Hi All,
I gave a very brief version of my WT experience when I was a newbie here, but I thought I'd share the details a little more now that I've gained some distance and feel that I can post more objectively about it.
I was born in November of 1970. I grew up in a dysfunctional family (like everybody). My mother was particularly controlling, she was extremely insecure and therefore expected perfection from her children, lest they reflect badly on her and cause her to doubt herself. She adored me as long as I was the exact person that she expected me to be. When I was a teenager, I tried to assert a little of my own independence, tried to establish my own identity some, and she freaked. It was like she wanted me to be her cheery little 10 year old straight A student forever. My teenage years were miserable, constant fighting with my mom, involvement with drugs, and increasing anxiety and depression as the years went on. In a total reversal from my early years, I barely graduated from High School, often scoring C's, D's, and F's. I was completely unmotivated, I never did homework, the only thing that saved me was that I was good at taking tests.
My dad didn't play a big part in my upbringing, he and my mom were married until I was 16 but he never took much interest in me. He had a terrible temper, and although he was not physically abusive often, I took some punishment for sure. Especially when I started smoking when I was 14, it was like World War III in my house, it really got ugly. But I was so determined to defy them that I eventually won out, they allowed the smoking, as long as I did it outside.
I don't diss my parents now (I sure hated them then), as I realize that they too were raised in crazy families and therefore they didn't know how to be good encouraging parents. It is sad that so many of us are the offspring of persons who have no clue how to raise kids.
After High School, I drifted from job to job and had no real direction at all. One result of my f*cked-up teenagerhood was that I developed a very pessimistic and hopeless outlook. My good friend used to joke with me that I hated everything, and it was probably true. I contemplated suicide often, but I never had a good plan or the balls to pull it off. I'm not a big anti-gun person, but I'm sure glad that I didn't have access to a handgun during those difficult years.
I got tired of the drug scene (marijuana had ceased bringing me any sort of pleasure for some time, all it did was make me paranoid and "spaced-out". The "spaced-out" effect brought me much ridicule from my so-called friends at the time, and I increasingly became the target of vicious teasing. Every drug crowd that I've ever known has their whipping boy, and in my crowd, I was it, BIG-TIME.)
I got tired of the abuse so I said "later" to that scene and started attending drug-abuse recovery meetings (Narcotics Anonymous). But, I was just a recovering pot-smoker who looked about 17 years old (even though I was 21) and here I was with these hardcore dopers who had spent many years of their adult lives living the life of a street addict. I didn't relate to them, nor they to me, and soon I became somewhat uncomfortable at the meetings. It was right at this time that JW's came into the picture.
I started talking to a girl (I will henceforth call her Sheila, but that is not her real name) who I was in class with at Community College. I usually was way too insecure to hit on girls, but she seemed weak and vulnerable. I got her phone # and called her one night. She proceeded to tell me her story. Her mom and dad had been JW's in the 1970's, but left due to a falling out with the elders. Then her dad left them and moved to Michigan. Her mom had remarried, and now mom, stepdad, and Sheila were studying with the JW's. At the time Sheila was a ball of fire for the troof. We must have talked for 4 hours that night, and I was absolutely fascinated with this religion she was telling me about. We dated some (though it never blossomed into anything) and she gave me the Paradise, Creation, Greatest Man, and several other books, I devoured them as quickly as she gave them to me. I especially enjoyed the Creation book, I thought that it was the most fascinating book I had ever read, and it convinced me that evolution was completely baseless and false.
I started attending meetings with her and I fell in love, head over heels, completely, with JWism. I gulped down that KoolAid like I was dying of thirst. The teaching that attracted me the most was Armageddon. I had developed a strong nihilistic streak before I started studying JWism, and the idea of God destroying all the modern-day governments sounded like the best idea I had ever heard.
I look back at that time in my life and realize that I was so naive, and so desperate to surrender my will to a better mother than the one who had raised me, so desparate for something to grab on to. I think a few Hoffer quotes are in order, as they apply to me so well:
There is apparently some connection between dissatisfaction with oneself and proneness to credulity. The urge to escape our real self is also an urge to escape the rational and the obvious. The refusal to see ourselves as we are develops a distaste for facts and cold logic. There is no hope for the frustrated in the actual and the possible. Salvation can come to them only from the miraculous, which seeps through a crack in the iron wall of inexorable reality. They asked to be deceived.
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.
In man's life, the absence of an essential component usually leads to the adoption of a substitute. The substitute is usually embraced with vehemence and extremism, for we have to convince ourselves that what we took as second choice is the best there ever was. Thus blind faith is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves; insatiable desire a substitute for hope; accumulation a substitute for growth; fervent hustling a substitute for purposeful action; and pride a substitute for an unattainable self-respect.
There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.
Much of Hoffer's work applies to me, but I think the above quotes are enough to make my point. At 22, I was a miserable, hopeless person who hated everbody and everything, and most of all I hated myself. JW's gave me just what I needed - a fanatical holy cause to totally submerge myself in so as to forget about my hated self.
I started studying with an 18 year old Pioneer from the congregation who's territory I lived in. I made rapid progress and was baptized in less than a year. Sheila also was baptized, but she quickly faded and has not been involved with JW's for many years. I would love to get in contact with her again, but I don't know how to. I hope she comes to this board someday.
