"Where Do You See Yourself in Five Years?"
- 7 days ago
- 10 min read
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both,
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far I could,
To where it bent in the undergrowth."
-Robert Frost
With a post titled as this one is, you would expect today's story to pick up five years ago, in April of 2021, when we were just starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel to the Covid nightmare we all lived.
That isn't where this starts, though.
This starts long before, many years earlier, around 2003, when I found resonance with "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost in My elementary school reader/literature book.
I remember looking at the poem and thinking... "That's Me."
Even as a young girl, sitting in My Bais Yaakov(1) uniform, all prim and proper and tznius(2)...
I looked at this poem about taking a less-traveled road... and I saw Myself.
I saw that I wasn't going to take the path they were setting Me on, even as I believed it was My definite future.
In the Ultra Orthodox Jewish world, there's the concept of being "off the derech", or "OTD."
The phrase literally means "Off the path," but it's used colloquially to indicate that someone has left the Ultra-Orthodox fold.
When I was a kid, I remember these topics being talked about in hushed tones. "Kids at risk" was our thing, rather than "Say No to Drugs, Kids!"
Yeah, sure, there were youths using illicit substances, as there is in almost every community...
But the problem that was focused on was not the drugs, but the lack of adherence to the community norm.
"The Road Not Taken" resonated with Me so much that I decided to commit it to memory.
I repeated it and repeated it, to the point that I wrote most of the intro to this blog post without checking the wording.
I didn't know at the time, but there was some part of Me that knew I was going to go off the beaten path.
I didn't necessarily know that I would go off the derech, but I knew I was somehow going to do something different than what was expected of Me.
By the time I was in high school, I was still very much part of "the Bais Yaakov system," and still on a path that all Ultra Orthodox girls-young women are expected to take: Finish High School, go to Seminary(3) (preferably in Israel), become a wife at eighteen, become a mom at nineteen, and have at least six kids, preferably all within a year and a half of each other.
I wanted all that, that's the funniest thing.
I wanted that life, to marry young and have a large family.
I wanted to be frum(4).
I wanted to stay on the path.
And yet, "The Road Not Taken" always made My chest get tight.
I would read the poem, reread it, find it months later, read it again...
And it would always make Me feel this deep, deep longing.
I didn't know what I wanted, but still, some part of Me knew... it wasn't what I was being groomed to do. Who I was being groomed to be.
A part of Me wanted it, though.
A part large enough that sometimes I still feel a sense of mourning for the future I lost when I started breaking off on my own, unbeaten path.
A part of Me wanted to be that good girl, that young woman, that mother, that matriarch of a family in a painfully patriarchal community within an already patriarchal world. I wanted to dress in a tznius manner.
I wanted to be good, because I loved Hashem(5).
I believed, with all of my heart, certain things I had been told about God.
His presence, his abilities, his existence as an individual entity that is everywhere at once and is omnipotent and omniscient. I believed it so hard, and I knew deeply that there was a tension there that needed to break.
Cognitive dissonance can be a trip when you're aware of it and okay with it.
I started the journey towards real cognitive dissonance regarding my innate belief system when compared to the belief system I was fed from birth in ninth grade, when I was taking the New York State Regents exams. It was slightly before the exams, actually, when Mrs. B, the 9th-grade Bio teacher who also taught 10th-grade Chumash(6), told us that they had gotten an exception from the Board of Regents, that since we were religious and believed in creationism, we were exempt from answering questions about evolution.
(In fact, a good few of our school books were redacted with black marker to make sure that the students couldn't accidentally read about evolution/the age of The Universe/other religious beliefs, since they definitely weren't going to teach it.)
I remember sitting there and thinking...
What was the harm in answering those questions?
I believed in natural selection and survival of the fittest, even though Darwin was one of the most mocked names in My upbringing.
I believed in natural selection, and I believed in Dinosaurs, I believed in the vastness of space and the planets around us potentially holding extra-terrestrial consciousness.
I even somehow believed in the Big Bang.
And still, I believed in the God I was told existed. And still, I loved Him.
