To explain this thread I need to tell a sad and horrific story about someone that was once a friend...............for the sake of privacy I will refer to her as Carol.
I met Carol in the about 1990. I was not a JW (had left when I was 16 and unbaptised). I was suffering with panic attacks, I think for many reasons but mainly because I had recently lost my dad and took it very hard. I lived with my then boyfriend, who later became my husband in a town in South Yorkshire. Because of the panic attacks and my JW upbringing I prayed on and off and hey presto the JWs turned up at my door.................I kinda saw this as some kind of sign. Carol lived up the road (literally) from me and was a JW and I started to study with her and another sister. The panic attacks stopped, I made rapid progress, my boyfriend started studying with a brother who was very enigmatic and soon we were married and both baptised.
Carol's history was that she was not raised with any religion, had been heavily into drugs in her teens and right up to having her first child and then stopped. A friend of her's had become a witness and through her, she too became one.
Carol and I came became good friends, she was a bit of a nutter and good fun to be around. Her husband was not a JW and she was not that happy with him. When I first knew her she was very studious, loved the truth, was raising her two boys as JWs and pioneered as and when she could. Fast forward a couple of years and she became involved with a married brother in the congregation and as a result ended up disfellowshipped. During this episode she also slept with her flesh and blood brother (sorry to shock folks) but its true and she told me how as children he had had sex with her when her parents were out. She had been drunk one night at the time she was involved with the married brother, and he had come into her room and they had ended up there again. She was disgusted with herself. I was still a JW at the time and had nothing to do with her because of the disfellowshipping, but heard stuff about her getting into drugs again, she had left hubby and was with another man and was pregnant with her third child.
After I was d/fed I got in touch with her and went to see her. She told me she was using heroin (again) and her life appeared to be very messy. By this time she had four children, the youngest being a baby. She was diabetic and at 7 months into her pregnancy had been confined to hospital because of the pregnancy, diabetics can have very large babies and she was tiny. She used to sneak out of the hospital in the early hours of the morning, walk a mile to a friends house, scale a 6 foot wall with the aid of a wheely bin to get to people she knew would supply her with drugs but wouldnt answer the front door. I found all this very horrific and sad. There was a lovely person inside this shell of a human and I had once known that lovely person.
Several months later (from the first visit) I got contacted by her family to say she was seriously ill in hospital. I drove an hour and half up the country to find my once adored friend, swollen and bloated, unable to hold a conversation and just about alive. A heroin overdose. She survived this and was in hospital for quite a while and I visited her as often as I could. being in hospital she got clean and was very positive about staying that way.
Sadly, once free of hospital, she slipped back in with the old aquaintances and the last time I saw her she told me she was injecting into her groin because her other veins were not standing up to it. She has since died leaving four children.
I tell this story hoping you will not judge her to harshly. She had been abused from an early age and she never got the right help to sort herself out .
When I first knew her she was a lovely, warm, gregarious, devout human being trying to do her best in life. Being a JW had helped her get to this point. When I last saw her she was a sad, addicted shell of a human being whom I couldnt trust to leave with my handbag.
Would she have been better staying a misled JW?
I remember in her good days she once said to me "When I was growing up I always dreamed I'd live forever and then I got the truth"
I have my own thoughts on this matter but am interested in your opinions.
And I kind of wanted to tell her story in memory of a dear person and friend, who life battered so badly from an early age, and who in the end turned it all in on herself.
Fi