Spirituk,
You said that nobody understands you, and you're wrong.
Understand this as the central point of my message: You're wrong.
I was Atheist up until I was 20. At least, I never gave the thought of God or religion ANY focus or merit. Then, while working at Nokia in Alliance, Texas, I met an 18 year old girl named Yvette. To me, she was incredibly beautiful and I figured that I would try to be friends with her.
She liked me. But she didn't like that I was foul mouthed and eccentric. She felt I needed God in my life, so she invited me to a Bible Study at her home. No, she wasn't a Jehovah's Witness. She was Apostolic. A cult is a cult, regardless of name.
I enjoyed the life she lived and she enjoyed the idea of me in it. So I started going to church with her, and bible studies at her home. Her father was a charismatic man who reminded me of what I was going through in my life, and was an example of what I could be with God. He was happy. When he spoke of God's word, there was a joyful passion to him. He loved me like a son.
I was happy. And then I met someone she tried to hide from me. Her boyfriend Daniel. Daniel was a hardcore Apostolic and after noticing that I had feelings for his girlfriend, told me that if God wanted her to be with me instead of him, it wouldn't bother him because it was God's will. At the time, I thought he was saying "She's interchangeable if God wants it, so I don't care about her." Today, I realize he was saying "Stop it! She's with me for a reason."
But I was young and smitten and continued to flirt with her. It would have helped for her to tell me to stop, but she flirted back. Alot. Her father, who also worked at Nokia, heard people talking about Yvette and I and pulled me aside and put his foot down. We weren't allowed to spend time alone with each other anymore, and it stayed that way for a month or so.
One day, we both pulled a double shift (16 hours) because we were both managers of our respective production lines and second shift was out two managers for the day. This meant I had no ride home. Yvette offered to give me a ride home. It'd been the first time I was every really alone with her and I respected her father, so I didn't say much on the ride. But she started asking me why I liked her and I told her as briefly as I could. She told me she really liked me and asked me if I knew what she wanted for her birthday (it was two days away). I joked and asked if she wanted to see Eminem in concert (Apostolics detest worldly music). She told me bluntly that she wanted me to kiss her.
In hindsight, a huge mistake, but I did kiss her. The next day, I let my friend know what happened because he was rooting for us. My friend was a Jehovah's Witness and I was open to his views. He thought I would provide the sensibility she needed to see her views were nutty. He talked to her that day and she told him that I kissed her the night before. Only, in her version, she didn't ask me. I lunged or whatever. I did it out of the blue. Probably should have been a red flag, but smitten. Hey! It's blinding.
We were touchy and feely but did our best to hide it from others because everyone who worked with her father knew she already had a boyfriend. And yes, I'm sure some reading this think I'm a jerk for helping this girl cheat on her boyfriend. Probably right. If it helps my case, I never slept with her. Keep reading.
The time came and someplace new opened offering $9 an hour. Contrary to conservative mindsets, I managed 23 people for $7.50 an hour in 2004-2006 money and worked my butt off. Yvette and I went together to apply and we both got the job. We picked the overnight shift because it meant time together without people who knew either of us spying on us.
As an Apostolic, she always wore skirts. Pants were forbidden and on one particular day, she wore a skirt that showed alot more leg than I'd seen from her. I commented casually that she had nice legs. The next day, I have two floor managers telling me I'm being investigated for sexual harassment. Another employee heard me say she had nice legs, and I tried to dismiss it by saying that Yvette and I were close and she was okay with me saying things like that. I always complimented her looks and she always received them well.
Not this time. This time, they asked her if I made the comment. She said yes. They asked her if it made her uncomfortable. She said yes. I told them that they need to ask her again but add that I acknowledged our relationship, but also that either way, I quit. I wasn't going to work in a place painted as this one guy who I wasn't. I quit and I went to my JW friend's house to complain. I went home after it got dark and ate myself to sleep.
On Yvette's end, she told the floor manager she was afraid I was going to hurt her, so they had security walk her to her car. Then, she called her family and told them her version of what happened and said that she feared for her life and stayed on the phone so that her family could walk her to the front door. I was sleeping and had already gotten over the bulls#!ttery of the day's events because my friend, his brother, and his sister were good friends who knew how to talk someone through an issue. I held no issue against Yvette, though in hindsight, I probably should have. I felt that the floor managers planted the suggestion that she was uncomfortable. In my mind, Yvette wasn't the kind of person to set someone up like that. In hindsight, people. In hindsight...
