How My Mom Quit Believing in QAnon
She’s still into her conspiracy theories, but Q is no longer a voice in her head.
There’s a lot that my mother and I don’t agree upon. She thinks Bill Gates wants to kill, well, all of us. When she lived with me and my daughter for nearly a year in 2019, she thought it was terrible that I let my kid watch Sofia the First, because of all the… sorcery.
My Mom also believes that she’s a “targeted individual.” For years, she’s been adamant that a secret government agency — as in an MK Ultra thing — has been gangstalking and torturing her with radiation. Wherever she goes and wherever she lives, my mom is convinced that the government is causing her excruciating pain and slowly killing her through special microwaves or rooftop radiation machines. These machines can supposedly follow her anywhere, but these days, now that she’s mostly housebound, I don’t hear about them quite as much as I once did.
Life with my mother has long been complicated and difficult. She raised me and my older sister in a very strict evangelical family cult and taught us that we would go to hell if we didn’t do everything her way. No, she didn’t say it in those precise terms, but her message was clear. Her interpretation of morality was not to be questioned. Over the years, I learned that the hard way.
