I was always the kind of kid that took things very seriously. It’s just the way I’m wired. I pay attention to words that are used and words have always had a lot of very specific meaning to me. For example, when I was really little my grandpa told me that he was going to take me to the circus and he said that “we’re going to have a ball”. Well, when he showed up without a ball I was crushed. I didn’t know what the circus would be like but I thought that he was going to bring a ball and whether it was a baseball or basketball or one of those rubber bouncy balls, that was always my favorite toy. He said we’d have a ball, and then he didn’t produce one. So as a tiny child I had no frame of reference for this phrase that he used and he had to buy me a ball before we could go to the circus.
So when reading the propaganda that Jehovah’s Witnesses produce I took it very seriously. When I was at meetings and it was being fed to me from the platform, I took it all in.. After all, I was told that this meant my life and my happiness. I’ve already spoken as to how my life changed when I was eight or nine and my parents became Witnesses, and how things changed at home and at school. I’ve also laid out the FOG and what I was living in as far as the teachings and the structure and what was expected of us.
My Spiritual Career Begins
But now I’m going to chart my course as a young Jehovah’s Witness growing up into adulthood so that you can see how this progressed. As promised, I’m going to get to an event in 2008, something that just came out of absolutely nowhere that set my life on a different cours, a much healthier one. I had no clue that it was going to be the beginning of the end for me at that time in a lot of ways.
As a kid in the congregation, I took my first steps as a young Jehovah’s Witness by going out in the field ministry with my parents. At first, just accompanying them to the doors, and then later I would get to knock on the doors myself and give presentations to try to leave Watchtower magazines and books with people that we met. Kids are awesome little weapons for Witnesses to use at the door. Let’s face it, who’s going to turn away a cute little kid in a suit or a dress that is offering some sort of literature. So when you look at it from the outside, you can see that it kind of cements to this child that this door to door ministry thing is actually pretty cool and easy. People like you and they appreciate you coming to their door when you’re cute and you’re well-dressed. They’ll look at you and say, “look at how well-behaved he is”. You place magazines with them and you feel good.
So then I became an unbaptized publisher. This is where the organization started to get more of a grip on me because you start being able to turn in field service reports of your time and literature placements even though you aren’t yet an official baptized Witness. You meet with two elders in a back room and they ask you a few questions to make sure that you’re a morally upright person and that you can represent the organization publicly. It makes you feel like you’re doing something important.
My parents were still studying Watchtower books with me. I was going to all the meetings, developing as a young minister going out publicly declaring “the truth”. And then I started feeling pressured to get baptized. It’s actually called dedication and baptism. So first you’re expected to dedicate yourself to Jehovah God in prayer. Water immersion, or baptism is the public symbol that a person has dedicated their life to Jehovah, or more accurately to the organization of Jehovah’s Witnesses, in prayer. The funny thing is that they act like that’s between you and God, but in order to get baptized, even though you prayed and dedicated yourself to God, you first have to go over their baptism questions with three elders in the congregation. The elders would determine if you are ready for baptism, not some prayer between you and God.
There’s a book that they use, and in the back are questions for baptism. You pore over these questions, reading cited material and scriptures, so that you can give them the answers that they want. You have to meet with three elders, one for each section, to show that you have a working knowledge of their doctrines. Most Jehovah’s Witnesses remember who those three brothers were. It’s a very personal thing. I remember the three who met with me. However one thing that I remember is that even as a child I realized that I was smarter than some of them and it made me wonder about some things. For instance a good sign that any Witness is “making the Truth their own” is when they can regurgitate information in their own words, rather than merely reading it from a cult publication word for word. “Making the Truth your own” is another Jehovah’s Witness’ term. Well, there’s one elder in particular that would ask me questions and when I would answer them in my own words he would tell me that I was wrong and then give a simplified version of my answer word for word out of some publication like he didn’t understand that I was putting it in my own words. It was a little disconcerting even as a kid. Here I was basically going for extra credit and it was over his head and he was an elder. I thought I was going to fail and not be able to get baptized because he wasn’t the brightest person. Ultimately though, those three brothers got together and discussed my worthiness, even though I’d already dedicated myself to God in prayer as far as they knew, and then they decided what was between me and God was cool with them and approved me.
So I was able to go get baptized on July 4th 1992 at 14 years old. I was officially baptized as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the district convention that summer at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky. It was in front of probably ten to twelve thousand people.
Things started to change after that. As a baptized brother I was now expected to pray publicly at the meetings to either open or close them as they say a prayer before and after every meeting. So I did that at times. I started getting more talks at the meetings instead of just the bible readings for five minutes. Sometimes I would be given a subject and was expected to develop a talk around that subject and then speak for five minutes. After each person gave their talk they were actually graded on it publicly from the platform. The Theocratic Ministry School conductor always gave you something to work on, like proper pronunciation or gestures, logical and coherent development and so on. If you didn’t do well you would be told to work on it again, and if you did well then you’d be given something else to work on. There was always something you could be doing better.
