This time in my life taught me the truth in the words 'Hindsight is always 20/20'. And even as I write this now more and more surfaces in my mind. Perhaps this will answer for myself as well as my readers The question I asked in the beginning. "What Made us So Special" It was September 1992 I think.
Junior Year of high school and I had started slowly to make friends. I had three very good friends by then Helen was my closest. She was a Fiery Baptist as was Randy My second good friend. We three would sit in the lunchroom and packing bibles debate the truth of god and man religion and Philosophy. At the time we had no Idea that’s what it was called I don’t think, or at least I didn't. Well, we would debate it as well as 17 any year old could!
I remember Helen's words over and over. "They aren't Christians Lilith, That is not love!" I told her everything. About my father, The Organization, my aspirations, My questions about the religions other than the one I had been born into. Here is something if any of my family actually has the balls to pick this book up and read it through they will be thinking as they read. This is how bad association spoils useful habits. Yeah, pisses you off doesn't it. That I can call it so easily, even still?
Two years earlier I had began writing poems, short stories anything I could get out of me onto paper. And in reading my own words I realized how angry I was but also how much being able to move people, paint pictures with words meant to me. How much I loved to be as effective at it as possible. I wanted to be a English Teacher or at least Study English Literature. About the same time that there was a Assembly, one of those conventions that made me so Excited to go to as a child. They Still excited me, but it was for an entirely different reason. Boys, it became about my appearance, and just so you know I was a very large girl. at the time i was spilling well over 300 pounds and I knew what my fate was going to be in the pool I was seeing around me.
So it was even harder to feel accepted and have hope you will find that one “Brother” who would love you for who you are not your looks! After all God will make us all healthy in the new order! This was another rule that was pounded into you. They would call them “Requirements” its a softer sounding word, they really like to pull that shit. Sugar coat a pile of bull shit so you can swallow it. Your head shaking with Cognitive Dissonance because you know what yer swallowing but you just can’t help yourself.
You were only to marry “In the lord” if ya didn't and you married a non believer, again you were shunned. Not necessarily disfellowshipped. But being as you married someone who was not one of “The Flock”, what would happen when things like Christmas, or other holiday’s came up, or *Gasp* Oral sex! Training you to fear any deviation from the JW Norm. Thus keeping you, or trying to, tied to the collective.
When I was little we lived in a Rural Area, Amish and farms Miles between houses. The people who went to my congregation were simple folk. I loved it there, my whole family lived out there. It really was more important to them that you were at the Kingdom Hall not how you looked while there. More how i always believed god saw it. My Father worked in the city of Dunkirk and Conawango Valley was a Long drive thru dangerous roads to work every morning before dark. Especially during the Western New York Winters.
Shortly after the blizzard of 1977 my mother and father decided it was time to move closer to work and we left the country and moved to Dunkirk. The culture shock alone was enough to make it very difficult. This Congregation was very different. The women were shiny! They dressed as if they were peacocks. Bright colored dresses, perfectly cut short helmet hair, or long and swept up and solid as if they were going ballroom dancing. The smiles on their faces even to a 6 year old were fake and cold. I was a child yes but I learned really fast that anything that tries to dress up the visible is trying to make something Invisible. This is something I learned even in the end of my story. Painfully so, and in a hail of heartbreak and loss.
When one of the other Families in the congregation came to my home their daughter and i were in my bedroom getting acquainted. She opened my closet and looked through shaking her head, "Well we are gonna have to help you with this." She went on to insult everything I had to wear. Later when I was in her home I saw she had half a closet of things with tags still on it. She even laughed about the fact she had things she still hadn't worn.
My mother changed, she started making us dress in the Same way. Spending more money on clothing and on appearance than we did before. By the time I was in Middle school she was Working as well full time to help support our family. to support not only our new home but the "lifestyle" we had to appear to be living. Appearance, Is what became Important. Despite talks from the podium about keeping your eye simple, I felt like I was drowning in complication.
