Month: March 2022

On Living With the Fear of Dying

So much is going on in the world that forces us to confront the darkness within men’s souls and the uncertainty of life. The war in Ukraine, the continued fight against the Covid-19 pandemic, countless regional conflicts, and the everyday murders and crimes in cities around the world. Here in Israel, we are experiencing the worst wave of terror attacks since the Second Intifida. In a week’s span, eleven people have been killed in separate attacks, with one of them being the worst single attack since the 2014 Har Nof attack in Jerusalem. We are living in a state of national anxiety, national uncertainty, national fear, and national grief. This is a small country, and every attack so far has occurred within a half hour drive from my home. One happened in Hadera while I was working just a short drive away.

This is real, it is in my face, it is on my mind, and the deaths weigh collectively on our souls. My boss told me today to expect less students for the next few weeks as people avoid public places. He took me aside to try and assuage my fear as a new immigrant faced with the reality of terror. I had to reassure and comfort several students who came in today who persevered through their sadness and grief to try and maintain some semblance of a normal life.

What do I say to them? How do I comfort someone was born here when I have only three years of life in this land? What do I tell my family? How do I look at myself and wonder if I made the right choice coming here? I love this place, I love these people; but the fear of dying because I went to a bus stop, or a mall, or took an evening stroll tends to override the power of patriotism and the conviction of my beliefs.

I don’t want to talk about the politics of what’s going on, because I don’t believe that it’s material at this point. We know why people commit these acts of terror. We know the realities on the ground. We know that something must be done; but yours truly and most of the Israeli and Palestinian world cannot come to an agreement on what that solution must be. We are the perennial Gordian Knot, and the object of increased scrutiny. There are many reasons why, but I don’t want to talk about them; not because I do not have a political opinion, but because I care more about what this means for my daily life and not for some grand scheme to solve a problem that seems to never end.

I was talking with a friend of mine last night, an American that I’ve known since high school; and it was difficult to tell him what was going on in my life. My job is going well, my wife and I are healthy, I am mentally stable, I have dreams and ideas on how to make my life better; but this situation looms over everything. It is hard to think about finding ways to enrich your life when you know that people are dying around you. It is difficult to plan and see yourself somewhere in a year when you don’t know if the next time you go into work or go shopping could be a tragedy waiting to happen. The fear is pervasive, and maybe the terrorists are winning if I can’t help but be afraid when I go outside.

So what can we do? As a nation? As a people? What can I do?

I don’t have an idea of some kind of grand scheme to solve the problems, I am just a simple oleh trying to make ends meet while finding my place here in my new home. I cannot preach about Zionism, about patriotism, or about national strength; not because I don’t believe in those things, but because I don’t believe that my voice is the right one to speak.

The one thing I can say is something that the Lubavitcher Rebbe always talked about. He always talked about bringing light into the world, and that small acts of compassion and devotion can bring a little illumination into this world and hopefully pierce the overwhelming darkness. The people killing innocents in the street want to achieve their goals with acts of murder, acts of terror, and with acts of hate. I believe that the only answer to this it counter them with the small acts of light we can do in this world. We must meet death with a commitment to life. We must meet terror with steadfast belief in the goodness of the world. We must meet hate with love and compassion.

These may just sound like platitudes, and they are; but they can change things. One reassuring word to a scared young woman counts in this world. One act of kindness make the burden of living with the weight of this situation a little easier to bear. One recommitment to believing why we are here and what we are meant to do can help us stand straighter when the weight of grief on our shoulders makes it hard to do anything but stay home and be afraid.

I will continue living here, despite what is happening here. You may worry for my safety, and my family’s safety; and for that I thank you. Some people reading this may completely disagree with me, and that’s also okay. I don’t want to fight with anyone, I don’t want to debate about my right to be here; I just want to believe that everyone deserves to live without fear of dying randomly on the street. I believe that there is still hope, that we can find a solution to all of this. I don’t know how we will get there, but I persist in that belief because I truly believe that all people in this world just want to live in peace.

