Is there something you always carry on you, even if it’s seen better days?

Project coordinator: Rachel Bachrach

Illustrations: Menachem Weinreb

I suffer from severe mental illness. Some doctors say I have an anxiety disorder and severe depression, others have labeled it a personality disorder, but regardless of the diagnosis, these issues have plagued me since I entered beis medrash. For eight years I was a shell of myself — I joke that I’ve had more inpatient psych hospitalizations than most people have gone on vacations.

Holding down a job was essentially impossible once my breakdowns began. I was determined to succeed at least in one area — driving — but even that seemed out of reach. I failed my driving test not once, not twice, but three times. I finally passed on my fourth try, when I was 18. It was a big milestone.

Sometime down the line, my cousin, who owns three stores and a warehouse, hired me to drive for him. I transferred merchandise, made trips to wholesalers, and took care of various errands. For six years, I drove his van hundreds of miles a day all over the Tristate area. Zipping between double-parked cars in Brooklyn, navigating pedestrian-filled Manhattan, even shutting down the lower level of the Verrazano Bridge one Friday afternoon when the transmission went haywire and the van caught fire, I became an expert driver. Driving was therapeutic — and even fun.

My driver’s license gave me the freedom to hold down a job, and to be good at that job. That license, and what it represents, showed me I can become an expert at anything I want.

Confidence restored, I decided to think about my future. If I can hold down a job, I thought, I can commit to classes, to coursework, to deadlines and responsibilities.

And so I did. I’m now starting my last semester of my undergrad program, and once I graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, I plan to move onto bigger things. It might be social work, it might be graduate school, it might be something else entirely, but for the first time in a long time, I know I have a real shot at a real future.

Whenever I feel insecure, I pull out my license. Looking at it reminds me that I’m a mature adult and a capable person, no less than anybody else around me. I know everyone carries their license on them. Mine is different, though. It represents so much more.

Nathaniel Tissler is studying for his bachelor’s degree in psychology in a college in New Jersey.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 860)