Jennifer Delgado-Fashion, Beauty, and Web3 Blogger

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

Trying to Save My Father

Part Two

My father’s lungs stopped working and as a result he was intubated. I will never forget the look in his eyes when he was intubated. For me it is one of the most haunting memories of the entire sickness. I remember my father strapped up against the medical bed, sedated and pinned down while doctors pushed a thick tube down his throat. I will never forget the look in his eyes when they were preparing to intubate him. I think in that moment he felt one of the deepest moments of heartbreak in his entire life, feeling his heart absolutely breaking, seeing his faith in goodness and happiness and hope completely get violently stripped from him. He saw the worst happen instead of something better, a nightmare becoming real instead of a triumphant story as he had hoped he would experience. I think he experienced medical trauma that he had no idea existed before that moment. I think in that moment he realized he possibly was not going to get better and that his suffering would get only deeper. But my fathr was so brave, he did not cry at that moment, and he did not cry often in the hospital. My father fought so hard for his life, even in that moment he gave it all he had. After he passed the doctors said that he was incredible for lasting as long as he did despite the cancer and sepsis, that he only lasted as long as he did because of the amount of sheer, inner brute strength he possessed.

Thereafter every day was like a medical emergency, a nightmare scenario that was my life instead of something I would watch on TV. I was extremely sick at that time. I was battling panic disorder with agoraphobia and Lyme Disease acutely, and the stress made my symptoms worsen severely. Since my father chose me as his power of attorney, I was in charge of making his medical decisions and going to the hospital most days. Only people who have gone through exposure therapy for phobia’s can understand how excruciating it was physically and emotionally to go to the hospital every day despite being agoraphobic. So many times I would vomit outside, sob, have panic attacks, etc., but I would just keep pushing, moment by moment, day by day because my Papi needed me. My love for him was greater than my suffering. His need for me was greater than my anguish, and it felt worth it all just to sit next to him and kiss his forehead and hold his hand. To grieve every day, on top of battling the phobic thoughts and compulsions, my spirit and mind felt shattered and broken beyond comprehension. I felt like I was just focused on functioning one tiny bit at a time, to just keep breathing, just swallow this food, just take one more step, just breathe one more breath. Because Papi needed me. It was at this time period that besides when I was begging God to let my dad get better, bargaining with him, etc., I stopped praying for Him to help me on an individual basis. I didn’t see how God could exist and allow me to be diasbled and agoraphobic and watch my dad die at the same time. 

For several months my dad lay in the ICU, too fragile to be moved downstairs or sent home. The doctors wanted to take him off all of the life support and have him pass, but he staunchly refused, wanting to stay on it and keep fighting and hoping for enough improvement to get better enough to do some kind of treatment for the cancer. What the doctors understood implicitly was still something he and my family and I couldn’t seem to accept. Our religious beliefs were in overdrive then, convincing us that a miracle was imminent and we would be rewarded for our faith. Sometimes I would catch my father in moments of sheer agony and exhaustion, seeming to want to give up, to want to ask for peace and to let go, but whenever we asked he would say no, that he couldn’t and wouldn’t leave his children. And that he didn’t want to die, he wanted to live so badly. My dad fought off the sepsis, endured the dialysis, did not eat for months due to being intubated and the cancer having grown too much, and breathing through machines, defecating on his bed, with tubes and IV’s all over his body. He would beg for ice, for water, for food, but his body couldn’t process food anymore and we couldn’t give him any because of all his tubes, and he couldn’t even do simple tasks anymore. 

There was one day where I realized my dad wasn’t going to get better. I asked the doctor why my dad couldn't do cancer treatment if the fungal infections and bacterial infections triggered by sepsis had been fixed. He essentially told me, look at your fathers body, look at his stomach, it is impossible for him to recover. Cancer was everywhere. I really saw him in a bare naked way at that moment that perhaps I was too numb to have noticed before. I saw his skeletal frame, his massive tumor-ridden stomach, his beautiful, precious body full of disease and saw that he was too far gone. The doctor was right. There were too many tumors and the cancer had infested into his body beyond any hope. I broke down weeping in the hallway, because I knew mentally at that moment that the battle was over, my prayers weren’t answered, and I was going to lose my precious Papi. 

It wasn’t long after that that my dad’s moment of passing came. One day I was alone with him with my twin sister and best friend. My mother and siblings had left to eat something for dinner and so that my mother could finally get a break from watching him. She and my Aunt Goya were his constant companions, especially my mother. She was his constant support and best friend while he was dying. On that early evening I read to my father from the Bible, and I prayed for him and to him. I told my Papi to not be scared, that God loved him and he was so loved by Him. I told him through prayer that God didn’t want him to be scared, that God was going to show him right now why he shouldn’t be scared, and that his father and his aunt and everyone he loved that passed before him were right there with him. And I kept telling him again and again, to not be scared, that God loved him, and that he was safe and would be okay. I imagined in my mind while I said it that he was seeing God behind his eyelids, showing him light and peace and happiness, and that he saw his father and loved ones who had passed there too. Right when I finished the prayer and said amen, all of my father’s machines started beeping and going off, and then there were nurses and doctors everywhere, moving me away from him and starting CPR on him. I remember crying and screaming, feeling like I was outside of my body looking down. I remember feeling the confused mixed up emotions of not wanting to let him go but also wanting him to leave his tortured body and not suffer even a milli-second longer. I wanted my Papi to be free, I wanted him to no longer have to live this God forsaken existence. I felt or saw a bright light flash up towards the ceiling. I knew immediately it was my Papi. The doctor’s kept doing CPR, but I knew he had left. My father passed on December 1, 2019.

His death was devastating to me because there was no way I could fix it, no hope it could get better. He was just gone. After his death I suffered from nightmares and flashbacks. I received PTSD treatment for trauma, and it helped immensely. That along with therapy for grief and allowing time to pass has allowed me to gain peace even though I will never be okay with the fact that this happened to my father, and I miss him always.

