VirusHead

Life in Atlanta seems so unreal and disconnected and wrong sometimes. I like some things about being here, but it’s stifling and isolating and I can’t help but feel that overall it’s unhealthy for my spirit, mind and body. I feel like I’m walking in a ditch. I feel like I’m trapped in plastic wrap.

There are probably a lot of other places that I would enjoy. In the States, I feel that I’d like Washington or Oregon, maybe parts of California. I enjoy some places in the southwest – at least to visit. I love New England, but I’m not sure that I’d really do well there over the long-term.

Every once in a while, I wish I could have stayed in Paris.

Here are some things that I hold dear in my memory:

• Our tiny studio apartment on the top floor of a building on Rue des Carmes, in the Latin Quarter, Left Bank, 5th arrondissement. Rooftop access allowed us to view the city from a spectacular viewpoint between Notre Dame Cathedral and the Panthéon. Because of a strange arrangement of windows, we could see Notre Dame from inside the shower!
• Food! Every kind of food. I never had a bad meal. Even when I received a pig’s foot (thinking I was ordering pork chops) it was delicious. I ate everything – and was thin.
• The intellectual style, the flirtatious style, the rude style – every style. I have never been so fascinated by other people.
• Street markets overflowing with gorgeous fragrant fruit – and the lilacs that I could never resist.
• Walking. I walked everywhere. I was never so fit. There was something new to explore around every corner. Glorious places, historical monuments, public gardens, the riverwalk, hearing street music, getting caught up in a parade.
• Trying to buy nail polish remover over the counter.
• The long nights. It seemed as though Paris nights last forever. We would stay up until 2 or 3, and never feel it.
• Dear friends. You know who you are – and one is gone forever.
• Bookstores and booksellers – lot of places to find amazing things to read, even in English.
• The ambiance that somehow allowed me to feel free and happy – and a little wild. I felt comfortable being myself.
• John was teaching in Lille, so he stayed there for part of the week, and we had a rhythm of some days together and some days apart. That worked out very well for both of us.
• Throwing my high-heeled shoes over the bridge and walking across Paris – stockingfooted – in the middle of the night.
• The wonderful woman in a nearby pâtisserie who taught me the words for everything in a bakery – and relentlessly corrected my pronunciation.
• The crazy shops of Montmarte and the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur at the tippity-top of the city.
• Excellent public transportation! The Métro is easy and fun, and I’ve never been on a faster train than the TGV.
• The Parisian way of saying “oui” – with an in-breath, and the hint of a long “a” at the end.
• Père-Lachaise Cemetery, especially the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse and the wonderful sculpture over Oscar Wilde.
• Centre Georges Pompidou. I could wander around in there forever.
• Movies! Tons of movies!
• I loved almost everywhere we went, especially throughout Haute-Provence and Haute-Savoie. My favorite meal was in a crypt in Dijon.

I could go on and on.

The contrast – and not just because I was young and in love – is so striking.

I feel a strong desire to be living in some place where there are a lot of vital, creative, intelligent people. I miss and want an intellectual community – live, not only just over the internet. I miss debating. I miss the rules of dialogue and discourse.

At the same time, I can’t really blame anyone but myself for my isolation. It’s not as though there aren’t great people here in Atlanta, too – and I’ve withdrawn somewhat voluntarily. I just don’t feel that I have anything to contribute to the various scenes here. I don’t belong here.

Maybe it’s just being married, being a mom. Maybe it’s that I’m much more tired than I used to be, and it’s hard to motivate myself to leave the home nest. Maybe it’s that my working hours take up so much of my time and energy now that I feel guilty leaving my son and husband to do much of anything else outside. I’m already gone so much. It might get better when Ben is old enough not to need childcare.

I think the biggest factor, though, is that so many of my good friends have moved on. Who can I call anymore – even to go catch a movie? As far as the more local options are concerned, I’m not a member of any church – which seems to be the major venue – and I feel too old to be involved in music, or even the art world. I’m not an academic anymore, and truthfully I don’t have very much interest in engaging with the kind of intellectual life I see.

Today I had lunch with a dear former neighbor. It was so fun just to go out to lunch with her and help her a little on some computer things. We ran into someone else that we both knew – and who didn’t know that we knew each other. Such a little thing – three women laughing – made me realize how much I miss things like that.

John and Evan and Ben took the opportunity to go hiking up Stone Mountain. They had a fun time and I was trying to think about the last time we all did something like that all together. I think I’m probably the party-pooper of the bunch – they even had to drag me out to launch the rocket. I wonder if it would have been different if we had had another child – a girl, maybe. Too late for that, though – I’m just outnumbered. Or maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. Maybe I’m just becoming too introverted.

