Hi there!
I've already posted in this forum but I haven't told you my story. Here it is:
Nowadays I'm a PIMO in my late 20s from Spain.
I was born in the cult and I can say that during my whole childhood and most of my teenage years I believed in this. However, I felt that here was something wrong with me, as I wasn't comfortable telling people I was JW, talking about JW stuff, nor did I feel "excited" and "grateful" whenever a Watchtower publication told me that I should.
As you can imagine, preaching was something that I hated from the bottom of my heart.
I was baptised at the age of 14 and the first "shock" came when I was 16. I had finished secondary school (here in Spain it lasts 4 years, for 12 to 16 year-olds), my marks were excellent but I didn't know what to do next, and I was a bit tired of studying. Thus, following the recommendations of the DVD "What Will I Do with My Life?", I decided to annull my enrolment for Bachillerato (a 2 year preparatory course for university) and I began to work with my father in something related to construction with the hope of becoming regular pioneer when I hit 18.
This lasted less than a year, but it was the most depressing and miserable period of my life: I hated my job, I was bad at it, I felt like scum. The comfort, self-worth and motivation that I once drew from studying were gone... And I didn't improve at all in my preaching, so knowing that I wasn't good enough at it made everything worse. As a result, the image of the pioneer full of happiness and holy spirit was shattered into pieces for me, and it was kinda shocking that I didn't become happy doing what the organization said. Thus, I decided to begin Bachillerato.
After I began, I just 2 or 3 months I became the happiest person on earth: it was hard, but I was good at it and I loved the things I learned. My classmates were awesome, we all felt like a big family. Here started my first serious "Crisis of Conscience": I felt so comfortable with my "worldly" classmates that I started feeling angry with all the things the Org said about mixing with non-believers and so on.. and little by little I started to reject everything about the Org. I even come across some apostate material but I didn't take it too seriously (although it planted some little seeds). When the end of Bachillerato was getting closer, I realized that I had to decide: to begin a regular degree and eventually leaving the JWs, or to start an on-line degree and staying in. Back then, although I felt the aforementioned "anger", I wasn't mentally ready to leave and I wasn't even fully "awaken", as I still believed in the JW prophecies, so I chose the second option.
During my degree years I lost contact with almost all my former classmates and met many new JW friends and thus I somehow "recovered" spiritually, although there were some things that I preferred not to investigate in much detail (evolution, the veracity of the Bible...) because I knew my JW arguments didn't stand a chance. I saw myself being a JW for the rest of my life, even though I was a bit atypical: I was very "rational", I listened to heavy metal, I loved spicy humour and swearing -with my friends-, and I admitted openly that there were many things I couldn't agree with like encouraging children to get baptised.
Little by little these incongruities in my person became more and more difficult to bear and my former doubts began to flourish again and I started to question many other things (like the utopia of paradise, the poor arguments used in WT literature, the hypocrisy of inviting others to ours meetings but we are not allowed to attend theirs, the moral weakness of many JWs, the problem with the non-existing signs of "the last days", the authoritarian and cruel nature of disfellowshipping, the control that the organization would like to enforce on the information we take in...). Finally, one night during the summer of 2014 I reached this fatal conclusion with tears in my eyes: If I ever wanted to become a whole and consequent adult, I HAD to leave the JWs.
From that date, my awakening process has progressed full speed ahead (607, evolution, Bible prophecies, the ARC...) and we can say that we have arrived to the point where I am now.
I'm still living with my parents, as I'm still studying to pass some entrance exams to become an English teacher (my degree was English Literature) and thus economically independent. I hope to achieve this independence throughout this year and I hope to leave the JWs afterwards.
It is going to be very hard, as I have my close family and some dearest friends within the cult, but I know it can't be otherwise, I don't want to live in an eternal contradiction.
Thank you very much for reading my experience (sorry if this post is too long!)
Any comment will be highly appreciated.
Paradiseseeker.