Guess I ought to do some kind of meaningful post about what the last 3 years have meant to me. Hmm. Good idea.
Good idea, SD!
Good idea, SD!
It's "sd" now, sd-7. "SD"? What do you think I am, a tiny chip in which you may store your digital photos? Nah, I called myself that in the past, until I realized that my username isn't actually in capital letters and adjusted to "sd". But thank you.
Anyway, 3 years, huh? I'd say I can't believe it, but...when I look at how my kids have grown, I realize that I have no choice but to believe it. The time has passed. Three years since I was liberated from the Watchtower.
To tell you the truth, I've spent too much of it in grief and too little of it truly enjoying what I earned--the right to think for myself and be myself. There's some part of my true self that I have found myself unable to be open to, unable to consider. I know I'm making a mistake, a compromise, and shutting my eyes to it. I've made the most important decisions based on wrong premises, instead of holding those decisions to the same level of conscience and reason as my choice to leave the cult.
It seems that even my wife feels that I have no purpose now, beyond just working for the family, being a husband and father. As if that's armor I strap on to hide even from myself the fact that I don't have a big 'purpose in life' right now beyond the immediate needs or wants of the moment. I've studied the Bible on my own, ventured into thoughts of an agnostic and even atheistic nature, learned a little about objectivism just from reading 'Atlas Shrugged', but mostly I've just done a lot of what I've always done--watch movies, play video games, read novels and comic books, write in my journal, write short stories and occasional songs, and...not really much else apart from the duties of work and maintaining a household.
I think part of me feels that many of the greater things we could do are merely exercises in futility. You need more than one person to make a difference. Alone, he or she will simply be trampled. But me? I don't know. I just want it to be finished, whatever this is supposed to be about. Is there a point to all this, or were we all just a series of variables that showed up somehow and will disappear and be replaced by other variables?
Maybe it doesn't matter. At least I can live the rest of my days knowing I opened the door and found the answers I needed for myself. It made this existence a little more bearable, a little more real. Considering how much worse it is for so many on this planet, I'm actually pretty fortunate. That'll have to do.
--sd-7