Since his passing my health has gotten significantly better to the point where I have been able to return to school and am almost done with my bachelor’s degree. I have never returned to the Jehovah’s Witness religion. The mixture of my illness, my father’s death, and the ensuing pandemic resulted in me being able to sort of wean myself off socially more and more from the religion in a gradual way. This gave me the opportunity to leave without having to be questioned, investigated, or shunned. Many family members who identify as Jehovah’s Witnesses no longer speak to me, as even though I am not officially shunned as I no longer attend meetings I am seen as “worldly” and thus a bad influence. The elders of my congregation thankfully pretty quickly forgot about me and stopped checking in on me very early on. The vast majority of “friends” either disappeared when I got sick or slowly cut me off when I stopped attending meetings and being responsive. For many of them I do not hold any anger, as I don’t expect them to give up their families and their entire lifetime worth of friends and community just to be able to talk to me. I understand that for them to psychologically survive they have to stay in the religion, and for that I feel sad for them. The few friends who have kept in touch have done so in secret and privately; I will never share their names because I do not want them to get in trouble or suffer consequences in the religion for continuing to be my friend. If I ever go public with my experiences I know that I will be shunned and my name will be announced in my old congregation as someone who is no longer a Jehovah’s Witness and is ex-communicated. I truly don’t care about that, although I do worry that it would cause suffering for my family members still in the religion. For the most part though, I have mostly just let the religion fall into the past and don’t really think about it or let it interfere with my current life and current movements forward. I have started seeking therapy for cult survivors, as I have found that there are some lingering effects from being raised in a cult, especially with difficulties with intimacy and feelings of safety. Regardless of the difficulty of confronting that emotional trauma, I feel so thankful for leaving the religion. I would do it one hundred times over, and I know that my father understands why I had to leave from where he watches me and loves me regardless.

In a lot of ways I feel lost in figuring out my career and my path in life. But I have so many dreams and so many hopes in particular for my dad through me. I dream of becoming successful at whatever career path I choose and never changing my last name, so that when people hear of things I have accomplished it is his last name that they hear. I dream of opening a clinic after him, or naming an academic scholarship after him in his hometown high school in Mexico. I dream of making him proud, of taking care of my siblings the way he would have; I dream of just making him smile and experience happiness wherever it is that he is now. I can’t spoil him the way that I always planned and hoped to, so this is the best that I can do. And I know that he will be happy and proud of me because he loved me unconditionally, and that will always be the way that I love him.

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

Trying to Save My Father

Part one

My father had been having stomach pains for a few months before he eventually went to the hospital for those symptoms.The doctors at that hospital told him he likely just had an ulcer and sent him home, but worsening pain and nausea compelled him to head to another hospital emergency room. There he was told that he had stage four stomach cancer, and that he likely had less than a year to live. My twin sister was alone with him when the doctor told him that. She called me in a panic as well as my siblings and my mother to tell us what the doctor had said. My dad didn’t believe the doctor. He was in shock, as we all were. My dad was one of the healthiest and strongest people I knew. He had the strength of a bull like my cousin said, always full of energy, a hard worker, and resilient. He had never had any health problems in his entire life and rarely went to the doctor. I think we all had the sense that it was inconceivable that he had cancer, and he also was shell-shocked by his diagnosis. But my dad told the doctor that he was going to get better, that he wasn’t going to die in a year. He was determined to fight and get better in particular for his children, repeatedly saying to the doctors that his children still needed him. After finding out the diagnosis, my sister ran home the entire five miles from the hospital, crying. After that nothing was ever the same, and our lives became the seasons of “before cancer” and “after cancer.”

The medical drama that our life became felt like it happened both extremely rapidly and horribly slow. My father’s belly swelled up like a balloon, as the cancer had spread throughout his abdominal wall and gastro-intestinal lining; it was causing ascites, which was a buildup of fluid around his abdomen. It was awful seeing how taut his skin was, his belly straining against the tumors and cancer-filled fluid in his abdomen. This was extremely painful and uncomfortable for my father, as he felt constant pressure and pain in his stomach and it frightened him. He also had excruciating nausea, severe reflux, and despite having been such a lover of food all his life he could barely get anything down at all. It hurt me to my core to see my father struggle so much to just choke down one egg or one piece of fruit. My father, who had had the most voracious appetite and such a passion for cuisine, was reduced to being afraid to eat, afraid of the ensuing suffering that would result if he ate. We would take him to the hospital to get the ascites drained, but it would come back extremely quickly because of how advanced his cancer was. Thus, any symptom relief from draining it proved to be very temporary. My father and mother were told by the doctors that no treatment really works effectively for late stage stomach cancer; even chemo in their opinion was more for making him more comfortable and if he was lucky would allow him to live for a few more months. But my father loved his four children so much that he insisted that he was not going to die, that he would continue providing for his family, and he wouldn't let cancer take him prematurely when we still needed his presence in our lives. 

At the time of my father’s diagnosis, I was somewhat still practicing as a Jehovah’s Witness, as was he and most of my immediate family. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness my entire life. Jehovah’s Witnesses have very strict beliefs concerning friendship and community, and what makes one deserving of being able to partake in the emotional support of a community. As Jehovah’s WItnesses, emotional support from our congregation and other members of the religion depended on our obedience to the rules set forth by the religion’s leaders, known as the Governing Body. In order to be spoken to, be able to attend social events, and have congregation elders and other members of the congregation visit you or give you emotional support, one had to follow all the rules once they were baptized. Failure to do so would result in the revoking of all aspects of community and socialization, and if they think your actions warrant it, it can even result in expulsion from the religion or shunning by the entire community and your immediate family. My father in the years before his death had felt compelled to start making a difference in his hometown in Mexico and to give back. He began volunteering with a local non-profit here in Chicago, called Los Guerrerenses. Through them as their Secretary, my father was able to do charitable work for his impoverished hometown in Mexico, including building a playground for local schoolchildren and helping with legal fees to reunite family members from his hometown with their family in Chicago that they had not seen in person for decades. This however was seen by the religion as taking part in a political organization, which is expressly prohibited in the religion. This led to members of the congregation slowly beginning to ignore and mistreat my father, and the social alienation he received from them just pushed him farther away and further into his charity efforts at the non-profit. They chastised him for being involved in “wordly politics” and admonished him that if he wanted to be accepted by them he would have to stop all of his political activities. My father refused to stop helping his village in Mexico, and he did not understand why it was viewed as something negative by the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

