Greetings to everyone. I am new here and this is my very first post. I've been following the message threads over the past few months and decided it was time to register. (I couldn't decide on a unique UserName or else I would have done it sooner!)
I'm 31 and from Wisconsin. Like many of you out there, I am an ex-JW who chose to quietly fade away about 7 years ago. I was raised a JW since was very small, although my folks weren't all that regular at the meetings until I was about 15. I went through the typical pains of being a JW kid in school -- being teased, made fun of, no flag salute, no birthdays, no holidays. I was always the different one. When you're that young, it's so difficult to understand why you just can't be normal like everyone else. My mother would never explain why we couldn't do these things, only saying that "Witnesses don't do that kind of stuff." We used to have an elder and his wife from the local hall stop by once in a while to visit us and encourage us to attend the meetings. After a while they started a book study with us from the "Life - It Does Have a Purpose" book in 1984. As I entered high school a few years later, I was not allowed to be part of any sports, clubs, parties or have any "worldly" friends. This proved frustrating for me as we never went to meetings and I just didn't understand what it meant when my family said "Witnesses don't do that kind of stuff - it's wrong". Eventually I was put in touch with a local elder (who was the PO) and started studying the Paradise book and Truth book because I thought it was the right thing to do. This was the first time I started studying in depth on my own. This went on for a year or so and I ended up getting baptized in 1989.
When I look back now, my heart was never really into it completely and I felt I did it just to please my parents. I was always nervous about going out in service because I just didn't have enough self-esteem at the time to be very effective. After I graduated from HS, I started leading a "double life" and hanging out with non-JWs almost every night, much to my parents dismay. I even got reproved for "questionable" activity with a non-JW girl I had met. Not too long after I met a non-JW girl who I fell in love with. A year later we were engaged which was the ultimate SIN in the eyes of my family. My fiance was non-denominational and knew I was a JW, but loved me so much that she decided to study to become a JW. She did this and was baptized in 1995, and a few months later we were married. We were told by the elders that we couldn't get married in the KH because my fiance was only a Witness for a few months and that it might "stumble" people. Imagine that! After that we attended for a while, but then stopped altogether. Around this time I started attending technical college and started doing lots of research on the Internet. This is when I first learned about all the opposing views of JWs. At the time I felt like such an apostate reading this stuff, but eventually I read Crisis of Conscience and In Search of Christian Freedom and realized I was living a complete lie. It was then that my wife and I decided that we would never attend meetings again. One problem... my entire family are still JWs and if they found out I would be shunned forever.
So for the past 7 years, we have completely turned our lives around and consider ourselves no longer Witnesses, although we have not formally DA ourselves. We celebrated our first Christmas in 1998 and now have two wonderful sons. I have made a promise that my sons will never have to go through what I did. My family still doesn't know that we celebrate Christmas, although we got a surprise elder visit a few weeks ago and they got to see our brightly lit Christmas tree through the window! One of those elders happens to know my brother so it just might be a matter of time before they find out. I don't really care, because it is so wonderful to not be controlled by the Borg. I'm now on the outside looking at the Witnesses and it is a shame how blinded they are by the WTBTS and the GB.
My apologies for the long post - I just felt the need to share my story. I'm sure you'll hear more from me soon in the forums.
YellowLab