I was also given responsibilities in the congregation like handing out magazines that people would order, taking orders from people, taking inventory. I’d help my dad count the money that was donated after the meetings to sign off on it before he took it to the bank. I cut the grass at the Kingdom Hall every few weeks when it was our turn. I would clean the Kingdom Hall after field service on Saturdays when it was our turn as well. When there was a convention we would volunteer to do something at it. Sometimes it was cleaning, or once we did security at night and stayed overnight. We never really took vacations, but once or twice I do remember us taking a long weekend to go to unassigned territory to help some congregation out. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, that means that some congregations often in rural areas couldn’t cover the large area that they had to cover in their door to door ministry. Maybe they had an entire county or maybe there wasn’t even a congregation nearby, so groups from different congregations would go down to these areas that were never hit with our message and we would go on an all out blitz and spread the message in that area. I guess that was our idea of a vacation.
So in addition to meetings three times a week for five hours, spending probably 10 to 20 hours a month or more knocking on doors, and going to school, there were all of these other things that I just mentioned that I had to prepare for and do as a young Jehovah’s Witness.
I also need to mention the most important day of the year for Jehovah’s Witnesses, the annual memorial of Christ’s death. It is the one observance that Jehovah’s Witnesses have, there holiday of sorts. Once a year they get together after sundown on the day that corresponds with his Last Supper and his death, and they do the whole bread and wine thing, only they don’t partake of any of it. We literally just sat there, passing the emblems around to each other in the wine goblets or on a little plate for the unleavened bread. According to Jehovah’s Witnesses there are two groups of people that are going to live forever. One, the vast majority, will live on a paradise earth. If you’ll remember they believe it’s going to go back to the Garden of Eden as that was God’s original purpose and he’s going to fulfill that. And then the other group will be one hundred and forty four thousand anointed ones that will rule as kings and priests in heaven with Jesus over that paradise earth. Now, how do you know if you’re one of that anointed heavenly class? You just know. They say that God’s Spirit speaks with yours and if you are so called, then you alone can partake of those emblems at the memorial.
They claim to do just as Jesus commanded, that he was in a room with his first anointed followers during his Last Supper, and that Witnesses today do the same as Jesus instituted there on that fateful day. Ultimately it didn’t make sense by our own beliefs though. If Jesus observed this with his anointed there, and nobody else was merely observing and passing around the emblems without partaking, then there is no precedent in the original observance for everyone to be there unless they are anointed and going to partake. So either only the anointed should show up to the observance and thus participate, or all of Christ’s followers should show up and participate and all should partake. They don’t celebrate according to their own explanation of the observance, but most never think about it.
Now most congregations don’t actually have any anointed ones that will partake. This was our one ceremony that we did as Jehovah’s Witnesses and we passed around the bread and we passed around the wine and we just sat there appreciating all that had been given for us to have the hope of salvation. It was a solemn occasion, and it was to be taken very seriously. But there was joy because this was what gave us our hope. The death of Jesus Christ and this memorial that he instituted. There was actually also a large public outreach to the community in order to invite them to attend. When the time comes every year in the spring you’ll see Jehovah’s Witnesses going door to door just leaving these little invitations for everybody to come to the memorial service. They count everyone in attendance and add up the numbers across the world and love having a crowd larger than their own membership numbers. That gives the work that they do credibility and instills hope in them for continued growth. After all, look at how many attend the annual event and it is usually double the number of people that they call their own.
Now back to my story. Once I turned sixteen, things started changing even more. I was actually given a car by another brother at the Kingdom Hall. It didn’t run but I got it to run. It was a rusted out beater with a heater but it was my first car and I loved it. I hated being at home because of my dad and I knew that a car was my gateway to freedom so I got a job working part time at a Wendy’s near my house that I could walk to. I started to save up money to fix the car and got my license. With that came some measure of sanity and distance from my family. Obviously I didn’t have a ton of extra time with all that being a Witness entailed, but at least I could drive to meetings by myself or go out in the field service ministry by myself or even with my friends. I didn’t have to be at home or be around my dad all the time and I would do just about anything not to have to. I even continued walking to work because it took longer than driving and I was in no rush to get home. With that car I was now able to auxiliary pioneer in the summer months when we were off school. So I signed up to spend 60 hours each month for June, July, and August to go knock on doors. I wanted to be a good Jehovah’s Witness and was told that I was setting a great example for other young people in the congregation. I liked that praise, it was about all I got, so it was a feeling that I was doing something right. I started being asked to read from the platform at the meetings and in the private homes that we went to for book studies. So I would sit up there with the conductor and I would read all of the paragraphs of whatever book or whatever lesson from the Watchtower we were being indoctrinated with that day. I was 100 percent certain that we had The Truth.
I had a lot going on but I also started to develop some good friends. Once I got my car I was able to go out and actually get my friends and do things. I was one of the first to have a car. We usually just went out and played sports. I loved basketball and football and I would play those all day if I could. I’ll never forget those times. They were some of the best of my life because I had friends and we were pretty tight. We also went to movies, we went fishing, we played video games, we would just hang out. At that point I felt like I really belonged and it was a great feeling.
Once I graduated high school and turned down college to regular pioneer and devote 90 hours monthly to the public ministry work, I found how little support I had in the congregation. The Kingdom Hall that I attended was super conservative and the sexes didn’t really mix much, even out in the ministry work. Often there were car groups formed of men and others of women and we went our separate ways. Being a young “brother” and pioneer I found myself out with lots of “sisters” in the congregation, but they often didn’t want to work with me or had their own plans together that didn’t include options for me to tag along. I can’t tell you how many times I ended up going out door to door or making return calls by myself all day. It wasn’t much fun, especially during the week. When I did have people that would come with me, I was often expected to drive. The problem is that I always drove and nobody ever chipped in any money for gas or wear and tear. Eventually my car died and I had to get another. I’m know that I went through two cars that year, but it may have been three.
