Ex-Amish Woman, 21, Details Escape with $24, a Partial Education and No Birth Certificate (Exclusive)

Now a viral TikTok creator, Lovina Hershberger tells PEOPLE she didn't touch a phone until she left her rigid, restrictive community at age 18

• Lovina Hershberger left her Amish community in Iowa in 2021, just days after her 18th birthday. She left behind her parents and 11 younger siblings in favor of a modern lifestyle.

• With the help of her ex-Amish older brother, now-21-year-old Hershberger fully adapted to the outside world. She taught herself to use technology and turned it into her full-time job, between editing the Amish Rebel podcast and making now-viral social media videos.

• Between her Instagram and TikTok accounts, Hershberger has garnered over 500,000 followers with her educational, candid — and oftentimes funny — videos about the Amish.

Lovina Hershberger left home on a snowy evening. It was a Monday night in April 2021, to be exact, 10 days after her 18th birthday. She’d plotted her escape thoughtfully, acting both in her own interest and in the interests of her family. She oiled their door hinges the previous night to silence her escape. It was an anxious dash that Hershberger knew would shatter the hearts of her loved ones, hence why she chose that Monday, after their community's biweekly church gathering was let out.

Though the April night only got stranger, nothing about that day was typical, Hershberger tells PEOPLE exclusively. She and her mother took their horse and buggy to make an uncommon trip seven miles away from their rural Amish community in Iowa.

“We went to town to get feed for the horses and stuff at the feed mill,” recalls Hershberger, now 21, who belonged to one of the strictest Amish subgroups, the Swartzentruber order. "That rarely happened, almost never."

Before embarking on the errand, she had already cleared out her room. She packed a suitcase with her most sentimental possessions and left the rest of her belongings for her 11 younger siblings. Her only older sibling, her brother Joseph, left the Amish one year earlier.

She jotted down a note for her mother and father, a few simple words that she can’t recall with certainty: “Something about, ‘Sorry. And I'm okay,’” says Hershberger. "I did not tell them where I was or anything. They had no way of getting a hold of me."

Related: Amish Woman, 23, Shunned By Her Family After Leaving Community: Inside the Restrictive Lifestyle She Escaped (Exclusive)

In an attempt to avoid creaking steps, she wore only stockings as she descended her family home’s staircase around 11:30 p.m. that evening. Their dogs barked while she put on shoes to guard her feet from the icy ground ahead, but Hershberger was able to pet them into obedience before they could jeopardize her departure.

She crept out of the driveway slowly, thinking her parents might wake up and spot movement outside. Whether she left unnoticed or was caught in the act, Hershberger knew they’d be heartbroken when they realized she wanted a new life. She took solace only in the fact that her timing might’ve delayed the pain of telling their neighbors.

“I left Monday right after church because they only have church every two weeks,” she explains over three years later. “So they had almost two weeks to recover and get used to it before they had to go to church again.”

She continues, “When someone leaves the community, it's always tragic. They treat it like a funeral kind of, and it's very sad. I didn't want my parents to have to go to church right after I left. I wanted to make it as easy on them as I could.”

Hershberger’s parents didn’t always make things easy for her though. In fact, her decision to abandon the Amish was initially an effort to break out from under her father’s control.

For three years prior to leaving, Hershberger worked as a school teacher for children in the community. “It was the one thing that I loved about being Amish,” she says. She always loved school, even as a child, though now she understands her education lacked in key areas, like world history. Growing up, the only subjects she studied were arithmetic, English and German.

But when the 2021 school term ended that April, her dad decided to end Hershberger’s beloved career as an Amish educator — and the rules of their old-fashioned lifestyle vested in him the authority to do so.

“The parents always decide what you do with your life until you're 21, and my dad told me that they're not going to allow me to be a school teacher again because it doesn't pay enough,” Hershberger tells PEOPLE. Instead, her father wanted her to work full-time on his sawmill, but that wasn’t a reality she was willing to accept.

Related: Ex-Amish TikToker Answers Questions About the Life He Left Behind at 17 — from Toothpaste to Parental PDA

For the first time in her life, Hershberger started rethinking everything she’d ever known and every future she’d ever envisioned. Before she was forced out of teaching, the young Amish woman never questioned her lifestyle. She pictured herself steadfastly respecting the rules throughout her life, following tradition, wearing conservative garb and raising a big family like the one in which she grew up.

