Today, I’m sharing with you a minor reworking of a comment I posted to The Skeptitcher Rebbe’s post “Five stages of Mourning Orthodoxy.” I have worked hard to make this a stand-alone piece, but I recommend reading his original post to help clear up any confusion I may have accidentally left in (and to support another WONDERFUL blogger!!!).
According to the Kübler-Ross model, there are five stages of grief an individual experiences when suffering a loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These stages do not describe a chronology, save that acceptance typically comes at or near the end of grieving and one hopes to make it pervasive. Throughout the slow process of coming out to myself and then stepping out of Orthodox Judaism, I indeed grieved; the image I’d created of myself and my future as an Orthodox man with a wife and kids was a palpable loss.
At age 16, I came out of the closet to my parents, apparently socially accepting Reform Jews. Before then, I had made a move toward more traditional Judaism in an effort to reexamine the faith I had abandoned briefly several years earlier, and was keeping an elementary form of Kashrus. After telling my parents about this new self discovery, they began throwing out reasons for why me being gay was a shanda for myself, for them, and for my newly found religiosity and observance. They told me they loved and respected me no matter what, but they weren’t going to march in a Pride Parade with me (fine, not my thing anyway), that I was stealing their grandchildren from them (I still want kids), that for weeks after coming out to them my father cried himself to sleep every night, that they weren’t sure they wanted me to bring my “…partners” over or be around their grandchildren, and that my life was going to be terrible now and they were so sad for me (ignoring the years of extreme, near physical abuse I’d already suffered as the only Jew in the school they forced me to go to). While none of what they had to say holds any water or was at all fair, at that point in my life, it was very convincing, and I decided I must be mistaken.
I strengthened my commitment to tradition, and when I arrived at college, gravitated towards Chabad and began observing the Mitzvos quite diligently. I never accepted the young earth concept or the flood story as told, and while I believed the concept of TMS, never felt it was central to my faith (remember I was brought up Reform, and to me that was just a nice idea, but not terribly important). As such, where others, in slowly moving away from Orthodoxy might experience the denial stage when dealing with these aspects of Judaism, they were not important to me. My denial was primarily about my own orientation, and it persisted even as the other stages ebbed and flowed through my psyche.
I moved sporadically through the various stages, but the central denial never left. Around the end of my sophomore year, I accepted that I had homosexual desires, though believed they were merely a test and that my job was to overcome them. I believed (because I learned on several frumishe web sites) that if I were to pray and learn more, the feelings would go away. I would get angry when nothing helped and would sometimes look for more radical methods, one of which involved burning myself with a lighter every time I’d had a sexual thought about another man. I would bargain that if HaSham would remove from me even some of the feelings, either about specific individuals or overall, I would take on new chumras. I even took upon myself SN as an attempt at bargaining. I became very depressed at the thought that nothing was helping and that I was doomed to eventually falter and that there would be no help for me then. By the end of college, I had accepted that I would not be able to get rid of my sexual desires, and by the end of a period in Yeshiva, I had accepted that I would eventually have to let them play out, but still denied that I was gay.
It wasn't until a year after leaving Yeshiva that I finally came to accept myself as gay, but took several more months before I accepted that I would have to share this with anyone. Once I had finally come to accept both that I was gay and that I couldn't go on hiding the fact from everyone for the rest of my life, I began an extreme and rapid move through the stages, though this time the pervasive one was depression. Finally, after the support and acceptance of numerous friends, I finally came to full acceptance of myself, and that was when everything fell through. I had to first grieve my sexuality, and only later, upon accepting that, my orthodoxy. While I’m still occasionally dealing with depression as a result of the above, I have very definitely come to a level of self acceptance and I couldn’t be happier about it. Now, when I see an attractive man walk by, I can look and not be afraid of who sees or ashamed that I’m doing some massive sin. I am finally comfortable in my own skin, and that has made all the difference.