When my father was dying he asked the Jehovah’s Witnesses to come visit him. He wanted them to give him emotional support and pray over him, as the congregation elders as leaders of the congregation tended to do when a congregation member was hospitalized. However, they refused to help my father or pray over him or offer him any encouragement from the Bible, instead telling him that if he wanted those things he had to go to their religious meetings in person. They said this despite the fact that he was already in the hospital with organ failure and would never be physically able to step outside of the hospital ever again. I have never forgiven them for that, and it proved to be the last straw in my wavering membership in the religion. Even though I had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, as I grew older my doubts increased and eventually I could no longer drown them out into silence. For example, we were always told to never read any information that portrayed Jehovah’s Witnesses in a negative light or that spoke about them at all; rather, we should only read about Jehovah’s Witnesses from the religion’s leaders themselves. Even as a middle schooler I realized that this didn’t make any sense, because in school we learned that to get to the truth one must read and research both sides of an argument. If one side forbids you from reading the other side's story, how could you ever know the truth? Even at that age it implied to me that they were hiding something or that they knew that the more the members researched, the farther away they would get from the religion cognitively and emotionally. However, as I did not want to get shunned by my family and community and was too scared to shatter my worldview that I had been raised to believe, I decided to just ignore it and keep obeying. 

Eventually in my first year of college, I got diagnosed with Lyme disease and panic disorder and agoraphobia, and this made me become extremely isolated and house bound. This enabled me to be able to see from a more distanced perspective all of the fallacies of my religion that I had ignored before. I could no longer ignore the fact that it did not make sense to forbid outside research, relationships or friendships outside of the religion, marriage outside of the religion, reading books about other religions or spiritual beliefs, certain clothing or hair colors or leisure activities, going to college, and many other things. I began to realize how controlling religion was, and how monstrous it is to try to control every single aspect of a person’s life, down to the color that they dye their hair and the people they are allowed to love. The social isolation allowed me to see the religion more for how it really was; the cult-like aspects of it began to show through the cracks, and as my friends from the religion all abandoned and forgot about me, I lost the fear of being shunned. I no longer hid from researching, as there was no point in fearing getting shunned as everyone forgot and had abandoned me already.

I began researching the religion online, and I discovered that the religion met many characteristics of a high-control cult. Slowly I devoured information online, everything from psychologists who specialize in cults breaking down why Jehovah’s Witnesses were a cult, to podcasts of people talking about their emotional recovery after leaving the cult, to researching the real history of the religion and background of its leaders. Rapidly the scales fell from my eyes, and I knew that in my heart and mind I no longer identified as a Jehovah’s Witness. I decided to keep it to myself untill my health was better, as I did not want to deal with my health issues and a religious crisis with my family at the same time. This was when my father got sick.

At one point when he was hospitalized, the hospital needed to give my father a blood transfusion. They said that he could die if he did not get it. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in blood transfusions, and if no bloodless options are available, they are commanded to deny themselves or their children blood transfusions even if it leads to death. I always knew even before my mental schism from the religion that if a day ever came when I or a loved one needed a blood transfusion, I would never deny it. I always thought the rule was incredibly stupid with absolutely no logic behind it. I instructed the nurses to give my father the blood transfusion. I asked my aunts and uncles if that would be ok, as my dad was worried about breaking the religion’s rules and them abandoning him. They told me that it was my decision to make, which I am still so thankful for them saying, and when I told my dad that they said this I saw an immense amount of stress and relief come into his eyes. I could tell my father desperately wanted to live, and he wanted to do whatever it took to survive, but he didn’t want to be abandoned and left to die alone. It hurt my heart and enraged me to see him think that he had to make a choice like that, to see him think that he had to choose between living or pleasing God just because some old white men in expensive suits far away decided to incorrectly interpret the Bible that way. That was the moment that I knew it was over; I did not believe in the religion, and I did not want to ever return to it. And I have never gone back.

My religious upbringing made me think that a miracle could absolutely happen. I had heard of so many medical miracles growing up in that religion, hearing all the time in talks and publications of people with a death sentence recovering because their faith in God was so strong it made God heal them. We often discussed in our weekly bible meetings or read in our religious magazine “The Watchtower” stories about people experiencing all sorts of miraculous solutions to problems because their faith in Jehovah was so extraordinary. We were always constantly told of the power of prayer to give us God’s blessings. So even though a part of me felt utter, sheer terror, the scope of which I could barely comprehend and the understanding of which I could barely carry, I thought that if I just did what I was taught to do, if I just had enough faith and believed enough, my dad would get better too. They were wrong, and I was wrong. My father never got better.

My father had his first session of chemo at the hospital, and then he was allowed to go home and rest until his next session. Instead of making it to his next session my father got extremely ill after chemo. His skin became gray; my once powerful and brilliant and strong Papi lay in bed all day moaning, groaning, gritting his teeth and softly weeping. My father had such immense strength, I had only ever seen him cry once, when his father died and he shed a few tears. I had never seen him sick in bed in his entire 53 years of life. He refused to go to the hospital, but the day that he was due for his next chemo he felt too weak to even walk, so we called an ambulance. Once he arrived at the hospital the doctors determined that something was very wrong, and that he had gone into sepsis. Sepsis meant that the chemo had caused infection to ravage his body and go into his bloodstream due to his white blood count being so low after the chemo. This caused his kidneys and liver to fail. 

