Hi Everyone,

I found this email I sent my girlfriend the week I left the JW's. I was feeling so guilty and afraid. My life is so different now. A little background info. I was an elder (service overseer) who was married for 15 years. I was also in love with a married woman who was in an open relationship. I decided I needed to get the hell out of dodge after I submitted my letter to the elders telling them I was done with the org. so I was on my way to London to celebrate NYE for the first time in High Style!

So here goes:

Hi Angel,

This is a chronicle of my feelings and experience in Europe on this trip. (I expect this to become an ongoing thread)

Friday Morning Dec 30, 2005:
3:50 am
I awake & get ready to go to the airport... I check email & discover that a reservation request I submitted for a room in London has responded favorably...50£ per night...
4:30am:
I leave Santa Rosa...on the drive to SFO I listen to the CD my Angel has given me...It really touched my heart, and the memories of our day together come flooding back in waves... waves like only the ocean can produce during a rip current... I am overwhelmed with emotions...Love, guilt, anxiety, warmth, admiration, gratitude, respect, appreciation, sense of loss that is overwhelming (my previous life, the only one I have known is gone now), anticipation of the future..., excitement, curiosity, nervous anticipation, FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, FEAR. The FEAR is overwhelming and all encompassing like no emotion I have ever felt in my life.

Fear the love of my life, my beautiful, innocent, loving, and capable wife will be forever damaged by my actions, and lack of strength to be honest with her, ( and myself) about my true nature sooner. Fear Mike with pull the veto and I will be lost on the river Styx between worlds. Fear I am not worthy of the grand opportunity that has been opened up to me to live true to my nature. Fear I will fail, and not be worthy of the beautiful, open, loving, and accepting people that offer a whole new world to me. Fear I will betray the sacred trust of confidentiality that I shoulder. Fear my Angel, Karin will tell me "I have found some one else Thomas, and there is no more room in my life for you". Fear that members of my congregation who I so fearlessly, loved, shepherded, worshiped with, and guided, for so many years; are stumbled by my lack of faith in their value system, and pained to lose me as much as I am pained to lose them. Fear I will not be able to function in life without all of my friends & family whom I have lost all contact with...Forever. Fear I am just not gonna pull it off.

These feelings of fear and doubt are completely foreign to me as I am normally, confident, capable, in control, and decisive about my life.

So I do the only thing I can do...I cry, and I let the feelings flow THROUGH me...And desperately try to let them go as quickly as they come. I am successful for the moment....

THOMAS