All we can do know is try and stick together, to comfort one another, and to find ways to share this burden together. Whether it’s giving money to the man on the street, helping people on the street, comforting those who are afraid, or doing mitzvot to try and bring some bit of holiness to this place. If we can talk about something it is manageable; and as Herzl said, if you will it, it is no dream. If we commit ourselves to making this a more beautiful world, that dream is still possible. Maybe I’m naïve, but I must have some bit of hope to cling to.

How do we live with the fear of dying? We must continue to hope and believe in the importance of life and the happiness that it can bring. I may be a dreamer, but I would rather live with this hope than succumb to a life of fear and anxiety. I came to this country to build a new life, and that’s what I’m going to do.

This post is in memory of those killed this past week and in hope that we see no more tragedies unfold in this beautiful and holy land.

Much love from the holy land; sadness, grief, and fear be damned.

What do I have to do?

I don’t know what I have to do. What do I have to say or write for someone to notice me? Why do I have to lie during the day and only feel myself at night, caught in the hit, hearing the voices, lying and crying myself to sleep in a world that never seems to understand me? Never seems to get me. Never seems to see me. Never seems to fit me. Never seems to want me.

I went to a Purim party the other day, decked out in my suit and hat, trying to play the part of the good chassid with what I have; and the first question I got asked was if I was in a costume. I should have said that aren’t we all in costumes, or maybe it’s just me. Faking it until I make it. Trying to act normal when I’m not, trying to be the ideal when I have fallen so far from grace, acting like I believe when I am no longer sure of anything in my life. Putting on the face of someone else over my own, someone who has goals, and dreams, and hope. Anything to hide the man underneath, the man who has given up, the man who no longer has the will to fight the demons, the man who’s biggest accomplishment is taking the next step on the long death march towards the inevitable.

I hardly write anymore, because I’m tired of sharing myself with others. No one seems to get it. No one seems to care. I see advertisements for how to write more catchy posts, use buzzwords, hell even write the damn article for you; but what’s the point in creating another lie? I am who I am, this despicable and pathetic shell of a man, clinging to the darkness because hope is untenable, and the light too blinding. I can see the views I get on these articles, and I understand why no one wants to read them. They’re sad, they don’t inspire confidence, they don’t have a positive message; I don’t leave you with the false impression of redemption.

This life I live, whatever it is, is the only one I have. I have seen so much change in the past year, and I thought by now I wouldn’t miss the numbness of the hospital bed and medicine times; but that would be another lie. I have a wife, a job, a place to put my head at night; but I am still so fundamentally unhappy. I look at the mirror and hate the man that I see. I look into his eyes and see everything again. The horrors, the pain, the suffering. I look down and see my scars, and I feel my body over for the ones you cannot see. The years of mental anguish and pain whipping my back, hundreds of nights spent caught in emotional turmoil cutting into my flesh. I feel the scars on my soul from knowing that there is a life I could be living and I am stuck here.

I will never escape this, this madness. I will never be able to tell the truth to anyone again, not because I do not want to lie, but because I don’t understand it anymore. So many things I see, and hear, and feel aren’t real but are so entrenched in my reality that I cannot explain it to someone else. I cannot look at them in the eyes and let them in. I have to hide it away, or write it away, because I can barely stand myself to talk about it. No one wants to see another suffering person, they want to feel good. They want to feel hope. They want to see some glimmer of light in this increasingly dark world.

I am not here for that. I am another part of the darkness. I will lie to you, but only as much as I lie to myself. There is no hope at the end of my road, only the accomplishment of living when you don’t want to anymore. There are dragons at the edges of my map, but they’re something I made up. This will not end happily, it will end with drudgery and best efforts.

I have to keep walking, one step at a time. Not because I believe that salvation is around the corner, but because I just don’t know any other way of living. I will live for now, at least I can hold onto that.

