I was like the living dead — here, but not here. Not for myself, nor for others

As told to Rivka Streicher

I grew up in the Lakewood of the 80s, when it was still every bit the yeshivah community it was originally set up to be. But I was also a kid with ADHD, bouncing off the walls in school, trying to find myself as a second generationer of the core group of shtark families who’d formed this town. My father is a serious talmid chacham, my neighbors were the rebbeim and the maggidei shiur of BMG. Life revolved around Torah and the yeshivah.

My parents were good people — I knew they loved me, and home life was okay. School was another story. I’m smart, so I should’ve had what it took, but my behavioral issues got in the way, and for a long time I didn’t connect to the learning.

By around sixth grade I took a good look at the world around me — the yeshivah at its epicenter, the growing community of kollelleit — and I realized this was it. You either learn or you’re out. And you gotta be in it for life. No one I knew in my little universe was into business. In this world, there was only one way to make it.

I resolved that I would. I started to spin a web of pressure around myself, becoming more enmeshed in the demands and expectations as time wore on. It paid off, externally at least: I got into a good yeshivah and seemed to be of the better bochurim. But the pressure was killing me from the inside. There was this huge cognitive dissonance between how I appeared and acted and how I felt inside. I felt hollow, like a husk, and had poor self-image. An existential crisis — who am I, what am I doing, I don’t feel any of this — raged inside me.

The way I viewed life, and viewed myself, was very black-and-white. No gray area, no room for accepting anything in between. My father is a real yiras Shamayimdige person with genuine temimus. He was the good guy, and our neighborhood was full of guys like that. Really good, sincere people. But me? I was out in the school corridors for most of my elementary school years. I couldn’t sit, so I got into trouble. I was told off a million times. Just be a good boy, behave yourself for once… What I heard was: You’re bad.

Those harmless yet bad-guy things settled inside me like ash, until there was a mound of cinders in my gut that was choking me from the inside. Bad, bad, bad.