In order to afford to do what I was doing I was working up to three part-time jobs to make ends meet. I had no financial support at home or elsewhere. So it was up to me to figure out how to keep buying myself cars, which meant working around the clock around my public ministry work, meetings, and other things you’ll see in a minute.
As a slight tangent, something that many don’t know about Jehovah’s Witnesses is that their control even extends to the type of car that a person drives. Because so much of our time was expected to be spent in the ministry work, it was expected that a person would buy a “good service car”. In other words, something preferably with four doors like a sedan, even better if you got a minivan to carry more people around in the ministry work. I’ll never forget standing on the car lot with a choice between two cars that I could afford, at one point. On one hand I could purchase a Ford Mustang convertible coupe that looked fun. On the other hand I could purchase a very basic Mazda Protege sedan. My heart wanted that Mustang so bad, but I knew people that were pulled into the back room and chastized by elders in the congregation because they bought a car that wasn’t a good service car. I was a pioneer at the time, so there was no excuse for me to buy the fun car. So, of course, I got the more practical car to make everyone happy and convinced myself that I was happy with that decision.
While I was a young pioneer, I was then appointed as a Ministerial Servant in the congregation, one step up from where I was as a regular publisher, a regular brother in the congregation, but also one step under being an elder. I guess you could say I was on my way. I conducted various parts of the meetings, asking questions and calling on people to give their answers. I gave talks, I ran the literature department, I ran the magazines department, I helped with the sound department. And in summary, I was also pioneering, doing all the regular Witness stuff and working three part time jobs.
As a ministerial servant, I would also have shepherding calls to go on. A shepherding call is a term for the way that the elders in each congregation are supposed to call on ones that need help each month. They would look through your field service reports and say, oh this brother here didn’t go out last month, so we need to go encourage him and have a shepherding call. Or maybe they heard that sister so-and-so is depressed so we should go see her. What I realized was that a lot of times these calls didn’t actually happen. When they did it seemed like we only ever saw the same people. Lots of people never even got such a call. Some people felt intimidated by these calls and thought that the elders were coming because they were in some sort of trouble, and let’s face it, that was true sometimes. It really shows the attitude and the division between the elders in the congregation and the rest of their supposed flock, that they’re basically afraid of the elders, and that they have good reason to feel that way. Elders have the ability to take away everything that you’ve ever known through the punishment of shunning, should they decide that you’re worthy of such a punishment.
I burned brightly in the congregation but eventually I burned out. I stopped pioneering. I was out of money. My car was broken again. I was going into debt trying to get another car. I kept praying to Jehovah for help. Here I was doing all the right things and everything was going wrong. Of course that’s not to be seen as a lack of Jehovah’s help, according to them, that’s just Satan bringing me down. So here I was trying to do all the right things and Satan was just putting up these obstacles in my path. I ended up stepping down as a ministerial servant too. I needed to go back to square one to start again.
Of course when you step down from any of these positions they even announce that from the platform. And so just like if you were disfellowshipped they’d announce that brother so-and-so is no longer one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, if you’re no longer an elder or a pioneer or a ministerial servant they will go up on stage and let everyone know that brother so-and-so is no longer serving as, in my case a ministerial servant and a pioneer in the congregation. Honestly, whenever something like that is announced, people start looking at you differently. They won’t recognize that you’re just burned out. There must be something wrong with you.
This was a big deal for me. It was one of my first moments of cognitive dissonance. I had always heard these stories of virtual miracles that were performed when people prayed to do the right thing and how Jehovah would swoop in and make it work out somehow. But it wasn’t happening for me. I was doing all the right things and I was praying intently to Jehovah and nothing was happening in my favor. For me it just meant working more and more hours, doing things for Jehovah, pioneering or whatever, and I was absolutely miserable in it all. And I gave up so much to do this. Where was God? Where was my help? I would push those feelings down and try to think that maybe it just wasn’t part of his plan for me. I wasn’t getting help from anyone and certainly not God.
At nineteen I just went ahead and moved out of my family home. I had the money and I wanted out so much. I moved into one side of a duplex. Things were starting to change as I got older and time passed. Friends started leaving the organization and I was starting to miss some of the people that I had been close to. People would just grow apart or get busy. This happens with everybody as you get older. People grow apart, they get busy, they get jobs, they have families. We weren’t kids anymore. We had responsibilities. And so, in the end I ended up with more time alone, and to be honest I didn’t like it all that much. Looking back now, I can see that I probably didn’t really like myself very much. I was bullied relentlessly in school, not just because I was one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and was different in that way, but I was also a super skinny kid with terrible clothes from thrift stores. I wore glasses. I made good grades so I was the nerd and I didn’t really have any friends there. So the cult identity was really all I had. My cult friends were all I had, but I remember feeling pretty lonely.
When you’re doing all the right things in the congregation, when you’re that young pioneer that is a ministerial servant too, everyone thinks that you’re awesome and likes you. But when you aren’t those things anymore you are nothing to them. It’s like you have fallen off your pedestal. I remember watching my dad during the period where he was no longer an elder. He was always super depressed anyway, but I guess he was even more super depressed because all that he had was that one role where people admired him in the congregation. That’s all he ever really seemed to care about. Like I said, he was a different person there, and it was taken away from him. He wasn’t happy at the meetings anymore, though later, when he was reappointed an elder for whatever reason and things went back to normal for him, he was happy at the meetings again and playing that role. But it was something that I noticed even back then – that change that would occur in people, the way they saw people based on their titles, and they way that people were treated differently based on who they were in the congregation.
