Sunday 24 March 2013
Dear Al and Val/ Letting Go
 |
| Me and Al and Val on my Wedding Day |
Dear Al and Val/ Letting Go
I’m broken. Oh so broken. I feel like when I feel I’m getting ahead and finally starting to feel abnormally happy, that ol’ friend comes around and brings me right back down, below dirt.
I’m tired of it and I need to let it go.
I was taking a religion course in grade 10 when I first came in contact with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had to choose a religion and then prove whether or not they were a cult. My mother had a dear friend named Olga who used to come to the house with the ‘Watchtower’ and ‘Awake’ magazines. Before I continue, let me give you a little background history of my situation.
All while growing up my mother enforced a strong fear of displeasing God and a longing to make him proud of my life choices. Mom taught all three of us kids not to steal, not to have premarital relations and to respect thy neighbor. Growing up with an illness, starting at a very young age, I had anger towards God because he gave me CF, you see. “Why me?”, I would always ask. So when it comes to spiritually speaking I was very vulnerable and an easy target for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So I thought of Olga and immediately thought that I would reach out to her for some information on her religion and do my report on Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was a rebel child and thought that she would pretty much do the assignment for me. But that was not the case. I spent days reading their literature and finished my paper, getting 100% mark from Ms. Peirce. In the days that followed, Olga was persistent on getting me to study the bible with her, and learning about what God had in store for this sick kid. I longed for answers. I longed for what the meaning of this life was and what kind of sick joke God is playing on me for giving me this terrible, terrible illness. So, I began to study the bible.
For the most part, I loved what I was learning. I quickly became passionate about the new findings from the bible I was gaining and what it meant for my future. I devoted hours to my bible study and spent many evenings abandoning homework to learn more about God and his purpose. But then, a couple of months later, something terrible happened.
I remember when I first learned, again from their literature that God did not approve of a homosexual lifestyle. The scriptures they gave to support such a theory never did make any sense to me, nor do they now. I was heart-broken. I knew deep down in my heart that I was gay, but quickly assumed that God hated this part of me, and worked hard at burying this part of my soul deep within me so that no one would notice the screaming voice inside.
My studies continued for months, and then years…..the friends I gained were the most important thing to me. I finally felt a sense of belonging even though it was indeed false. I was baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness on April 30th, 2005.
Then I met Al and Val.
You know about my past and my twisted relationships I had with both my Mom and my Dad. I never had what you call, normal parents. Al and Val never had any kids of their own. They resisted my friendship in fear of my Cystic Fibrosis. But I pushed because I knew the type of people they were. They had the biggest hearts and I was severely attracted to the both of them because they were REAL….not fake hypocritical Christians. We quickly bonded and they took me under their wing and soon enough I loved them so much that I viewed them as parents. I had never met two people who made me feel the way they did. I falsely believed that even if they knew I was gay, they would love me anyways. I thought that our love could withstand anything. They flipped my world upside down and taught me what it was like to have two parent figures who loved eachother. Loved me.
Then I met Alicia.
I was taught that I as a man should find myself a mate. A man and a woman would live together in perfect bliss and happiness. I already wrote a previous blog about how I fell in love with Alicia, so I’ll just say that we were married 8 months after we met on August 18th, 2007.
That voice, that thing inside that cried out every now and then for freedom crept up on my wedding day. It asked, “So, you’re really doing this? You are really going to marry a woman. The bible tells you this is right but yet I, your inner voice is telling you this is oh so wrong?” And I did.
Our marriage was actually more beautiful than you would think. I have some of my fondest life memories with Alicia, though they were never in the Kingdom Hall where I was brainwashed and taught “their” version of the truth. She had a way of making me laugh and seemed to enjoy all of my imperfections. We often spent time with Al and Val, and they even stood for us at our wedding. From the outside life seemed to be perfect. But in reality….. I was dying.
My nephew from my marriage to Alicia was killed tragically in a car accident on August 25th, 2008, one year after we were married. After he died, I began to question everything. I look back on that time as the pivotal time in my life where the real me started to emerge from underneath the bibles, and pamphlets. As each day passed my yearning to break free into the life I truly wanted to live grew harder and harder to settle, until one day on May 31st 2011 I had had enough. I was driving our van full of friends and family who joined me in St.John’s for the annual walk for Cystic Fibrosis. As I was driving my mind was going all over the road. I was thinking about my nephew, Rorry. I was thinking about what my life had become. I was thinking about how I gave up on my own happiness. And then all of a sudden, I heard my sister in law screaming from the back seat. Without even knowing it, I swerved out onto the shoulder of the highway to pass a transport truck who was travelling too slow for my liking. Before I had a chance to realize what I had done, I was demanded to pull over so that she could drive. I don’t know why I didn’t kill everyone that day, and I try not to think about it because I can only say that angels were there.
That night is when I derived a plan to take my own life. This was it. I was done.
After this incident, it still took me 4 months to find the courage and will to leave. With visits with the elders telling me to ‘pray the gay away’ and that Jehovah (God) would disown me if I chose this life course it made it extremely hard to finally leave.
