I was mormon. Thankfully my parents paid to traffic me, so I could afford to go to college and cut them off relatively soon after I got home.

I was threatened by local leaders and family if I didn’t go on a 2 year mission in another country, then when I got there, they:

• took my passport immediately and locked it in a building I couldn’t access
• required 12 to 16 hours of work a day, with discipline if productivity dropped
• refused to provide adequate food or medical care
• restricted my communication with my family
• assigned me a companion to surveil me 24/7 and report disobedience to leadership (and assigned me to surveil someone else)
• disciplined me when I was physically and sexually assaulted by other missionaries

I didn’t want to call it trafficking for a long time. I figured maybe God just had a weird way of doing things. But my spouse works at a recovery center for survivors of violence (including trafficking) and helped me realize that’s what it was.

A pretty big misconception is that trafficking has to look like selling slaves, and I agree that’s an egregious thing, but it can be a lot more broad than that.

There are a lot of resources at https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en if you’re curious. My mission experience checked just about every box for labor trafficking, and I’ve heard very similar stories from a lot of other people who have been missionaries.

The church in the ad is particularly harmful. I had to fight to get out of it, and only after they took 10% of my income for years and trafficked me. They want money, power, and control, not increased numbers at their services.

I don’t know about usual, but there is a huge wall between private/ personal and public/ professional for me. Nothing personal ends up under my own name if I can help it. Basically, I’m using my name as if it were the name of a business, and I use an alias or nickname otherwise.

Surprisingly little discourse for a nearly 1:1 vote ratio lol

Hell, Michigan lol

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. I’m trying to stay close to my mom, and she’s desperately trying to hold the family together, so if I don’t do anything, he would play the victim and use my mom’s hurt feelings against me. So I’m most likely going to just do something very generic, like you said.

It would be beautiful to donate to the local pride center in his name and just watch him seethe. That’s such a perfect idea, since if he actually voices a complaint, he knows it makes him the asshole.

Pure evil.

Hey that would be easy, he hates football!

That’s the goal. There’s some drama right now that makes that really hard, but within a couple years that’s where we’re headed.

Lol I love it

Hm… getting him more work, I love it.

I totally would but he’d throw a whole fit lol. Maybe for his birthday in a few months…

Yeah my wife loved the smell in the aisle, but it got old really fast at home lol

Yeah I’ve thought about just doing a few candy bars or something. I think the sunk cost fallacy has kicked in, so I almost want to go higher effort but bad lol

Hm… I wonder if Walmart still has watermelon scented candles. “But dad, it smells just like summer!”

My wife suggested “number one sad” with a card explaining that he was, in fact, my first dad lol

Ooh I like this. Especially since he hates strong smells.

That would be especially funny because he’s Mormon, and he’s very upset I’m not.