“You have to do it a certain way because it's tradition and church rules. They expect you to just do it the way it's always been done,” she explains, looking back on the way she understood her upbringing. "Basically you are not given the option of branching out with your own imagination."

That learned rigidity lingered even after Hershberger was forbidden to return to her classroom. “When I left, I still didn't think leaving was the right thing to do,” she admits.

But on that snow-strewn April night, 18-year-old Hershberger fought her instincts four miles up the road from her home. She arrived at the doorstep of a non-Amish man, a logger who worked for her dad for as long as Hershberger could remember. She and her family were well acquainted with him: she spent time speaking with him, baking for him and learning enough about him to remember that he didn’t lock his semi-truck, which was equipped with a built-in sleeper cab.

“Back then I didn't have any confidence. I was very scared that night. so instead of knocking on the door, because it was like 1:30 [a.m.], I went and crawled into his sleeper,” Hershberger tells PEOPLE. “I slept as good as I could on the semi-sleeper for the rest of the night.”

When she awoke to the early morning sky, Hershberger made her way from the semi-truck to the shed she knew was attached to the back of the logger’s home. When he eventually came down and saw her, she says he knew exactly why she was there and called her parents.

Related: Is Viral Tradwife Serious? From Making Paper to Cereal, 'There's Nothing Fake' in Extreme Videos, She Says (Exclusive)

"Tuesday afternoon, they came to the logger's house, and they stayed over two hours trying to convince me to go home with them, to go back to the Amish," she explains. "I was kind of in a state of shock. I don't think I said a single word in those two and a half hours. I nodded my head, shrugged and shook my head and everything, but no verbal words."

Suffice it to say Hershberger stuck to her gut. With the help of her brother Joseph, she prepared to move on into the modern world: "I was tired of having everybody tell me how to dress, what to wear, how to wear it," the ex-Amish says today.

Considering her resistance to those specific rules, it may come as a surprise to see Hershberger in many of the viral videos on her TikTok and Instagram accounts, between which she boasts over 500,000 followers. Now living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, Hershberger often dresses up in Amish attire to create content, and viewers frequently question her style in the comments.

"A lot of times it's just plain because I'm talking about the Amish and my account is about Amish ... My Amish clothes are my brand," she reasons to PEOPLE. "My content is about educating people about the Amish, so I want them to see it instead of just hearing it."

From a viewer's perspective, the head-covering and long-sleeved frock serves as a reminder of just how far Hershberger stepped into the contemporary world. She now posts on TikTok once a day, and she makes up for her limited schooling with the help of a once-foreign tool — "I use Google every single day for everything," she shares.

For the first 18 years of her life, however, she had no access to or knowledge about computers or cell phones at all. And internet access was just one of many avenues she needed to explore. Hershberger had to figure out how to get around with more than just a horse and buggy, though getting her license proved to be far more complicated than she expected. In the truest sense of the phrase, she had almost nothing to her name.

Related: Viral Tradwife Loves Halloween, but Gets Backlash from 'Very Sensitive' Community for Spooky Content (Exclusive)

"Before I could get my [learner's] permit, I had to get my social security card and my birth certificate. And those two take a long time to get. You need proof that you're a real person," she explains, adding that Amish parents typically keep their kids' official documentation "locked up" until they get married or turn 21 years old.

"I never saw my birth certificate or social security number before I left," she adds. Plus, the process of proving her personhood was exacerbated by her estrangement. "The fact that my parents [were] not supporting me, it looks a lot more suspicious."

Luckily, she did have some family to support her in the outside world. Hershberger credits her big brother Joseph and his wife for helping her adjust to a new life in her earliest post-Amish days.

"I had $24 when I left," she says. "If it wouldn't have been for my brother, I wouldn't have made it because he bought me my phone and everything and never asked for repayment."

She remembers how Joseph took her to get an iPhone, set it up and paid for her cellular service for the first month. His then-girlfriend, whom he married in 2022, set Hershberger up with a job cleaning homes, and she started generating enough cash flow to pay her own bills. There was only one problem: she didn't even know what a wireless plan was.