A Change Of Scenery
I decided that I needed a fresh start for myself. I prayed about things and said that I would try out congregations across the river in Indiana and that if I found one I liked I’d go there. I ended up trying and liking the Charlestown congregation. It was a good distance from where I grew up, and I liked that idea. A total change. People were friendly to me. Of course I didn’t realize at that time that there is a term used for cults called “love bombing”. It’s something they tend to do when a new person comes in. Everyone loves you and they overwhelm you with how happy they are that you’re going to be a part of their group. That lasts for a little while and goes away, oftentimes they go on to somebody else and forget you.
Now I had always known a lot of people but I always struggled to make real friends, although like many Jehovah’s Witnesses I just had a distorted view of friendship. But it’s always been hard for me to fit in because I was taught to push people away. Anyway, I got to know a new group of young people. I remember getting invited to go camping once with this group. We went out with a big group that included a mix of young people and older ones from beyond our congregation. It was people from several local congregations that all got together, including elders and pioneers. People were drinking. And although I’ve never been one to drink at all because I’ve been told that alcoholism runs in my family, I don’t care if other people drink. If they drink and enjoy themselves, more power to them. But I was watching people drink and some were getting maybe a little tipsy, which in the cult you’re not supposed to do. And then all of a sudden a bunch of these young people ran out into the woods. I didn’t understand why. I thought maybe they were playing a game or something. But what happened is a park ranger showed up and he was checking people’s identification to make sure they were old enough to drink. Here I was camping with elders that brought booze and were giving it to young people who were under age. And I guess everybody knew this was going to go down. It’s something that they did all the time and they just ran off because they didn’t want to get caught. You see, the higher I climbed on any ladder in the organization, or the more I got to go out with people to see who they really were, the more I realized that the man behind the curtain wasn’t what he claimed to be. They looked one way but weren’t necessarily that way, it was just an illusion. I knew that some things were like that, such as my dad giving talks about happy family life while being a miserable family man. But I didn’t know the extent of other things that were going on.
There was a get together one time at a well known farm that I went to. I played basketball and I had a great time. While I was playing basketball I noticed that young people were kind of pairing off and going into the woods together. I might see two young ladies walk off followed by two young guys and so on. Well it wasn’t long after that and an announcement started to be made at the meetings. So and so was reproved or disfellowshipped or whatever may have been. So I started realizing that things were not what they were made out to be. I was a true Jehovah’s Witness through and through and I did know plenty who were, but there was always this seedy underbelly of things going on. Most of the time I’m sure I had no clue.
Around this time. I actually started dating. Now let me take a minute here to explain Witness dating to you. First, you must always have a chaperone and they must be of an age of reason. In other words you can’t just go take a little kid with you on your date and send them off to go play while you two are alone. No, not even if you are 20 years old or 50 years old. You must have a chaperon at all times. Also, there are many more sisters than there are brothers, so brothers have more to choose from. It sounds gross to say it that way but that’s how it was depending on who you were. Dating is also only to be undertaken with a view to marriage and engagement is a vow. And what you vow you must pay. So breaking off an engagement is scandalous. You aren’t supposed to date around to figure out who you mesh well with, you are supposed to be looking at marriage from the first date with the first person you meet.
Personally, I was super shy. And if you remember, brothers and sisters in my congregation didn’t really associate. I had no clue how to talk to a girl much less approach one. I would have never even had the courage to ask anyone out. With all the bullying that I had endured my self-esteem was pretty much in the toilet.
Meeting My Wife
Well, one day somebody at my Kingdom Hall told me that there was a girl up in Seymour that I needed to meet. I had this happen to me previously twice and neither time did it go well but I figured that I had nothing to lose so I went up to meet her. Of course we met where many Witnesses meet, at her Kingdom Hall, of course. Everything revolves around being a Witness. I stayed the day with her and her family and that started things off. Her parents were nice to me. I worked pressure washing jobs in the winter and work would get so slow because of freezing temperatures that I could sometimes stay up there with her and her family. I would sleep on their couch and we would get to spend time together. Don’t worry. There was always a chaperone. She had four younger sisters, her mom and her dad, all in a tiny, two bedroom house, so there wasn’t anything going on there. There was hardly a moment to breathe without a small child jumping on me.
There wasn’t much to do. Her parents wouldn’t let us go out much so all we really did was talk and get to know each other. It wasn’t ideal but it really forced us to discuss life and how we saw things, at least the things you can talk about with other people around at all times. I was 22 and she was 19, both isolated kids in a cult, so it’s not like we had a lot of depth to us. I had at least lived on my own but she was super sheltered. She was even home schooled through high school so as not to have to deal with worldly kids. So basically, all she knew was that little environment in her home. Her parents, although nice to me, didn’t seem to like me. Or maybe they just didn’t want her to grow up and leave, which was something they made pretty clear in different ways. At one point my parents went up there and thought they were just going to hang out but really they were trying to get my parents to go along with them in breaking us up. I don’t know if they thought we were stupid or if they thought their house was bigger than it was, but we could hear them talking in the kitchen. I mean, they were right there just a matter of feet from us. My mom later told me anyway what they had said and discussed. My parents saw me as an adult and had no say in whatever I did. Her parents, on the other hand, were extremely controlling and she had to live there.
