Introducing myself

Well, here goes…

New here, obviously. Avoided these sort of forums in the past (is that what the hip kids call these things? Forgive me I am the height of uncool). First, it was because “I want to leave for my own reasons, I don’t need to hear what everyone else is hung up on” and then it was because I was angry and didn’t want to think about JW’s anymore.

(Fun story, I told my boyfriend I was ready to start interacting with others who had left, see if sharing my story could help others, and he offered I look here. Spent an evening reading the top posts, ended up in a massive argument with the bf about whether I can call myself atheist/agnostic, and had to apologize after realizing I was just. so. angry. at the JWs. So yeah, not ready. Only then I started thinking, maybe I am ready, maybe I need to be here to move past the anger. So here I am!)

The backstory (oh my god yes it starts at the start): I was born a JW. My mother, who was studying/freshly baptized when I was still cooking, took her stand on blood when giving birth to me. Until her, no one on either side of my family was a JW. I popped out – the second child. Dad, understandably distraught that his wife would choose to die and leave him a single father, upset that she had put her foot down and wasn’t open to reasoning with him on her decisions, and harboring some issues of his own, left my mom when I was 2-ish. I remember his temper and hiding in the bathtub. I remember going downtown for the first time to tell the judge I wanted to live at home with Mom and my older brother and my dogs and cats. So it was just the 3 of us in “the Truth”. Since the JWs say you can’t have ‘worldly’ friends, and shouldn’t associate with people who will discourage you from practicing your faith (i.e., the rest of the family on both sides), we were pretty insular. Just us and the congregation.

Fast forwarding a little, my brother got baptized when he was 15 or so. In high school, when he had a car, he started getting in trouble, wrecking the car/lying about where he was/drinking/etc. After a tremendous fight with my mom, he called Dad, packed up his clothes, and left in the middle of the night. That’s how he got out. He’s still bitter.

Back to me. After older bro was gone, I got baptized at 16. Not sure why, really. I was at a convention and 2 of my friends were getting baptized, and I just thought, “that should be me down there”. So I reviewed the questions and was baptized a month later at the special convention – I answered the questions about views on abortion by starting out with the fact that a woman has a right to control her own body, ha! I had been hair pulling and cutting by then, to the point that I was incredibly self conscious about getting wet (someone will see the bald spots through my hair), and wearing even a modest bathing suit (someone will see the scars on my arms). The night before I got baptized, I cut on my ankle, thinking it would be less noticeable than cutting on my forearms. No big family picture of beaming happy people from that day, just my mom and me and a weird smile.

A little after this, I realized that I didn’t actually have friends – the people my age in the congregation were all fakers and pretending to be a friend only when they had to for appearances sake, and of course no outside friends since that’s forbidden. Now I can see that all the other families had probably been warning their kids away from me for years as ‘bad association’ – I dyed my hair as unnaturally red as I could find in the dye aisle at Target, constantly drew henna/tattoos on my hands and as much of my arms as I could get away with showing, listened to metal and even briefly some Manson, and dressed like a dude when not in a dress. (That last one is my Moms fault, when it comes to everything feminine, I was raised by wolves.) Still, no one told me that and it was infuriating to hear the congregation pat itself on the back for being so friendly and open, for having such wonderful young people – who somehow collectively decided to ignore me. I recall thinking one day, “Fine. I’m not in this for friends anyway. I’m in this for Jehovah.” So I doubled down, tried to be as good as possible, and just be alone. Stubborn is my middle name.

Fast forward to after high school. I had the misfortune of crossing paths with someone who was new to the congregation, moved down from an upper Midwest state, and didn’t know anyone in the great big city. Things go as things go, and with the encouragement of my mom, started tentatively to see him. Bad signs, he wanted me to get a boob job and change how I dressed. Not even to the point of formally dating, it ended very abruptly with what I can only describe now as date rape. He was very apologetic, insisted we both confess to adultery, and later said he hadn’t felt that good in years. I was traumatized, my concept of myself and my worth shaken to the absolute core. They had the nerve to take me to the back room again to chastise me for overreacting and being too sad. Great diet program though.

By this time, through the wonder that is community college, I had discovered I was actually pretty damn good at math/physics, and transferred to a local but well known engineering school. So I was away at University for most of the day, had homework when I wasn’t there, and just in general had to actually interact with other people to get through the classes. Tough given that the JW’s had trained me not to trust or talk to non-JW’s, tough that I had socialized very poorly due to extremely few friends, and tough that I’m a math nerd. Looking forward to what I was going to do after college, I very seriously considered suicide to be the most likely eventuality. No one valued me as a friend, no one admired my body even, I didn’t have the shiny happy life good JWs were supposed to have, I was not valued by god if these bad things had happened to me. I had no self-esteem and no self-worth.

Lucky for me, I met the absolute love of my life before I graduated. I met him a few times around hallways/classrooms, and then the traffic conspired to have us side by side on the freeway. We pointed, we waved, we started carpooling, we ended up friends and then fell madly in love. (Can’t say traffic isn’t good for something!)

This is when I got my head out of my ass. Any one who tells me that I should not have this incredible depth of love, or that I should wait on the edge of suicide for someone else (i.e., a Witness) or something “better”, can only and ever be wrong. The more I accepted that I was getting out, the more I started to really consider what I did and didn’t actually believe. I switched congregations and stopped going to the meetings, only showing up when I got wind of an announcement I was sure I’d need to have knowledge of when talking to my mom. I’d head out at the right times, then take myself to a popular walking spot, change in the car, and get in some miles while talking to the bf. I lied about service hours enough to keep the elders off my back.

Which brings us to this last year. I have since moved across the country with the bf, and been continuing the fade. Threw out all the books, never even tried to go to a meeting, don’t go to the Memorials, and don’t answer the door when they come around. I brought the bf to a family reunion over the summer (brave guy), and while they were universally happy to meet him and excited about an addition to the family, Mom could only say that he seemed nice. (She knew we were a couple by then, and I had repeatedly reminded her that her problems were with me and not him.) She asked that we discontinue our every-other-week calls, which I understood to mean she was going to treat me as if I was DF’ed even if it wasn’t official. She confirmed that when she told me that she didn’t want me to come by to visit when I was in town again later.

We flew home last month for Christmas, and both my boyfriends parents and my paternal grandmother wanted to know if I’d visited Mom. All I could say was, “she asked me not to come by.” I am unwilling to defend her views anymore, so I told Grandma that she’d have to ask my Mom to explain what she was doing.

I finished the letter I’d been writing for 6 months, laying out where I think my mom’s actions are hypocritical (not going to take on the JW’s with her yet, only her inconsistent actions) and concluding with the statement that I did not want to be a Witness anymore in the clearest, most unmistakable way I knew how. I mailed it on the last day of 2016.

She texted a few days later, but I had come down with a sinus infection and only just now am getting better. I haven’t talked to her yet. I ended the letter very positively, asking that I hope she would talk to me again someday, and here I am not talking to her. I’m just so angry with her that I am afraid I’ll make it worse.

There’s lots I want to say/shout/cry, but I thought I’d start with the intro and see how it goes. In just the few days I’ve been reading the posts here, I know so many people are in so much worse situations, so I feel a little bad for the long winded whiny post. Thanks for reading! TL:DR – I don’t know what that was either. Emotional diarrhea. Sorry.

Submitted January 12, 2017 at 10:59PM by FredtheWart http://ift.tt/2jKuTuA