No, I’m not having suicidal thoughts at the moment. Thankfully, the toughest part of leaving JWism is behind me. At least I hope it is. However, I’ve been giving some thought to a topic that Onthewayout posted recently where he talked about how he had been able to realize that he joined the JW religion in an effort to run away from his problems.
The JWs gave him hope that Armageddon would soon come and wipe away all of his troubles. Instead of facing his problems head on, he adopted the JW wait-on-Armageddon mindset. To be sure, his problems were put on hold for a while, but they apparently came back once he realized that the JW hope was nothing but an illusion.
I was reflecting on this when I realized that something similar had happened in my life. Suffice it to say, I found myself going through my first emotional crisis when I was approximately 15 years old. I was an overweight teenager who had very few friends. My parents were never really involved in the congregation, so I had no real friends in the Hall, nor was I very interested in having any.
However, they insisted that I maintain a JW lifestyle. This meant no association with “worldly” kids, no school dances, no extracurricular activities, no holidays, etc. My life essentially consisted of school, television, video games, and a few meetings a week. I hated it. I heard stories about my friends in school going out on dates, having fun at parties, and doing the things kids that age generally do. I missed out on all of that.
To top it off, I was a little different in that I constantly wondered about the nature of God, how we got here, and our purpose on Earth. I never really bought into the JW nonsense as a kid, and my parents never really made an effort to teach me about it. They just knew it was the truth, and that was that. I came up with certain assumptions in my mind. For instance, I figured that it was more likely than not that an intelligent creator existed. If so, I thought that this creator would logically want his creation to know about him. And if he wanted us to know about him, he certainly would have left a way for his creation to be able to do so. These kinds of theological and philosophical questions plagued my mind as a kid. I wanted answers!
Eventually, things just got to be a little too much for me to bear. I was tired of living an unremarkable, boring life. I was tired of not having answers to my questions. I was tired of being a bystander in life. It got to the point where I wished that I would simply go to sleep and not wake up the next day. I was never really suicidal, you see. I never came close to actually carrying out an attempt against my own life, but I wished that death would come and take me away. I would spend hours at night crying over the frustration that I felt.
Right around this time, my older brother began to embrace JWism and his life turned around. He became really popular at the Hall and things began to look up for him. I allowed the Witnesses a tiny opportunity to prove to me that they had the truth, and it led to my eventual baptism. Of course, I wanted to believe what I was being fed.
I wanted to believe that God existed and had a purpose for us. I wanted to believe that there was something better waiting for us after death. I wanted to have a circle of friends to associate with. I wanted to be popular and feel loved and respected. I bought into their nonsense 100%. I simply disregarded the glaring holes in their doctrines and attempts to scientifically support the Bible thinking that no one had all the answers.
Embracing JWism, quite frankly, led to the best few years of my life. As the adage goes, ignorance was indeed bliss. I dropped a bunch of weight, the pioneer sister clique started to get my name out, and before I knew it, several really attractive girls were romantically interested in me. I was constantly being complimented on my public speaking ability. Elder’s wives told me how much they wished their sons would grow up to be like me. Looking back, most of the flattery was disingenuous and part of their love-bombing strategy, but it was something I had never experienced before. I was hooked.
But, as we all know, it was simply an illusion that had to come to an end. Things started to unravel for me a few years later. The overwhelming feeling that there was something amiss with the religion got to me. I realized that the so-called love you experience from the brotherhood cools considerably if and when you break any of their rules or begin to show individuality. All of this came to a head in my early 20s.
I was a firsthand witness to some extremely iron-fisted maneuvers by an elder to ruin the life of a young JW accused of premarital sex. It dawned on me that the problems in the religion were systemic. They weren’t isolated to a few imperfect men in a few select congregations. At that point, I finally allowed myself to look at the religion critically, and I began to see it for what it was: a complete illusion.
I ended up right where I was before baptism. The realization that there was no creator in the sky watching me, anxious to grant me a key to paradise, was a bit too much for me to handle. I went into a pretty severe depression. I gained about 50 pounds. I lost most of my JW friends when I stopped going to the meetings. In many ways, I reverted back to that overweight, unremarkable 15 year old kid. I again began to wish that death would visit me and take me out of misery.
I never really got to the point of actually planning or carrying out a suicide, but I just simply wanted to go to bed at night and never wake up the next morning. One night there were gunshots outside of my house and I was actually upset that a stray bullet did not end up lodged in my head. Needless to say, those were pretty low times.
Fortunately, I’ve left all of that behind. I’ve come to terms with the underlying problems that led me to embrace JWism in the first place. I understand now that there is no invisible man in the sky. And even if there is, he should certainly understand that it is impossible for me to search through the tens of thousands of religions that exist today to find him.
Plus, I threw away the best ten years of my life in a mind-control cult in an effort to please him. Certainly he should understand my reluctance to continue the search. I’ve come to realize that the quicker I understand that there is no God out there for me to find, the quicker I can get on with the task of enjoying the life I have ahead of me.
I’ve dropped most of the weight I put on when I left the religion, and I’m happy to report that I’m slowly, but surely, getting back into the dating scene that I’ve been away from for four years. I’ve also been able to accomplish a few things outside of the JW world for me to derive self-esteem from. I think I’m finally free from JWism, thanks in large part to the fact that I was able to address the problems that led me to become a JW in the first place.
Thanks for listening to me. JWD is the only place where I can express my feelings, and I am sincerely grateful for that.