mine was very difficult. i spent a lot of time kicking myself over being so stupid and for throwing away my childhood. i still do that to this day, but at least i'm starting to forgive myself...5/6 years later.
my fade started when i was 18. i was sick of how many of the jws acted around me. i think if we're honest with ourselves, in this day and age, MOST kids raised in lead double lives to an extent. ok so that statement leaves a lot of wiggle room, so in my experience, i'd guesss at least 2/3 of the young ones start leading doble lives and bounce on out. kids in prominent jw families, kids who were the type to be on district conventions and circuit assembly parts...were some of the most egregious offenders. now i'm not saintly by any stretch, however i have to say, if you're gonna be a jw, then for godssake act like one. it's NOT cool to call yourself a jw, to put up a false facade that you're some high spirited pioneer from a family that's at the top of the jw food chain, yet condoms fall out of your purse at a party...i can't imagine why a jw would need that if they aren't married...
that though, wasn't the biggest stumbling block for me. it was the way people treated me. i was absolutely sick of that. i gave up my dream schools in order to stay faithful and i felt that i'd always have the love of the congregation. turns out that love is a fraud. so my fade started when i was 18, the day i left the congregation i grew up in and moved to a congregation that had even less love for me. at the time, i started hanging out with some guys i met in a local college, we were taking classes together, and i stopped hanging out with witnesses. eventually i slowly faded away.
before the final meeting though, my mom convinced me to go to therapy. at the time i was really strggling with depression. little did my mother know, it had more to do with my loss of faith than anything to do with a simple physical imparity. everyone wants to throw fcking pills at you like that's the cure. how about getting out the goddamn cult? but i digress...
i started therapy and every session, at least at first, my therapist would want to talk about my father. now i'll be frank, my relationship didn't end with him on a high note. it actally ended with me legally changing my middle and last name, getting a restraining order and almost in me beating his head in with an aluminum baseball bat. so she was jstified in trying to get me to talk about him. however, i would each time say, well i didn't have a good father, but he's not mch of an issue for me. i didn't REALLY live with him and it's not like he was in my life every single day.i DID always go into how unhappy i was, that i had no real friends, that i was lonely as all hell and that my childhood scked ass and that i was losing faith. oh, but i always managed to say, please don't tell my mother about what i said. as a jehovah's witness, i'm not supposed to be saying anything bad about the organization. odd during my therapy, i'd always swing back to that interesting point. i'd always talk about how nhappy i was not going off to college, not doing...normal kid stuff. i mean, it's no big deal to miss your prom if you're from an area when there is no such thing as prom, but we're social creatres and dammit i'm from an area that has proms for their students. everyone goes, it's a rite of fucking passage. your first date, first kiss, first snogging (i love that word). all rites of passage. i always thought michel de montaigne was interesting. his concepts of normalcy and how that plays a major factor in how we humans work always struck me as spot on.
eventually it was clear that therapy alone wasn't gonna do it. i was either gonna have to get out and correct my life, or take some pills. i opted to take some pills. i mean, leaving just means everlasting destruction. so i started seeing both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. i'd see each person once a week and that still wasn't cutting it and finally, i'd say after a year of blffing to everyone and putting on a fake smile, i said enough is enough and i'll never take the pills again. i'll also never set foot inside a kingdom hall again.
so i stopped, but as that one thread says, 'the day you leave the hall is not the day the hall leaves you.' my decision tormented me and there were many times i'd defiantly look up and tell god i'd rather die than serve you for another second. i could never worship a god that did such heinous things like wiping out cities and peoples in floods and catastrophes. my god would not create such an amazing universe of such complex and intelligent beauty, but make such a convoluted set of rules in a book that was open to interpretation that clearly had false teachings in it and there's no way my god would force me to believe in miracles without direct proof. what nonsense is that? "oh yea, i know yo didn't see 'em cuz you're 2000 years too late, but trst me yo, my little boy came down to earth and he was healing the hell outta people. no pills or nothing. it was a miracle...like that wheat i gave to the watchtower."
so there were a lot of really gly ups and downs. the scales started falling from my eyes and i'll admit, i started panicking bc i started feeling old. i know it's silly to feel that at 20 or so, but here's the thing, up until that point, i realized i had not experienced life. at all, that everything i thought and believed was a lie. i felt i had to catch up and instead of motivating me to be gung ho and grab life by the short and curlies, it sank me into frther depression.
fading is easier for some than for others. i think it depends on just how deep you were in it, what you sacrificed along the way for it and i'm sure there's a ton of factors that go along with it, bt for me, those two things really rocked me in a bad way.