I don’t want to sleep

I say that I have a sleeping problem. I tell people that I’ve tried different types of sleeping pills; and I have, they just don’t do anything other than give me dry mouth in the morning or leave my tastes buds bitter for the better part of the day. I say that I just can’t fall asleep, that I have racing thoughts. I tell people that I’m afraid of my nightmares or waking up from them and not realizing that they’re just fiction. I tell people that I have insomnia, that it’s something medical. Something clinical. A side-effect.

That’s not true.

I don’t sleep because I choose not to. I stay awake until five or six in the morning, fighting heavy eyelids and unfocused eyes. I feel the sleep-inducing effects of my psychiatric pills; fuck, that’s what half of them are supposed to do. I can feel the exhaustion in my arms, the tiredness in my legs, and the burning desire to sleep when I turn to my side and curl up. I lie on my back in bed, staring into the darkness, knowing that sleep doesn’t evade me; I try and hide from her.

I don’t sleep at night because I can’t stop hearing them. I can’t stop hearing myself. Yelling. Screaming. Shrieking. I can’t stop hearing my own voice, the one that’s supposed to be telling me what’s right in the world, yell at me about how much I should hate myself and how I should hurt myself and how many reasons that there are that I should jump from the highest building I can find. I hear my voice, filled with rage, and disgust, scream at me about how ashamed I should feel, that I am pathetic, that I don’t deserve to live. The voice I hide from the world behind a veneer of false normalcy comes to me at night, unmasked, and filled with fury and hate.

The other voices are worse. Sometimes they say things, random words and phrases. Sometimes I hear people talk about me, treating me like a child. Sometimes they pretend that I am right here with them; but sometimes they make it well known that they are gossiping about me, criticizing me, disgusted by me.  Sometimes they just parrot whatever hateful and self-loathing things I say to myself. Sometimes they just scream; they scream and scream and scream with a voice that needs no air to sustain itself and whose vocal cords will never break from the rawness of unending sonic dissonance and degradation.

There are images too. Random things. Fantastic things. Faces from my past. People who I let down. Those that hurt me. Loved ones I miss. The gallery of every suffering complexion I have ever seen. The people who I wished I had said I loved them, but I never got the chance. They flash. They linger. They are all that I can see. Sometimes I scream for them to go, and sometimes I do everything I can to just try and remember them before I lose them amongst the pain. Faces twisted in agony mixed with glimpses of smiles I wish I remembered more vividly. My mind is a cinema, with every screen playing a different horror, a different memory; and I am bound to the chair with eyes held open forced to absorb it all.

I try to numb myself. I watch hours of YouTube. I binge episode after episode after episode. I take more drugs. I do anything to try and make myself as close to mindless as possible, anything to drown it all out. Replace the voices with a laugh track. Replace the faces with actors from a sitcom. Stop the screaming; just anything to stop the fucking screaming.

I want to sleep, I really do. It’s just that I would rather pass out exhausted and numbed from meaningless content and wake up tired than fall asleep begging for everything to stop, praying that this is my last night, that I die in my sleep so that at least I have a chance of my last moment being in a pleasant dream rather than this reality. The one where I hear mothers crying over their dead children. The one where I see bruised faces, and children whose faces hide their lost innocence. The one where my backing track is just samples of screams at different pitches. The one where I cannot stop telling myself that I hate everything about the man that I see in the mirror. The one where I am my own torturer, tormentor; where I whisper to myself to just die already.

I’m not scared of the nightmares anymore or waking up not knowing what’s real and what is just a horrible dream. Those things are fleeting, the constant repetition of my own hate-filled voice is always there, my own personal white noise machine.

I’m going to try and sleep soon, but I need to watch one more episode. Or two. Or maybe just finish the season. I would rather hear the same lame jokes and follow the obvious plot lines than keep on hearing myself tear myself apart.

I don’t want to sleep yet, they’re still here with me.