The absence of blatant racism / supremacism really does help ground myself when I’m feeling stressed. I’m white passing, and while everyone but my grandfather learned german as a second language, my german is abhorent being born here. English became my primary language rather effortlessly.
I became somewhat misanthrophic after peers of mine consistently wanted to bond over their racism, not knowing my background. I grew up not knowing much german, using a mix of my both parents languages, making learning german culture undesirable for me.
High german and german culture feels foreign and forced upon me personally, but I didn’t have a single culture and community I could completely call my own, which posed a set of problems I would encounter every other time I was trying to socialize.
I see that many people like me don’t really learn their parents language, nor the local one, but get drawn to english as their primary one (Especially if they’re born after the millenium). Being a third culture kid isn’t easy.
That being said, I am really grateful to have this space to breathe on the web, which isn’t primitively tribalistic, but focused on human values. I want to thank you for bringing this thought up.
Are you secretly me?
I used to have two such friend groups. One full of NDs like myself, the other became weirdly over years thanks to the manosphere and joe rogan types during lockdown. Both of em started at roughly the same spot, but the ND group started to affiliate themselves more and more with the irony pilled online-fascists, memeing the wehrmacht (they’re not even remotely of german decent, mind you), and aren’t able to be talked to about anything anymore. I’d say its real life brain rot, and even though they used to be nice ppl, I didn’t feel safe keeping contacts at all. (I always asked questions to understand why they repeat after what those irony pilled fascistoids say, but it didn’t bear any fruit)
The ones that became incels used to be chill, but one of them filled the group with incel-cope about not getting a date, and vented non-stop about other personal problems, increasingly blaming women and non-whites for his problems.
The moment I cut contact, it felt like I freed myself, and could finally start to know what respecting my boundaries and values is like. The loneliness I felt for the period after that wasn’t all to nice, but I’d do it all the same.
Being bombarded with transphobic, misanthropic, misogynistic and racist shit all the time is disgusting me on the web, and yet I still let it into my personal spaces.
While I used to hang during their radicalisation (and me starting hormones n social transition), it seems to me, staying just enabled their bigotry.
I used to think that I can, after some time, understand why they act the way they do, but its not worth my mental if they don’t even care to introspect themselves.
And yeah, I even went on vacation with em. It was weird and uncomfortable af tbh.
I wish you the best on your path, and hope you can enjoy the weekend trip non-the-less. ^^