On being an Ex

I've been reading the blogs of people who are ex Jehovahs Witnesses, trying to relate to them. There's parts of what these people have to say that I deeply relate to, completely understand. But there's an anger, a passionate rage, that I'm lacking.

And that makes me wonder. Am I not allowing myself to feel a rage that's secretly hiding under my calm surface? After all, the one thing I had pounded into my head from a very young age is that you don't question the Truth. You just don't. If you do, it's because Satan is in your head, and you let him in there. You'd best do your damndest to get those thoughts out lest you fall prey to the Devil. When I first started to get an inkling of doubt, the beginning of the end of my faith, I blamed myself for every contrary thought. I hated myself, for disturbing my beautiful peace. Of course, that didn't stop me from sitting in a Barnes and Noble cafe for hours, reading Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman, soaking in these tidbits of beautiful imagination. My fear and hatred didn't stop me from aggressively pursuing freedom. Mostly of thought, but eventually of action.

But it did create a dichotomy that I'm still having a hard time dealing with. In order to deal with that level of constant fear I shut down parts of myself, completely compartmentalized my brain. It allowed me to be around my family and friends, go to meetings, comment and study and be a model young Witness, without giving an inkling to the turmoil in my head. I hate to compare what I went through to anything worse than it was, but in many ways I was like a survivor of abuse. I created new, and separate parts of me. I lived completely separate lives, one in my head and one in reality. I'm pretty sure my family and those closest to me got little glimpses of what was happening to me. I'm sure they tried to connect to that part of me. But I never saw it. My fear was so intense, so all consuming, that I was absolutely convinced I was completely alone.

What was my fear comprised of? Loss, mostly. I would lose everything if I left the truth. It's hard to explain to people who've never been a part of such an incredibly insular society, but we have it drilled into our heads from a very young age that to leave the Truth is to leave not only Gods good graces, but every aspect of family and social life that's connected to it. I remember seeing disfellowshipped people sitting at the back of the Kingdom Hall at a very young age, not knowing what they'd done, but knowing it must have been something terrible. The stigma attached to disfellowshipping is incredibly harsh. No one is allowed to talk to you. If you want back in after your punishment, you have to come to every meeting, three times a week, and sit there in the back row of the hall through the whole service. And then leave without talking to anyone, without acknowledgement from anyone that you were there, without a kind word or encouraging look. To be fair, I do remember brothers and sisters who were truly kind, who took Christs words to heart and who acted like Christians towards disfellowshipped and elder alike. I remember seeing those people nodding kindly, saying hello, saying it's good to see you to the pariahs. But they were few and far between. For the most part, the stigma of being disfellowshipped was enough to keep everyone away.

I couldn't imagine being that person. I was a socially awkward little punk, and as I grew older and gained some limited social skills, how people viewed me meant everything to me. I worked so hard to be seen as worthy. My doubts jeopardized that worthiness. So, I hid from them. I let them grow in a place inside me that I could shut away and ignore when I needed to. And when I left, I hid the knowledge that I was leaving more than my childhood home even from myself.

When I moved to Portland with my sister in 2001, it was just supposed to be a change of scene. We both wanted to grow and thrive in a new community. We immediately started going to meetings in Portland, and made a few "friends" amongst the young people. But I, for one, was miserable. This wasn't what I wanted. I didn't let myself acknowledge what I really wanted, because it still wasn't doable without confrontation with my sister. But good lord, was I miserable.

And then my sister moved back after 3 months. And I stayed behind. That leave taking was almost as hard as the initial one 3 months ago. I remember bringing my sister to the train station, us hugging each other and crying hysterically in the parking lot, people passing by looking at us curiously. I think I promised her that it would be temporary, that I would come home as soon as I got my fill of independence. I tried, even then, to stay in the Truth. I moved in with a sister, went to meetings alone, tried to maintain a presence in the local Kingdom Hall.

