As I was trying to settle into my new life I constantly plagued myself with questions about where I had been and a bigger question, where I was going. In the mid eighties there wasn't easy access to any exJW's to ask questions and help me through a very difficult transition in my life. Today the Internet offers a lot of support through a large collection of exJW's from all over the world who offer many various options based on their own personal experience on where to go once you are out of the cult. I was not so lucky back then. I was truly alone in the world.
I did not realize at the moment that the level of stress I had just heaped upon myself was slowly starting to dismantle my life both mentally and physically. No matter how hard I tried, I could not shut my mind off to a constant barrage of mixed emotions and confusing indecisive thoughts. For the first time in my life I realized that someday I will die. Being raised a JW we were promised that Armageddon would come and destroy all the non-JW worldly people and we would live through it in to a paradise earth. We would then live forever and never die. We would help God clean up the billions of dead people stinking up the ground and use them as fertilizer to grow fruit the size of basketballs.
I remember hearing at age five that Armageddon was so close and "just around the corner" that if a person started a bible study with someone that week, that they would not learn enough in that short period of time to become a JW in time to get into the new world (they called it the new world back then) because it was so close to Armageddon. That was 43 years ago. Iv walked New York City blocks before, it takes a quite while to get around one of those corners. The block that the Armageddon corner is on must be in a different city. Maybe it's time the JW's found a different analogy and say Armageddon is right around the distance it takes to reach the outer edge of the universe. I think I'll send them that suggestion for the "Question's from the readers" section to the Awake magazine.
It's an incredible shock to your psychological well being to come to the realization that everything you once believed about the history of the earth and mankind was as valid and historically factual as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Not only do you loose your basic belief structure you eventually realize you need to someday face up to the fact that you're going to take your last breath on this earth and you are never going to be able to slam dunk a basketball sized grape. Now that one thing is on it's way out of your hard wired brain you have to try and replace it with historically factual information that is still being dug up and put together with every religious organization in the world trying their hardest to dispute it.
In the middle of trying to rewrite the history of mankind in my head to replace the myth of the naked lady and talking snake, I also had to deal with possibility of never seeing my Mom or family again and coming to the realization that I have become a grave disappointment to them. I also had to fit in the fact that I would not be able to see my sons grow up everyday and my ex-wife hated me even more for divorcing her than she did for marrying her in the first place. Toss in the fact that I didn't know how to date and I was scared out of my wits about even asking a woman out I was socially, emotionally, psychologically and definitely historically, screwed up. After putting that all together and trying to digest it, I could only come up with one positive thought about myself that wasn't completely and totally screwed up and a mess. My hair still looked damn good.
I missed not seeing my sons every day but I knew I could never go back to my wife or back to the only life I had ever known. I tried to fit into my new life using what little social skills I had picked up along the way with my sense of observation as well as my limited participation. I began to slip back and forth between knowing the JW religion was wrong and wondering if it was just me.
Growing up I was constantly reminded how evil people in the world were that were not JW's and how very soon they will all be destroyed by a loving God who loved the world so much he sent his son down to make up for a previous mistake he once made. It was so confusing, one minute God loved the world, the next minute JW's were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of all the evil worldly people dying off so they could all move into their big homes that the JW's had picked out when doing the door to door preaching work. I remember watching a few of those who I went with in the door to door work peeking into some of those big homes wondering how they were going to rearrange their newly acquired furniture after the people who just told them to leave, died at Armageddon. It was hard for me to believe I was once that insensitive as well as being a totally delusional idiot. Thinking that I was going to acquire things someone else had worked an entire life time for because of the ultimate fire and brimstone sale was very disconcerting at this time. I had a life time of mental readjustment to do and I wasn't quite sure where to start.
This indecisiveness and psychological confusion began to cause problems between Sara and I, and it was one of the major factors in our mutual decision to end our relationship. I don't know how she put up with my stupidity and confusion for the five months we were together. I learned a few things from Sara and some of those things helped germinate the dormant seed of self realization that had been hibernating inside of me my whole life. Sara helped me realize how I had not been honest with myself in more things than just JW issues. As a JW, I automatically gave the JW correct answer to a question without even examining how I really felt about anything. I was brought up learning how to lie to myself and give the correct answer instead of how I really felt. It would take me years to adjust this hard wired psychological glitch and my first relationship with a woman out side of the religion was just the first step in doing this.
