well, i have been checking this board for a few days and love reading the comments. i remember starting going to the meetings when i was 5 and continued till i stopped going to the meetings about 10 yrs ago......total of 25 yrs to the meetings. i remember as a kid not being able to celebrate birthdays or stuff like that and wearing our dresses up to our knees....that was awful. i remember when i was a teenager turning up at the kingdom hall one morning to go out witnessing and i was on my own and the group was just about ready to go out, and the brother who was taking the group said..."now, who wants to go out with linda".......and as i looked around, not one person put their hand up...how degrading that was for me. another thing i regret was not being my friends bridesmaid...she had moved to another state and was marrying someone who wasnt a witness and when she rang up to ask me to be bridesmaid, i said no......i thought i was just so righteous.....it bothered me for literally yrs. and a few yrs ago i actually wrote to her and told her how sorry i was and that friends mean more to me...and how i thought i was so righteous then and she wrote back and she said that she cried when she got that letter from me....we are in contact with each other by mail and thats good.
i am an overweight person and witnesses can be just as spiteful as the rest of them....they say, as long as you go to the meetings and put jehovah first thats all that matters, but they arent the ones in my position and dont know what its like. and there is also the material side of things...well, if you havent got a good car and money, no matter what they say, you are in the "group" ......there was an older sister who use to say things to me and i never answered her back because it wasnt the right thing to do. well, if she did that to me now, i would have something to say. i gave a talk once and i had to work on dress etc...well, the brother actually counselled me on the shoes i was wearing, how embarrasing, they were nice slip on shoes and they didnt look shabby or anything, i was nicely dressed. each congregation seems to have its own rules regarding disfellowshipping and their reasons for doing so and also the voting thing seems to have changed...now its up to your own conscience...well, well......when i stopped going to the meetings i lived my life in limbo and felt like i was going mad...after going to the meetings for so long, i didnt know how to live so to speak....i have a relative that is disfellowshipped and she is a lovely person and we still snuck around to see her, well, now it doesnt matter because we dont go to the meetings anymore. i have wasted the last 10 yrs of my life not knowing what to do but gradually i am getting more self confident about things...i am not dissassociated or disfellowshipped, just stopped going to the meetings.....went to a relatives place for dinner the other night, and they still go to the meetings but of course they had to bring up witness stuff. and now, i know of things personally that go on between witnesses that they shouldnt be doing. i know someone who goes to the meetings but reads her astrology signs and sometimes reads dream books to interpret her dreams and someone else looks at porno pictures on the net....well, there is more to say, but i will leave that for another day.,.................