SS, Yeah we are responsible for our decisions, but our parents are responsible for allowing abusive people (in your case JW's and the WTS) to control young lives. Teaching you to be a JW is harmful and evil. Other decisions aren't likely to come out right because you hadn't been taught how to make decisions. The smartest idea you've had was to leave the dubs (siblings, family included) to their own devices of hate. Because you are here you have probably helped many many people to know they aren't alone and abandoned when leaving dubdom. That's mighty important. Part of your healing(I hate that term) --- let's say part of your awakening has included this new group of friends. Everyone has their own story of success and failure. Because you asked the why questions you are way ahead of your siblings. Just imagine blind faith --- I think that's hell for sure... and your family is still there, spirits crushed and curiousity abandoned. Now you on the other hand are quite alive. So lets say that from now on pay attention to your decisions not as simply anti-WTS but something more. I don't know what to call that something more, except maybe, yourself? You will have failures, sure, but the good of your failures is that you are alive enough to make them your own, not because you were told DO THIS or DON"T DO THAT by a publishing company. Maybe as humans we need to accept the failures, no maybe embrace them as learning who we are, be like a physicist and build, rework, add new stuff understand yourself on the atomic level ;-) Really living is painful. I mean, look at the greatest in art or science. Picasso is a good example of changing by learning. Not only in his art which is marvelous to see his evolution, but even his personal life the women and his children. The very concept of the basic elements of structure beautifully reduced yet somehow enhanced by his dynamic simplicity. Like that dove picture or his guerra works, amazing. So that's like you too. Always shaping and reshaping your guts. Maybe it's learning from yourself and not from some idiot old men w/ many lawyers. So are you responsible? Of course. But just like if you get something like asthma because of pollution you are only responsible to get treatment so that you'll live. There's nothing to do about the cause of that illness. So you have the WTS diseased upbringing. You won't be able to change that, but time will fade the idiocy and pain. It won't ever really be healed, but your distance will enable your great mind and heart to live and make decisions your way, w/o the contaminant.
Hugs from Panda