After looking for some kind of community/assistance to help me get back on my feet, I can’t help but be confronted with just how corrupt and inadequate society truly is. Back in 2017 I was wrongfully terminated from a job I had for 8+ years, and it put me on a path that allowed me to experience the struggles of life all the way until I reached what feels like an impossible situation. (I’m going to try and summarize this as much as possible)
Basically, it starts with a lying boss that was stealing time and he had a tendency to fire employees for his own incompetence. I started documenting everything, he tried to fire me, I defended myself, and I got promoted. Then I had a boss who rarely showed up. He left me to run the place, stole time, I documented everything, I defended myself, and got promoted again. After that I had a District Manager that wanted me to steal time from anyone who went over 40 hours and I refused. She held a grudge against me, lied about me, demoted me, and then eventually fired me. Ultimately, it turned out that over the years this District Manager never officially documented anything. She promoted me just to shut me up, played the long game, and planned to fire me all along. Coworkers, bosses, middle management, HR, and the labor department, etc. No one cared. I even had some of the emails/proof from previous attempts to fire me but there was no investigation. 8+ years of hard work went down the drain, and I lost the only work reference I had for nearly a decade.
After that, a friend of mine got me a job working fast food and then Covid started. Work was scarce. I lost my apartment. I moved back in with family, and I had just enough money to afford my car payment, car insurance, food, gas, etc. The economy was shutdown. People were stuck at home. Tension grew and there was a lot of growing hostility due to increasing political division. Everyone had different opinions and strong convictions, but being someone who thinks for myself, I didn’t just ‘pick a side’ and that caused some problems. My friend’s families stopped being friendly. Friends stopped reaching out as much. We stopped spending time together, and everyone just seemed to grow apart.
At this point, I was learning a lot about narcissism and after moving back home after 16 years, I started to recognize and confront the dysfunction in my own narcissistic family system. 3 siblings lived with my dad rent free their whole lives and now that we were all in our 30’s, I noticed that nothing really changed since we were kids. I started bringing little things up in conversations here and there, but all of it was just repeatedly and systematically swept under the rug. Time would pass, tension would grow, and boom all of that tension would turn into an explosive fight. After the fight everyone else would just act like it never happened, but I was not ok with that. I wanted to confront the problem and offer solutions but unfortunately my family did not like that at all.
Now, if you know anything about narcissism, narcissists will do anything to avoid accountability, so what does my family do? They started to gaslight me, devalue me, isolate me, and then started a vicious smear campaign against me. Looking back now, I severely underestimated just how much my family secretly hated me. It turns out that they were doing everything they can to turn me into the scapegoat and blame all of the family’s dysfunction on me.
1 big example is that my health started slowly declining over a 2-and-a-half-year period. One day I caught my brother spitting or putting something in my food, so I asked him to stop making me a plate. Then something happened. I started ‘magically’ getting better and now I honestly believe that I was being poisoned. If that’s not bad enough, during this time every little thing turned into a huge fight. I couldn’t wash my hands, wash the dishes, make a sandwich, wash clothes, or even throw a bag of trash in the trash can without my family starting an argument over it. All of it was just extremely exhausting. I lost my job. I lost my car. I ran out of money and that’s when I realized that I was in some serious trouble.
Now, I apologize if this post is getting a little long, but this is when I started learning about intentional communities. As a Christian, I started looking into churches, church communities, and monasteries, etc. Then I started looking into volunteer work, government assistance, jobs with housing, work exchange programs, etc. Then I l found this website and started learning about ecovillages, homesteads, worker farms, tiny homes, co-op living, and self-sustainable communities, etc. But unfortunately, despite all of the great work you people are doing, I have been confronted with the sad reality that the entire system is ‘collectively’ just one big dumpster fire.
For example. 1. I have 15+ years of experience working in retail and I don’t have any skills that most intentional communities need. 2. I don’t see any jobs or opportunities that offer housing and/or job training. 3. I only learned about intentional communities after falling on hard times and no one believes my ‘sob story’. 4. Narcissistic abuse conditions you to keep quiet and I find it hard to share my story especially since I have a history of being punished for defending myself. 5. Kindness is habitually treated as weakness so if you genuinely need help or want to help, your vulnerability leaves you at risk. 6. Beyond this website, there is no reliably effective way to connect and communicate with like-minded individuals. 7. My health isn’t the greatest so I can’t just leave my abusive family and join a community without an understanding of where I am physically/mentally. 8. I tried calling the police on my family and despite documenting their behavior, the police told me that ‘if my family was dangerous then I would just leave’. A response that is in my opinion completely insane. 9. There seems to be more help for recovering addicts, women, children, single mothers, and families but little to nothing for single men. I’m not even saying there is enough help. There just seems to be a few more options. 10. Being a Christian living in a ‘Christian’ nation, I am authentically shocked to discover that most churches operate like a business instead of an intentional community. 11. If there are churches and church communities that operate like an intentional community, a system to connect people to those communities is basically non-existent. 12. Intentional communities are not immune from corruption and narcissistic abuse. A lot of the stuff I’ve experienced while running the ‘rat race’ can also be found in any community.
If you made it this far, I appreciate you. Thank you for listening. I honestly appreciate the goal of this website, and the world desperately needs more of this. Hopefully, by sharing my experience, we can not only appreciate everything this website represents but also recognize just how much work there is to do. If I can, I would love to introduce the idea of intentional communities and connect it with the Christian church. That is my vision. Not only are the resources available but the potential to make a fast spreading long lasting impact on the world……it’s all right there. I just need to connect with people who will help me make that vision a reality.