Waking Up

I don't remember one morning where I woke up and suddenly knew Jehovah's Witnesses were wrong. "Waking up" makes the process sound binary because that is how ex-JW people talk about it, but for me it was accumulation. I made contact with more non-Witness people and kept discovering that their perspectives were internally coherent. They were not secretly miserable caricatures waiting for the world to end. They could be kind without having the right doctrine. They could reason morally. They could know things I didn't. The outside world kept refusing to instantiate the model I had been given of it.

Evolution was one of the intellectual pressure points. I had been raised with the expectation that the evolutionary account was wrong in some deep way, and then as I read more biology and neuroscience it kept... making sense. Not as a slogan, not because I wanted rebellion points, but because mechanisms fit other mechanisms. Comparative anatomy, genetics, selection, development, brain organization—the pieces had explanatory continuity. Eventually the cognitive burden shifted. Instead of asking "how could evolution possibly explain this?" I was asking why I had expected it not to.

The social realization hurt more. I began understanding how constrained my adolescence had been, especially around friendship and romance. There is a period when everybody is inexperienced, everybody is making dumb mistakes, and relationships can form inside this huge school-based pool where repeated proximity does most of the work. I had spent a lot of that period treating ordinary teenage social life as spiritually dangerous or irrelevant. Then the door opened after the market had structurally changed. Adults have jobs. People move. Friend groups have history. Dating carries more explicit stakes. You do not get the same sandbox back just because your beliefs changed.

And geography made it worse. Living at my parents' house without being able to drive normally was not only inconvenient transportation. It collapsed the reachable social world. In a spread-out Texas environment, no car can mean no spontaneous anything. Every outing requires logistics or dependence. The internet gave me theoretical access to everyone and my physical body remained stuck in a small radius. I became painfully aware that independence is partly infrastructure.

This is where "I missed out" became a recurring grief. Not because I think there is one canonical adolescence everyone deserves. Plenty of people have awful high school experiences. But I had voluntarily—or semi-voluntarily, under a worldview I trusted—excluded myself from experiences I now wanted and could no longer obtain in their original developmental context. There is no refund. You can have first dates later. You can make friends later. You can get naked later. You can learn sex later. But you cannot be sixteen with other sixteen-year-olds all learning it together.

There was anger in that realization, but also embarrassment. How do you tell normal people in your twenties that you are missing knowledge they acquired implicitly years ago? How do you know which norms you don't know? I had been very competent in domains with explicit rules. Social life is mostly undocumented APIs with local conventions and adversarial ambiguity. I could understand a Jacobian faster than I could infer whether somebody actually wanted me at a party.

[link/embed: posts from waking-up period] [map: parent's house / geographic constraints, without publishing exact address] [timeline: doctrinal/social shifts] [links: evolution material that mattered]

Eventually I stopped trying to make this awakening purely intellectual. If I had missed a developmental period, I wanted some of it back. That impulse produced what I later started calling my second adolescence, which was fun and awkward and horny and sad and occasionally completely fucking ridiculous.