I found out that she made these moves a few days later when I showed up to her family's house for the study. Her father, though a foot and a half shorter than me, successfully talked down to me and made me feel awful as though I was a horrible person. In a matter of words, I could have told him that Yvette and I had a relationship for the last two months without their knowledge. I could have told them that we'd kissed several times, or made out in my car and her car during breaks while she was on the phone with her boyfriend. Or that she was the one who suggested the nightshift for the reasons I stated. This revelation would have spared me the grief of the man who I respected as a father figure more than my own father.
I didn't. This revelation would have turned the girl I was head over heels for into a public sinner. Her family would know she was playing Daniel, and he would make sure everyone at our church knew about what she did. It would wreck her publicly. I did tell him what I did after I quit and that I had no ill will toward her. That I didn't know why she would make those accusations about me because I had a reputation for being a teddybear. I literally, until a couple years ago, thought killing insects was wrong, living the statement "he wouldn't harm a fly."
But because I was so shameful of what they thought of me, I stopped going to the studies. I stopped going to our church. I cut ties with that family. Or tried to. A couple months later, Yvette called me, wanting to talk. She said she had something to tell me, and in her tone, I knew exactly what she was going to tell me.
"Who did you kill?" I joked, hoping my initial feeling was wrong.
"I didn't kill anyone," she replied.
"What bank did you rob?"
"I didn't rob a bank," she said. I didn't want to prolong it anymore. She knew for two years that I was the only person she could turn to for anything, and I knew she thought the same thing here. So I asked her:
"When is the due date?"
She was shocked that I asked, and then broke into tears admitting she was pregnant. I congratulated her and said I thought she and Daniel would be great parents.
"It's not Daniel's," she cried. Well, it sure as hell wasn't mine. I asked who the father was, and it was a coworker I'd met shortly before I quit (turned out to be the employee who reported the "sexual harassment"). She asked me to come over the next day, and like an idiot, I did.
To this day, I can't remember anything being said of value that day. No discussion of the child. No apologies or well wishes. It was the last time I saw her.
Until 2011. We have a mutual friend from our church and her name and face popped up on the "people you may know" section of facebook. I sent her a message apologizing for the way we worked out. I told her it surprised me to see she still looked the same and owned the same car. And I told her that she didn't need to reply. It was a message of "I'm doing fine, glad to see you are, too."
I got a reply asking for my phone number. Then she called, and I heard her voice, and she was happy to hear from me. Like, balls to the wall excited. She recapped her life for me. They moved to San Antonio. She and her Daniel were married and they had two kids together (three total). Her family stopped being religious shortly after I last saw her. Everything was decent.
Then she told me her father and mother were drunks. Her brother gets arrested alot. Her husband cheats on her and they were in the process of getting a divorce. She made comments about how much she missed me and thought about me. She scolded me for not being the one to marry her and I reminded her that I asked her every day for a year to marry me in one capacity or another.
Later that day, she called again, and told her coworker "I'm on the phone with the love of my life." At this juncture, I'm no idiot anymore. I know exactly what it is she's doing and it felt disrespectful to me. Then she tells me she wants to see me "so bad." Slips in that her and Daniel hadn't been intimate in over a year.
I was just angry, so I told her I would meet her that night if she could tell me why she told our manager she felt uncomfortable. She said she didn't remember saying it, so I asked her why she told security and her family I was going to hurt her. Again, she said she doesn't remember it.
I'm livid and she argues that I only wanted to talk to her just so I could yell at her and I told her I didn't want to talk to her, I wanted to send an easily dismissable email letting her know I'm still alive and well.
Things settled and we were going to be friends. Only friends. Nothing more.
About a month later, she turns a phone conversation into a talk about sex with her. She sends my phone a few risque pictures and I ask her to add me to her facebook. She says she can't, that she doesn't have access to it despite reading a message I sent her that morning. I dismiss it as she doesn't want to. It's her right to add whoever. She tells me she's at work in San Antonio but asks how long it would tak to meet her if she showed up in Fort Worth. Again, I'm dismissing it all. As smart as I am, I'm still ignoring things for a trust she hadn't earned.
