Rock Bottom  

I grew up in the Lakewood of the 80s, when it was still every bit the yeshivah community it was originally set up to be. But I was also a kid with ADHD, bouncing off the walls in school, trying to find myself as a second generationer of the core group of shtark families who’d formed this town. My father is a serious talmid chacham, my neighbors were the rebbeim and the maggidei shiur of BMG. Life revolved around Torah and the yeshivah.

My parents were good people — I knew they loved me, and home life was okay. School was another story. I’m smart, so I should’ve had what it took, but my behavioral issues got in the way, and for a long time I didn’t connect to the learning.

By around sixth grade I took a good look at the world around me — the yeshivah at its epicenter, the growing community of kollelleit — and I realized this was it. You either learn or you’re out. And you gotta be in it for life. No one I knew in my little universe was into business. In this world, there was only one way to make it.

I resolved that I would. I started to spin a web of pressure around myself, becoming more enmeshed in the demands and expectations as time wore on. It paid off, externally at least: I got into a good yeshivah and seemed to be of the better bochurim. But the pressure was killing me from the inside. There was this huge cognitive dissonance between how I appeared and acted and how I felt inside. I felt hollow, like a husk, and had poor self-image. An existential crisis — who am I, what am I doing, I don’t feel any of this — raged inside me.