So, instead of continuing on and attempting to reformulate my post that was completely destroyed yesterday (which I might still do at a later time), I'm just going to continue with something completely different.



I simply feel lost. Completely and entirely lost in my life. I don't even really know what's important to me anymore and am unsure, at times, what I believe. I don't know if I even want to believe in anything at all.

I know I believe in G-d. I know what I believe G-d is. I believe in Torah, and that it was given to us as a road map. A road map to where, and to serve what purpose, I don't know, but that doesn't matter. The Almighty gave it to us, and, as our Creator, should be trusted to get us where we need to go.

But when it comes to halacha, I simply don't have an answer. I want to trust the sages, but the people who follow the sages seem to count me out. It's as if I don't exist because I'm different. I'm not the normative, so I can't be a real Jew.

But then there's this whole thing with trying to find a job. I don't have a formal education. I still feel victimized by the school system that decided, so heartbreakingly, to rip my IEP in half and deny me the help I was legally entitled to as a citizen of the United States. At times it simply feels like the United Fucktards of America. The only thing uniting us is our mutual hatred of each other.

How can I find a job when they all want me to have my High School Diploma or GED, but I can't get my GED when I don't have the money from a job? I'm stuck in this sick cycle of endless pain and anger and anguish. I'm horrified by the fact these people can't see past the tip of their noses. I have great skills to offer, an excellent work ethic, but none of it matters because all they can see is a lack of a little piece of paper which means absolutely nothing. And forgive me for actually wanting to get a real High School Diploma at the ripe old age of 25.

I'm sorry you people think I'm stupid, but I've been tutoring college students in multiple subjects since I was 12 or 13 years old. I'm that guy that was getting paid $50 his Freshman year of High School to write someone's college paper for a third year composition class. I'm the guy that tutored Accounting over the phone to a friend halfway across the country after taking zero Accounting classes in his entire life!

Still think I'm stupid?

I'm grateful to HaShem for the blessings of my brain and ability to learn quickly and everything else I've been given. But, admittedly, I have absolutely no idea what I'm supposed to do. How am I supposed to use these things? I've been granted such a blessing as this intense passion to try to fix what's so horribly wrong with the world, but I can't get anyone to listen to me. I'm great at starting protests and riots, as certain managers of a certain movie theatre in Atlanta can attest to (that was awesome seeing so many people decide to just go along with one persons words and sit down all at the same time and refuse to leave without appropriate compensation for the movies we couldn't see do to a power failure, not to mention the manager who decided to insult us all horribly).

How do I use these gifts?

How do I fight for people when I don't even know who I am?

I'm so confused.

I started off on writing this to attempt to write about how I feel my thoughts and feelings of love and intimacy are juvenile and I've wound up here, someplace completely different. Maybe it's because I feel I will, by default, be a bad Jew.

I'm a transman who is dating a possible transman and neither of us, if this does last forever, is likely to have children. The person I'm dating will probably never want children and physically cannot bear them. I will never be able to afford it unless I land some off the wall job that pays me $100,000/year and has the best benefits imaginable. I also might be asexual, so I wouldn't really be pleasing my spouse, since they are most likely asexual, so where does that leave me?

Oh, and did I mention that I can't find a job in my city that will actually allow me to have Shabbos off? Or how about the job that didn't want me to take off for Pesah? Guess who my boss was? If you didn't answer "a Jew" you'd be wrong.

That's why, for a time there, I didn't want anything to do with any congregation. The anti-semitic words, like the time I was told it was completely justifiable for the cop to insult me and make me feel as if I didn't belong on the property of a Synagogue because I look "middle eastern". Um, I'm sorry, please forgive, but, aren't Arabs and Jews both middle eastern people? Or every time I'm told that "all Arabs should die for what they've done". There have been instances of extremists Jews, so get your head out of your ass! (that's not something that would go over well at the Oneg, eh?) And then to put so much into my studies and into following halacha and be told that I shouldn't do those things because I'm not a Jew, but every piece of reading material I was given told me to do those things...

And getting stabbed in the back by my boss didn't help things, either. That's when I decided to take a step back and just focus on rebuilding what felt like a destroyed relationship with HaShem. It took me further and further away from the community, and deeper and deeper within myself.

I almost broke down on Yom Kippur.

Okay, so maybe I actually did breakdown on Yom Kippur.

The break the fast they provide every year I couldn't afford. It was a $15 cover. I didn't have the $15. I still don't have the $15. And it makes me extremely sad. I don't like hand outs. I could understand if I was being forced to continue fasting because I didn't have food at home, but I DID have food at home. I specifically made food before Erev Yom Kippur to have to break my fast, but they all wanted me there.

Yom Kippur just brought up so much pain.

For a time I was homeless when I lived in Savannah. Those Winter nights on bus benches, pretending to wait for the bus, but really trying to sleep. Not being able to eat because I didn't have any money because my brother took all of it for "rent" so he could make a down payment on a car because he never made the payments on the other one and let it get repossessed. Finally almost passing out because I hadn't eaten in a week and was pumped full of ephedrine because I wasn't able to sleep and my bosses forcing me to eat and actually sobbing because I couldn't eat something if I didn't pay for it.

And all the days in the Summer of 5768 that I didn't eat. All the days where I just lay in bed all night, trying not to cry, because I was hungry. Or only having rice and beans. For G-d's sake I was a kitchen manager making $550 a week at one point, and here I was, a guy working at Denny's, again, but not making more than gas money. I wasn't even making minimum wage, but had no way to prove it because they just kept calling me a liar.

And now that I'm just about to get back on my feet, I'm just about to get all my bills caught up on the 2 of February, just about to be able to afford to put money into my savings, and I'm getting screwed out of a job again. My bosses never came to work for most of December and corporate is starting to come down on them and saying that we have 6 to 8 weeks to either get new business or find new jobs.

I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go.

HaShem won't help those who won't help themselves. But how can I help myself when I don't know what to do?

Tags: asexual, depression, judaism, sexuality
Current Mood: depressed