Imagine a world where the Devil might be hiding in Smurfs or yard sales, where dancing and holidays are considered the work of Satan, and where one wrong move can damn you to hell for eternity.
Kyria Abrahams spent her childhood as a Jehovah’s Witness, taking all the rules to heart and becoming even more fanatical than her parents. “When you’re a fundamentalist kid, it’s cool to be a zealot. If you can’t be bad, you might as well be very, very good. So me and my JW homies had our own crew. After the meetings, we’d hang out in the Kingdom Hall parking lot, not smoking, and brag about how totally unrebellious we were. Then we’d put down a square of cardboard and not break-dance.”
Abrahams started “witnessing” (going door-to-door to convert the surely doomed), and at 16 she met Alan, a rebel Jehovah’s Witness eight years her senior, who believed in the faith, but also strove to be educated. He refused to go to the mandatory three meetings a week. Abrahams was barely squeaking through high school and was impressed with him for all the wrong reasons. She and her best friend Lisa convinced him to start attending more meetings. “As long as Alan was going to all the meetings, it was okay for me to ‘like’ him. By ‘like,’ we meant ‘date,’ and by ‘date’ we meant ‘get married to.’ ”
That her marriage was loveless didn’t seem to concern her; that she was unemployable didn’t either. She stayed home all day, prancing around the house, telling herself how cool it was to be a married woman. It was so cool, in fact, that she started drinking alone in the afternoons, began cutting herself and started sleeping with men she met on the Internet – all while tying to reconcile her Jehovah Witness self with the wild girl she’d become.
Abrahams was thrown out of the church; left in a world she was completely unprepared for. “It didn’t feel wrong to have sex with my friend’s boyfriend because I couldn’t fathom anything being wrong anymore. I’d been told that murder was as wrong as eating birthday cake was as wrong as smoking, as wrong as reading books, as wrong as having sex with your friend’s boyfriend. I needed time to grade each of these things on its own merit, to make sense out of the world.”
It was years before Abrahams became self-aware, taking on a new job as a stand up comedienne. She certainly had the material.
I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed
(Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing)
by Kyria Abrahams
Simon & Schuster