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

Dating After The Cult

I never imagined romance, dating, or marriage for myself beyond the limitations that Jehovah’s Witnesses put on it until I was already almost completely out of the cult. There is an immense amount of guilt, shame, fear, and loss of autonomy for Jehovah’s Witnesses when it comes to dating and romance, in particular for women. If I had not been raised in it myself I would have never guessed how perturbed and unhealthy courtship practices are in the religion. I know that even now years after having left, I still have negative psychological handicaps created from the toxic interpretation of romantic love that was indoctrinated into me.

Jehovah’s Witnesses do not believe in dating or marrying outside of the religion. Doing so will most often result in some type of punishment, ranging from having “privileges” like hanging out with fellow members outside of meetings no longer being permitted to being outright shunned by the whole community (including your immediate family). Sex before marriage results almost always in “disfellowshipping” or shunning from everyone who is a Jehovah’s Witness, including immediate and extended family, friends, etc. Because of this I have always felt that any notions towards romance were always anxiety-provoking and made me feel a mix of hope and despair. The thought of kissing someone, even as a little girl, made me feel both sick to my stomach and excited, because it felt embedded with so much psychological risk. Like any other individual I dreamed of having romantic love in my life. But growing up I was always afraid to actually take a step towards it, because if I fell in love with someone outside of my religion or had sex before marriage, I could lose all of my close relationships and have my life destroyed. Sex became something terrifying, as being weak-willed towards it or giving in to it so to speak would result in ostracism and technically, eternal death because you would be committing a serious sin against Jehovah God. These fears kept me from dating when I was a teenager, and whenever any young man would draw too close to me emotionally or physically I would automatically panic and repel myself away. By pursuing any romantic relationship I was risking my entire life, and I couldn’t think of any romance that was worth that level of potential suffering. 

In addition to those teachings that are indoctrinated into members, we had a very strange and almost archaic method of courtship that we were supposed to abide by. If two individuals were interested in dating one another, it had to be for the sole purpose of eventually getting married. We were only allowed to date before marriage because to date just for the sake of romance or companionship was seen as sinful or dangerous. We were repeatedly told why dating without the intent of marriage was sinful through lectures called “talks”, private conversations with other members, and in books written by the religious organization just for young people to make sure we weren’t doing satanic things like having sex or masturbating. When you and another individual, who had to be of the same sex since homosexuality was considered a serious sin, liked each other and wanted to date each other you had to get permission from the congregation elders to do so. The interested couple had to write separate letters to one another’s congregation elders telling them of their romantic interest in that person and inquiring of their “spiritual standing”. Every congregatiton had a group of elders, which was the group of men that made all of the decisions for each congregation; a congregation could consist of anywhere from 50 to 200 individuals that belonged to the religion that all lived in the same geographic area. Once both of your respective elders wrote back approving of you dating one another and verifying that your suitor is of good spiritual standing under their standards, you are permitted by them to start courtship. Courtship officially consists of going out on dates like a regular couple would, only a chaperone always had to be present or the couple had to be in a group setting to prevent any sexual activity whatsoever. Even as a child I found this rule to be incredibly ludicrous and embarrassing. Thanks to movies and TV, I got an idea of what romance was supposed to be like or what one could be inspired to try to mimic at the very least. Even though many people in contemporary society criticize Disney movies for giving false and unrealistic depictions of romance, in reality it saved me because without those examples I would have thought that cult-like romance rules were normal. Because of Cinderella and Aladdin and Hilary Duff movies, I knew that moments like privately conversing, a first kiss, the first time holding hands, etc., were supposed to be private and intimate. In the religion however, because you are never permitted to be alone with your romantic partner if you aren’t married, this results in rushed marriages and extremely short courtships because people resent having no private intimacy with their partner. This also results in a lack of psychological and physical knowledge of the other, because since you are never purely alone with one another, you never truly get to know one another’s sole presence emotionally or physically. Oftentimes I felt I could see in the faces of so many young Jehovah’s Witness girls the anxiety of knowing that they were marrying a stranger and someone who they never truly got to know intimately.

The panic and anxiety I developed as a result of this indoctrination oddly ended up working in my favor. Because I would flee any potential Jehovah’s Witness courtship due to panic symptoms, this resulted in me not dating young and getting further trapped in the religion by being trapped in a marriage with a Jehovah’s Witness. Instead, I ended up leaving the religion around the age of 24 due to illness, betrayal, and a host of complicated scenarios that made me unable to further live my life according to a belief system that I didn't really believe in or morally approve of. This didn’t end how the religion affected my dating life however, as when I entered the outside world and started online dating like so many people my age, I found it to be incredibly challenging, and I was incredibly well, stupid, with my decision-making.

Most young people, in particular in Western or democratic countries, will typically experience their first romantic experience in junior high, with more complex and long-term romantic relationships developing for them in high school and college. This allows individuals to have years to learn about their likes and dislikes, what red flags are, what kinds of situations or partners are predatory, etc. However, because I was raised in a cult I had none of that knowledge that other girls swiping right on Bumble alongside me had cultivated over the years to navigate dating. My first mistake was that I did not know what kind of men I liked and didn’t like. Did I like Repubicans or Democrats? Did I like older or younger men? Did I want a spiritual or agnostic partner? I truly had no idea because I had barely interacted with men outside of the cult for several years by then. The average woman would have at least an idea of what worked for her and what she found attractive, but I felt like a bumbling idiot that said yes to honestly anything that a man said that wasn’t completely horrible. I had no idea of what constituted a red flag besides something obvious like physical violence, and I didn’t know what was something that was permissible or excusable as a one time thing. For example, at that point of naivety I truly did not know that an unsolicited dick pic was a red flag and behavior that should immediately lead one to hit the block button. I thought that it was okay as a mistake or one time thing, and that I should just go along with it to not upset the guy. I had genuinely no self-respect and no sense of self-preservation because in a misogynistic cult I had never been taught to cultivate those qualities as a woman. I had no idea how one could explore their sexual and intimate needs but still protect and respect oneself. Because of this, I had no option but to learn how to love others and myself by sheer trial and error.