This is where things get uninteresting. I don't really have much to say about my years as a JW. I started out at a somewhat wealthy congregation. I soon became uncomfortable there, as I was not wealthy, and I was not comfortable at all with the young "raised in the truth" crowd that I was so often relegated to, since I was not married. I was always being stumbled over something. The attitudes and behavior of many JW's gave me far more cognitive dissonance than I was capable of handling, since during my study and early association I had romanticized JW's as being the most ideal people on the earth (I think this is the way the GB sees JW's too, hence the denial of the pedo situation). But, it was always me that was the problem, I just needed to realize that even though this is God's organization, that it was comprised of imperfect people (tm). That sort of stop-thought only worked some of the time. Most of the time, I just couldn't believe the things I saw and heard. I remember thinking, "God is going to destroy everybody except THESE people???"
It wasn't until after I was baptized that I attended my first memorial. I remember thinking afterwards, "All that buildup for this?" I was embarrassed by it, everybody passing the emblems without taking them. The memorial was always a source of cognitive dissonance for me, I never looked forward to JW's annual rejection of Jesus, even though it was supposed to be the main event in our theocratic calendar. I thought it was the most boring and embarrassing meeting, a bunch of hype over nothing!
I was "Brother Struggling". I was always going to the elders with this or that problem. Several studies were conducted with me over the years, and I also had numerous CO visits to try to encourage me. You see, I was smart, I gave great talks, and they desperately wanted me to get the other aspects of JWism together so that they could give me more "privileges". But I never did get it all together, and felt unending guilt as a result. After every assembly or convention, I would think to myself, "I'm really going to get it together this time. I'm going to study and meditate and go out in service and pray and boy am I gonna be a killer J-Dub." This usually lasted for all of 3 days or so, then it was back to the normal routine. As the years went by, the elders saw that I wasn't "progressing", and they left me alone.
Then I changed congregations, and the cycle repeated itself. I gave a couple of good talks in the TMS, and the elders started paying me all kinds of attention, but they soon realized that wild horses couldn't drag me out into the door-to-door work. I hated it, and generally didn't go out more than once every rour or five months, even less as time went on. They soon left me alone.
Meeting attendance had always been my top priority, it was the only aspect of JWism that I enjoyed. I liked the meetings because they got me out of my lonely life (the life I've largely returned to since leaving). But around August of 2000 I suddenly stopped attending meetings. I had become completely discouraged, as I felt so much guilt for not going out in service, and never witnessing informally to people, the only thing I did was attend meetings. I began to see my JW existence as being futile, I was never going to live up to the standards, and when Armageddon came I surely was going to get it.
However, I was not yet ready to break away. Around January 2001 I decided to give it another try, at another new congregation. Same old thing, the brothers swarmed me at first but soon found out that me and FS weren't friends. But, right away something happened at this congo that hadn't happened before. There was a sister there who was very attractive, but she was a LOT older than me. I had met her once before, at a circuit assembly. We talked a lot at the meetings, and our eye contact became more and more...well, you know. It didn't take long before things became extremely intense between us, and it totally sucked because we were absolutely f*cking crazy about each other but she was way older than me and there was no way it was going to work and we had to sneak around to be together. We had a couple of times alone together. No disfellowshipping offenses occured, but damn those moments alone with her were better than any actual sex that I've ever had. I've never had such a free exchange of affection with someone as I had with her. We were on the phone with each other day and night, talking about how much we liked each other and how terrible it was that we were never going to be together. By March 2001 I was emotionally spent, and I almost checked myself into a mental hospital. I lost my appetite, my hair was falling out, it was the worst time of my life, being in love with someone who I was never going to be able to be with. I wanted to die, but somehow I pulled myself together and we discontinued our relationship (sort of). The attraction never went away for either of us, and I died everytime I saw her at the KH.
The 2001 DC rolled around, but I wasn't looking forward to it. I knew that I was going to see all these young, attractive couples there, and here I was, as alone as ever. I was an absolute nothing in the org. It had gotten to where I was kind of a joke to a lot of JW's, and they didn't make their feelings a big secret. I was becoming, as TR put it, a "Weirdo Single 'Hovah Dude". To top it off, the sister discussed above started dating this guy who, by her own admission, she was not very attracted to. But he was "strong in the truth, and that's what really matters, right?" was how she rationalized it. She ended up marrying him, after dumping him about 10 times while they were dating.
Anyway, the 2001 DC featured the Korah drama, and as I've mentioned in other posts, this was a big turning point for me. The drama made me angry, and for the first time I really started to question whether or not I was in "the truth". The drama was so heavy-handed, and so obviously designed to instill fear, that it had the opposite effect that it was supposed to with me. I remember thinking, this is fucking ridiculous. I had had similar thoughts before, but this time I didn't fight them off and rationalize them away. That drama helped me see the man behind the curtain more clearly than I had before. I attended a few more meetings after that DC, but in the back of my mind I knew it was over. 9/11 scared me a little, but lo and behold, it didn't trigger Armageddon. January 2002 was the last time I attended a meeting. I cried as I drove home from that meeting, mourning my loss. Something that had seemed so wonderful to me at one time now had come to seem so pathetic and contrived. In March 2002, I went online and started learning the real truth. I picked up CofC, and the rest is history.
I don't regret my years as a JW, I think it was such a tremendous learning experience. I learned so much about myself, and the weaknesses that I had that made me such an easy target for the JW's. I value my intellectual freedom SO MUCH now, I can read what I want to, and express my opinions if I want to, and no stupidass religious borganization is telling me what or what not to think. I am slowly healing, from both my childhood and WT wounds, and for the first time in my life I'm starting to feel comfortable in my own skin.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.