I'm back with the fourth part of my life experience. It was a much shorter gap since I posted the previous installment. The part will mean little if the previous ones haven't been read. Here are the first three:
Here is part four. I suspect there will be at least one more to write. Thanks for the previous comments and interest. These are only fully understood by those who have gone through it.
That crisis would be divorce. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been too surprised. After a separation of several months, my wife returned in April 2004. I was happy to have her back but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t in a good place either. Trust had been shattered. I no longer felt we could move forward with selling the house. It was my inheritance and I wasn’t ready to make any moves.
We both made mistakes in the intervening months. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the email I received at work in the middle of the day in December 2005 in which she said she wanted a divorce. I had to immediately leave work. We talked but her mind was made up. I was gutted but, honestly, it was nowhere near the pain and bewilderment I felt two years earlier when she initially announced her dissatisfaction. I guess even if only in my subconscious, I realized this day was coming.
To regress a bit, as I mentioned earlier, I had come to a decision to leave the Watchtower organization while on vacation in California. This was in August 2004. Our attendance at church activities dropped off from that point. I alone continued to go some as I didn’t want to cause too much attention if possible. My hair was still relatively short at this point since I had had it cut very short in January 2004 when I came crawling back to the religion. Still, it was getting noticeably un-Witness like. The Watchtower imposes very strict grooming regulations on males and I was starting to stand out. I had absolutely no intentions on cutting it.
I narrowly avoided getting officially thrown out of the religion (disfellowshipped) in March 2005 for violating a rule. I had to meet with some elders but they decided to give me another chance. I had already determined that whether they threw me out or not, nothing would be changing as far as my participation in church activities and hair length. I think the last time I attended a regular meeting was in September 2005 so I had been completely inactive for three months when the bombshell of divorce got presented in December. So, this was a test. Would I go running back as I had when my parents died and when I had the initial problems with my wife? No, and it barely even crossed my mind.
Much more had been growing than just my hair which, by the end of December 2005, had been growing for almost two years. I am someone with a longhair identity. I don’t feel right with short hair and I never have. To finally be breaking free of the rules that kept me from expressing this about myself was a profound experience. It was like cracking open a chrysalis and emerging as a transformed being. I had previously unknown confidence. I looked in the mirror and saw the real me staring back. I came to fully appreciate that this wasn’t going to change and that to ever take steps backwards would be a colossal mistake.
For someone who has been free to form their own opinions and beliefs about the world, it’s hard to even describe the state I was in. In some ways, I felt like a child, discovering the world and making real choices about what they like and what they believe in. Instead of following a carefully scripted existence, my life was now a blank slate. Some who leave go through a period that almost mimics adolescence, filled with experimentation and even risky behavior. I did some of this. Nothing too crazy but I did sate my curiosity about a few things. I got burned some but also enlightened and wouldn’t trade my experiences. I lived. I grew. The horrible stagnation of being stuck was finally over.
So, after the initial shock of realizing that divorce was in my future, I prepared as best as I could. I visited a friend in Colorado for a week shortly after getting the news and this was very beneficial. I was able to take a step out of the situation and steel myself for the unpleasant process. My wife had moved out by the time I got back. The house definitely felt empty but again, not as empty as it felt during the separation. I began doing some modest redecorating and gradually began to view it as my apartment. We went to court in March and it was finalized in July 2006. The actual divorcing process wasn’t easy but it could have been a lot worse. We both made compromises.
It was during that winter that I received some unwelcome calls from elders – first by telephone – and then actual visits. A close friend of mine had gotten disfellowshipped for apostasy, the most egregious offense in Witness eyes of all. It got back to the elders eventually that I hadn’t stopped associating with him as I was supposed to do. They wanted answers. I stopped answering the phone and responded to one of the messages that I was going through a divorce and in absolutely no position to discuss anything. One day they stopped over to the house unannounced. I happened to be doing yard burning so it was a convenient reason not to talk much.