When I left, I was instantly, I mean instantly looked down upon from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. People who once viewed me as a great friend, now viewed me as the scum of the earth. People with whom I would share my life with, soon would not even share a smile. I haven’t spoken to Al and Val ever since and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of them and wonder how they are doing. I see my old friends at work or in the city and they look upon me with disgust and disapproval. If there is one thing I learned while I was a Jehovah’s Witness is that I never, nor will you, meet anyone group of people as self-righteous as they. They can do no wrong, you see. They have ‘the truth’ and if you are a part of another religion, unless you conform to their ways, then you too are scum of the earth. They claim to teach love, yet their teachings are full of hate. They claim to be holier than the pope, yet they are some of the biggest hypocrites out there. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of amazing people in there, and a lot of people I miss, but most of them had ulterior motives.
It’s hard pill to swallow when people say “Well how can you be mad at them, when you lied to them about who you really were?” But you see, had I been honest, I wouldn’t have been accepted by them. I had already been disowned and abused by my father and could never understand why, so to put myself through that voluntarily was ludacris. And remember the fragile state I was in in the first place. My longing for answers outweighed the pain of hiding my true self until the pain simply became too unbearable.
People tell me all the time to ‘get over it’, ‘let it go’ and ‘move on’. Stop letting yourself be hurt by this and victimizing yourself. To those people I say; You have no idea what it was like, what it is like to be one of these people. You are brainwashed to the point where hate becomes love and though you preach ‘Do Not Judge’, you judge everyone. I spent 8 years as a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s 1/3 of my life. It’s not something you can let go of that easy. Every time I see one of the them I am reminded of the hatred in the world and how there never will be peace as long as religious organizations such as this are still around. It’s so easy for people to say, get over it, but you just simply do not understand.
A part of the reason why I am writing this blog is because I want to start working harder at letting this go and forgiving MYSELF for this mistake I made. I cannot express in words how free I feel and happy that I am living an authentic life full of joy and honesty that I have never experienced before. Sometimes I have to pinch myself because I cannot believe I am here. But there are days, like today, when I miss my old friends and miss talking to my ex-wife that really upset me. And I think it’s normal. But it’s robbing me of joy and that’s why I want to work on it.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that you will never be happy or experience a false sense of happiness if you ever leave their cult…..
I guess they were wrong about something.
“I just want to be myself and I want you to love me for who I am.” ~ Lady GaGa
Peace and Love,
Jamie Leigh Francis
xo
I’m broken. Oh so broken. I feel like when I feel I’m getting ahead and finally starting to feel abnormally happy, that ol’ friend comes around and brings me right back down, below dirt.
I’m tired of it and I need to let it go.
I was taking a religion course in grade 10 when I first came in contact with Jehovah’s Witnesses. I had to choose a religion and then prove whether or not they were a cult. My mother had a dear friend named Olga who used to come to the house with the ‘Watchtower’ and ‘Awake’ magazines. Before I continue, let me give you a little background history of my situation.
All while growing up my mother enforced a strong fear of displeasing God and a longing to make him proud of my life choices. Mom taught all three of us kids not to steal, not to have premarital relations and to respect thy neighbor. Growing up with an illness, starting at a very young age, I had anger towards God because he gave me CF, you see. “Why me?”, I would always ask. So when it comes to spiritually speaking I was very vulnerable and an easy target for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
So I thought of Olga and immediately thought that I would reach out to her for some information on her religion and do my report on Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was a rebel child and thought that she would pretty much do the assignment for me. But that was not the case. I spent days reading their literature and finished my paper, getting 100% mark from Ms. Peirce. In the days that followed, Olga was persistent on getting me to study the bible with her, and learning about what God had in store for this sick kid. I longed for answers. I longed for what the meaning of this life was and what kind of sick joke God is playing on me for giving me this terrible, terrible illness. So, I began to study the bible.
For the most part, I loved what I was learning. I quickly became passionate about the new findings from the bible I was gaining and what it meant for my future. I devoted hours to my bible study and spent many evenings abandoning homework to learn more about God and his purpose. But then, a couple of months later, something terrible happened.
I remember when I first learned, again from their literature that God did not approve of a homosexual lifestyle. The scriptures they gave to support such a theory never did make any sense to me, nor do they now. I was heart-broken. I knew deep down in my heart that I was gay, but quickly assumed that God hated this part of me, and worked hard at burying this part of my soul deep within me so that no one would notice the screaming voice inside.
My studies continued for months, and then years…..the friends I gained were the most important thing to me. I finally felt a sense of belonging even though it was indeed false. I was baptized as a Jehovah’s Witness on April 30th, 2005.
Then I met Al and Val.
