i felt superior and lucky in a weird way... i remember at a young age calculating the odds of being born into a religion that (at that time) had only 3 million members, compared to their being about 5 billion people in the world. i felt like i had won some kind of religious lottery. i was glad that i would make it through armageddon, when so many people would be killed.
Ya, this is exactly what i used to think. I felt lucky that out of all the billions of people in the world that it was ME that was born into it. I felt fortunate not to have got into drugs and prostitution and stuff....
Then, as a teenager i thought, "hang on, its only a minority of worldly people which are into drugs and prostitution". I began to realise that there were some nasty pieces of work in the congregation and most people in the world weren't wicked and satanic. Those thought were somewhat quelled by talks about how "even if worldly people seem nice and moral, they still haven't really got God's view on morality".
The social aspect of being a JW didn't attract me at all. In fact it annoyed me to be disturbed to go to yet another gathering held by my parents' pioneer friends and have to do "guess which bible character's name is stuck to your forehead using yes-or-no questions" and other "wholesome bile bible-based quizes"... (I always won those, i knew more bible characters than any of the elders and pioneers).
To show you how "spiritual" and theocratic my family was, my mother died when i was 4 years old. At the funeral, my father left halfway through the "reception" and went on the ministry to "cope". He said that he felt better sharing "the hope" with others, than having people at the reception feel sorry for him and his 4-yr-old son.
My grandmother and some people in the congregation have told me that he never got an opportunity to mourn. My dad re-married some time later (to ANOTHER "pie-in-ear") and he just became even more cold, logical and legalistic.
I never had any time for myself. As soon as school was over on Tuesdays and Thursdays, i had a couple hours to do my homework then off to the theocratic ministry school and service meeting or the book group. Home from the meeting, straight to bed. Then Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, bible reading, preparing the book for the group and family study...... I never had a lie-in. Saturday morning 8 o'clock, street witnessing. Join the group for ministry at 10. House-to-house until 12. Join another family for the Watchtower pre-study in the evening. Sunday 10 o'clock public talk and Watchtower study. Then wholesome association. Ministry straight after the meeting from 1 to 3. Dad's personal study with me from the YPA book in the afternoon. Daily text every evening after dinner. Go on an evening return visit or bible study with my parents on the weekend...... As you can see all the days of the week were jam-packed with "theocratic activities".
I started to turn the original thought the other way, out of all the billions of people, why was i born into this regime? WHY ME??? Am i the only person who feels like this? All i see are happy faces, i have a fake happy face too, i wonder how many smiles out there are fake? none of them? all of them?... i was so afraid of looking at "apostate" material or looking for information of the WT on the internet. I really thought it was the truth, but i thought "if this is what Paradise is gonna be like, i'd prefer to die in armageddon".
The only thing that kept me mentally glued to the WTS for a while was the thought that "What if im wrong and Jehovah's day comes 2moro?... What if all this is true, and my mother wakes up in the resurrection and doesn't see me there? How is she going to cope?" That thought still goes vaguely through my mind sometimes even though i don't believe in any of the teachings of the JWs anymore. It was just ingrained deeply into me as a child. Inculcation is indoctination.
All in all, im kind of glad to have gone through all of that so that i can actually appreciate real life and freedom, but i still notice thought-patterns that originate from the WTS that im trying to stamp out.
*My aunt left the "troof" as a teenager in 1975, but my father stayed on. My aunt's daughter Zadie Smith who was born in 1975, wrote a book called "White Teeth", which is kind of semi-autobiographical. My cousin was never brought up as a witness (and we haven't really been in touch because of the WT Society's expert ability at breaking up families). She therefore has a limited perspective, and it doesn't have a lot to do with my experience, but you may be able to see a bit of what my father's side of the family was like back in those days, from my aunt's perspective. (Buy it, pleeeease... bit of nepotistic advertising there, lol.)
