Poetry is the history of the human heart.
Billy Collins
Leaving the Jehovah’s Witness religion was a very intense period for me. There was such a potent cocktail of conflicting emotions coursing through my soul: betrayal and guilt, happiness and sorrow, and feeling everything at once and all the time.
During this period I wrote a lot of poetry as an outlet and a way to cope with the stress. It felt to me that poetry was the only thing that came out whenever I tried to write. It was my self-help and comfort.
For inclusion in this project I have selected ten poems that I wrote between 2003 and 2009. This period coincides with my awakening while within the Witnesses, my journey out of the religion and the immediate aftermath. Some of these pieces have been previously published, but here alongside the seven skeletons they are now, for the first time, presented in the context in which they were written. I feel that this contextual shift makes them all hit different.
I have, for the most part, resisted the urge to change them. I will admit though that there have been some light edits, mainly changing line breaks and enhancing readability.
From now until the end of this project I will provide a poem or two that fits alongside the week’s essay.
As I try to explain in the essays, on an intellectual level, what it meant for me to leave a cult like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, hopefully these poems provide some insight into what that felt like.
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