Tonight the wife is out, and I had some time to think.
I was watching TV but got bored, because there is a fantastic thunderstorm going on right now.
I turned off everything, and started to think about things, ans why I've had a kind of empty feeling lately, as to my past. I think about the little things, the history of my life.
Somewhere, I lost my life to the JWs, that early time that is supposed to be the most important in forming who we become.
I remember being a child, but can't remember when I felt like a child, I just seem to be missing something. Is it the birthdays, holidays, friends I was barred from having? Maybe that's a part of it. But, there's a sense of belonging you have as a child (I suppose), that people talk about. They talk about being coddled, encouraged to explore the world around them, have fun, and enjoy being a child. Just going outside and playing ball, you know?
I think that the JWs robbed that specific history from us. They took the dogma of eternal death and rammed it down our little throats, hoping something would stick as we gagged on it. For most of us, something did. We hung on through our formative years, yearning for acceptance from people who cared only for their own religous rhetoric, and not for us, the innocent little children, who looked for strong adults to lead. We were like sacrifices.
I wanted so badly to be like the other kids, not thinking about death and armageddon, just being able to play kickball and not wonder when the end would come and kill all those little playmates of mine. It disturbed so me so much when the elders talked about the birds eating the flesh of the dead....I envisioned my 'worldly' best friend, dead and being pecked at by birds.
Beyond that, you could see a difference in the JW pals you had, and the 'worldly' friends. The JWs kids all seemed kind of dead, unless they were allowed to do whatever they wanted ( fence-sitters). But, any JW parent that followed the party line kept their kids in a box; we were screaming to get out. We expected to be beat at or after meetings, expected to never see our weekends, expected to have no friends but those who were pushed on us, expected billions to die, expected to not have one out-of-witness experience.
Granted, there were some good times as a child; there's no childhood that is completely horrible. At the same time, I feel in my soul that I want so much more history, I need more real experience to go from.
Just not the experience of sorrow. I've had enough of that, thanks.
I remember being barred from things that were so important to me personally, yet not important because of what they were on the outside, but because of what they represented-getting closer to the humanity I so desperately needed to be a part of.
I want the experience of being five years old, and looking forward to twelve years of agnst and adventure as a child, looking forward to meeting people, to acheiving my potential. I don't know when I became apathetic about my own existence, but it happened somewhere in my childhood. We were driven to think that everything was meaningless, but unlike monks, it was nonreligous. This wasn't for our spiritual betterment, but so that we would become soldiers of the Witness Reich, marching in our plain clothes and ties, every weekend and day off that we had, so that we wouldn't be 'ensnared'.
Isn't it ironic that we were captive all along?
ash