And still, I followed Him, wholeheartedly.
I held tight to these cognitive distortions as though for dear life, for most of my life, even as I started interacting with people outside of the community.
I grasped onto them tightly and refused to let go, even as I comfortably and easily "talked to boys", or rather had normal conversations with people of all genders.(7)
I perused the internet and read forums, and I started an alias profile on Facebook(8).
My home had filtered internet, but I had My workarounds, and I made friends in various places through various social media sites.
I enjoyed movies, I wrote fanfiction.
I grew My circles, and I broadened My mind.
At some point in 2013, I discovered the then-popular random match chat and video sites. I rarely used the video chat function, but I used the interest tags in the chat to link up with strangers who watched the same shows that I did, and we would roleplay various scenarios. It was there that I met a woman who eventually (after a 5-year long-distance relationship) convinced me to move over 2,400 miles for her. I hadn't prayed for a while by then(9)... But while living in that apartment alone, I was confronted with a choice. I could choose. I could choose My path, and I could do it My way. I remember it so vividly because the emotion was so deep and raw.
I took My siddur(10) with Me as I stepped outside. I stood outside at the bottom of the stairs (I lived in the basement apartment of a home belonging to a wonderful older couple), and I prayed. There is a portion in the prayer liturgy called the "Shemone Esrei", which simply means "Eighteen", alluding to the eighteen paragraphs in the prayer meant to be recited standing still in place.
In the Shemone Esrei, there is a paragraph called "Shema Koleinu", which means "Hear our voices".
While the rest of the liturgy is pre-written by ancient rabbis, and one is not supposed to speak between paragraphs, while reading Shema Koleinu, one is allowed to pause in the middle of the passage and place their siddur over their face and "speak to God directly". I stood out there, at the bottom of the basement stairs, and I held My siddur in My hands. I started praying, and as I got closer to Shema Koleinu, I felt Myself focusing on My intention deeper. As I put the siddur over My face, I just... started speaking. I spoke to God, and I told Him the deepest feelings I had about life and My path.
I told Him how angry I was, how hurt, and I told Him that in order to heal, I needed to rebel.
I had started straying a bit from My family's tradition of kosher previously, but nothing that the community at large really frowned upon. But standing out there in the back of the house, I knew that I was going to do more. Do "worse". I spoke to God, and I cried. I cried deeply, I sobbed. I sobbed to someone I fully admitted aloud that I didn't know was listening. I demanded his attention, and I felt My anger boiling as I cried to Him. I had been hurt by members of the community, of My family, and still I had observed everything so deeply and truly. I demanded His attention, and I demanded His forgiveness. I told Him that I was going to sin. That I knew I was going to stray from the path, that I knew I would be going OTD, and that I was in pain because I knew that it was coming. And still, I told Him, I was going to make those choices. I knew that I needed this, I needed to heal from the trauma I'd endured, and I knew that taking this path was the way I needed to go.
After that, I gave Myself some more freedoms with learning what My needs were and how to respond to them.
I started breaking Shabbos, and I started engaging with My sexuality more. It was in 2021, though, when things really started changing for Me.
It was around March of 2021 that I started dabbling in hypnosis creation.
I had enjoyed listening to files Myself previously, but nothing really resonated with Me to the point that I was really able to enjoy it...
So I decided to make it Myself.
It was through the hypnosis that I met a subject and submissive, and while we dated, I explored My Dominatrix and sadist sides.
And all the while...
All the while, My cognitive distortions stood strong. All the while, I believed that - even as I was mindfully sinning - I was, at the end of the day, a good Jew, because I believed in God and I believed that what I was doing was right for Me and right for My healing journey.
I had been dabbling in My dominatrix side for a little while before I got My first paying client, a young man who was also a semi-observant Orthodox Jew.
To celebrate, I invited My boyfriend at the time out to a nice dinner in Downtown Brooklyn. Kosher, of course.
The moment is somehow crisp in My mind.
The speakers on the semi-covered patio where we were sitting were playing Blue Moon, beautifully performed by Frank Sinatra.