You know about my past and my twisted relationships I had with both my Mom and my Dad. I never had what you call, normal parents. Al and Val never had any kids of their own. They resisted my friendship in fear of my Cystic Fibrosis. But I pushed because I knew the type of people they were. They had the biggest hearts and I was severely attracted to the both of them because they were REAL….not fake hypocritical Christians. We quickly bonded and they took me under their wing and soon enough I loved them so much that I viewed them as parents. I had never met two people who made me feel the way they did. I falsely believed that even if they knew I was gay, they would love me anyways. I thought that our love could withstand anything. They flipped my world upside down and taught me what it was like to have two parent figures who loved eachother. Loved me.
Then I met Alicia.
I was taught that I as a man should find myself a mate. A man and a woman would live together in perfect bliss and happiness. I already wrote a previous blog about how I fell in love with Alicia, so I’ll just say that we were married 8 months after we met on August 18th, 2007.
That voice, that thing inside that cried out every now and then for freedom crept up on my wedding day. It asked, “So, you’re really doing this? You are really going to marry a woman. The bible tells you this is right but yet I, your inner voice is telling you this is oh so wrong?” And I did.
Our marriage was actually more beautiful than you would think. I have some of my fondest life memories with Alicia, though they were never in the Kingdom Hall where I was brainwashed and taught “their” version of the truth. She had a way of making me laugh and seemed to enjoy all of my imperfections. We often spent time with Al and Val, and they even stood for us at our wedding. From the outside life seemed to be perfect. But in reality….. I was dying.
My nephew from my marriage to Alicia was killed tragically in a car accident on August 25th, 2008, one year after we were married. After he died, I began to question everything. I look back on that time as the pivotal time in my life where the real me started to emerge from underneath the bibles, and pamphlets. As each day passed my yearning to break free into the life I truly wanted to live grew harder and harder to settle, until one day on May 31st 2011 I had had enough. I was driving our van full of friends and family who joined me in St.John’s for the annual walk for Cystic Fibrosis. As I was driving my mind was going all over the road. I was thinking about my nephew, Rorry. I was thinking about what my life had become. I was thinking about how I gave up on my own happiness. And then all of a sudden, I heard my sister in law screaming from the back seat. Without even knowing it, I swerved out onto the shoulder of the highway to pass a transport truck who was travelling too slow for my liking. Before I had a chance to realize what I had done, I was demanded to pull over so that she could drive. I don’t know why I didn’t kill everyone that day, and I try not to think about it because I can only say that angels were there.
That night is when I derived a plan to take my own life. This was it. I was done.
After this incident, it still took me 4 months to find the courage and will to leave. With visits with the elders telling me to ‘pray the gay away’ and that Jehovah (God) would disown me if I chose this life course it made it extremely hard to finally leave.
When I left, I was instantly, I mean instantly looked down upon from the Jehovah’s Witnesses. People who once viewed me as a great friend, now viewed me as the scum of the earth. People with whom I would share my life with, soon would not even share a smile. I haven’t spoken to Al and Val ever since and there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of them and wonder how they are doing. I see my old friends at work or in the city and they look upon me with disgust and disapproval. If there is one thing I learned while I was a Jehovah’s Witness is that I never, nor will you, meet anyone group of people as self-righteous as they. They can do no wrong, you see. They have ‘the truth’ and if you are a part of another religion, unless you conform to their ways, then you too are scum of the earth. They claim to teach love, yet their teachings are full of hate. They claim to be holier than the pope, yet they are some of the biggest hypocrites out there. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of amazing people in there, and a lot of people I miss, but most of them had ulterior motives.
It’s hard pill to swallow when people say “Well how can you be mad at them, when you lied to them about who you really were?” But you see, had I been honest, I wouldn’t have been accepted by them. I had already been disowned and abused by my father and could never understand why, so to put myself through that voluntarily was ludacris. And remember the fragile state I was in in the first place. My longing for answers outweighed the pain of hiding my true self until the pain simply became too unbearable.
People tell me all the time to ‘get over it’, ‘let it go’ and ‘move on’. Stop letting yourself be hurt by this and victimizing yourself. To those people I say; You have no idea what it was like, what it is like to be one of these people. You are brainwashed to the point where hate becomes love and though you preach ‘Do Not Judge’, you judge everyone. I spent 8 years as a Jehovah’s Witness. That’s 1/3 of my life. It’s not something you can let go of that easy. Every time I see one of the them I am reminded of the hatred in the world and how there never will be peace as long as religious organizations such as this are still around. It’s so easy for people to say, get over it, but you just simply do not understand.
A part of the reason why I am writing this blog is because I want to start working harder at letting this go and forgiving MYSELF for this mistake I made. I cannot express in words how free I feel and happy that I am living an authentic life full of joy and honesty that I have never experienced before. Sometimes I have to pinch myself because I cannot believe I am here. But there are days, like today, when I miss my old friends and miss talking to my ex-wife that really upset me. And I think it’s normal. But it’s robbing me of joy and that’s why I want to work on it.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that you will never be happy or experience a false sense of happiness if you ever leave their cult…..
I guess they were wrong about something.
“I just want to be myself and I want you to love me for who I am.” ~ Lady GaGa
Peace and Love,
Jamie Leigh Francis
xo
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)