I Felt the End Before It Came: Memoirs of a Queer Ex-Jehovah's Witness by Daniel Allen Cox

Author:Daniel Allen Cox [Cox, Daniel Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2023-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Recently, Wes was giving a sex-ed workshop at my former high school, and when they went to look for my grad photo on the wall, there was none to find—not even an empty space, as I had imagined there might be. I’d skipped the photo session that day, the culmination of a year in which I’d let my grades slide. It was as if I’d wanted to disappear. What was the point in trying if I wasn’t going to university?

Several of my teachers also seemed not to care. High school guidance counsellors met with me once about continuing education and never followed up. Advisers should be trained to detect when a student’s lukewarm attitude to school and lack of career dreams or aspirations might be connected to the anti-intellectual stance of a high-control group. This would put them in a better position to determine whether the severity merits intervention. I barely graduated. On the last day of class, students gathered around a metal garbage can to burn textbooks. How could I justify spending seventeen dollars on a grad photo to commemorate all this?

One of the many jobs I held after high school was at the family moving company, where I worked for a few years alongside current and former Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because JWs are pressured to limit their schooling to community college and vocational training, they rely on trades to pay the bills. Trades are okay because they focus on physical things; the intangible is the domain of the Almighty. Also, as a small contractor, you can work independently and have greater control over who your colleagues are. You can hire other Witnesses. People let us into their homes because we were movers, but they trusted us specifically because Witnesses are known for their honesty, and we were proud of that. And sometimes it’s simply handy: because of financial instability, my mom, my stepdad, and I moved from apartment to apartment nearly every year, usually without much warning or planning. The trucks were always available and we were our own best customers.

I pushed dollies, mastered the straps, and learned how to rip tape with my fingertips. We moved pianos down icy stairs and up slippery ramps. We schlepped crystal cabinets across time zones and arranged set pieces for lives we would never live. We moved furniture as if it mattered, as if it wouldn’t be destroyed at Armageddon along with the unbelievers who owned it. It was tempting to preach to them—a moving van can be a perfect Trojan horse—but we usually held back. I continued working as a mover even after I left the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As any mover knows, books are the heaviest, so customers often left them for us to pack. And since it turned out that I was good at boxing them, I’d often find myself on book duty. Electricity shivered through me as I plucked books off shelves and wrapped them in newsprint. I categorized entire worlds of knowledge closed to a JW, the kind of texts I would have otherwise read at university.

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