Holding back from sinking in was part of my survival. My intuition told me not to sink in to what surrounded me as I was growing up. My intuition also told me to hide or hold back from visibility…the elephant in the room…I never let myself sink into agreement or into Belief and God-the-Father said to decide for myself…A thing I was careful never to mention to anyone.

I felt like my 2-year-old cousin holding out his hand, with a just-sucked-on-a-lemon face, for another of the “Sweet-Tart” candies he insisted he wanted. When asked if he was really sure he wanted another one…he said “Yeah, maybe next time it won’t be so yucky.”

Throughout my childhood I kept saying to myself versions of that same, “Maybe next time it won’t be so yucky.”

Maybe the next Watchtower…maybe the next Assembly…maybe the next Talk…will make sense to my heart and I will love this God and this Truth.

Only, unlike my cousin with the candy, I was careful never to show just how “yucky” being One of Jehovah’s Witnesses felt to my body.

Anger 

Last year I was working with a writing prompt about facing and naming something I hate. Hate is not an emotion I experience much. I could only think of one thing I hate.

Fear clinches my body when I even start to think about what I hate.

Even all these years later, almost two decades out of the Organization…I almost can’t write the words.

They stumble in my throat and I don’t know my way around…around the truth that I hate God…Their God…and the requirement to support the Organization’s image of the coming slaughter…The Society’s requirement that I agree with the justification of 7 billion people to be killed to solve all of humanity’s problems.

I hate the idea that the best most loving answer God has is death.

I hate that my father chose this path, in part, because he wanted to have authority from God over females. He wanted God assigned Superiority because he was male.

I hate that and I have known it since I was 5.

However old the ‘Stoning’ story becomes for the book…he told me when I was 5, “I will stone you if God and the Organization tell me too.

Stoned for disobeying your father or for sex.

I hate the control they sought to take of my body, of my mind, of my spirit, and of my energy to act in the world.

I am sad.

I hurt with the decisions of my father and these supposed men of God.

I am angry the Organization takes it upon themselves to decide who must live and who must die.

Malawi    <See “Breaking the Hold-Chapter 9” subheading “The Malawi Situation”>

I am angry these supposed Men of God lured my Nana, my father, and my uncle into supporting and offering on an alter to this Jehovah the lives of their children.

My heart burns for the wounded children…the men and women sacrificed on the alter of greed and led by men drunk on power…I see in these men the image they describe as the Whore of Babylon Whose Hands are Dripping with the Blood of the Holy Ones.