This of course led to so much emotional pain and disappointment. When a man told me that he tested previously for STD’s and was positive, I believed him. When they said they were looking for something serious, I believed them. And finally, when they told me they loved me I believed them, and it wasn’t until a man ghosted me after taking my virginity that I learned that strange men usually shouldn’t be trusted in matters of sexuality and romance without proving their integrity long-term first. Words were meaningless no matter how beautiful they sounded, and I love you didn’t necessarily mean they loved me no matter how sincere they sounded. I also had never heard of love-bombing or other awful techniques men use and had no idea how to identify them to avoid those men. Although this all probably seems so obvious to any person from the outside, I can’t express how different my mindset was after being secluded and sheltered in a cult for so long. Only a fellow cult escapee can understand the level of innocence and naivety that I had and how deep my desperation to feel unconditional love and acceptance was after having been blocked from romantic love for so long. In a cult love is always conditional, conditional to you behaving and thinking exactly how they demand of you. I left with such a deep hole of loneliness and alienation that I just desperately wanted to be loved, even if it meant accepting broken and painful love. Even though trial and error is a horrible way to learn, one does eventually learn, and I did.

I had a little over a dozen dates with over a dozen different men. Some of the dates were awful which is now somewhat hilarious to look back on, but of course at the time it would end in me bursting into tears onto my mom’s arms when I got home. Other dates weren’t so bad, and I even managed to have a little bit of fun while I was on them. After dating twelve different men, I finally was figuring out what sorts of things I did like in men and what sorts of things I would no longer tolerate. This led to me eventually deciding to delete all of my dating apps about a year after downloading them. Hinge and Bumble instead of helping me find a romantic partner taught me a lot about myself, and they unintentionally taught me what dating and romance were like outside in the real world. A lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses would probably say that I got what I deserved by leaving, that by leaving the cult one will only find a sinister and selfish world where people just use you without recompense or conscience. However, I find this to be an extreme exaggeration of the truth. A lot of men on dating apps are just looking for sex. But there are men on there that are lonely and seeking companionship, and there are others I met who really were looking for their life partner and were extremely respectful and kind. I think that even though the dating apps didn’t result in success in finding a long-term romantic partner, it allowed me to see that people were more complex in the outside world than the cult led me to believe. It wasn’t as simple as either a God-fearing cult member or a demonic outsider unknowingly a slave to Satan, but rather people on the outside were just simply, purely, human. But more importantly, dating showed me how to have love for myself, and how to fight for myself and my own well-being.

In the cult ultimate obedience and submission to religious authority figures is one of the primary tenets of the religion. It is constantly drilled into us to submit to God’s authority and commands given to us through the elders and the Governing Body, the leaders of the religion who (of course) are all elderly men. Women are stripped of so many life opportunities in the religion, ranging from discouragement of having children, to not being able to hold the same positions that men can hold in the religion, be discouraged from seeking powerful careers or attending university, to being told that they have to submit to the will of their eventual husband and be an obedient wife. Multiple times I was told that I was the ideal Jehovah’s Witness woman, because I was submissive and meek, obedient and quiet. They obviously meant this as a compliment, but looking back I can only feel the urge to scream hearing that. All it tells me is how deeply trapped I was, and how my well-being was not a priority to them. These sorts of indoctrinations stayed with me when I eventually left the cult, and I had low self-esteem as a result and no true protectiveness over my emotional or physical well-being. After being raised in an emotionally abusive cult, one doesn’t realize when so many minor transgressions are taken against you mentally because you have excused so much emotional abuse for so long and have seen it normalized all around you. Dating online as painful and disastrous as it was made me learn how to say no. I learned how to say stop, no, enough is enough, I deserve more than this, and I learned most importantly how to say, I love myself. I came to a point where I just loved myself too much to put myself through one more disappointing man, one more disappointing date, one more uncomfortable sexual encounter, one more instance of depriving my mind and my soul of what it really wanted and deserved. I deleted the apps, and I learned how to stand up for myself and to see my mind and body as sacred. Too sacred for any man, in and out of the religion, to control or diminish. I deserved to be honored, loved, and nourished from anyone who wanted to have any kind of relationship with me.

I ronically enough, it was only after I deleted the dating apps and started focusing on loving myself the way I never was in the cult that I met my now first long-term boyfriend, David, who I have been with for the past year and a half in a very happy and healing relationship. I really think that when life saw that I learned one of the most important elements of romance, self love and self respect, that it felt I was ready for a relationship. I know I could have never learned how to love myself in the cult. I am so eternally thankful that I found a way out.

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

Bella Hadid NFT Drop

BELLA HADID NFT DROP

For the first time in LeDrop WithCheese history, I proudly present to you our very first guest writer, Jennifer Delgado! I had the pleasure

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

The Metaverse: Part 3

The past few years have involved many changes in journalism as a result of the metaverse and attempts to cover it and the social changes that result from it. Firstly, experts believe that journalists may begin to conduct interviews while physically present in the metaverse instead of doing zoom, phone, or real-life interviews. This was seen in the 2022 Olympic where journalists interviewed athletes in a virtual studio. This was also seen in sports journalism in Eurosport where a self-described digital virtual “cube” was utilized to interview athletes and celebrities in a life-like digital studio, as explained in a Reuters 2022 article. This will enable jounalists to be able to interview people who are otherwise inaccessible or hard to be in person with, whether it be because of conflicting schedules, travel issues, security risks, etc. This will allow the public to get more diverse interviews (China Daily, 2022). There are also computer programmers who predict that a new invention known as “7G Journalism” will evolve, which will be media and news stories that are transmitted directly into people’s brain through micro chips. This would enable the media to transmit news content 24/7 to humans from satellites directly into microchips implanted in their brains. This could potentially then solve the issue of some communities having lack of access to the internet or metaverse advancements if they have chips inside of them that give them the latest news, as depicted in a 2022 China News Daily article. Journalism can also continue to utilize NFT’s as they have been used to create financial profits for newspapers and magazines. For example, The New York Times sold an article as an NFT for $800,000 and journalists can continue to use NFT’s in the metaverse to protect from copyright infringement and create financial revenue for struggling newspapers and magazines and to attract new users (Reuters, 2022). By supporting newspapers and magazines the metaverse contributes to more distrubition of news to a larger audience, which can further reduce inequities in knowledge about the metaverse. Finally, the metaverse will significantly alter the way that content creation is related to journalism. Many journalistic outlets and news agencies are using social media apps like Meta, Instagram, Twitter, and Tik Tok to share news with a larger audience.

