This thread so far is so good it should be compulsory for all JWs to read!
For me stopping going to the meetings was a real pleasure for many reasons. Not having to listen to the brain-dead zombies praise the governing body at stultifying meetings, listening to saccharine indoctrination about love and paradise... all in the past... Oh the joy! I had the time to do things I wanted to and nobody was going to criticise me for it like attending Humanist meetings and doing prehistoric archaeology and taking university courses. They may have criticised but who cares? Perhaps the best bit which I didn't see coming, was that after being a JW drone for all my adult life up to that point; I now became myself...who I really was...my natural identity. This was a completely private thing not something anyone else would know about. The result was that I realised I had struck out against this false authority holding me in their straightjacket. I began, and without too much smugness, to be pleased with my own boldness in having made this very important shift in my life, from uncomfortable mental slave to a free person... in my late forties and just growing up!
As a JW everything seemed to be contaminated with a veil of grey "worldliness". Now the real world unfettered by religious obligations, is to me endlessly fascinating and rewarding to contemplate (and I contemplate a lot!)