I can’t decide if I’m just trying to hang onto a life I should have abandoned long ago (maybe even a romanticized version of it) or if I really have just become a hopelessly boring old woman. I don’t know how other people manage to do all the things they do. I can only do anything in bursts of energy that don’t come along as often as they used to. Maybe it’s just the winter doldrums.

Years ago, I made a tape that I called my K-Tel Self-Pity Collection. Those same songs don’t let me sigh and weep and be morbidly self-absorbed and morose in nearly as satisfying a way anymore, so I’m looking for new items.. I mean, how many years can you listen “Shilo” or “Daniel” anyway?

Do you any have suggestions for really good music for wallowing in depression/sadness (until you can get sick of it and work your way out)?

If I’m going to feel sorry for myself, I’d like to do it right.

It’s such a familiar narrative now, and it’s almost comforting to me to see more and more people testifying to it – to know that what I observed and experienced is pretty much the same from congregation to congregation, and not just a matter of my own family or community in the Jehovah’s Witnesses: the fantasies of a paradise earth devoid of all but other Jehovah’s Witnesses, the fatalism toward the coming apocalypse and the lack of engagement in the world, an almost total lack of compassion, paranoia and fear of others, spankings and beatings “out back” at the Hall, the abusive and sometimes predatory nature of many of the elders, the way small slights divide families while larger issues are ignored, the hypocrisy, the mind-numbing repetition in the many meetings – the smallness of it all.

Joy Castro is now a literature professor – it is very heartening to find that so many of us, who were not irretrievably damaged but instead went on to thrive, were able to save our sanity and navigate a different path if we had something else – like intellectual curiosity, a higher sense of ethics, compassion for others – some private treasure to hold onto like a mantra while redefinining faith and value for ourselves.

Bits from the article “Turn of Faith” by Joy Castro
August 14, 2005, New York Times Magazine

Three times a week in the Kingdom Hall in Miami, my brother and I strove to sit perfectly still in our chairs. Our mother carried a wooden spoon in her purse and was quick to take us outside for beatings if we fidgeted.

…
My loneliness was nourished by rich, beautiful fantasies of eternal life in a paradise of peace, justice, racial harmony and environmental purity, a recompense for the rigor and social isolation of our lives.

This bliss wasn’t a future we had to work for. Witnesses wouldn’t vote, didn’t involve themselves in worldly matters, weren’t activists. Jehovah would do it all for us, destroying everyone who wasn’t a Witness and restoring the earth to harmony. All we had to do was obey and wait.

Shortly after our return to the States, my father was disfellowshipped for being an unrepentant smoker — smoking violated God’s temple, the body, much like fornication and drunkenness. Three years later, my parents’ marriage dissolved. My mother’s second husband had served at Bethel, the Watchtower’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Our doctrines, based on Paul’s letters in the New Testament, gave him complete control as the new head of the household; my mother’s role was to submit. My stepfather happened to be the kind of person who took advantage of this authority, physically abusing us and forcing us to shun our father completely.

After two years, I ran away to live with my father. My brother joined me a tumultuous six months later. We continued to attend the Kingdom Hall and preach door to door; the Witnesses had been our only community. Leaving was a gradual process that took months of questioning. I respected all faiths deeply, but at 15 I decided that I could no longer be part of a religion that condoned inequality.

…
I love my mother, but I also love my ”worldly” life, the multitude of ideas I was once forbidden to entertain, the rich friendships and the joyous love of my family. By choosing to live in the world she scorned — to teach in a college, to spare the rod entirely, to believe in the goodness of all kinds of people — I have, in her eyes, turned my back not only on Jehovah but also on her.

Joy Castro is the author of a memoir, “The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah’s Witnesses,” to be published next month by Arcade and from which this essay is adapted. She lives in Crawfordsville, Ind.

Here’s a bit from “Farm Use” in Without a Net, in which she writes about mealtimes:

“Food becomes a measured thing. Each mealtime, my stepfather dishes himself up from the pots. Then my mother may help herself to half of what he has taken. Then, while he watches, she can spoon half of what she’s taken onto my plate. A portion half the size of mine goes to my brother. If my stepfather wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, my brother gets one-eighth. If she gives us more than my stepfather calculates is correct, he beats us with his belt.”

What is it with the belt, anyway? I remember my mother asking my father to hit us with his hand, so that he could feel how hard he was hitting us – but he preferred the belt, followed by a biblical lecture which might well have been a reading from some back issue of the Watchtower magazine. Of course we had all the bound volumes. I remember being beaten one time for standing near to the stereo and looking to him as though I might be thinking about touching it. He wanted his children to be perfect in Jehovah’s eyes – spare the rod, spoil the child. Myself, I always wondered what exactly a “rod” was… I mean, in that context (ha). It always sounded like it might have been a bad translation – anyone know?

Thanks goes to H.K. for alerting me to this.