The metaverse will change the face of social media and thus content creation, thus transforming the way that journalists will utilize these outlets to create news content. AR and VR as significant components of the metaverse will enable journalists to make news content that is more interactive and engrossing for users. Users may be able to feel virtually present in an interview with a celebrity or politician, feel that they are physically present in different parts of the world and different events shown on the news, and they may be able to participate in chat rooms following news content that resemble real-life interactions. Changes such as this have already begun with social media apps such as by Meta creating their new app called “Polar”, which allows creators to create AR effects and filters onto their social media content. Journalists can use this feature to make the news more interactive for viewers. The metaverse will also increase public access to AI tools such as video editing, animation, and music created through AI. Journalists can then use these AI created features to make more immersive news stories that leave a lasting impression for viewers. Other apps being released like “Presence Platform” and “Promethean Ai'' likewise allow creators such as journalists to create mixed-reality video content and build virtual worlds to better educate and inform viewers. Journalists can even use these platforms to take their viewers through tours of virtual replicas of events or places in the news from far off countries. All of these metaverse related advancements can enable journalists to ironically better explain and better educate the public on the metaverse as explained by expert F. Fatemi in Forbes magazine. These advancements can also be utilized to create news and media that promotes positive social changes such as equality. Thus, these innovations give journalism more tools to play a role in making the world more equal and people more humane.

The arrival of the metaverse is introducing the world to new frontiers in the possibilities that technology can afford us. The developers of the metaverse are attempting to create a world that is as complex and nuanced as the real physical world, and it will have as much or even more ramifications than the Internet has had on social change. The metaverse will trigger large amounts of social change involving varied facets including economic distribution through metaverse financial opportunities, cyber crimes, and physical and mental health. For this reason it is imperative that journalists serve as the main educators of the public concerning the metaverse and spread awareness of it. Only by doing this can journalism prevent the metaverse from creating larger societal inequalities. Journalism is already beginning to use the metaverse and its associated facets to improve the field of journalism, and by continuing to utilize these new technological features it can continue to make a difference in people's lives. By impacting the public's digital lives they can massively improve the public's real physical life, and this is why it is so imperative for journalism to remain on the pulse of the rapidly changing world of the metaverse.

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

The Metaverse part two:

Finally, the most significant social change that the metaverse will bring are financial and economic changes that will impact people across the globe. The metaverse is estimated to become a billion dollar industry. Companies such as Facebook have become highly focused on the metaverse and moving their business directly into it. Facebook has rebranded itself “Meta” after the metaverse, and it intends to focus on bringing VR and AR into its sphere to play a powerful role in the metaverse and in creating people’s second lives. However, billion dollar companies should not be the only ones reaping financial advantages from coming in early to the metaverse. Companies are already beginning to invest heavily into the metaverse and associated projects and reaping financial rewards from it. Crypto is a trillion dollar industry and NFT’s are a billion dollar industry that even regular individuals are making fortunes from trading and investing into, and both are heavily associated with the metaverse. The metaverse involves NFT’s in many aspects, such as billboards or clothing that virtual avatars wear, and many metaverse companies are selling their own crypto tokens. NFT’s can only be purchased through the Ethereum network, which has escalated rapidly in value and will likely continue to skyrocket the price of Ethereum ecosystem tokens. According to the article entitled, "People are dropping millions for land in the metaverse. here's why" published in CNET, in Decentraland you can only purchase digital property through a crypto token that belongs to the company, a token named $MANA, and thus investors see that specific token as a great investment for future profits. NFT sales have reached $25 billion dollars in the past year at an increase of 18,400% which is astronomical. NFT’s are also beginning to be used as insurance or deeds for digital real estate. However, the average individual does not know about these financial implications or how to invest in these projects or start-up companies that are building a presence in the metaverse. A similar analogy would be comparing it to people who bought Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook when they were brand new companies. If more low income people had bought even a small amount of stock in these companies, it would have significantly improved their lives financially over time. The same opportunity is present with the metaverse, but again disadvantaged communities are not aware of the business and investment opportunities that they are beginning to miss out on. Companies and individuals are also buying real estate in places like Decentraland, a part of the Metaverse where developers are building a life-like virtual city. People are buying real estate there, such as condominiums that they expect future users will want to purchase for their avatars’ to reside in whenever they are in the metaverse. Real estate property is currently much more affordable than experts believe it will be in the future, with some investors buying up to sixty or seventy condominiums total for less than $100,000. In the real world that price would not even get you one condominium, whereas in the metaverse currently you can get dozens of properties for that price which you can then sell in the future for financial profit. Companies like Dolce & Gabbana are also buying billboards or land in spaces like Decentraland in the metaverse for the express purpose of using it to advertise their products to users.

