When I was a kid and they picketed the conventions, I thought I would get possessed by just looking at one. Now, my heart goes out to anyone who is picketing JW conventions. I understand the feelings of anger and the sense of injustice, but demonstrations also make the Witnesses look BETTER. It's awful and wrong that society views things this way, but unfortunately, the immediate connection in people's minds is "picketer = insane."
klydia
JoinedPosts by klydia
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When You Were In, Did You Regard Apostates As Losers?
by minimus inwe were trained to not even look at them at conventions.
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How many of you would still be "Blinded" by the JW's had it not been forJWD
by superman injust conducting a little survey for all of you active members and lurkers of jwd.
just simply proving the importance and support of this website.
for me personally, while i was still in jw land i had always ahd doubts but still generally believed it.
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klydia
I wish a website like this had existed when I left. People who leave now are very lucky to have this kind of a support system. I was just lucky to meet some good people who took me in. My dream is to one day create a network of homes and education programs where people who leave cults and are shunned by their families can have somewhere to live while they reintegrate into society.
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The cover art for my new JW memoir!
by klydia inhey all, .
my memoir about growing up as a jehovah's witness is being released by touchstone in march '09 and wanted to share the news with the ex-jw community.
it's called "i'm perfect, you're doomed - tales from a jehovah's witness upbringing.
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klydia
Here's a little excerpt! Hope it's not too long.
I wasn't sure what to choose, but I think the "congregation nutjob" is something every ex-JW can relate to.
Hope you enjoy it!
Chapter 2: Rejoice! For The Dead Are Rising!
"Would you like to see a picture of my dead baby?" Sister Bailey asked me, already opening her wallet. "This is Jason. He died."
Sister Bailey did not look well. For one thing, surgical gauze was flapping off the side of her face. She had recently lost one of her eyes to cancer and didn't seem all too interested in getting it replaced. In lieu of a glass eye, she regularly covered her ocular cavity with a vinyl, flesh-colored patch. She held this in place with surgical tape, wrapped her whole head in gauze, then accessorized the entire dressing with a lunch-lady hair net.
"I'm sorry your baby died," I said. At ten-years old, I didn't know how to respond to an unrequested dead-baby picture. I'd merely been walking down the aisle of our Kingdom Hall, looking for my friend Michelle so we could play hide-and-seek under the coat rack. Now I was confronted with Sister Bailey's dead son.
"Don't be sorry, sweetie! He's only sleeping," she chided. "We'll see him again in the New System!"
One of my favorite Kingdom Melodies was called 'Keep Your Eyes on the Prize'. It told the story of how, after Armageddon, Jehovah was going to bring us all back to perfect health and resurrect our loved ones into paradise. Sister Bailey always punched it when we got to the line: when eyes of blind ones see again.
Someday, Sister Bailey would be able to see again. Jason would be reunited with his mother, and she would greet him with two wholly beautiful blue eyes. Still, I got the feeling that Sister Bailey might continue to wrap her head in gauze, even after paradise. It was her signature style, her single white glove.
Then, too, you'll see the dead arise. If you keep your eyes on the prize.
Jason was grey. He had white streaks through his face from having been folded and unfolded so many times. I asked what he died from.
“He just died,” she answered. “It was a long time ago.”
If I'd thought Sister Bailey was crazy before, this was definitive proof. I couldn't wait to tell my friends that Sister Bailey had shown me a picture of her dead baby, then wouldn't even tell me how he died.
"Sista Bailey smells like cat pees," was Michelle’s only reply when I finally found her. "Wanna play hide n' seeks?"
My mother had no patience for people like Sister Bailey. Most of our congregation had already had it up to here with her antics.
"She just wants attention," my mother said. "Well guess what? Don't give it to her." Mom stamped her feet and cackled a purposefully fake, slapstick laugh. This was her signature note of sarcasm and schadenfreude.
Sister Bailey was self-involved. Naturally. What other reason could someone have for refusing to get a glass eye?
It was hard to garner pity in our congregation, especially when Ida Wachohowitz had already been in a concentration camp. Michelle told me that Ida always drank her coffee scalding hot and in one single gulp. She'd gotten used to doing it that way under the Nazis and never quite dropped the habit.
"She had it rough," my mother sighed. "Real, real rough."
Unfortunately, she hadn't been locked up for being a Jehovah's Witness, which could have made her a congregation celebrity. Still, it was impressive. The point was, she'd been persecuted by Nazis and you didn't hear her complaining. Our congregation had a low tolerance for whining, but a high demand for a good story. And, frankly, Sister Bailey's missing eye had long grown boring.
Sister Bailey was just one of the large group of insane, elderly sisters for which our Kingdom Hall was slowly becoming infamous throughout New England. While every Kingdom Hall had at least one "eccentric" member, we boasted an entire coffee klatsch of mumbling, mothball-scented, silk flower-behatted widows with spotty memories for taking their anti-psychotics.
Sister Blanche was our very own Minnie Pearl, with price tags dangling from her clothes like a septuagenarian shoplifter. She believed the secret to longevity lay in the consumption of raw garlic. She swallowed her ambrosia in whole cloves, with a spoonful of honey, immediately before clutching a bible to her chest and shuffling off to the Kingdom Hall.
It became a game to my father to presuppose where "the garlic factory" would settle during any given meeting. Then, with all the drama of a high school cafeteria, he would make a big show of seating our family on the opposite side of the room.
Like all factories, Sister Blanche belched. She became increasingly huffy with each passing eruption. "Ex-CUSE me!" she'd exclaim indignantly, as if she'd had just about enough of these shenanigans and demanded to know exactly where this disruption was coming from.