So such was our dating life. We met in November of 1999, and in January of 2000, we were talking about marriage. Again, that’s what all of this was for. We decided that we wanted to get married, so I went out one day and bought her a ring. Actually it took me some time because she had metal allergies and I wanted to learn what would be best for her and to try to find her something that I thought was as nice as I could afford. My actual proposal wasn’t exactly romantic. There was no allowance for any of that in this situation. Her oldest sister got the kids out of the living room for a couple of minutes and I proposed. We were now engaged. We wanted to go out and eat dinner to celebrate, but her father had slaved over a pot of hamburger gravy and threw a fit like a petulant child. He was offended that we wanted to go out and not eat what he had worked so hard for. So we ended up eating his stupid hamburger gravy. He would not let her leave the house that night. Again, they weren’t supportive of us dating, or in this case, getting engaged. Like everything else, it was always about them.
I do envy those that have great stories about their dating and their engagement, but that was not us. We have a story but it’s not a very great one. I’m the kind of person who loves putting together surprises for people and would have probably come up with something elaborate and very meaningful. I love doing that stuff, but there was just no opportunity with the situation we had to deal with.
In March of 2000 we were married in the Charlestown Kingdom Hall. So there wasn’t very long in between us meeting, getting engaged, and marrying. It was a simple ceremony, there were maybe 100 or so in attendance, and afterward there was no reception. We went to a restaurant though and did eat with some family and a few close friends, plus the guy that we both think her parents really wanted her to marry and pushed to include.
Yes. If you noticed we were married roughly four months after meeting. It’s been over 23 years now. We knew what we wanted. We didn’t see a reason to wait. And unlike a lot of Jehovah’s Witnesses, especially those that get married young, we didn’t just get married to have sex. We watched so many do that and get divorced in a few years. We were both the type of people who sat back and watched other people’s misery and tried to not repeat it. For us the attitude of being willing to work together at life and to enjoy it together, that was more important than anything.
We were so poor when we first got married. I think that first year I paid taxes on something ridiculously under the poverty level. It was maybe ten thousand dollars or something. I had worked a job reading meters and getting chased by dogs all day. Actually, the money doing that wasn’t bad. But she would stay home and clean the house over and over with nothing else to do. We had no clue how to do life together. I came home one day and asked her if I could quit my job. I was absolutely traumatized from being chased by pit bulls and rottweilers all day, and I just could not take it anymore. She was fine with it, but I had never quit a job without having another one lined up before, so I wasn’t really fine with it. But I just couldn’t take it anymore. The day that I quit there was one woman meter reader that worked with us and she had gotten mauled in the chest and required reconstructive surgery. That was it for me. Almost everyone there had been bitten at least one time but me. I knew it was inevitable and I just could not mentally handle it anymore.
On my wife’s side of things, she had been home schooled for high school and her mom actually used her since she was home. My wife ended up watching her youngest sister a lot. In fact she was at one time referred to as Little Mommy by her sisters. Her mom really discouraged her from doing her school work. She would rather her sit and listen to her stories or go hang out with her at Wal-Mart or something like that. So on my wife’s side of things, she didn’t even have a full high school education. My goal was to help my wife at least get her GED. I told her we would need to at least get this, because if something happened to me and she needed to get a job she had to at least have a high school equivalency. So I helped my wife get her GED. She knew everything she needed to know and just needed a refresher on a few things, other than math where she really struggled, so I helped her there. Ultimately she passed it and got a great grade on it, and she was super proud of that. She even called her parents and told them that she got her GED. They didn’t really seem to care, but she was proud of herself. This was a good thing that would give her more opportunities in the world. Everybody should be able to accomplish that and feel good about it.
There was a sister in another congregation that needed some cleaners to clean banks and car dealerships at night. So we signed on for her and subcontracted. We did that for a while, but eventually she lost her contracts. So we started our own cleaning business. We liked working together but we hated working nights. We talked about it and thought that maybe we could clean apartments. They could be cleaned during the day and if you could get a whole complex, you’re cleaning all of their turnovers each month. When you’re getting a house to clean, you would only get to clean that one house. But when you get an apartment complex, you can get more work in bulk, depending on the size of the apartment complex.
We had about $500 in the bank. We bought a few supplies and bought some business cards. There was a point in my life about two or three years earlier where I was a telemarketer. Eventually, I managed a large marketing department for a company. So I just sat down, got on the phone, and started cold calling apartment complexes. I called five numbers, got three appointments with the property managers, and we landed two deals out of that. We ended up cleaning professionally now for about 19 years together, ending up in a place where we focused on cleaning people’s individual private homes. My wife still does that today.
Now that was good but it wasn’t all good. You see, I had no clue how to handle money. Growing up poor, if you actually got a dollar you spent it, because you never knew when you might get another. I had a scarcity mindset through and through. My wife, on the other hand, had an abundance mindset. She had a very sheltered life. Her dad actually made decent money. So she just knew that things got taken care of, and she had no clue what the real world was like. She never had to handle money before. It’s not like she asked for a lot. I didn’t know how to handle money and she did not care about money whatsoever.
