motivations would be wrong. Is this a protestant neuroticism? All I desire would be to return to a simple life free of all the visciousness of the World. I don't know why I'm writing this here. I don't feel like I really have any to talk about this with.

thank you

Took an actual IQ test administered by MENSA. Results: exactly 100.

Laughed at it at first, and now weeks later, it's starting to wear on me. They say things like intelligence are kind of "up in the air" until adulthood, it's still somewhat malleable before then. Well, I'm turning 25 in a month, and that's the age brain and personality are set in stone. I'm feeling depressed thinking that what I have now is what I've got, I have to make it work for the next 40 years or so.