As I write, I am sitting at my desk with an electric heating pad pressed against my lower back. This is awkward, since 30 teenagers are now witness to my decrepitude. I wish I could say the injury was sustained on some marvelous adventure, but this is not the case. Yesterday, I leaned over to tie my shoe and when I stood up...I couldn't. I was stuck. I was also in great pain. I yelled a word you shouldn't say in a school building and waited until I was recovered enough to hobble home. In other words, I'm getting older. But despite the aching back and the anti-wrinkle cream in my bathroom, I feel like I'm just now beginning to sort out who I am.
I didn't do a lot of soul-searching in my 20s. Things were changing too rapidly to sit still and reflect. I moved from college in North Carolina to my first job in Boston, then to Manhattan, and eventually to Brooklyn. I was a new teacher who was trying to survive being the sole adult responsible for a roomful of 10-year-olds during the day, and I was going to graduate school at night and on weekends. Those early days of teaching were rough. I distinctly remember one little girl climbing into a cupboard and refusing to get out, while a little voice inside of me said, "Maybe it'd just be easier if you let her stay in there." And I'll never forget the melody of Rihanna's "Rude Boy," which was the playback song of a student's mother that I called on a regular basis. The only searching I wanted to do at the end of the day was of the inside of my eyelids.
Trying to sum up what happened shortly after I turned 30 is tricky. Maybe it was an existential crisis? A quarter-life crisis? Just a good, old-fashioned freak-out? The bottom line: never stopping to figure out who you are is a recipe for disaster. For a good amount of time, I was grappling with some pretty big questions about who I was and the expectations I had for my life. Only recently have the fears and doubts that were clanging around my brain like a mariache band started to ease up.
The first decision I made when I started to feel like myself again was that I wanted to be Jewish. It was the most sure I'd felt about anything in a long time. With the mariache band quieted, the little voice that was telling me, "You should do this!" was finally loud enough to hear. I remembered that I had even purchased some books on converting years before and "hid" them so haphazardly they begged Moses to ask me about them (typical guy, he didn't understand that I wanted him to do so and instead just thought I was bad at hiding things), but the venture had gone no further. This year, in the days leading up to the high holidays, I cracked them open again. As I read, I became convinced that the rituals and community I was reading about could help me become a stronger, more self-accepting version of myself.
I don't expect converting to solve all my problems. It's not a cure all for worries and anxieties, nor will it grade the pile of papers on my desk or go to the gym for me. But I can't dismiss the joy it's brought me thus far, either. It has reminded me of the parts of my identity I'm proud of, like my ability to find and build community, and my love of language and writing.
And at the end of this process, being a Jew will be part of my identity, too. I'm curious as to how far the label will extend into my psyche. The last two things I've "become" are a teacher and a partner. Both changed my life tremendously, but were roles that centered around my relationships with other people. Becoming Jewish is an inward process. So I wonder: will I feel like a different person at the end of the conversion process? Will I be stronger for the soul searching that adopting a new religion will demand? Will I learn enough about myself that the next time the mariache band shows up, I can wave them away without any hesitation?
But now the muscle relaxer I've taken has started to kick in, telling me that I've done enough rambling for one day. Next up on the blog: meeting the rabbi and our first week of Jew class!
In the meantime, what about you? What experience most changed the way you saw yourself and your place in the world? Comment or email me at loveandmatzoballs@gmail.com.
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