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  • Writer's pictureRobert Lawrence

XI. Baptism By Fire:My Fall & Initiation Told in Four Parts

Updated: Sep 7, 2022

Moving away from the city

Cares fade

Now everything seems so small

All of the drama, hopes, and dreams

Don’t matter anymore

Is this what death is like?

Spirit detaching from flesh

Moving from one reality to the next

Having enough distance to gain

Perspective, understanding

Gazing at one’s life

And judging without attachment

Simply analyzing how we did

This time around

And deciding if we want to do it again

To lose this supreme view

And dive back in

Where distance is lost

And everything is monumental

Love, loss, hardships, and slights

All there to envelop us

In a heavy blanket of experience

Until we are ready to throw it off

And remember what it was all for



What was it all for? Have I reaped any rewards from my choice to leave the Jehovah’s Witnesses at 18? I lost not only my religion, but my parents as well. I was never told that would happen. I didn’t know. Now they are no longer allowed to associate with me. And for what? A life lived alone or with boyfriends who could easily cheat and lie to someone so eager to believe in childhood dreams. Did I lose God for this? And Leo. There is no proof that this man who has me asking so many internal question, diving back into old pain, will not be the same.


Who hurt me? I hurt myself. I have failed to find love because I’ve never allowed it in. Never let anyone get too close. Always reserving a space for my parents. Hoping they would come back. But I’m growing tired of hoping. For Witnesses, and even me, the prophesied last days are upon us and I know not to reach out. To not be the sinful bait that will keep them away from everlasting life. I will not play that role. But I need love. I long for it. Therefore I must retell this tale and heal. I pray that I can finally move on from my own self-inflicted purgatory. Move into the light and haunt these inner halls of loneliness no more.


This period of my life shaped who I believed myself to be and tainted all of my relationships hence. “Why are you so desperate?” a man recently asked. Hurt by his observation, I displayed my desperation by cutting off all communication in that instant. Rage moving through my trembling hands as I hit “block” on my phone. My ego was satisfied but something deeper, calmer, knew the truth: I am desperate. Desperately trying to fix the past. To save my relationship with my parents. Especially my mother.


Let us begin the story of my fall with her. Mother. For it was she who fanned the flames. She who gave me enough inner fuel to let everything around me burn. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.


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