I came to this realization of the difference between how I really felt, and giving a preprogrammed answer, the first time Kurt asked me the talking snake and naked lady question. The second time was during a life lesson with another naked lady, Sara. We were doing stuff (that is as detailed as I will get here) and my mind went directly to it's preprogrammed response. I told her to stop doing something she was having a good time doing, because it was wrong. She stopped immediately, sat up, looked at me like I was crazy and then asked if it felt good and was I enjoying myself? I thought for a few seconds and answered "yes, it did, and I was." Then she looked at me with a frustrated but comical look and said "then shut the hell up and enjoy it you moron."
Revelations sometime come to a person in the most inappropriate times, this was one of them. After six and a half years of a loveless and sexless marriage I had finally found a woman who could offer me both sex and love and I didn't even have to beg for it. I was presently being introduced to sex without guilt and right in the middle of it, I was both mentally and physically wrestling with an epiphany. Timing in the area of sexual gratification and life altering awareness is something that shouldn't coexist outside of a guys first time into the fumbling inadequacy of loosing his virginity. I was starting to settle into, and humbly accept my newly dubbed title as moron. It was a moniker that would take me years to completely understand before I could finally change it to the more direct and appropriate title of "idiot."
The time with Sara convinced me that I had a long way to go before I might actually be able to fit into a social setting where I didn't feel out of place or years behind the rest of the people around me. For being what I thought I was, a fairly bright person, I was beginning to realize that I was far behind the rest of the world in the area of social awareness and compatibility. Being raised a JW and being kept from normal social influences I had developed a sever handicap that I later would see as a psychological condition of "social retardation."
After Sara and I broke up I began my search for new friends who would replace the JW ones that so lovingly turned their backs on me in their act of obedience to their cult leaders by shunning me. The JW's of course do not call it shunning, they call it an act of love. That's like calling a rectal examination a moment of soul searching. I wasn't nearly as upset loosing my life long friends as I was trying to find and figure out my new ones. Being raised in a closed door cult I was not given the proper social tools that would help me differentiate between what was social bad, and good, in the real world. To the JW's, everything outside of their acceptable and segmented exclusive religious boundaries was bad. I no longer wanted to just take their word for it, I wanted to come to my own conclusions.
I was raised to be unbalanced in life. I had grown up very closed minded and my perspective on life was narrow and tainted. I started to become very angry and for a while I wanted to do what I had always been told was wrong. As I have seen, and heard, about many people who have been repressed in their childhood, they tend to run in a lightening speed to the far end of the balancing scale, I was about to do the same. If someone is way out of balance to the point of mental abuse and psychological imprisonment while under cult mind control, the only way some can feel psychologically balanced again is to experience the far "other" end of the scale and enter into doing things they know are wrong but simply no longer care about. I saw a drastic case of this during my time with an exJW girlfriend who was sexually and mentally abused by her father and the elders of her congregation. I will get into that further down the road in another part of this story.
During my time of being incredibly angry about my old life as well and the strong feeling of not fitting into my new one, I began a journey of social rebellion and self destruction. I began to simply not care about myself or anyone else, I just wanted all the questions and the confusion in my head to go away. I began to drink heavily to make my thoughts and feelings drown in a puddle of muddy indifference. When this happens the JW's say it's because a person has left god and the truth and have turned to evil. The truth is people go off the deep end because the were"in" the so called truth" and are now trying to deal with that religion of lies and bullshit without any prior experience dealing with real life. My drinking began to include sporadic infusions of coke and pot. I would coke up and smoke during the week and then try to deal with the increasing withdrawals during the weekends when I picked up my sons. I was continuing to live a double life that I had learned so well to do as a JW. The only difference now was the ones I was hiding it from and what I was hiding.
The more I got into coke, the more I began to except the confusion of who I thought I was, as an on going part of my life. I had not yet realized that I never really knew who I was or what I really thought about myself, others, or anything else in life. All I knew before, about anything in life, was prepackaged for me and hard wire programed into my head like a toy robot. Push this button and I go left, push that button and I go right, flip that switch and I repeated a prerecorded response that six million other toy robots so proudly claim was the same exact recorded message in every language and county in the world. I had no clue who I was or what I thought because I was never allowed to think for myself or say one word about how I really felt about anything. The majority of what a JW thinks and feels is already thought out and presented to them through mindless and repetitious sermons as well as a child like pre digested question and answer exercise called the watchtower study. For the majority of my life up to this time, I was a walking talking resemblance of a human being that shared one collective, single minded, judgmental, and narrow outlook on life along with six million other JWs.