Another means by which individuals and companies are drawing huge financial profits is through offering services in the metaverse. Many individuals who are software engineers, web developers, or talented computer coders are using their abilities to create apps and digital space in the metaverse and then selling them. Artists are also drawing or creating NFTs, different types of avatar characters, and even designing buildings for different companies in the metaverse. Writers are being hired to create storylines for different experiences in the metaverse, musicians are being contracted to create music for different events, and makeup and clothing companies are creating digital items to sell to people to decorate their avatars. This is a huge opportunity for the artistic community of the world who are often under-paid and over-worked. In the metaverse their skills are rare, highly valued, and highly paid for. Thus, communities with many POC or economically disadvantaged individuals with artistic skills would greatly benefit from knowing about these possibilities that exist for them in the metaverse as expert Meehan clarified. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the metaverse is predicted to be worth $678.8 billion dollars by the year 2030, most individuals of lower economic classes and under-privileged communities are missing out on the benefits of the metaverse largely because of a lack of education and knowledge concerning it. This is when the immense importance of journalism comes into play, as journalists can use the media to educate the public about the metaverse and increase the public’s understanding of the metaverse so that they may be able to invest and partake in this new digital sphere. 

There are many factors that have created economic inequality and a lack of access for individuals with less resources than the most elite members of society. Firstly, wealthy companies are able to buy more land, more products, more NFT’s, and more crypto than regular individuals, and this widens the economic gap that already exists and takes away the amount of profits smaller investors could potentially make. In addition, many individuals across the world and even in developed nations suffer from a lack of access to electricity or high-speed Internet. Thus, this creates a severe disadvantage for them in their ability to partake in the metaverse or learn about the metaverse online. A cultural gap also exists with inequality in the metaverse, as some cultural groups may feel more intimidated by complex technological advances than other ethnic groups where it is more deeply ingrained into the culture. There may also be language barriers, as much of the metaverse is currently in English or Chinese, causing a barrier for individuals from poorer countries who speak neither of those languages. In addition, many individuals from third world countries do not even know how to use a computer or do not even possess one, and this lack of tech knowledge caused by societal and economic inequalities keeps them from being able to take financial profits or partake in the metaverse. This can be seen occurring often with individuals from Latin American countries or Africa in comparison to individuals in the West or wealthy parts of Asia. For all of these reasons, it is necessary for governments and non-profits to create significant campaigns to increase the poor and under-privileged’s access to electricity, a home computer, and high speed Internet. Journalists can assist with this in two ways. Firstly, journalists can help spread information about governmental programs that assist with obtaining the afofrementioned lack of resources, or they can campaign politicans in the news to make new programs to decrease tech inequalities in their respective communities. Secondly, expert Meehan explained that journalists can serve as educators, breaking down the complexities of the metaverse in the media and providing resources for individuals to use or reach out to to better learn to partake in the metaverse’s offerings. This way, they too can partake in the financial benefits of the metaverse, and it can become a tool to decrease levels of economic inequality rather than exacerbate it. Finally, journalism will impact the metaverse and vice versa because they are already interacting with one another in a variety of ways, and continued exposure of the metaverse through journalism can be expected to continue to develop.

[jenniferdelgadowriting]

THE METAVERSE: A DISRUPTOR IN SOCIAL CHANGE AND JOURNALISM-Part one

The metaverse has arrived regardless whether the public is prepared for its arrival or not. Just like the invention of the Internet completely changed the world, the metaverse will alter the daily lives of regular individuals as well as the workings of companies and governments. The introduction of the metaverse will trigger significant social change, and it will be necessary for journalism to cover these social changes, potential problems, and suggest solutions to the public; by educating the public on all aspects of the metaverse, journalists will enable the public to make informed decisions on the best ways to partake and benefit from the metaverse as much as the elite do. Individuals who are not aware of what the metaverse is miss out on a plethora of financial benefits and potential jobs and opportunities. Nonetheless, when regular individuals learn of the metaverse’s existence and partake in it they can be vulnerablde to potential issues that the metaverse may come to have including racial and economic inequality leading to lack of access, health consequences, a lack of ideological and political diversity, lack of regulation, cultural appropriation, digital violence, and over-controlling governments taking over the metaverse space. It is the duty of journalists to cover all of these topics in the news and media, and they are already doing so with the use of VR, AR, and virtual life-like newsrooms. New metaverse potential technologies also involve journalism, such as the possibility of transmitting news to people’s brains through microchips. Journalists can also use the metaverse to create more engaging and innovative digital content as well as use the NFT industry to further advance journalism. By leaning into this new invention and being willing to cover it in the media despite its imposing and complex facets, journalists can stay up to speed with the latest technoloical innovation and help the public take advantage of its greater good. 

The metaverse as it continues to develop will trigger massive social changes that will affect directly and indirectly every member of the world. The metaverse is akin to the matrix in the blockbuster hit The Matrix, a digital world that is being developed to parallel our real lives but include insane capabilities that the Internet would allow a user to create. So for example, users would be able to use VR and AR to simply put on their headsets and be transported to another Universe where they could explore all the features of regular life (such as having a home, going out with friends, going to stores or dance parties, etc) but also be able to experience what is impossible in real life (such as go sky-diving from Mars). This however leads to immense social changes that society will need to grow accustomed to. Firstly, the metaverse will create an entire new society where individuals will be able to lead a second, highly realistic, digital life. For this reason, there is the potential for companies and web developers to create entire societies or social structures. This has created concern that the metaverse will be unfairly taken over by huge corporations and wealthy countries, and that they will input their will into the world-building of the metaverse. Although it has been compared to being the second coming of the Internet where we can have a do over and improve the failings that the Internet possesses, the opposite can happen where it can be made into an unequal place with the same social issues that the Internet has. This outcome must be avoided. The metaverse is an opportunity to create equal space for less powerful and less wealthy communities. It can be designed to be self-governed by all of its users. This will promote the idea of ideological diversity and prevent only an elite few from expressing their world views. As scholar Chen N. Xi explained in a scholarly article “the metaverse is not simply a platform developed by one company, implying the usual constraints of monopolization, but rather a new plane of existence, not just a void of control by any single corporation, but also free of incursions by any state entity or government”.

