I still get moments of sadness and loneliness, however grounded and "moved-on" I think I am, and however little reason there is to feel that way. I imagine many in my position feel similarly. In my case it's often linked to being tired, but reasons don't remove the unpleasantness.
In considering the whole thing, one fact became very clear: just because you don't like something, that doesn't mean you won't miss it when it's gone.
I spent many years chafing against the restraints of my life, the hypocrisy, the meaningless rules, and the knowledge that I didn't have to suffer them, that there was a price I could pay and be free, was part of the suffering. Yet, as a thinker, I also had a drive to make sense of what I could. So now I can feel bereft on occasion. Something I knew intimately has gone from my life.
The very restrictions of brethren life make it something easy to rely on. So many aspects of life can be taken for granted, so little thinking is necessary to live from day to day, that I think people (me included) lose the capacity to make sense of liberty. I'm no neurologist, but I should imagine that if London taxi drivers have a larger "map" section in their brain than average, then brethren must have a big chunk devoted all the things that they need to remember to believe and do. Those of us who have abandoned all that need quite a lot of retraining to repurpose those functions.
So yes, I miss something I never liked. Miss it a lot, sometimes. Whatever I thought of it, it was familiar, and the familiar has a strong pull. It pulls harder whenever something knocks my stability, and I can well understand how people succumb to that attraction if temptation coincides with a moment when they're finding life difficult. All that would remain is to put a gloss on the real reasons, find something, anything, that says things would be different on the return to what they were before, and stop insisting on thinking for oneself. Isn't always harder doing something yourself than letting someone else do it?
Nobody needs worry about me, I hasten to say. My life has plenty of fulfilment, and I still don't think I could swallow the transparent nonsense that comes with the stability and financial support. But I'd be fooling myself if I pretended there was no temptation at times.
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3 comments:
Some of us have been talking about this lately - that pull from something we know we dont feel attracted to anymore. To me it feels so much that it is at a primitive level - at the level of neurons firing because they are used to fire. There seems to be no thought behind it for me - just a sense of a pull. For others, certain words such as "get right" trigger the feeling off
Missing the familiar is nothing unusual - even if the familiar is something we have turned our backs on. Spousal abuse, for example, the victimes still report missing the familiarity of the relationship even though they have left something really nasty behind. Just the way our minds function I guess and I daresay it has survival value - and maybe that is why it pulls harder when something happens to rock our stability.
Unpleasant though
As humans we all seem to adapt to the tribe we grow up in. Us ex-EBs can never replace that tribe in our sub-conscious, even though our rational thoughts are very clear that we were right to leave the tribe.
I suspect that a preference for the familiar is hard-wired into our brains, probably because the unfamiliar is potentially hazardous. People distrust unfamiliar food. When in unfamiliar places they feel homesick. Among the Brethren we learn to manipulate the rules and dodge the consequences, but in an unfamiliar society there is a completely different set of rules, requiring a different set of survival skills, which cannot be acquired overnight.
Thank you, survivor, for the last paragraph of your blog entry. I was beginning to get worried. People who have served a long prison sentence sometimes want to go back inside, and people who have separated from abusive relationships sometimes do the same. And people who have a clear perception of the nature of Brethrenism sometimes blot out their perception, adopt a sort of doublethink, and go back to live a life of make-believe.
I think one way you can experience the safety of the familiar is to mix with fellow-escapees, so long as you can find some who don’t spend all their days bellyaching.
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