It’s hard to tell.

My mother had a tough childhood, growing up in a country that was a dictatorship —she spent my whole life telling me why dictatorships were bad and why dictators are to be avoided, and how to not fall to charismatic leaders who could become dictators…

But then somewhere along the line she got suckered into the 2012 end of days conspiracies, which when those didn’t turn into anything, she turned to “channelings” from “aliens” in the so called “Galactic Federation of Light” (which for those keeping up with crazy 2020 headlines, That was the SAME group mentioned by the Israeli scientist who claimed to have made contact with aliens… unfortunately I believe the old man was duped by the same folks who have been circulating these GFOL channeling/conspiracies for the last decade or so, at least.) and those channelings kept telling her of a coming Ascension, which also never happened…

At the time when she was big into Aliens/2012 conspiracies, she was also unemployed, and bored at home most of the day, while I was at school… I convinced her to get a job in 2014, and from then until 2018, she worked a normal job, at a department store, and had friends. She was less into the conspiracies, and the crazy talk,because she had friends and a job she enjoyed.

In 2018/19, she quit her department store job for to start working “for herself” (Uber/Lyft), which already gives you a lot of alone time… but then in 2020, she was no longer able to take passengers for Uber Lyft, she started delivering food.

Isolation in her car, over the pandemic, absolutely created a perfect environment for her to listen to these videos, chain texts, Facebook posts, and all the conspiracy crap that started circulating all over everyone’s parents’ pages last year. (Partially because THE ALGORITHM PUSHES THOSE VIDEOS, partially because they’re old and don’t know how to Google or verify facts on something. Still hits me like a ton of bricks how fucked up it is that the same people who told us to not trust everything we read online and watch on tv—just started trusting everything they read and see, even if it’s clearly fake?) So she’d be alone, in her car, waiting on orders, watching these terrifying videos that make you think the world is ending —while being one of the few people out driving in the city during the actual lockdowns that happened last year, it would make things seem scarier. She already wasn’t a fan of the growing homeless population in the city, and with the pandemic, there were more of them, and one of the things she said (it’s awful) to deny the pandemic was that “if it was real, it would be killing the homeless people on the streets, there would be less of them, but there’s even more than before!”.

But her boyfriend she met right before the pandemic, also watches those conspiracy Q videos, and engaged with her in them, and keeps her engaged with them. They actively scare her, and instead of doing what a good partner should do —calm her down and tell her why it’s fake and not real— he encourages it and convinces her even more how real it is, even when these things are so very far from truth.

I don’t want to blame it all on her boyfriend, but he’s a huge factor. So is the isolation. As well as the fact that she isn’t educated… and it is also possible that she could be somewhere on the schizophrenic spectrum, because she has an aunt with schizophrenia, and statistics for it in families if one family member has it, go up… there are a lot of factors, but the BIGGEST FACTOR is that She Already Had Been Involved With Cult-Like Forms of Thinking and Conspiracy, Before This. (It just wasn’t this debilitating. She wasn’t ruining relationships with her family members over alien conspiracies… but she did treat me like absolute shit over 2012 ascension conspiracy, when she thought she would get to ascend to the ‘next dimension’ but the people ‘in lower vibrations who aren’t even aware, like [she is]’ wouldn’t get to. She would lump me in the group of Others, and it hurt a lot to feel like my crazy mother wouldn’t even include me in her crazy end of times ideas.)

I just feel like there comes a time when I need to chose my sanity and mental health and well-being, over re-parenting my parent who clearly failed.

So I don’t feel guilty that I haven’t spoken to my mother since she moved in with her QBoyfriend. I feel sad that she ruined my relationship with her, and with my grandma and aunt.

It’s sad, and the worst part is I’m not alone in this kind of suffering. There’s this whole subreddit full of people in similar boats as me, but it all feels like none of us really have any solutions!

I just wish there was a fix all bandaid for this.