Tidying the straggles

I feel at a crossroads right now. Having said that, I've felt similarly for about three years ... which is how long it's been since I started to write down what I felt and thought about life among the brethren and in the process changed my life.

It feels a bit strange at this distance. I was quite worked up, and I can't recapture that. Not to mention that once I'd made my feelings public it became impossible for me to stay in the circumstances that were driving my writing, although the novelty of the change to "normal life" provided material for a while.

If I've learned anything on the journey, it's that there's nothing particularly remarkable about being in the brethren, nor about not being in the brethren, nor about having a past in the brethren. Human life is varied. Everybody has a story about where they came from and where they are now. Everybody has hopes, fears and ambitions. So do I, and my past still provides interest to people I meet if it happens to come up, but interesting is all it is. Nobody assumes it defines me, or that it explains anything, let alone provides an excuse for anything. I was once in this strange religious group that has plenty of quirks useful for small talk. Someone else lived for years in a third-world country. People are interesting.

I suspect that this is pretty much incomprehensible to those remaining in the brethren. The group is the centre of the universe, and the fact that they simply don't matter much is something they cannot grasp. They expect that anybody who isn't for them must be against them, and that anybody who's left must have very strong feelings because everything is black and white, especially about such a hugely significant thing as the existence of the brethren and their doings.

From my observation of many of us who have left, I think we tend to carry a lot of that with us. I spent a good while feeling as though my ex-brethren status defined me, even while trying to prove otherwise, and using it (mostly just to myself) as a reason for all sorts of things. "I'm new to this," I'd think, "I can't be expected to understand / succeed / react correctly." I've gradually realised that that is how most of the world feels most of the time, actually. Maybe it's the rigid boundaries of our old brethren life that makes us unusually conscious of the fluidity and unexpectedness of normal life - or maybe that's just another layer of the excuses that come so naturally. Anyway, I think it's a trap, moving subtly from thinking we're unique and different because we're part of the brethren to thinking we're unique and different because we used to be.

So as and when I find time, I'm going to try to note down my thoughts as they are now, three years from the start. I'd like to round this whole blog off neatly instead of letting it dribble away to nothing! Then perhaps I can move off into proper normality, leaving this phase as a properly-formed complete document of the experience.