People go different directions when faced with emotional challenges. Some people start distancing themselves as soon as they understand what they’re facing. Others steer into the skid, knowing what’s coming, trying to get ahead of it. Some people draw from their community for support. Others prefer to handle it on their own. Some people turn to faith for strength. Others, not so much.
I still remember the day I lost the foundation of my own faith.
I had triumphed over meningitis and was facing down diabetes. After six months, I was starting to come out of the initial stage of extreme fear, starting to push at the extremely rigid boundaries placed on me by a backward-thinking doctor and parents who didn’t know yet that there were other ways.
Through it all, the “why me?” question burned at the back of my mind. Few around me understood that I was grieving, and when I found no answers or outlets, the rage began to build. Right around that time, my parents brought me to the leader of my religious community for counseling. This was a person everyone already knew was horrible at communicating with anyone under the age of 40, so I suppose none of us should have been surprised that his version of comfort was to hand 13-year-old-overly-medically-educated me a book called When Living Hurts.
Not once, but twice.
It's not even a book for the grieving, and it’s definitely not for children. It’s to educate people who believe someone is spiraling downward on how to recognize the signs (and no, the books were not for my parents. He gave both copies directly to me.) Even the title raised my hackles. It felt like he was passing off my distress as something that could be solved by reading a book. Even now, I still have a visceral reaction to it – one of strong resentment.
I’m sure he was doing his best. But in this case, not only was his best woefully inadequate, it actually caused damage. There aren’t exactly a ton of Jewish people in my hometown. He was the only religious or spiritual authority I had access to. And on the 45-minute drive home, staring down at the second copy of that awful book, I literally felt the connection that I had built to my spiritual self -- through study and tradition I had learned as a child -- break off from my identity and float away. I had never been overly religious, and as transplants to the Midwest, my family and I were not accepted readily into the existing pecking order very easily, so it was neither a difficult nor painful break. Once it was done, it was done. I have never seen a reason or had a desire to rebuild.
That’s not to say I haven’t thought about it. I am privileged to know people who hold different belief systems and varying levels of faith, and sometimes I envy the ones whose faith is strong. It acts as a bulwark for them and offers a measure of purpose and comfort when things become difficult. For me, it’s just not possible. Religious life for me has become about the familiarity of childhood traditions and seeing family.
In the years since, I have found my sources of strength and comfort elsewhere. But having a little faith to fall back on sometimes might have been nice.