We hang up because she has to work, and I go to her facebook page just thinking about all the reasons why she wouldn't add me. Then I see the only reason. There was a guy on her friends list on her front page that had a picture of he and Yvette kissing as his profile. I go to the page and see his status is In a Relationship With Yvette ***** since (the day after she and I started talking again).
I sent her texts saying I didn't want to be the other guy anymore and that we were done talking. She said she wasn't seeing anyone so I was again, livid.
I sent a message to her boyfriend saying that Yvette and I had been talking romantically and that she was planning on meeting me sometime soon. I apologized saying that I didn't know about him and told him if he wanted to, I'd give him my address if he wanted to beat my a$$ because it sucks to be cheated on and it's more unlawful to attack a woman than to attack a man.
He asked for my phone number and thanked me for letting him know but wanted more details. I told him she was at work, he told me she told him she was with her aunt in Fort Worth. I told him it explained why she was talking about meeting me that day. I told him she sent pictures and he had me send them to his phone and got pissed because she sent some of them but not all of them. I kept apologizing and he kept assuring me that it's not my fault and thanked me for being honest.
She called him after she got my message that I was letting him know. He called back a few minutes later saying that she told him I have been stalking her since she was 18 and I was able to quickly dismiss that by asking if any of those pictures were available on websites. He said no, and I pointed out that I had to get them from her.
I also pointed out that I had her number despite it being a number registered to him. That her coworker will vouche that she referred to me as the love of her life. That her father was told by her, with me on the phone, that she was so happy I was in her life again.
I gave him my facebook password to see our emails.
And that was the last time I heard from either of them.
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This was long. It was a long story to tell and this was the shortest I could make it and have it make sense. But it's evidence Spirituk that someone on here knows what it's like to be enamoured with a manipulative, heart-breaking, seemingly soulless woman who makes you feel the purest center of love only to rip that feeling away with the most dispicable offense.
I put myself out there with this. I've given sooo much information about who I am and what kind of person I am because you and your friend on your other topic need to realize something that is so simple, so honest, and so real.
"There are other fish in the sea."
"It's always darkest before the dawn."
"Blah blah blah."
No, what you need to realize is that this girl who offended you, who hurt you in a way you thought no one capable of, this girl is nothing. She is in a country away from you living her life and if there is a God, or if there is karma, or if Newton was right about action/reaction, then she will see justice. But not from you. Not from people you talk to.
Ask around. I'm very much a believer in taking action if I want to get something done. But in this instance, action of any kind will only react to you. This girl is nothing. She is someone who shared words that you are allowed to forget. She shared feelings that you can ignore. She took a part of your heart but you need to realize she left it with you when she left you. There is nothing left of this girl but your memory of what she did to you.
The right answer is never violence. It's never revenge. It's never looking for peace in the destruction of others.
You are wrong, Spirituk. Your anger will subside. Your bitterness will fade. Your rage will be a long-forgotten tummyache. And you can choose to be left with forgotten memories of what some girl did to you way back when, or you can choose to be left with nothing but your actions.
This site, it's impossible to rally them to action and it's because justice DOES exist. See, the Watchtower Society is falling. Slowly, but surely it is falling. Time is catching up with the Jehovah's Witnesses and they are forcing themselves to accept more and more lunacy because the light of truth is shining brighter and they are being revealed for what they are.
We have Cedars on here, who writes about the Watchtower fallacies. He doesn't print them and post them around neighborhoods. He doesn't have a street team making people aware of jwsurvey. He writes a piece and clicks post. Then some from here read his message. Some find those articles when searching for JW information. Some refer friends to his site. His message comes out, not from activism, but from knowledge and time.
Your life will get better with time. This girl will face her inner demons with time. The Watchtower Society will crumble with time. Jehovah's Witnesses will see the mistakes they made with time. This website has an update that will make things easier and better for users, but that too, will only happen with time.
To Spirituk and pastOkage, and anyone raging for action against personal injustice, please remember the only cliche feel-better phrase with any absolute truth is this:
Time heals all.