But that didn't last long. As soon as I was no longer accountable to anyone, I started skipping meetings, and eventually stopped going at all. As soon as I moved out of that sisters apartment, into a room in a new friends house, I fully embraced my freedom. I'm trying to remember how I felt about that. I have a few ugly memories, sitting in my bedroom before moving in that incredibly depressing apartment decorated with Coke and Disney memorabilia, waiting for that sister to come home from the meeting I skipped and feeling intensely guilty. But I only felt guilty because I was still tenuously connected to the Witnesses through that sister. As soon as I moved, I don't remember feeling any guilt at all. I had left the Truth a long time ago, the only thing keeping me going through the motions being fear of loss and censure. As soon as I left my family, created that loss for myself instead of having it forced on me, the worst had already happened and I was free. I didn't tell them for over a year, due mostly to that lingering fear of censure. But I lived my life as I saw fit, and by god was it wonderful. Those first 7 or 8 months are full of amazing memories for me. I didn't go crazy, start fucking anyone and everyone in site, drinking too much, doing drugs... my rebellion was tame and consisted of sitting in a particular coffee shop for hours, playing chess with old Iranian men, making friends with anyone who would be my friend. The incredible rush of that freedom, to talk to anyone I wanted to without fear of their worldliness seeping into me... it's never gotten old. I still relish and take advantage of that freedom.

I spent the next years just recreating who I was, living my life as I saw fit. I was happy, and eventually I was able to reconnect with my family, to be honest with them. I've been incredibly lucky, in that I haven't completely lost every connection to my past the way that so many others have.

But that luck is because my family is fucking amazing. It's not because they're Witnesses, it's because they're good people. As Witnesses, they're compelled to judge me, to fear for my salvation, and to push me away. I chose the world, and that's pretty much a death sentence in their minds. They can try to get me to come back, but they can't accept who I am. That's what the Truth teaches them. Who they are... their basic humanity is better than that. They ignore too much, in my opinion. They pretend that nothing has changed, they avoid painful subjects, and they maintain the peace at all costs. Yes, that makes them weak in some ways. But god damn, does it make them wonderful in other ways. Just as I was raised in extreme fear, so has my entire family been indoctrinated in that same fear. The fact that they can rise above it to keep my in the midst of their love... it's amazing.

I rail against it, sometimes. I wish so hard that my family could accept me for who I am. I LIKE who I am, and I want them to as well. And they do, to a certain extent. But they can't know who I really am, not without shattering too many safe barriers. So they love me, and they remember me as I used to be. And it has to be enough, because I love and respect my family.

But I don't love and respect the religion that makes this subterfuge necessary. And it's taken me ten years to even acknowledge that level of rebellion, of anger. I can respect the way of life that Jehovahs Witnesses choose to live. I can see its beauty, and respect it's ideals. But I can also hate its cruelty, its deliberate ignorance, its embracing of a judgmental and rigid structure that smacks of Victorian times. I can hate how its inability to embrace change or difference of any sort for fear of how it will rip its flimsy grasp on the reality of millions out of its greedy, power hungry hands tears apart families and creates broken humans. I can hate how it broke parts of me, parts that I'm still just learning about.

But that's all the power I'll give it. It means nothing to me any more, outside the bounds of my relationship with my family. I'm learning how to deal with my fears, I'm growing into the promise of courage it took to leave in the first place. And that's all it is anymore. It was impetus for me to become the person I am today. Staying angry at that religion is like staying angry at the bullies in junior high who gave me a terror of looking different. I'm an adult. Bullies gave me strength, and the ability to never be one myself. They took nothing from me, because I gave them nothing. This religion gave me some beautiful things. A consciousness of the suffering of others, the ability to analyze, a desire to be a part of a community that gives and loves unselfishly. I may have had those regardless, I don't know. But I somehow doubt I'd be as strong as I am today without the forge fire of a crisis of faith, without having forced myself to leave something precious to me to gain something even more precious.