My boyfriend looked at me over the table and posed the question that he said had been on his mind for a while... Do I believe in Evolution?
In that moment, I was finally struck with the need to admit it aloud: I did.
I think I laughed nervously as I explained the mindful cognitive distortions I had, and he seemed reassured by that.
He seemed relieved that even as I held tight to the creationist beliefs, I still believed in scientific history, and that was okay enough for him.
It didn't feel like enough for Me, though. Not really, not deeply. Not truly.
The cognitive distortions were starting to creak under the pressure.
The cognitive distortions were fading, and I was starting to need to confront... What do I actually believe? What do I believe inherently, in My deepest heart?
What do I hold true in My core values, not the values and the stories that were given to Me?
It was just over a year later when I finally confronted them.
It was a simple average day; nothing special was going on at all.
I wanted something, though.
I wanted it badly.
I knew, deeply, what I wanted. I wanted it to make sense. I wanted to understand how to remove the distortions and put everything together in a neat, clean, and easily understandable way.
So I sat down. I sat down with My laptop, opened the original Hebrew text of the Torah. Page one. "In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth." Easy. Simple enough. I kept reading. I kept reading, and slowly... Slowly the doubts I had intensified. I pulled up a text document and started writing. I wrote.
I wrote from My heart, and I cried.
I cried because I knew that I didn't feel Him anymore. I cried because I knew that it was done.
There was no going back. There was no going back to My old beliefs, there was no recapturing of the spirits in Pandora's box. I had believed in Him so deeply, loved Him so deeply...
And he was gone. It was empty. There was no one there.
I still miss Him, sometimes.
That feeling in My chest as I believed that God was there with Me.
The belief that was so strong that it created an almost dissociative rift between Myself and My internal core beliefs.
I believe things differently these days.
I believe in science, in history.
I believe that The Universe is a unified thing, multi-dimensional and fractionated into little pieces of individual consciousness.
I don't believe in God, no.
I believe that we are here to beautify The Universe by witnessing it as human consciousness.
I believe that We, each of us on an individual level...
I believe that we are The Universe made conscious, broken into pieces to experience the beauty and pain that The Universe inherently is.
I do miss Him sometimes, yes. There was a safety in feeling held by an omniscient and omnipotent being. But I looked down that path.
I looked down one as far I could, and I saw that I couldn't take that road, because it wasn't Me. It wasn't My belief.
So I took the road less traveled And that has made all the difference.
(1) The "Bais Yaakov system" is the name for the system of girls' schools, all inspired by one woman from Krakow, Poland, back in the early 1900s. There was no throughline in education for orthodox girls before that, for the most part.
(2) Tznius is the premise of dressing and behaving in a modest fashion, usually used when referring to and policing women's bodies and how they present/dress/move.
(3) The concept of "seminary" for Ultra Orthodox Jews is that of post-high school education for girls, mostly to teach the young women how to be teachers and mothers, and to continue their study time of Torah concepts.
(4) Frum = Ultra Orthodox Jewish
(5) Hashem literally means "The Name", and is used as a stand-in for God's name, which Orthodox Jewish people do not believe should be said outside of prayer.
(6) Chumash is the "Torah" portion of the Jewish written law and religious history. The five books of the Pentateuch.
(7) In the community, one is expected to speak as little as possible with the "other" gender, and even then to keep it to the bare minimum and business. This is obviously unless they are immediate relatives or spouses.
(8) Besides for internet and social media being frowned upon in general, there were school rules around home internet and texting when they came around, and TV and movies, as well.
(9) Women have less stringent rules when it came to daily prayers. With regards to the requirement to pray with a quorum of ten three times a day, women could pray on their own, and even not at all - if their children kept them busy. I took that stringency as an excuse to not pray most days, and eventually the practice faded out of daily use for Me.
(10) Â A siddur is a prayer book.
(11)  "Breaking Shabbos" is a phrase that means breaking one of the laws of Shabbos/Saturday, which is the Jewish day of rest.