The Faithful Witness

"the faithful and true witness." [verify exact verse/translation before publication]

Jesus was not an aesthetic influence for me. He was the model. Jehovah's Witnesses put "witness" directly into the name, and I took the entire thing with an intensity that now feels almost difficult to reconstruct from outside. I wanted to be faithful. I wanted to be clean. I wanted my decisions to follow what was true even if that made me look weird to everybody else. I would dress like a Jehovah's Witness. I mean that literally as a recognizable type: the clothes, the grooming, the seriousness, the whole visual claim that I was not trying to look like whatever teenagers were supposed to look like. At school I wanted it to be obvious what I was.

There is a version of this story that is easy to tell after leaving: restrictive religion prevented normal adolescence, I was indoctrinated, then I woke up. That is true at one resolution and false at another. From inside, a huge amount of it felt GOOD. It gave me a coherent moral structure. It told me that truth mattered more than popularity. It made sacrifice intelligible. It put me around adults who praised discipline and sincerity. It gave me a role where being unusually serious as a teenager was not awkward; it was evidence of spiritual maturity. I was not secretly rolling my eyes at all of this waiting to escape. I was trying to win at it.

I built my school schedule around pioneering. [embed/scan: schedule] This is one of those artifacts I really want because a schedule can communicate the seriousness better than retrospective prose. I was optimizing courses, ministry hours, congregation responsibilities, everything around the premise that spiritual work had the highest expected value. If Armageddon is actually coming and eternal life is actually available and the preaching work is actually assigned by God, then obviously you do not optimize for the same future as somebody whose model ends at retirement. The weird decisions become locally rational immediately.

The congregation reinforced this with status of its own. Talks were a place where preparation and correctness became visible. I remember my early talks, the effort, the desire to do them properly. [add exact first-talk memories] Standing up in front of people and delivering the material correctly was another system where preparation usually paid off, which fit perfectly into the rest of my life. Later I would deliberately do badly on talks as a social experiment, which is such a bizarre inversion of this period that it deserves its own treatment elsewhere. At this point I wanted to be the kid adults could point at and say, yes, that one is doing it right.

Sexual purity was part of the same optimization, and it is impossible to separate the later second-adolescence chapter from how literal I was about this. Attraction was not just a bodily fact. It existed inside a moral system. Dating was not just something I happened not to do. There were rules around association, intention, marriage, what you looked at, what you did with your own body. I was fascinated by bodies anyway because of course I was. The system did not delete puberty. It changed the semantic layer wrapped around puberty, which sometimes made ordinary curiosity feel disproportionately significant.

School success and religious seriousness reinforced each other until they didn't. Being disciplined helped everywhere. Being willing to be different helped everywhere. Believing that truth was objective probably helped me take science and mathematics seriously later even when those started disagreeing with the institution that had taught me to care about truth in the first place. I still credit Jehovah's Witnesses with some of the ideals that eventually made it impossible for me to remain one. That irony is real and I don't want to flatten it.

[embed: meeting programs] [embed: ministry schedule] [photo: me dressed for meetings / school] [scan: talk outlines if any survive]

At the exact same time I was trying to make myself into this faithful person, I discovered another thing that felt almost religious in the older sense of the word: not doctrine, just awe. Mathematics suddenly opened into this enormous space where the universe could be compressed into operations, and I fucking loved it.