I didn't really feel pressured. I was 12 years old. My parents had done a very good job of immersing me in JW rhetoric. That was the only way I knew how to look at the world--the only paradigm I had. I remember when I was 7, my dad suggested that I join the school. And when I was 8 I started doing my own simple presentations. When I was 9 or 10, probably 10, I don't remember whether it was suggested to me that I might become an unbaptized publisher, but I do remember one of the questions was, "Are you doing this because your morther or elder father told you to do this?" The correct answer was no. In our family study, which we had regularly, my father did express his desire that one day we would become JW. But he never gave a time table and neither of my parents ever pressured or even suggested to us individually that we get baptized. I basically believed the JW philosophy myself, because that was the only philosophy I knew. And there was an article in a Watchtower that kind of motivated to go ahead and do what I always knew I was going to do anyway. I was 12 at the time and I decided at that young age, that I knew what my life was going to be so I might as well go ahead get with it. I knew what was right and there was no excuse for not doing it. Of course, I was wrong, as I had never considered any other path in life. Although I was too young to decide something that serious, I do remember some JW rhetoric for pressuring your children to pioneer. Some parents pressure their children to become doctors or musicians and start grooming them for this as soon as they are born. And now I think of some monarchs. I suppose if its just your profession, sometimes its not so bad, but in other cases, you realize that your path in life has been predetermined by someone else and it starts to bother you.
