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Follow-up question: For those who made a significant change, how did it affect your relationships, whether romantic, social, familial?
A few of you mentioned in comments to my previous question that changing your mind could or did affect relationships. To those who did go through such a significant perspective shift, please share your story!
Like many people in the previous discussion, I grew up conservative and religious. I was a true believer. I held some skeptical views and didn’t fit into the core group, but I still led strong on the fringe with the other misfits. For example, I was all in on the concept of God and Biblical inerrancy, but I was enough of a feminist (without using the word) to defy the subjugation stuff.
I slowly, slowly separated myself as I began having friendships that challenged my indoctrination. It was steeply ingrained with instinctual rebuttals, so it took an embarrassingly long time to dismantle some basic tenets. But when I came to realize that its anti-LGBTQIA stance was a feature and not a bug, my beliefs came apart much quicker.
Since I had been a leader and active member, I lost a lot of friendships. Some directly confronted me on my changes; others quietly faded. My parents are still very active in our religion, and it has strained our relationship; however, they do adhere to the “love” aspect so they are trying to adjust themselves to their lost sheep. It helps that both my siblings are also agnostic - I think it’s just hard for them that I finally went that way, too.
What this change did do, unexpectedly, was improve my relationship with my partner. Without all the guidelines and expectations of the religion, we’re much freer with each other and our kids. We have more fun - possibly because I have less anxiety.
And I’ve made a lot of new friends, ones that are more flexible and open in their thinking. They allow me to be malleable, as I do with them. Many also share a similar religious trauma/history.
All in all, I feel more at home and myself than ever before with this current life. It took a lot of sacrifice, humiliation, and loneliness to get here, and it’s not safe for everyone to do. But I’m grateful I could.
I find this super interesting because I've found the exact opposite (though I've only moved US to Germany, so not quite as far). My background is very religious but being so far away means that I miss all the day-to-day pressure on that front, and when I do call or visit we can focus on the positives of hanging out together.
One of my sisters had a kid last year though and I really wish I could see her more often than once a year at most. Glad I live in the age of smartphones on that front, at least! I'm luckily pretty far from my parents' health deteriorating (I hope) but I do also worry about that.
I live 250ish miles from my home city, the mates and friends I made throughout my twenties vanished in a puff of smoke the second I moved away.
I've got a couple left, one is golden and the other has become very opportunistic after the last few years have changed their life.
I've found people are less and less likely to actually put that graft of friendship in due to social media. I haven't got any, so sometimes meeting old friends can be daunting as they refer to social media things about their lives... That I've no idea about. But the art of conversation seems lost on them to actually elaborate and share what it is they've done / did.
Another comment has someone mentioning they moved from the US to Taiwan. I also moved across the same ocean, but to another Asian country: Japan.
Sad as it is to say, I don't talk with my friends or family back home very often. But strangely enough, I'm MUCH happier here than I was in America. This probably has to do with the fact that I live in a small-ish city, and my costs of living are VERY cheap (so long as I don't buy anything from overseas, with the yen being super-weak now). I have new friends, a new social circle, and I'm not terribly far away from a Big City... which is also where all my new-found friends live.
There are a lot of things I miss back in America, but I'll take living in Japan (I've even made significant progress on learnign the language) over going back to America any day.