So I handled the finances and honestly, I did a terrible job. I did our own taxes for the business and I messed up badly the first couple of years. I did not realize that we had to file self-employment tax which is a huge percentage. It’s the majority of tax that you pay when you own your own self-employed business. The IRS did eventually catch it several years later and sent me a massive bill. Business was good though. At one point I had the largest property management firm in Louisville locked down, and my dad and one of my brothers worked for us. Then one day we showed up to find out that they had sold off all of their local properties to different companies, and we lost about sixty percent of our business in one day. I had to let my brother go. I also had to let my dad go and my wife and I had to scramble to put the business back together again.
At that point I started a mobile auto detailing business out of thin air with no knowledge and no experience whatsoever. And it got us through the summer while we transitioned to cleaning residential homes and built the clientele. I also took some contract work performing inspections of properties for commercial mortgagors while my wife was out cleaning houses. So we did what we needed to do. We cobbled enough things together to make the transition.
Darkness Falls
Now, while all that was going on something else was about to happen. This is a monumental event in my life. I was the oldest in my family but my oldest younger brother had moved out of my parents house. And long story short, he was disfellowshipped.
Here’s what happened. After he moved, I didn’t know where he lived, but I found out what area he moved to. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. So I found out the street that he lived on. So what I do? I went knocking on doors. That’s what I was good at right? And that’s how I found him. I was concerned about him because we had been close. I mean those years where I felt lonely living on my own in that duplex, he and I would often go out fishing and we’d have fun together. And now he just disappeared.
So after I found him, we hung out a few times, but I could tell something wasn’t right. I was trying to encourage him, but I could tell that he just wanted to be left alone. As far as the whole JW thing went, he was choosing another path.
One night at a meeting at the Kingdom Hall, in the auditorium, a particularly abrasive elder that I don’t like a lot, came up to me and said that because I knew where my brother lived, he wanted the address. I asked why. And then he said, “Well, the elders are concerned and they want to help him.” I could tell that was not at all what they wanted. I was upset and told them, “You know, if you wanted to help him the time to have shown that you care was a long time ago, not now. Now it’s too late. He clearly wants to do something else and now you care?” To me it seemed like this wasn’t so much caring about a person as it was wanting to punish a person. Well he got mad and demanded the address. So I gave him the illustration that they like to use a lot from the Bible about a shepherd that leaves his 99 sheep to go find that one lost sheep and told him to go find his sheep if he cares so much and wants to help. I found him, so you go find him. Things got pretty nasty and heated and we were practically shouting at each other in the auditorium. Another elder jumped in to intervene. But they eventually did find him. They waited outside his job, if I remember correctly, and served him with a letter to come to a judicial meeting at a certain time and day. If you don’t show up to one of these meetings when you’re requested then you are disfellowshipped by default. My brother didn’t want to have to deal with any of them. He just wanted to be left alone and go his own way. He was disfellowshipped instead. I can’t imagine how horrible that was for him.
So at that time I was forced into a position to have to shun the person that was probably my best friend, even though at that point in particular we had gotten away from each other a little bit. We kind of drifted our separate ways. I had moved away to the other side of the river, me in Indiana and he in Kentucky. It was really hard on me. I left notes on his car a few times. I found out where he worked and I would go leave a note on his car. But it was to no avail. In one I told him that since I had moved away from the congregation that we grew up in, I knew something was wrong with that congregation. Of course, later in my life I found out it wasn’t just that one. But at that time, I thought I knew the secret. I really thought there was just something messed up in his congregation. I was trying to save him. I was grasping at straws to encourage him to come back. Eventually I heard that he moved to New York City and that he was gone. I was pretty devastated. My wife was pretty broken up over it too.
I was super depressed, as I said before I was bad with money, and I started feeling rich now that I was making anything above minimum wage. It didn’t take much to make me feel wealthy when I came from nothing. Basically, the way it worked out, I just wasn’t saving for taxes. I really had not figured out that aspect at all. And we already owed the IRS more money than I’d ever seen in my hand at the time. So I just kind of buried my head in the sand. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t see any way out. So I self-medicated my depression and everything else by buying things and eating. When we got married I was six feet tall and one hundred twenty five pounds soaking wet. I had tried everything to gain weight. I lifted weights, I took weight gainer, I ate plenty and nothing worked. Well the magic to gaining weight for me was depression and eating out constantly while working a lot. At my heaviest I got to about two fifty. Well okay, I got to two fifty on the scale and then I stopped looking. So it wasn’t just a tax bill that was ballooning, so was my waistline.
Oh, and our marriage was terrible for a few years too. You see, I was a narcissist trained by the best, my parents and the cult. I had been taught my whole life that other people were supposed to be just like me and my wife was nothing like me. She had grown up in a home where her dad would come home from work frustrated and look for excuses to hit her. He would get mad and watch for one of the kids to do something wrong so that he could go take them back and spank them. Afterward he would feel bad and want to play. Now I never hit her – I’m just not that person, but I’m sure that the person that I was, did trigger her. She was afraid of me being frustrated and I was frustrated a lot. We were two very unhappy people for a few years. Honestly, there were talks about going our separate ways. We have a basement, so at one point we basically even lived in the house on separate levels. We just really were not getting along very well and I’ll take that upon myself. It took both of us, but I was certainly the aggressor in the situation. I was certainly being narcissistic. I was the one trying to make things go a certain way, and it just wasn’t clicking.
