While my journey had been inward-focused, I now viscerally felt what the support of others could do

As told to Rivka Streicher by Yehuda Weiss

While my parents were well-intentioned, their hardline approach in our insular community didn’t work for me. I was restless, confused, maybe depressed, yet all I knew was that I wanted out. I began engaging in self-destructive behaviors, felt like a failure, and fell and fell. But here's the thing about hitting rock bottom. There’s no way out but up

I

wonder, sometimes, if I was ever a carefree child. From early on, cheder was not my happy place. The rules, keeping my finger on the place in the siddur, Chumash, Mishnayos — and the, often, corporal consequences if we didn’t do, listen, follow, follow, follow.

For a thinking, inquisitive child it was hard. I felt like a sheep — always having to shuffle, trot, and bleat the same way as the others, and if not, I was at the rebbi’s mercy.

If only home could’ve been my safety zone, the place I could retreat to lick my wounds from cheder. But home was just another place to hide.

“You don’t know what my rebbi did to me today…” I’d try to say to my father.

He’d turn on me. “Why did he do that? What did you do to deserve it?”

I’d mumble something.

“You did that? Well, we also need to discipline you.”

I learned quickly not to trust anyone, to keep my pain and shame to myself, to resist sharing because I couldn’t expect compassion.

To be sure, my parents were good, well-intentioned people, but at the time, to them, good parenting meant reinforcing expectations and doing whatever it took to keep us on the straight and narrow.

Were they worse than other parents, than my friends’ parents? Probably not. Like most people in our insular, chassidic community, they were young when they started a family, and were treading the path they knew without really thinking about why they were doing it. When they encountered negative behavior, they’d treat the symptom by reprimanding or punishing, without stopping to consider the root cause.

And then came a sensitive second child like me. Their hard-line approach just didn’t work. I didn’t feel that my parents were in my corner or that they had my back unconditionally. Sometimes, I felt, What am I to you? A trophy? To look good and right in my place in the family’s perfect picture?

I was around 11 when I began struggling with anxiety and depression. I didn’t know why I was feeling full of nervous energy at times, and like I didn’t want to get out of bed at others. Lazy and unmotivated were the messages I heard about myself.

When I’d try telling my mother that I didn’t have energy, or felt sad, she’d downplay my feelings and fears, pushing them back under the rug where we could walk over them and pretend they didn’t exist. “If you only try harder, you’ll be fine,” was what she told me over and over.

The world of mental health, especially children’s mental health, was hopelessly simplistic and misunderstood at that time in our community. If you’re crazy, you belong in a mental institution. If you’re not that crazy, just get over yourself.

So I tried, but I’d sometimes experience debilitating panic. I often couldn’t sleep, and my emotional angst kept me up at night. The anxiety kept me from doing things. I felt different, like I just couldn’t fit into a world where fitting in was almost the only thing you had to do.

As I approached teenagerhood, these feelings led me to act out in rebellious and self-sabotaging ways. It started with tiny things, like refusing to get a haircut at the same prescribed time as the other boys. Pushback from yeshivah and from home came fast; the more I pushed, the more they’d come back at me. I felt that my home, yeshivah, and community were one big prison. And my parents were the prison guards.

Teenagers have intense feelings where everything is a huge deal and can look like the end of the world. The depression intensified and I had little will to live — I couldn’t see a point to it all. Most days, I did the bare minimum just to get through, to survive. That my parents didn’t know how to deal with or accommodate me just exacerbated things.

I chafed at going to yeshivah every day, and abiding by the same rules, same schedule. It felt meaningless. I felt meaningless. I acted out in bigger ways, and at 15, got myself kicked out of yeshivah in our community.

I was sent to a less-intense yeshivah in Monsey, where I learned that the world is bigger than my own chassidus, that there are other types of Jews.

I still couldn’t find my place and continued heading downhill. By then, I was used to fighting with authority, as if my problems were external and if I would come head-to-head with everyone outside and on top of me, I could feel better.

By 17, I was out of the Monsey yeshivah and landed in a much-more-lenient-than-my-parents-would’ve-liked yeshivah in Lakewood.

Still, they didn’t ask, “What’s going on for you, Yehuda, that you keep acting out?” They didn’t take my mental health challenges seriously. If the new place was more open, it was still a yeshivah. So long as I was still pushing through the system.