by vinman 23 Replies latest jw experiences
Hi VINMAN.
Look at things this way - you've been born again and given a second shot at having a life not controlled by elders and the Org. Just take things easy to start with, and let your instincts lead you.
Would you like to learn a trade or a skill which really appeals to you?
Birds of feather.........You will almost certainly start making new friends who share your selected hobby/passion.
Enjoy your new life.
I hear you. The prospect of living forever on earth gave no urgency to living life in the now. Leave it till the new system! You'll have plenty of time to study, learn music and do your own thing then! So you never needed to think about life goals and if you did, it was more of a fantasy.
For the now, my interests come last and my family's interests first. My down time now is reading and researching all of 'this' and I am becoming consumed by it.
I still don't think that I am living an honest and authentic life but will integrate more things in every now and then. Hence my garden goal this year :)
Guess what. I want grandkids to pick fruit from nanas garden. Didn't ever think about having grandkids coz surely that would be after a thousand years. Good god yes it is layers and layers of cultedness.
MJB Guess what. I want grandkids to pick fruit from nanas garden. Didn't ever think about having grandkids coz surely that would be after a thousand years. Good god yes it is layers and layers of cultedness.
I am hoping/imagining that happens for you- I know as a kid those times were the happiest with my (nonJW athiest Grandparents) Yeah gardening with grandma!
I have driven a car for over 20 years, excellent time to learn to ride a motorbike ☺it is exhilarating, liberating, and for me the place I learned 'mindfulness' which I am now more able to practice in everyday life. My mind was such a whirr of constant active thought before. Being on the bike, where I have to focus intensely on every action, on my surroundings etc for survival, it helped me blow out some cobwebs of indoctrination. I cant recommend it highly enough as long as you have decades behind the wheel and know that when you are riding you are essentially invisible to other road users. So ride with caution commensurate with your invisibility and you'll love it!
I am still newly awake and have been obsessed with all things exjw for months, but I thoroughly enjoy reading here and bolstering my freedom of thought. Strangely I can cope with the thought of my loss of the best 2 decades of my life to the bOrg, but it upsets me if I think of it in terms of individual days, hours or minutes. That I find too mindblowing. I put off almost EVERYTHING I enjoy to the new system. And I enjoy so many things, now feel my time left is so short it is daunting to prioritise what I want to do. If I hadn't been bOrged, I would have had boyfriends, maybe marriage and kids. A career, travel, perhaps owned my own home. Nicer cars instead of old bangers. Cooking, baking, entertaining, parties. Dabbled in painting, drawing, photography, knitting, embroidery, sewing, cross-stitch. Tennis, badminton, swimming, yoga, pilates. Surfing, parachuting, paragliding, hiking, climbing, abseiling, skateboarding, rollerskating, iceskating. Charity work, Religious exploration and perhaps true spirituality. Instead I have been a pioneer or wannabe pioneer all this time. Expert in front door design, doorbell ringtones, ornamental knockers and garden admiration.
Now reaping what I sowed...a bumper crop of humdrum, always skint, with a very basic education that threatens to leave me that way! Yet knowing TTATT now feeling truly happy and free, and although time is short and choices limited by present circumstances, possibilities seem endless simply because I'LL be choosing for myself.
So I've taken a step back to my teenage pre-bOrg self, become a compassionate vegetarian like I was then, and starting over. Clean slate which I selfishly won't be letting ANYONE else take a chalk to. This is MY life and while I welcome opinions from loved ones on what I should and shouldn't do, they don't expect me to conform to their opinions. They understand I have spent too long conforming to The Seven Men and have to make my life my own now....feel a re-write of song 64 coming on. Which reminds me...singing, learning instruments, writing music and songs...my To Do lists are too daunting, so I'll start with a 10point bucket list and add a new item each time I cross one off 😊.
In summary, if you enjoy whiling away a few hours on exjdubbing, do it! At least it is your choice, and you will design your own roadmap away from this intensive debriefing. But I think we all need it to some extent, cult withdrawal can cause PTSD so it is not surprising we need at the very least some support, understanding and a place to offload/vent. I am drawn to it daily, I'm sure many of us are. But also many are now ex-exjws, even ex-ex-exjws so this too passes and 1 day we too might just live 24hrs with it barely registering on our thought radar.
Of course--it's part of the normal grief process.
You can't recoup lost time. All you can do is make the most of what you've got to work with now. Build yourself a life worth living.
Vinman, coming from the perspective of a have been JW, married to a born-in the JW (but not baptized) husband that went from total inactivity to suddenly becoming zealous to become baptized (the "new personality" creating a relationship train wreck in our marriage, which traumatized me), I must say my reading and learning obsession is still hanging around for going on now four years. I feel it is because relevant issues remain unresolved. He has lived as an inactive fence sitter for two+ years now with an occasional reminder to me that he will become baptized "soon". ( ironic use of the word IMO)
Maybe your personal need for reading and learning has to do with the unresolved.
Hi Vinman
A child in a library is an analogy that fits extremely well (plus it vindicated my decision to log back on here as soon as I had a moment to spare - bonus!) In my experience, the best way to deal with an obsession if you feel it is becoming unhealthy in terms of time consumption is to split it...find another obsession, then another, then another. Enjoy them consecutively then your time will be shared between them 😆 And none of them can then be time consuming enough to rate the obsession label.
Decades of indoctrination through the mind-control represented by the BITE model are going to take some undoing, so I accept that this thirst for accurate information and reading all the experiences which we identify with is helpful to un-prove what we spent so much time being convinced of. Sacrificing time, energy and resources is some seriously messed up sh!t...allow yourself whatever it takes to recover and rebalance. Seeking to discover what you really want to do with your life now that you have a considerable portion of it reclaimed unexpectedly is a great place to be. That child will soon find their way out of the library and into the sweet shop more often!
At times I put a time limit on my reading, granted it was a lot of time, if I remember like two hours a day.
But by forcing yourself to stop, you have to fill up the rest of that time with something else. It also makes you take a little time to process/reflect on what you have read. Like I say it was nearly two years for me, so I wouldn't beat yourself up if you are only 9 months in.
