I empathize. I've spent two thousand hours during the last two years researching security stuff and I'm _still_ not sure how to proceed.
Best I've come up with is Mullvad VPN, Monero, Trocador, Tor, and I2P.
I will keep reporting what I learn. So far: Telegram is honeypot. Cloudflare is a Fedgov monitoring service. Bitcoin is being set up to become "B"ankster "T"otal "C"ontrol coin.