I've had so much anger and depression over the last 6 years. When I left the b0rg I replaced people I hardly knew with my family... I had so many psychological problems then and when those relationships failed I turned to drugs, self harm through burning and cutting and even was hospitalized a few times because I tried to kill myself. I was in and out of toxic relationships with people who I thought I needed to complete me as a person.
About two years ago I hit another 'rock bottom' in my life and was drinking and using cocaine and was completly cycling in another JW's guilt pity party. The next day feeling like hell on toast something snapped inside me I think... something important. It wasn't enlightment, Jesus, Elvis or any of that... I think I began to see the world and life as diffrent... something diffrent without the JW armageddon glasses on. Suddenly the things I recall people telling me in the way as advice when I left started to click... certian things in my life started to become more clear. I felt like something, some point in that I broke out of the installed destructive cycle I was programmed to preform as a child.. and I was wasting my life. I started making changes... started picking up the peices... I started to heal.
I'm turning 24 next week. In the last two years I have received my GED, enrolled in college, quit using drugs, mended the good friendships I had with others and discarded the destructive people in my life. I've been devloping interestes and hobbies beyond hoping the end is coming and I no longer feel like the victim I always had 6 years ago when my family began shunning me thus beginning a very dark period of my life. Coming out of the Watchtower was very hard.... and very complicated to explain. I don't even know how to explain the process myself. I feel less and less like a person who is and only is an ex-jw. Because when I was in I was just that... a JW, and when I left... I was just a ex-JW... I never devloped a sence of idenity when I was raised and isolated as a JW, and I didn't have one when I left. Now I feel like I'm finding my voice for the 1st time. I feel like I'm realizing what I am good at and what makes me special and deserving of love.
That makes me feel really good.
Thanks for letting me share.