My thoughts and memories rapidly became my worst enemy. The uncontrolled confusion in my head was doing more damage to my brain than the alcohol and coke was doing to my body. I just wanted to scream, and cry, and kick, and jump off the highest cliff so the thoughts in my head would finally be lade to rest. I began to hate myself even more than I hated the egotistical controlling leaders of the watchtower society that I had seen for who they really were on my trip to Bethel hell. I eventually got to the point where I could no longer sleep at night. I was prescribed a new drug to help me sleep called halcyon that eventually became more addictive and damaging than the coke and alcohol combined. I didn't completely realize it at that time but I was slowly doing what I secretly and psychologically was trying to do, I was killing myself.
This act of self destruction went on for a little over a six month period of time. During that time I had numerous one night stands with women who had no idea how completely screwed up I was. I became so out of control that I would have a different woman over for each night of the week. I didn't care about hurting them or even if I got to know them. They were just another variation of the addiction I had that made me hell bent on destroying myself because of the confusing and screwed up life that I was now faced with. I no longer cared about anyone, especially myself. I would buy an eight-ball (a bit over four grams) of coke and suck it up my now beet red nose in less than a week. It was a twisted and lost form of therapy, but it was not a therapy to eventually help me cope with life and get better, but more of one that would eventually help me end all the confusion by ending myself. I went from the freedom of leaving the religion to the imprisonment of my own mind trying to change everything I had learned and now was forced to reexamine. I had some new friends at the time but none of them knew the mental torment I was going through, nor could they possibly understand.
I hurt some good people back then and it took me a long time to see that and eventually except it. I was hanging on to the opposite and far end of the balancing scale and I almost fell off. I had run the gauntlet from perceived goodness and self righteousness to total wickedness and self destruction, and I barley made it out alive. The worst part of it was I was fully aware of what I was doing on the surface but kept myself in a constant condition of denial. I had learned well in my JW upbringing how to hide how I really felt and say exactly what others wanted to hear. I tried several times to tell my Mom I did not want to be a JW when I was growing up but I was always made to feel guilty or threatened with birds eating the eye balls out of the sockets of my dead body at Armageddon, so I always, and eventually, gave in and went back to lying to myself and others so that my Mom would still love me.
At a time in my life where I needed the love and understanding of a mother who loved me simply because I was her son, I did not have it. My Mom taught me exactly what the JW cult taught her, lie to yourself and make sure the name of the Watchtower corporation is never tarnished by anything wrong you may do. Let your loved ones die because they refuse blood to qualify a twisted interpretation of a myth and old jewish law in the bible that the leaders of the Watchtower use so they can claim they are different from, and above any other religious organization. Hide the true facts about thousands of children molested by their members just as long as the mighty walls of the Watchtower look sparkling clean and void of any blood stains. Let the children of the Watchtower grow up to hate themselves in total confusion between their real feelings and the feeling they are instruct to have. This, because of the heartless and self absorbed power that their leaders have as they demand the absolute and totally blind obedience of their followers. I was very close to dying at this point and frankly my dear, I didn't give a damn.
A few weeks later on a business trip to Atlanta I was meeting with two associates from England, one from New York, and another from Atlanta. During our dinner meeting I had lost all desire to participate in the business discussion and began to shake and sweat profusely. I just wanted to go back to up to my hotel room and try to sleep. I stood up and told the woman who was hosting the meeting that I didn't feel well and I needed to go to my room. She said that I looked like hell and they would continue the meeting at the office in the morning. I went up to my room and passed out.
The next morning I slowly got up and headed down to the hotel lobby to be picked up for the meeting. I was still shaking a bit but felt a little better after a night of sleep. On the way to the office Becky had pulled into the drive way of a hospital. As we sat in the parking space I asked her what we were doing there. She said that it was decided to continue the meeting without me because it was obvious to everyone else that I was sicker than what I had claimed. I fought her for a few minutes and then agreed to get checked out just to shut her up. They took the usual blood and urine samples as well as the typical blood pressure and tiny little peek-a-boo flash light in the eye. The longer I sat on that damn padded examining table with the scrunched up noisy paper sheet on it the worse I began to feel. I demeaned that I be let go and head either too the scheduled meeting or to my hotel room.