It was miraculous that they let me be. I think a few factors contributed. I wasn’t kidding about not being able to deal with it while going through a divorce. These elders knew my background of depression and the ordeals I had been through. I don’t think they wanted to chance pushing me over the edge. I also think that one elder in particular exercised some human compassion and decided to just let me go without receiving official sanction. This mattered to me, especially at that time, because I had family still in the religion and while I knew that they’d have little to do with me just because I was no longer attending, I knew they’d definitely have *nothing* to do with me if I was disfellowshipped.
When I walked out of that court room in March 2006 was when I really began thinking about my path ahead. I was 34, single, with an undefined belief system. I was now single in more ways than one as that former decent circle of Witness friends was gone and I knew that at least real life contact with my remaining family would be probably non-existent. It was frightening in some ways but also exciting as I thought about that clean slate. I had a scuba diving trip to Bonaire long planned for April so I had that to look forward to. It was taken with my local dive shop so I knew some of those attending. It was nice being around non-judgmental people who weren’t basing my worth on my performance in meeting a certain religion’s rules.
I hadn’t thought about dating for so long but it soon became apparent to me that it was something I wanted to do. As an introvert, I don’t mind being alone and can find considerable enjoyment in many activities without having others around. But being single is not a state I would choose as I deeply value having that close bond to another. I felt that this was an important step forward and would help me move on. So, with some hesitation, I joined my first online dating site. It wasn’t long before a woman four years older than me made contact and we agreed to meet. There was some physical chemistry but not much beyond that and we only went on two dates. She just stopped replying and I never found out what really happened. I was in a vulnerable emotional state and let it affect me far more than I should have. I hadn’t come to fully appreciate that the world of online dating is often made up of serial daters who go through lots of candidates. It was good for me though. I put myself out there. I was allowing opportunities for my future to develop.
I decided to back off from the dating site for a while even though I had signed up for a six month membership. While on that Colorado trip back in January, I had made plans to with my friend to visit Europe in August so that trip began to consume my thoughts. I had always enjoyed traveling and it was a great way to grow and open new horizons. My friend and I first visited England and then flew over to Germany where we met a friend that I became acquainted with online. He showed us much of the country and we crossed over into France a bit too. It was a fun trip, my third one of the year.
I had been back about a month when out of the blue a woman contacted me from the dating site. I had been putting no effort into it but she seemed interesting so I agreed to meet. We went on a few dates but nothing came of it. It was around this time, however, that I met a woman at an online community I was part of. We had gotten to know each other a bit and then she sent me a message which led to us quickly developing a friendship which in turn became something more. There were a number of factors such as age difference, location and circumstances that made me very hesitant to get involved. In fact, several times I “ended” it but we had a very strong friendship and it just kept gaining momentum. We agreed to meet with her coming to stay at my house for an initial visit of over two weeks. This began an intense one year relationship that was filled with highs and lows.
I came into it with lots of baggage. I was still really in just the beginning stages of processing the fact that I had left my religion. The divorce and its aftermath had made it less prominent in my mind for a while. When you spend your whole life expecting to never die, to just pass through God’s war of Armageddon into a paradise earth and then live forever, it can take time to begin to think differently. The teaching of a resurrection also enters into it as it was always my hope to see my parents again in that paradise earth. This woman had what I’d call New Age beliefs. She grew up Catholic but left that and had her own horror stories of guilt and fear of hellfire. It was interesting to talk with her. She had great insight almost to an empathic level and knew me very well. We had some amazing conversations as she helped me see how people outside a high control group think and act. She helped me see how deep my wiring truly was.
All sorts of Witness taboos began falling as she introduced me to various things. The newness of it all was very exciting. Still, my inner demons haunted me and I went through periods of deep depression. The loss of the hope my religion offered is not given up without some grief. I also truly fell in love with her but knew almost from the beginning that it would never last long term. It was a truth that we both avoided facing for a long time. Oh, we made plans and had hopes but circumstances and realities made things impossible. I don’t regret the relationship for a second but wish that things could have been easier on both of us. I grew so much during that time. The bonds of Watchtower thinking were loosed to an unprecedented degree. I was coming to understand so much more about who I am and what I was looking for out of life. The end of that relationship would hit me very hard but in the crucible of that angst, the stage would be set for a whole new experience. A very positive one!