by LivingTheDream 49 Replies latest members private
Hi Makersmark -
Welcome to JWN! Nice to have you join us.
There are *many* classes you can take online and even just one or two per semester will eventually lead you to a certificate or degree. There are so many options now for non-traditional education.
Looking forward to hearing more from you in the future.
-Aude.
At the last few conventions I attended, there is ALWAYS an intelligent young student providing a testimony where they turned down scholarship and the scorn of their teachers and counsellors to pursue full-time poineer work. I am sure you would grit your teeth as I do. I repeat your admonition:
"there is always time to pursue education or learn skills that will improve your life. This is simply your right as a human being. You should go for it. And, if you haven't started, then I strongly urge you to start right now."
I see it as such a terrible waste of potential for these young people, each uniquely endowed by God with skills and abilities, to be suppressed for the supposed "superior" calling of field service.
I love threads like this...
When I was part of the borg I was constantly discouraged from pursuing things that felt "right" for me. It's funny how many of us who left got good grades, I even skipped a couple.
Instead of being encouraged to use that to my advantage and get ahead, get an education to prepare myself, I was told to pioneer. Sometimes I get so angry at those years wasted. It took me a very long time to shed the restrictions the JW's had put on me. Even mentally for a while after I left I was carrying them around.
Eventually I realized only I can change it. I found an internship with a photographer which is what I've always wanted to be. The photographer has contracts with MTV, VH1, and many other amazing companies. In 6 months time I became an associate of hers. I had never even held a DSLR in my hand and now I take her overflow clients. On top of that, it's now only a year later and I'm shooting her wedding next month.
If you had told me this was possible 5 years ago, I wouldn't have believed you. Unfortunately there was another issue with the JW's that caused my partner and I to start out our lives together 30k in the negative. Before we left the JW's my parter had helped out a sister whose JW husband had raped and molested his own daughter. My partner paid thier bills for a while until she could get on her feet. She eventually did get on her feet and married another brother and was paying some of the money back.
When we were DF'd the payments stopped and we never heard from them again. But we're almost done with that debt and with the pain that came with it. We are living a life we are proud of every day all because we didn't allow them to hold us back. (She incidentally has gotten an amazing carreer that no one would have ever thought her capable of either.)
We all have the key to our own happiness and success. We just have to get out from who we were told we are supposed to be, to who we really are. If we do, the world will be a better place, because we are some awesome people.
I'll tell ya the biggest reason for them discouraging higher education...You may find out you like learning!
For me I got into bethel because I also had a 'special skill' (mechanics.) When I went for my associates after my vocational school I found a wonderful world opened to me. I had to take electives that including 2 socialogy (sp) classes my 1st was political science...My gawd I found out I liked politics?!? I also took a psychology course again a door opened that I NEVER thought I would enjoy.
Makersmark,
I second Aude's advice. I'd like to give you a bit more insight into my own experience that might make you see where I'm coming from: When I got out of Bethel, I was in my mid 20's with NOTHING. My friends from high school had all finished 4 year degrees and started careers and even bought houses. Me? I had ZILCH. I was lamenting this to my mother one day and she told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. She said, just get started on your goals now and forget about other people and what they had done.
Best advice of my life. I snapped out of it and hurried up and got a 2 year degree very fast in order to get my first job in my field. I got a job right away with that modest degree and NEVER GOT THE 4 YEAR DEGREE I always thought I would get. It didn't matter. It turns out that experience in my field was more important than advanced degrees and I realized, for me anyway, that the schooling was a means to an end, not the end itself. So, I blazed on in my work, loving every day of it for the next 26 years and it keeps getting better. There never was one day that was the "it" day for me, it simply just got better every time I thought about where I was at.
So look, I didn't get started until what I thought was "too late" for me too. On top of that, I never even got that 4 year bachelors or even the masters or PHD like some of my peers. Oh well. Too bad. I don't care because it doens't change my "now" at all and it doesn't dimish what I'm doing right now, nor how I feel about my life right now.
It won't for you either if you start right now.
Go for it.
LivingTheDream
infpalex,
This is what I'm talking about. I don't even know you and I'm proud of you too. Outstanding.
One thing I have found with the very accomplished "wordly" people I am friends with is that they allow themselves to celebrate their own accomplishments and as well as openly celebrating each others too. It almost seems to me like the more accomplished the person, the more generous they are in complimenting and helping others. JWs simply do not do that.
As ex-JWs then, we should be helping and encouraging each other in our endevors and celebrating each others successes.
We ARE some awesome people!
LivingTheDream
darthfrosty,
My wife got me into politics too. Now I'm a junkie.
LivingTheDream
LTD,
I finally went to "EVIL COLLEGE" after getting DF'ed. Nothing else to live for, so might as well get educated! It was funny, I ended up at an Uber Christian uni. One of my classes was on Theology. I thought I was well prepared to defend JW beleifs in one of my courses. Being a non-Trinitarian at a Trinitarian College. I quoted from JW pubs, and almost got hit with a plagiarism complant because of their lack of references.
In my research, I found Randy Watters' site, and information on the UN debacle. It freed me to be me, and of the looming threat of the Big A. I had to reevaluate everything I believed as true. Starting with: Is the sky blue?
And I graduated with a 4.0 GPA, after ditching my JW shit-for-brains dogma.
JK
p.s.: Keep the stories coming!
JRK,
Awesome story, great GPA, happy ending. Well done.
You made me laugh because I found myself wondering if up was up and down was down, if water is wet and so on. I got so messed up I'm still trying to figure it out to this day.
That's why you don't see me opining on this board about doctrine all that much: I just don't really know what the hell I believe right now. It scares me because I don't know what I will teach my kids?
--
I got a few stories left in me yet.
LivingTheDream
Makersmark:
I feel for you, because I as a grown man of 31 with wife, child, mortgage, etc feel exactly the same way!!!! It hits me the most at night before I fall asleep.....I think of what "could have been." My family physician told my parents at age 4 that I was gifted, should be in special classes, etc, etc. This was 1984, and when those series of WatchTowers came out about the "Generation of 1914" and shit, well my parents couldn't be bothered to groom me for what I wanted to be, which was some sort of Doctor. (My mother coincidentally was an RN since before she joined the JW's)
I got nearly straight A's in school, but was forced to take average classes instead of the AP and advanced classes that I should have taken in order to get into a good college. Took the PSAT's and SAT's against my parents wishes and scored into the 1300-1400's. On a whim, I filled out an application for Penn State, Drexel, and Temple Universities. (I live in PA). Guess what? I was accepted into all of them, but I couldn't tell anyone......and I couldn't go. Reasoning? I had no idea how to go about getting scholarships, and my parents were flat broke due to not saving a penny because the "Big A" was right around the corner. Also, I was so conditioned to believe that college was a negative experience, and that the world would eat me up, that I just gave up completely in regards to college. It wasn't until I was 20 that I finally started to go to PSU night classes because the architectural-engineering firm I worked for as a CAD Drafter paid for continuing education, so I finally went. What an incredible experience, and I so wish I had completed my 4-yr degree in Mechanical Engineering.
I have a good job.....live very well in my field....but I wish I were an architect, doctor, or photographer. I too lay awake at night sometimes and cry.....actually cry.....at all of the missed opportunities, education, and career that could have been. It's not so much that I feel sorry for myself, but I feel so robbed and conned.....violated really, but a bunch of people who in the grand scheme of things, are nobodies who wield power of 6 million people with seeming impunity. It's disgusting and mentally frustrating that our lives were dictated and interferred with in such a manner.
- Wing Commander