"One morning I was trying to call someone. I texted someone, and it just wouldn't go through. I couldn't figure out what was wrong," Hershberger recalls. "At the time I was living with an ex-Amish cousin. I was like, 'I can't text anyone.' She's like, 'Well, does your phone need refilling?' And I had no idea what that meant."

When her cousin took her to Walmart to purchase a plan, Hershberger was struck by what she viewed as a risky setup maneuver.

Related: Former Tradwife Reveals 'Ugliness Behind the Scenes': Back to Back Babies, No Epidurals and Milled Flour (Exclusive)

"I followed the instructions on the back of the card, and it said to shut the phone off, restart it. I did that and it took every bone in my body not to panic because I thought I had just killed my phone because it was black," she laughs.

Despite never touching a phone until she left the Luddite community, Hershberger has turned technology into her full-time career. She downloaded TikTok in 2022, originally just "scrolling for fun" until she started seeing videos of people talking about how to generate an income online. Hershberger says she turned to YouTube for further information and found "very detailed tutorials on how to edit videos."

"I started going in and just playing with the editing softwares and stuff to learn how to edit. And I started taking little videos and editing them together, seeing what I can make," she explains. Today she works as a podcast editor for her ex-Amish uncle, who produces the Amish Rebel podcast.

"He's wanted to start a podcast for a long time, but the reason he finally started it was because he knew I could do the editing," she says. She also regularly features on the discussion series. "It's usually me and my uncle that are talking together, and I love doing an episode. It's awesome."

Her personal TikTok presence wasn't always meant to be about the Amish. She originally preferred not to mention her background in favor of blending in with other creators. Hershberger had one account to make food and wellness content, then reserved her now-viral page — where she shares content under the username "literallyjust_a_girl" — to try out new trends and post "just for fun, because I love making videos and being silly and stuff."

Unfortunately, neither niche garnered an audience. "I just tried to fit in, to be like everybody else. And it wasn't successful. It was never successful," she admits.

Then she came across a trending sound that encompassed everything she'd been through in just six seconds. She recorded herself in modern clothing to mouth along to the words: "I'm not just a b----," the audio began. Hershberger lowered her camera, then reappeared in full Amish apparel to finish the sound, "I'm a b---- with a backstory."

She wrote alongside the video, "POV someone asks me where my accent comes from."

Related: Tradwife Parodied on SNL Addresses Controversial Lifestyle, Wants Women to 'Get Back in the Kitchens' (Exclusive)

The TikTok blew up, garnering over 9.6 million views and 1.2 million likes. With that, she found a new reason to use social media.

"People started asking me questions ... I started answering them, and people love it," says Hershberger. "I'm like, 'Okay, this is nice. I love talking. I love answering questions and people love hearing my answers. So this is the way I'm going to go.'"

She continues, "I don't have to share my whole life and everything with everybody. I don't have to get up and film the whole day and then edit it and everything. I can tell people about something I'm passionate about and they love it."

She's since shared a variety of videos detailing the ins and outs of Amish life. Most of the clips deal with topics that she witnessed firsthand, like how the Amish pay taxes, what goes into an Amish girl's morning routine and how divorce works within the community, using her own grandparents' situation to explain the latter issue.

Some of her TikToks are simply cheeky jabs at her upbringing, like one of her dancing to Mariah Carey's 2009 hit "Obsessed." She lip-synced along to the lyrics — "You're delusional, you're delusional" — behind overlaying text reading, "Just in case my Amish ex is stalking me on here," much to the delight of 4.1 million viewers.

In reality, says Hershberger, there's only "a very, very, very small chance" her Amish ex-boyfriend might actually ever see the video since he was baptized as an official member of the church and likely doesn't have any social media access. So why did she post the video? "Well, I have an Amish ex. It wasn't a pleasant experience dating him or anything," she states matter-of-factly.

Related: Amish Family Hospitalized After Eating Toxic Wild Mushrooms

The social media star hasn't abandoned her love of culinary content either. She regularly posts Amish cooking tutorials, demonstrating how those in her former community make dishes like cheeseburgers, cereal and ice cream sandwiches, which for the Amish "means it has to be at least zero degrees or colder outside because you don't have a freezer," she said in the video.

While it's an entertaining concept for modern viewers on TikTok, Amish food holds a significantly special place in Hershberger's heart. She says it's the main thing she misses about her old lifestyle, "because they grow all their own food and they have big gardens."