Within a few hours (but it seemed much longer) the doctor came in and sat down with a few charts. She looked at me and in a very quiet but stern voice said "you are a very very sick man and you just might not check out of here." I looked at her and in a very sarcastic but respectful voice and said "bullshit." She began to show me the lab reports and the there were little red warning stickers all over the place. I don't remember everything she said was wrong with me but I do remember her saying that I had Mono, hyper thyroids, strep throat, and some kind of hepatitis and... my kidneys and liver were close to the failure rate. She then told me that she didn't know if I would pull of this very apparent life threatening condition. She looked at me with one of those very serious doctor looks and said "you are dyeing and we want to check you into the hospital immediately."
It took me a few seconds to collect my thoughts. I looked back a Becky who was standing right behind me and saw that she was starting to tear up just a little. Becky and I were good friends and business associates but I didn't think all this was that big of a deal. I looked back at the doctor and in another sarcastic but whimsical tone of voice I said "bummer." Nobody thought it was funny, except me.
I refused to stay at the hospital (ya I know, typical guy macho crap) but instead I called a lady friend who lived in Atlanta and asked her if I could stay a few days with her. Before I forcefully removed myself from the hospital the doctor gave me some prescriptions, told me to stay in bed, and she thought it would be a good idea to get my affairs straighten out in case I didn't pull out of this. I was such a complete and total idiot, not only didn't I care if I pulled out if this or not I also had to call the two women who lived below me at my apartment back home and ask them to go into my home office to get my insurance papers and fax them to me. I explained my situation and condition to them and they both started to cry. After I got my faxed insurance papers I called my ex-wife and gave her the numbers to call for my life insurance. Then she started to cry.
I couldn't figure out what the big deal was. I was so incredibly messed up both mentally and physically, dying was one hell of a comforting option at that moment. Besides that, the lady friend I had in Atlanta was a real knock out and all I could think about was the real possibility of finally seeing her naked. I had reached an all time high in the realm of stupidity, indifference, self-centeredness mixed in with some serious arrogance and lack of compassion for a hand full of people who actually cared whether I lived or died. To make a little longer story short and not get into the details of sweating twenty pounds of body fluid out of my body in one week, I got better and flew home three weeks later. And yes, I got to see her naked. What an idiot!
After I got home with orders to immediately go see a doctor and stay in bed for at least another six to eight weeks (I didn't do either) I began to examen this almost life ending experience. My ex-wife started to come by with my two sons and took care of me for the first time in the eight years I had known her. After a week or so, one thing lead to another and she and my two sons started to spend the night. After two weeks of what I thought was a little sincerity from her, she told me that we could never be together again because I would never come back to the religion so she was no longer coming back to take care of me. I liked seeing my boys everyday and the two times my ex-wife and I slept together in that two week period of time was weird but a little on the fun side. I had to agree with my ex-wife that it was better if she stopped coming around and I could take care of myself.
Nine months later my youngest son Emery was born.
For a while I seriously thought of permanently tattooing the word "stupid" across my forehead. I started to wise up and take better care of myself. I stopped doing coke and cut way back on my drinking. I had gotten over the hump. Now I just needed to try and put things into perspective without trying to kill myself. I was not the first ex-member of a cult to turn to drugs and alcohol and I am sure I will not be the last. As bad as this transition out of a cult life may seem, it is sometimes the drastic measure some need to take in order to balance out the severity of their one time cult life. I don't recommend it, but I certainly do understand it. Life lesson number three hundred and sixty-one, only a few thousand left to go.
In part 8, Ill go into my escape from reality as I move for a year and a half to live above the beach in Laguna Beach California. For that short amount of time I almost completely forgot about the JW's and my past life. I began to find my way back to the less high and low center of the balancing scale. I also began to finally learn who I really was and just how I could begin to put my life experience to that date into perspective. I also became more of and arrogant asshole for a little while and finally realized where the beauty in a woman really was. I also found out that so called "worldly people" I was raised to look down on, and superior too were genuinely loving and caring people as well as some of them being a bit plastic and completely out of touch with reality.
Take care,
Dave