Determined to finally beat this problem once and for all, I again sought professional help — something I would continue to do for many years, at enormous financial and emotional cost. I tried traditional therapy, prescription medication, hypnosis therapy, neurofeedback, and other modalities, but each time, the process followed a similar trajectory: I got my hopes up, invested tremendous effort, time, and money, and ultimately found myself back in the same place as before, just a lot more discouraged. For years, inner peace eluded me.

Even as a balabos, I continued to hear, in Shabbos derashos, the same message I had heard countless times during my years in yeshivah and kollel: “You can overcome any nisayon! If you invest intense and consistent hishtadlus, the siyata d’Shmaya will follow, and ultimately you will achieve success.”

This message was bolstered by countless stories that followed this basic construct: Someone experienced difficulty in a particular area of avodas Hashem — fill in the blank — and after prodigious effort and tearful prayers, he suddenly found himself able to succeed and overcome his nisayon. In the most dramatic versions of this spiritual rags-to-riches narrative, the person ultimately becomes a gadol.

I don’t doubt these stories, nor do I take issue, chas v’shalom, with the idea that a person can overcome even tremendous nisyonos, with a combination of effort and siyata d’Shmaya. But about a year ago, after decades of trying to overcome my nisayon, I finally realized that I was torturing myself and wasting considerable time, money, and emotional energy in fighting a lonely battle I could not win. This realization liberated me somewhat, helping me to concentrate on what I was good at rather than beat myself up for my failures. I’m still not completely at peace, but I’m better off than I was before.

I didn’t ask for this struggle, and I don’t think I’m a bad person for having it, even if it means there are certain obligations I can’t fulfill, or can’t fulfill optimally. While few people are aware of the precise nature of my nisayon, I’m sure many people find certain things about me strange, such as my spotty attendance at shul (which, to this day, is the place where my issue becomes the most challenging).

Despite my problem, I am still an upstanding member of my community who learns and supports Torah and sends his children to mainstream yeshivos and Bais Yaakovs. Nevertheless, in terms of ruchniyus, I’m largely on my own, trying to chart my own course, one that accommodates but does not totally succumb to my unique limitations. When I have a sh’eilah in hilchos Shabbos or kashrus, I ask my rav. When I’m trying to figure out how to deal with my nisayon, I have no one to ask.

After struggling with my nisayon for close to three decades, I would humbly suggest that there are two categories of nisyonos: those that are meant to be overcome, and those that are meant to be a lifelong struggle. Knowing which category a nisayon belongs to can be a challenge in its own right, and may be the most torturous aspect of the nisayon, one that leads to endless self-flagellation: Am I fooling myself? Am I just being lazy? Why can’t I just be “normal” and do what everyone else is doing? Maybe if I would try a little harder…

The most obvious examples of nisyonos that need to be endured are chronic physical disabilities or ailments, but what I’m really referring to are nisyonos that can’t be seen or understood by people who don’t suffer from them.

The “you can overcome anything” message resonates very well with our instant gratification, microwave generation. But the message of “you just have to struggle with this” doesn’t resonate nearly as well with us. Some people can’t handle the prospect of living their entire life with a problem that makes certain aspects of Yiddishkeit extremely challenging and unfulfilling, and would sooner abandon frumkeit than try to reconcile their challenge with frum living, knowing that they’ll never succeed fully. And our society hardly glorifies the person who looks like an average Joe yet is quietly coping with substantial challenges.

Even those who refuse to throw in the towel might suffer a mental breakdown or crisis in their attempt to live in a way that isn’t fully congruent with the way Hashem created them. I personally witnessed someone have a nervous breakdown after pushing himself unnaturally for too long. He never fully recovered.

The much-vaunted message of “you can overcome” may be helpful to those who really do need encouragement to propel them past their difficulties, but it only increases the agony and guilt of those whose nisyonos need to be endured for the long haul. Unfortunately, this second type of nisayon, which requires a completely different set of management strategies, receives almost no public attention. I, for one, have never heard it addressed in any derashah.

It is this lack of attention to the endurance-type nisyonos that has spurred me to tell my story.

By now, you’ve long been wondering what this mysterious problem of mine is, and why I’ve been so deliberately vague about it. You may have concluded that the nature of the problem is delicate, controversial, or unmentionable in a frum family publication. But that’s actually not the case.

I suffer from a condition called misophonia, which literally means “hatred of sound.” People with misophonia have visceral reactions to certain sounds, especially sounds related to the mouth and sounds that are repetitive. Regular, everyday sounds that most people would barely notice can be torture to a person with misophonia, triggering anxiety, panic, and rage.

That’s all, you’re wondering? Well, that’s exactly why I’ve avoided naming my problem until now. To anyone who doesn’t have the condition, it sounds minor, almost silly. So the fellow next to you in the beis medrash is humming in your ear. So the guy behind you in shul is davening too loudly. So your kid is thrumming on the table. To most people, these sounds would be mildly annoying, at most. But to me, they’re unbearable.

It’s precisely because my problem is not dramatic, or poignant, or headline grabbing, that I wasn’t eager to identify it here. In fact, I would have preferred to omit the nature of my condition altogether, except that I don’t want people drawing the wrong conclusions.

Unglamorous as it may be, misophonia is nevertheless seriously disruptive to my life, making it difficult, and often impossible, for me to daven or learn b’tzibbur or be part of the shul experience — which, aside from the avodas Hashem aspect, is also the center of a frum man’s social life. Misophonia interferes with my family life, too, since the sounds of people’s chewing, breathing, and other normal activities can drive me to distraction.

I’m not here to educate people about misophonia, nor am I looking for sympathy. What I would like to do is start a serious discussion about how to distinguish between challenges that people can realistically expect to overcome and challenges that people have to learn to live with — and how we can cope with the latter, even as we cling tight to our mesorah and don’t yield an inch to those who wish to “adapt halachah to the times.”

In my younger years, each time I heard a variation of the “you can overcome” speech, I’d enter a new cycle of guilt, resolutions, efforts, and subsequent failure. Today, I’m able to ignore pep talks like these and tell myself that this is not my avodah. I’m living my life, not anyone else’s, and my job is to soldier on in my lonely nisayon, trying to do the best with the tools and limitations Hashem gave me.

Now available from ArtScroll/Mesorah: LifeLines 2, a collection of memorable LifeLines stories with brand-new postscripts containing updates on the narrators’ lives and adding another dimension to their stories.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 709)