"Jeez-Louise!" my father would not-quite whisper to whoever was sitting nearby. "Maybe if our sisters didn't eat an entire Italian restaurant before every meeting, we wouldn't have this problem."
Sister Dubin was our resident schizophrenic. She was only occasionally aware of what year it was and held the deep-seeded belief that house cats were actually demons in disguise. While Sister Blanche fell into "old bat" category, Sister Dubin was crazy for real. One Sunday, our congregation received a phone call from an irate neighbor claiming that someone from our Kingdom Hall had verbally accosted her kitty. Soon after this incident, Sister Dubin was privately taken aside and asked if she might not prefer to praise Jehovah in a more personal, silent way. For example, by staying home.
My father told me this was because Sister Dubin was "making us look bad," but I didn't understand how Jehovah could allow himself to look bad. Wouldn't his Holy Spirit stop that from happening?
"It did," Dad explained. "The Holy Spirit moved the elders to tell her to stop preaching."
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The cover art for my new JW memoir!
by klydia inhey all, .
my memoir about growing up as a jehovah's witness is being released by touchstone in march '09 and wanted to share the news with the ex-jw community.
it's called "i'm perfect, you're doomed - tales from a jehovah's witness upbringing.
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klydia
p.s. If you're on Facebook, I made a group for the book, so I can post updates about it:
http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php?id=518290543&ref=ts#/group.php?gid=64879220692&ref=share -
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The cover art for my new JW memoir!
by klydia inhey all, .
my memoir about growing up as a jehovah's witness is being released by touchstone in march '09 and wanted to share the news with the ex-jw community.
it's called "i'm perfect, you're doomed - tales from a jehovah's witness upbringing.
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klydia
Thanks everybody! I'm so glad you like it, too! I also love how it kinda looks like Brooklyn in the background. Bethel is burning! Betterdaze, I'll try to find a good excerpt and post it, sure! I'm in the process of making a website for the book, too. - Kyria
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Is there any one thing you DID like about the witnesses?
by dobbie inok so obviously there's more bad than good(slight understatement i know!
) but is there anything you did enjoy about the religion?
just wondering cos i asked myself that question and the only thing i can think of (and it seems a bit materialistic to me lol) is that i could dress up in nice clothes and see men in suits!
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klydia
I miss not knowing the answer to EVERYTHING. Of course, it's more *satisfying* to mature and understand that you don't know everything and that's part of the process of life, but it's never as comfortable as the immaturity of being a snotty little know-it-all. :)
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The cover art for my new JW memoir!
by klydia inhey all, .
my memoir about growing up as a jehovah's witness is being released by touchstone in march '09 and wanted to share the news with the ex-jw community.
it's called "i'm perfect, you're doomed - tales from a jehovah's witness upbringing.
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klydia
Hey all,
My memoir about growing up as a Jehovah's Witness is being released by Touchstone in March '09 and wanted to share the news with the ex-JW community.
It's called "I'm Perfect, You're Doomed - Tales From A Jehovah's Witness Upbringing."
I just got the cover art for it, and I think it's hilarious.
I took one look at the "wicked" running from fireballs and thought: "Score! Ex-JWs are going to *get* this!"
The design itself was out of my hands, but I did scan a bunch of pages from the Live Forever book and sent it to the publisher.
I think they were clearly inspired! What do you think?
- Kyria
(Also, you can pre-order it on Amazon.com, but the cover art isn't up there yet, and it's not available until March). -
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Last night at "Worlds Apart"
by klydia inhi everyone, i met a bunch of people from the 'ex-jw meetup' at the screening of world's apart last night.
i just wanted to say again how amazing it was to see you there and to talk to you after the movie.
i've been "disfellowshipped" for 10 years, but i don't think i've ever really talked to any ex-jw's in depth like that.
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klydia
Hi everyone,
I met a bunch of people from the 'Ex-JW Meetup' at the screening of World's Apart last night. I just wanted to say again how amazing it was to see you there and to talk to you after the movie.
I've been "disfellowshipped" for 10 years, but I don't think I've ever really talked to any ex-JW's in depth like that. It was a very moving experience. There are some things that no one else can understand unless you were in it, and it meant a lot to me to be able to talk to someone about it after the film ended.
I knew there was something special going on in the audience, because the woman behind me was crying in a way that no ordinary filmgoer would cry unless they, too, had been shunned by their family. At several points, I had to put my head on my boyfriend's shoulder and weep. It was very hard to watch, even after all these years. Mostly, I think, because the rest of the non-cult raised audience seemed horrified and enraptured by the story... and yet, really, it's ALL of our stories. For the first time I felt like people really cared.
Anyway, thank you for being there, even though it was a coincidence :)
- Kyria
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Message I got on myspace from a JW
by crazyblondeb ini got the following message from someone i used to know, on myspace.
he lived down the road from my family.
he's still a jw.
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klydia
"All the kids I was kept from hanging out with are now dead, drug addicts or losers who cheat on their spouses and convince themselves they are a great person, yeah, I missed out alright." Really? ALL of them? EVERY kid he knew is now a drug addict? Wow, Satan sure is everywhere! The kids I wasn't allowed to hang out with are now, well... people with careers and families and lives. Most of them are doing quite well since they were allowed to go to college, unlike me. So incredibly brainwashed.
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Do you remember giving talks?
by klydia ini'm trying to remember the process for giving a talk.
i remember getting a slip with a topic on it, but what else was on that slip?
did it tell you what scriptures you should cite, or what book the talk was based on?
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klydia
By the way, my boyfriend and I are currently losing it over "beast fed." Would that make the UN the Wild Breast?
