My Family Was On A TLC Reality Show. Here’s The Dark Secret That Never Aired.

I still visited the family often, desperate to get through to my siblings. I stood up for them and called my parents out on being unfair, for the first time in my life. For most of my childhood, I didn’t advocate for my siblings, because I had nothing to compare our experience to, no way of knowing it was not normal or fair.

The tension escalated as I continued asking questions, and began reminding my siblings of the times we were all taught to forgive and forget about ― how we always had impossible expectations and responsibilities. But I wasn’t living there anymore, and my mother could always come along and tidy up the thought process of a doubting child. She’d done the same for me for the first 19 years of my life.

Soon, my parents banned me from talking to any sibling without their supervision. Then I received the dreaded phone call from my dad: an ultimatum that I could either submit to Christian counseling with them ― and endure more controlling, emotionally devastating attempts to bring me into submission ― or I would lose complete access to my family.

I had to let go of my brothers and sisters, which is by far the most difficult decision I have ever made in my life. As soon as I got the phone call about losing access to my siblings, I began writing on my blog about my parents’ abuse. The best evidence I have to back up the abuse claims I detailed in those blog posts came from my dad’s attempt to save face. The day after the first post, he released a podcast in which he blamed my delusions on mental illness and left the microphone open for my siblings to respond to what I had written. My dad deleted the podcast within hours. I reported my parents to local authorities for child abuse, as did my therapist. I don’t know whether an investigation was conducted, but the following year, six of my siblings were enrolled at the local charter school, and today the eight youngest are in school.

In 2015, I moved from Colorado to Seattle in search of a new life. Within a year, I was homeless. With no college degree and limited schooling, I only qualified for jobs doing physical labor. I worked at a grocery store deli while sleeping in a car. I showered at a gym and changed into my uniform in the bathrooms of other grocery stores. While I was living in a car, I lost my entire blog and the hundreds of posts I had published, because I couldn’t afford to pay the web hosting renewal fee.

This past year, my partner, whom I met through mutual friends in 2016, and I found a community in Olympia, Washington. Here, we are among others who were cast out by extreme religion, most of us LGBTQIA+ and facing poverty and chronic homelessness. We exist to fight the patriarchy and colonizer-capitalism ― and to embrace our lives and love without the guilt our families and the church foisted on us for so many years. Thanks to the help of many friends and strangers from around the world, my blog archives have been restored, and I have some financial support from online patrons of my work.

I suffer from chronic pain and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). I do not own a car. I can no longer work on my feet because my body is so damaged from being overworked as a child, so I write. Between therapy and the relentless inconvenience of poverty, I write. I write about trauma and recovery, about poverty and injustice, about what I know now.

Twelve years ago, my family’s lifestyle was made into a spectacle for entertainment, alongside a host of controversial shows on The Learning Channel. I wasn’t allowed to watch TV as a kid, so while my peers were getting to know fourth-wall-breaking humor through comedies satirizing the genre like ,, my siblings and I were uncertain in front of the camera crew. We were being under-educated, overlooked due to the sheer number of us, and the older kids were raising the younger ones, while also catering to our parents’ every whim.

I have not spoken to my parents in three years. I’ve been told their “door is open” and that they are willing to welcome me back if I can set aside everything that makes me who I am today. I’ve never had a chance to come out to them as bisexual. As for my adult siblings, most people guess that our shared experience would bring us closer, but this has not been the case. Deeper still than the religious element of our upbringing was an emphasis on work ethic, being a “good asset” ― and it was this that came between my sisters and me in recent years. When I was homeless, my two older sisters blamed me for my own poverty. My parents’ snare has always been our siblings, and Lydia couldn’t bear to lose them. In our last exchange, she told me she was back to taking advice from our parents ― financial advice from my father and advice on essential oils from my mother for her own unvaccinated children.

Four of my adult siblings are still part of the Quiverfull movement. My parents’ primary message is that people should have more children, and my siblings are on their way to having large broods, too. Sometimes I receive a phone call from one of my brothers, but the chasm between what I believe now and what they believe makes communication nearly impossible. I miss them, and I hope someday I can build a relationship with them that isn’t based on adhering to my parents’ beliefs. Though deluded people with nefarious intentions still run the world outside of the one I eventually escaped, my pyrrhic victory is I don’t have to delude myself anymore.

Note: The author changed their name in March 2022, and this piece has been updated accordingly.

Artemis Stardust writes nonfiction about their experiences growing up in a large fundamentalist evangelical family. They blog about recovery and inequality, and they are working on a memoir. Their writing and artwork can be found on Patreon, and their site and other links can be found on LinkTree. They reside in Washington State with their partner and two cats.

This article was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in 2019 and was updated in March 2022. We are reposting it now as one of the most-loved personal essays by BuzzFeed readers.