That word, “Podium” or the other one they like to use, “Platform”. The more business like way they called what the Catholics refer to as “Palpate” or “Alter” I believe. It doesn't matter, these are the things they emphasized and drilled into our heads, prided themselves on. We were scolded or reprimanded for calling the hall “church”. We were going to the “Hall” on Sunday, not “church” because the “church” or False religion, would be destroyed at Armageddon. These were the things that made them “no part of the world” separate from the wicked system of things. The sugar coating on shit. The setting up of the “Us vs Them” mentality. What I meant by what I said in the prologue of this whole thing.
“Those evils that the others seemed happy to either accept, ignore, or grow completely blind and dumb to?”
Or at least one of those things.
I was roughly 13 and we were headed to that assembly My conversations with Helen and Randy already fertilizing the seeds of doubt My family and The Organization had sewn in me. This is where my memory as a whole seems to come back, In Detail and living color. The name of the Location eludes me but I remember it was a Opera House Style theater. There was a Drama at this one made me for the first time tell my mother I didn't want to be a witness anymore. The whole Drama was about a teenager wanting to go to college when they graduated High school but his parents urged him not to because it was Unnecessary association with the World (anyone not a Jehovah's Witness in good standing) And they would not be able to help him in any way because it is not in harmony with God's will. Something switched on in my mind, no way, I want to teach!
I told my mother the same day I didn't think i wanted to be a Jehovah's Witness anymore. I was told in no uncertain terms I am a teen I don't know what I want yet and Until I am 18 I do as I am told. They always like to throw in at the end
"Remember you will suffer the consequences of your actions"
This is a true statement, but the consequences for a Jehovah's Witness youth are far greater than some young people. What my parents choose to ignore, or at least disregard, that as much a the consequences of the next few decisions I made over the years were mine to bear. Some of my decisions were a consequence of their actions and they too are suffering for them. I understand that and it has by 15 or 16 that I began learning the scope of the wake we ALL were creating. How long those waves would take to dissipate, or not.
I spent the next year or so in my head and on paper. So many questions, but when I asked them the most I got in return were "Do not question Jehovah's Organization, To question Jehovah is dangerous." you see how they did that? Equating the Earthly Organization The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, to God. Carefully and intentionally making it hard for a Member to separate the two in their mind. It was that very same summer we went to the assembly that, my mother informed me, that few of my "Friends" from the hall were getting baptized at next year's assembly. Ready for it?
"Maybe you should think about it yourself they are all doing it together, you don't want to get left behind and time is short Lilith, Armageddon is near.." I sat there disgusted, did you not hear me? I do not wish to be a WITNESS!
It shames me to say I did it anyway. I was still scared of the consequences which I had no way to know yet what they would be. Yeah, there it is, I really didn't wanna do it. But, only people I knew as “good” only real support system, so on so forth. I think you get it. It wasn't even Armageddon, by this time my poetry and drawings, so dark, so sad, so final. Armageddon would have been welcome. By now I figured myself dead anyway, I was masturbating regularly, smoking in school, secretly wanted to fuck for real, and was dreaming of college. My poetry reeked of it. I recently found a lot of it. At the end of this I will post some, maybe one at the end of one of these once in awhile. Why not hey? Complete with age I believe I wrote it or thereabouts.
In my Junior year of high school, my mother made her own statement about consequences. She made a even more poignant statement about how she was feeling in her world. The experience started as my writing gave way to drawing and sketching my feelings as well... I wanted more opportunity to put on paper random feelings or experience.
Sitting at the kitchen table with a sketch pad and pencil my mom came in and saw a pic of a heart I had made. A swollen heart Tied with a rope so tightly that is was dripping blood and staining its constraints and the ground under it. She put her finger to her chin and lower lip rubbing it slowly and gently because she had cold sores. She got them when she was stressing or worried, and she got them often.
"I have an Idea for a picture you can draw," She thought for a moment, this I learned from her a good lesson. think a bit before you speak. Not that I always did or do. "A woman torn between two men."
I remember the feeling in my head as my mind wrapped around it and put it instantly to visible concept.
"That is a good one I think." she said and walked away with the laundry basket she had brought up stairs.
It turned out to be a variation of the one I had drawn except the ropes were tied around each side of the heart, tearing it in two almost all the way leaving it intact at the bottom tip only barely. It wasn't long after that, that i saw that heart ripped in two in my mind. People refer to moments like this 'The Point of No Return' And this was that moment for me as far as The Organization was concerned. It was my first lesson in real trust, true friendship, and the final exam on my parents fallibility.