Another potential problem is other countries trying to take over power and influence of the metaverse. Some scholars and developers such as Xi fear that China has already begun to do this, as the Chinese government by the end of 2021 had filled out over 11,000 trademark applications containing the word “metaverse”.  China is also at a distinct advantage because they have large cloud-computing software which puts them at an advantage when it comes to world-building in the metaverse, and this has led to fears that they will design the metaverse in a way that prioritizes their own financial interests rather than other ideals like freedom and wellness. This leads to fears of an impending digital Cold War, with China and Western countries competing over influence and power in the metaverse. There also needs to be protection against privacy concerns. There are fears that governments or corporations will use the metaverse for data harvesting for their own private financial gain, such as by using VR or AR headsets to gather information about the public . Other concerns involve the possibility of digital crimes in the metaverse, such as stealing digital tokens or property, spreading private images, bullying, and sexual harrassment. There is also confusion over how the metaverse will solve societal and cultural issues such as cultural appropriation or ingrained racism. How do we prevent racist notions from being embedded into the metaverse? And is it possible for cultural appropriation to exist in the metaverse or “blackface”, depending on how different people of different real-life ethnicities choose to have their personal avatar look like? These are all questions that a regulatory body would do well in solving and protecting users from, which is why some argue that it should be created in the metaverse to police against cyber crimes. Another issue that regulation could help with —-- policy issues concerning stealing jobs from POC and giving them to digital influencers who are not human but completely computer generated. Do these computer made digital avatars’ steal the livelihood and social influence that rightfully belongs to real people, especially people of color or lower economic means? The metaverse has an opportunity to protect against the broader issues of creating a racially and economically conscious and progressive web3 society where people can live a second life in a society without the racial and economic inequalities that the real world has, as argued by scholars such as M. McDowell in Vogue Business. But in order for us to accomplish that, it is imperative for journalists to lead an education campaign on the basics of the metaverse, how to get involved in it, and to keep the public abreast of new developments so that they can take action to secure the best possible outcomes for society.

There are also concerns that allowing the metaverse to have free reign over itself could lead to regulation issues and the escalation of crimes in the way that the crypo and NFT spheres are struggling from. For this reason, some urge that the metaverse will need to have some kind of independent regulatory body to protect users from illegal activities including fraud, illegal money transfers, theft, gambling crimes, and protection of freedom of speech for users. This regulatory agency would have to find the balance between enforcing protections of privacy and protection from search and seizure while still defending users who suffer from digital harm. According to a scholar, J. Garon, as the metaverse expands and develops more, these regulations will have to be re-shaped and expanded to meet the demands of its users . There is also concern of cyber violence occurring, such as online aggression towards others, virtual attacks, bullying, etc. This can involve racism, homophobia, and other types of digital hate crime. The concern is that because these things will take place in a digital space, they will be blown off and seen as not as serious or as genuine a problem in comparison to real-life acts of violence or hate crimes. However, by allowing this to go on unpunished it will only proliferate and become more common. This is a risk from the metaverse of the potential to bring societal ills into people’s second, newfound digital lives that they were promised would be better than their real life. Journalism has an extremely important role to play in this issue, as journalists can inform the public of and report cyber violence or attacks that occur both on an individual basis or for larger amounts of people in the metaverse. This bad publicity can then compel future regulatory bodies, owners of worlds in the metaverse, as well as individuals to take the proper action to remove the source of the aggression and potentially revoke the offending parties’ ability to partake in the metaverse. Thus, journalism can play an important role in protecting, defending, and speaking out for potential future victims of cyber crimes in the metaverse, as described in the article "Tech-facilitated violence: Thinking structurally and intersectionally" by Dr. Bailey.

Other social issues that will be prevalent in the metaverse and important for journalists to write about are those involving mental and physical health. Researchers fear that the main psychological issue that the metaverse worsens is escapism, which is the attempt to escape one’s painful or uncomfortable reality through digital games or media. This is commonly seen in both video game and social media addiction, where individuals flee mentally to those digital experiences to be able to ignoretheir real life responsibilities or experiences. There is concern among researchers that this type of digital escapism will only grow more severe with the metaverse, as people will spend even more time online, partake in even more addictive AR/VR digital experiences, and can come to see their virtual life as more pleasureable and more important than their real-life one. This can lead to repercussions with their lives including failing classes, losing jobs, having personal relationships suffer, etc. These repercussions then would significantly harm the mental health of people. People will flee to the metaverse whenever something in their physical life feels uncomfortable and painful, and this becomes an addictive process because this escapist behavior often releases feelings of pleasure and euphoria. As expert D. Han explains, long-term this leads to a wide array of consequences including “anxiety, depression, increased aggression, lower self-control, lower interpersonal skills, social anxiety, and severe loneliness”.  Individuals can also come to experience difficulty re-entering the physical world after spending so much time in the digital one, as they may come to feel that they have forgotten communication skills or feel social anxiety interacting with people in real life. Physical consequences of potential addiction to the metaverse are predicted to include physical discomfort, vertigo from VR features, eye fatigue, reduced cognitive performance, motion sickness, and obesity. There is then concern that this will lead to lawsuits over health issues, and in such a scenario who would be to blame? The companies who are world-building or a regulatory agency that has still not been created in the present moment? For this reason it is imperative that journalists take the lead in reporting negative health repercussions when they begin to occur; this involves being brave enough to speak out about health issues being caused by the metaverse even if it angers large companies who are the root of the problem, and journalists can further help the public by informing them on how to prevent or manage metaverse addiction. This can include warning parents of what signs to look out for in their children, explaining to instructors or professors of young adults the importance of including social and outside activities in student life to offset time spent online, or it can include releasing news reports detailing to the public and politicans potential solutions or new developments to focus on. By doing this, journalists can help mediate the negative health aspects of the metaverse so that the positive effects on health can be more prevalent instead, such as helping individuals relate to one another more psychologically, connecting people emotionally from different parts of the globe to decrease loneliness, and providing forms of socialization and activity for disabled or chronically ill individuals who are bedbound or housebound as Han reiterated.