In retrospect, the reality was that when we got married we both were looking for something. I was looking for a person that I could help. I’ve always liked helping other people in various ways. Unfortunately, “helping” can quickly become “I’m the fixer”, and that’s who I was. I was the fixer, which is not a good thing. It not only goes too far and can be controlling, but it is bad boundaries to fix people that aren’t asking for help. It doesn’t dignify the other person at all. And my wife was also looking for something. When she was asked what she liked about me, one of the things that she liked was that I was very decisive. My wife didn’t like to make decisions. So you can see right there, that on some level we were kind of both getting what we asked for. She, on one hand, wanted someone to basically direct her life, and I wanted someone whose life I could help guide. My goal was never to direct anyone’s life in every single way. The fact that we had so many discussions about this shows that I wasn’t a true true blue narcissist. I just had some narcissistic tendencies because I realized that this was not healthy. In the end, I needed to learn to step back, and she needed to learn to step up. At that time, it really just wasn’t a healthy situation. In fact at one point, out of frustration, I punched our refrigerator. It won. Sure, I dented the freezer, but I got a boxer’s fracture out of it. I had never broken anything in my life, but I knew immediately that something was wrong. I had to go get that taken care of at a local immediate care center.
I’m telling you these things because this is the reality. This is how things went. So let’s just discuss it openly. I’m not proud of the person that I was. But this is who I became through not only my family of origin, but the cult. And I think that it was a very strong influence in all of this. My wife isn’t exactly proud of the person she was at that time as well. She had her own issues that she brought from her own family of origin and the cult conditioning. I’ve already mentioned just a small example of what went on in their home. So she brought her own brand of dysfunction which of course is what we all do in any kind of a relationship. I know this is my story so I’m trying to speak more to that side.
So at the time I was doing inspections which was lucky because I could do those with a cast on my hand. If I was cleaning it would’ve been a lot tougher. But if you know me, you know I would have done it one way or the other. At some point, we decided to take up our carpet in the house because we realized that we had hardwood under it. We checked the different corners and it looked beautiful. Well when we took up our carpet we realized that the floors were eaten up in areas by termites and in other areas and have been urinated on so frequently by a dog or cat that someone owned before us that the wood was ruined.
In my desperation to fix our financial state, I decided to start selling things at a booth at a local peddler’s mall. We made some money but eventually we stopped because it just wasn’t enough anymore. So now our house became flooded with unsold goods and large display cases, like the big glass ones where you might go to a department store and they have watches and jewelry in them. We had some of those. So let me paint the picture for you. Our house was now basically hoarded with stuff. And the floors were a disaster but you couldn’t see them anymore from all the stuff that was piled on top of them. We started living in the basement to run away from the problems upstairs. Tax debt was mounting. We probably owed over thirty thousand at that point. Money that we didn’t have and had no way to obtain. We weren’t getting along in our marriage. Neither of us really had any friends to do anything with. Business had been a mess. The one supposed bright point was we were still busy doing all the JW things. Life was pretty ugly and not working out at all.
In fact, during this time I actually went to the elders in the current congregation that we attended. I asked for a meeting with them because I knew that our life was a disaster. And again, I thought that everybody else had theirs together. So I went to the elders and I asked them sincerely what I should do. At the time I had a few little things in the congregation that I was doing. I was running the sound department and things like that, and I told them I just don’t think I can run the sound department anymore. I don’t think that I measure up to what one of Jehovah’s Witnesses should be in order to have a privilege like this and my life is a mess. I said “Look, I wish that I could go live other people’s lives. Or go be a fly on the wall of these other people’s lives so that I could see what they were doing differently because my life is a disaster.” I couldn’t keep up with all of the quote “spiritual things” that I was supposed to do. I was having a hard time making all of the meetings much less handling all the responsibilities at the Kingdom Hall. I couldn’t do the personal study that I was supposed to do. Where was I going to find time or emotional energy for that? So I asked these brothers, “What should I do? What is the key?” and I’ll never forget what they said because it was a pretty big moment for me. It really set me down a spiraling path that was even uglier than I was already on, and I’ll explain here in a minute how dark it got. But one of the elders looked at me and he said “Well, basically what it comes down to is that what we do shows what we care about.” So he was basically telling me that I didn’t care enough about this. He was telling me that the fault was mine. He made me feel even worse than I already felt. He had a chance to help me in some way and he did what Jehovah’s Witnesses always do, which is to moralize everything. Basically I was just a bad person. I didn’t care enough. I was feeling terrible and actually coming to them and asking for help which should have shown that obviously I cared. I was trying everything I could but to them I just didn’t care enough. If I did, I would do more for them, and for Jehovah.
To make matters worse I had always had suicidal ideations since I was a kid. I will say that they started at some point after we became Jehovah’s Witnesses, which is something I’ve heard from others, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. Basically, if I was walking down a street or walking down the sidewalk next to a street and the street was super busy, I would visualize myself walking out in front of a car and wondering what that would be like. And it’s almost like there was something pushing me to do so. I don’t know what it was. I hated my home life. I was bullied at school constantly and really all I had in the world was this cult where I fit in as a kid because I was a good kid and I did what I was told, but clearly I was deeply unhappy, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
Well by 2008 those little voices in my head were screaming at me. As hard as I was on my wife with my narcissistic traits, I was even harder on myself. I was a raging perfectionist. There were standards to be met and by God you had better meet those. And I had better meet them too. And those standards that I set for were impossibly high. I hated myself so much. I can’t really express how deep it was. I would literally yell at myself to get it together. I would call myself names. I would cuss at myself. I would punish myself for not getting things done right. After all, it seemed like everyone else around me at the Kingdom Hall had it all together right? There was that image of all these perfect lives. In contrast, mine was just sucking. It just fueled me to keep reaching for perfection. It seemed like the harder I pushed the worse things got.