Some of her fondest childhood memories took place in the kitchen, working beside her mother and using manual kitchen tools like hand-cranked egg beaters. Before she left, Hershberger collected her great-grandmother's recipes and copied all of them down in a notebook to bring along as a piece of home in her next chapter.

More recently, the content creator compiled 51 of those recipes into a downloadable digital cookbook she sells online. Eventually, she hopes to expand the project with more dishes and produce paper copies as well. "It's hard to get a hold of good Amish cookbooks unless you know the Amish and you go to their stores and stuff," she adds.

Hershberger also uses her social media platform to touch on more consequential ongoings in communities like hers, like what it's like to menstruate as an Amish woman. "Periods and pregnancy are two things that are never talked about" amongst the Amish, she summarizes for PEOPLE. "They just don't discuss it. It's embarrassing."

She's even reviewed heavier matters outside of her own experiences, like sexual assault within the insular traditionalist world, though she began her TikTok post with a disclaimer that she's not qualified to unpack the issue in its entirety and cited a fellow ex-Amish creator who has opened up about her sexual abuse within the community.

"I was very blessed growing up. I never knew that happened. I never experienced it," she tells PEOPLE. "But since leaving, being on social media, I found out that that stuff does happen. And it's very sad for me. It's very sad to hear stories, but I don't have the experience. I never experienced it, so I can't express it the way someone could that did experience it."

TikTok isn't the only way she's connected with other former Amish people. In the outside world, they flock together from a point of common understanding. In her experience, ex-Amish people are generous buoys to one another, particularly while they're first getting their footing beyond the rigid lifestyle.

"They all know what you went through. They all know what you're struggling with and everything," Hershberger reflects. "So they're a support system. They will help you and everything for free."

She actually met her now-husband, Eli — who left his community a few months after Hershberger left hers — when they were roommates in a common living arrangement for those fresh out of their Amish communities. "Something ex-Amish do a lot is they pile into one house and make rent cheaper because they're all struggling to get started," she says.

On TikTok, Hershberger tells her own story with transparency and depth. To answer her followers' questions about whether or not she communicates with her family, she reads letters she receives from her family members. She says that's the primary way she keeps up with her siblings and parents, though she does actually visit them in Iowa from time to time.

Since Hershberger left before becoming an official member of the church, she says the Amish rules don't prohibit contact. "They can disown me, they can ignore me. They can tell me not to come home to visit, but they can't technically shun me," she explains to PEOPLE.

Related: Widowed Man and Woman Meet and Fall in Love. Then On Their Wedding Day, a Double Rainbow Appears (Exclusive)

Her parents do adhere to restrictions when it comes to calling their ex-Amish daughter on the phone.

"They're not allowed to call me. I mean, they could call me, but Mom and Dad prefer not to because I left the Amish. I'm not supposed to have a phone, but I do," she adds. "So they're not going to use my phone that I'm not supposed to have, according to them, to call me to talk to me."

Hershberger says there's no bad blood between her and her siblings, though "tension" lingers in her parental relationships.

"It's definitely not just smooth sailing," she notes. "There's definitely something between us because of what I did. Because they think I'm dishonoring them, and they don't like the way I live my life."

In August, Hershberger invited her whole family to come witness her most recent life milestone: getting married. Eli welcomed his family as well, though neither group of relatives attended. It was a small ceremony at sunset, officiated by Hershberger's ex-Amish uncle and attended by her older brother, his wife and other ex-Amish friends the bride and groom have met along their journeys.

The newlyweds are planning to host a bigger reception soon, giving their families another chance to show up in support.

"I am very much doubting that my Amish parents will show up, but my ex-Amish uncle thinks he can convince them to come," she says. "I don't think it's very likely, but I would be very happy if they would come."

The reality, Hershberger believes, is that her parents aren't happy about her nuptials simply based on the fact that they would've preferred her to marry Amish. The same goes for Eli's family, she says. In another life, now over three years gone, the bride would've wanted that for herself too.

"Before [I left], I thought anybody that left the Amish was condemned. They were doing wrong, and I was never going to be one of those people. I was going to say Amish, be respectful, raise a whole big family and I never thought that would change," she admits to PEOPLE.

"I went against every respectful bone in my body to leave," Hershberger adds. "It was a very scary time. But it led to beautiful things."