Before I continue I want you to remember who my father had proven himself to be before this moment in life, Cold, angry, and selfish. A Man who had the emotional warmth of a wet mop left out in December. I had watched him emotionally abuse us all, my mother included. Berating her and treating her like a Idiot in public. Literally using the words "Are you stupid" on her out loud in stores and parks and even at the Kingdom Hall. He had no control over himself, let alone his family and children. He thought he did, but I think the next year or so would teach us both that the biggest consequence of your actions is a change in your perception. All of us got a huge adjustment to our lens.
My Whole life my mother was the spiritual Titan of the family. She tried very hard to instill in us what she believes to be the true religion, 'The Truth'. She would tuck us in every night and listen as we said our prayers. Talking with us as she got us down and kissing us good night. She tried to have family bible studies as often as she could. But she was on her own. Most of the time my father kept his same 'Point A to B' attitude and there was no joy in them. We hated them and she saw it. So she did what she could. Talked to us and kept us as close to the straight and narrow as she could. She tried to put joy into them.
My father was an elder at this time and he gave talks and had many a responsibility in the congregation. Judicial Committees, public talks away at other congregations. He rarely if EVER worked up his own talks. My mother, a woman who truly loved and believed what she thought was true. A good Christian Wife, lets her husband lead the household, make the decisions, and rarely questioned him or spoke ill of him at least in our presence. She loved my father very much. He completely took her for granted.
I had to laugh to myself as a memory comes to mind. My mother and I had gone to a wedding shower or something, some good christian gathering of sisters for a wedding or baby arrival one early afternoon. It was our chance to socialize, My father hated having people over again people and children he had no control over. Extra unneeded bull shit. So we went and ended up being there for a bit longer than we thought it was six or seven at night before we got home and my father was obviously seething. He was angry. Eyes wide and filled with anger he looked up at my mother from the couch my little brother laying on his back as we all did as kids. He was a teddy bear, when he was comfortable and in control.
"I haven't eaten all day. I've been waiting for dinner." He was serious. We had such a great time at the shower. Games and fun and friends and food! I looked at my mother and my jaw fell WIDE when Ii saw her. She was ashamed! She felt selfish! I shouted
"NO!"
I stormed out of the living room and went to the fridge grabbed mustard, Ham, cheese, and then the bread off the counter. The whole way I was running thru my mind All my mother does for this family, my father worked more than full time, YES! But my mother worked FULL time, Came home Worked another full time job and not just what all the "Worldly" mothers do. Add to that the preparing of his talks, trying to give us kids a Peaceful lesson in God and "The Truth" ON TOP OF taking care of us kids. WE mowed the lawn WE helped with the house, WE worked up our on talks as much on our own as we could once we were old enough to do so. HOW DARE he make her feel bad for enjoying time with friends and family. They watched me leave and argued until I returned. I dropped all of it on his lap and said
"Are your arms Broken?"
Honestly I do not remember what happened after this really I don't remember a consequence. Because another bomb went off shortly there after that again altered my perception of the world around me. My mother and Father have not been the same people to me since this time, and never will be again, the same is true of me.
Psychotic Reality - Age 17
Fuck it all
it always fucks me
living a life of hate
in a psychotic reality
where every turn is a mistake
and every face covered by a mask
hiding true thoughts
behind lies I despise
even I cannot forsake
the attempt to realize
why my life's a shit hole
of immeasurable size
like a dog digs its fleas
so my existence digs me
a flea on a dog's back
is what I have come to be
a black hole
a void
spinning in front of me
the vortex so alluring
the solution so easy to see
to get off this dogs back
I must let it dig at me
until one deadly stroke
eliminates completely.
or I could jump off,
take fate into my own hands
on the floor
where they can step on me.
then darkness
where quiet can be found.
where i will sleep quietly
no other parasites around.
Death to the reality
of living life happily
only a fool of social acceptance
in such a dream believes
I finally see
what they have been telling me
life is full of hate
and seething debauchery.
a churning cesspool of personalities
out to help themselves
and simply fuck you and me.
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