It was a good thing that my wife and I worked together because it ultimately kept me from doing what I wanted to do and might have done if left alone. I never had a weapon in the house. I’ve never had a gun, I’ve never shot a gun, and it’s probably a good thing because if I did I can almost guarantee you that I would have put a bullet in my head. I can’t tell you how many times when I was driving I wanted to run headfirst into a concrete wall or pillar or off of a bridge. These were little rage filled moments internally of complete self-loathing where I just wanted to punish myself for being a worthless piece of crap and for not being able to control my life while everyone else seemed to have theirs together. I saw no way out other than that. It was super, super dark. I hated myself. No one else seemed to like me. I didn’t get me. Neither did anyone else. The one person in life that I thought I fit in with, my wife, seemed to not understand me. We were on totally opposite sides of the world. What was the point? I was tormented every day. It’s not like I wanted to die, but if I ended it somehow violently and in an act of hatred to myself, I’m sure it just seemed like a fitting way to go out. It would just make it stop and ultimately that’s what I wanted. Anything to make it stop.
Now, I told you something happened that changed things for me. One little moment that lit the kindling of a fire that would burn bright for the next seven years. And eventually I burned my whole life down as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I was on the computer, as I often was, escaping into online forums where I could fit in if just for a moment. Sometimes it was just talking to other fans of the local college sports teams. Sometimes it was business subjects. I bounced all over the place. Well one day I was on a forum about small business as per usual. I was talking in circles about all of my ideas and my frustrations because I couldn’t execute on all of them when some random guy on the forum posted that he’d like to send me a private message. He asked if he could do so and I said sure. The contents of that private message would send me on a different course, one that I never expected.
It turns out that this guy was a retired ADHD specialist and he saw something in me that led him to believe that I had ADHD. I’ll admit that I personally thought that ADHD was a made up disease and an excuse for bad parents to medicate their children so that they didn’t have to control them themselves. But what did I have to lose by listening to this guy? What was the alternative? Going out in a blaze of self-hatred?
He recommended that I read a book called Driven to Distraction from Dr. Edward Hallowell. Well I did read it. I still don’t read books like a lot of people with ADHD. I don’t have the focus to read. My mind wanders when reading the written word, but audio books are right up my alley. I can listen to an audiobook while doing something else, especially something physical that helps me to focus.
So I bought the book in audio format. One Saturday morning my wife and I were out detailing a car for a client and my wife and I queued up the book on our devices at the same time and we listened separately on our headphones while detailing the car. She always detailed the inside and I would detail the outside. I will never forget listening to this book. For the first time in my life, somebody understood me and the way my brain works! When the book was over, I cried because I didn’t want it to end. This was magical for me. I was finally feeling understood and finally being able to understand myself on some level. Since we started listening at the same time there were so many times where my wife would get out of the car and just look at me with her eyes wide and shake her head in amazement. I was doing the same thing to her. Unlike a lot of people with ADHD I excelled academically, but like anything, it’s on a spectrum. I would have flunked out of high school if I had to read books. If I had been given books and I had to just read those and go do the assignments by myself, I would have failed. But I was very good at listening in class. I learned well when something was auditory and so I just listened in class. I paid attention and my brain worked super fast. So it just all came in and stuck. I believe what I have is called ADHD overfocused.
So first let’s understand and establish that ADHD isn’t necessarily an attention deficit. It can be. Some are more inattentive, but for some of us, it is that we actually pay attention to literally everything around us and we get distracted easily. But it’s not because of a lack of attention, it’s actually a lack of focus. I notice everything when driving. I know where every car around me is. I’ve never been in a wreck and I have narrowly avoided some really close calls where people almost hit me, because I caught something out of the corner of my eye, or I knew where they were and I was able to move really fast. It’s like this weird super power. Unfortunately a side effect of being overly focused can be near obsession. Almost OCD-like tendencies which includes perfectionism. Combine that with a cult that is pushing perfectionistic messages constantly and it is a perfect storm for self-hatred. The cult of Jehovah’s Witnesses, as I said earlier, leaves most people with the prevailing theme of feeling like they’re never good enough. So I had kind of a double whammy there. Honestly, it’s like this book woke me up from some sort of deep sleep, some sort of autopilot. I don’t know what I was doing over those years. I was doing the best that I could. I was hustling. I was trying really hard. I was pushing the heck out of things. And I know that it was hard and painful and horrible. But I think that on some level maybe it was just the depression, and I was just checked out. I mean I was there. I was grasping at straws. Looking back, I realize I had no clue what I had even been doing. But now I had a new direction. I didn’t know it but that was about to take me down an amazing road, a road would take me through hell, but it was a productive hell. Then there would be some heartbreak. But on the other side of that was a freedom that I’m experiencing now that is unlike anything that I ever had in my entire life.
Next I’m going to go through those following seven years. The things that I learned are just the things that I needed to hear. They’re things that so many people need to hear. I learned so many beautiful things and my life was completely changed.