There are a dozen little girls stuck inside of me, entrenched in similar but separate worlds, trying to access the outside world past a perspective that overwhelms them with its constancy. It’s a lot easier for me to view my past personalities as isolated individuals that caused one another rather than an ephemeral, shifting one. When I look at myself at six years old, I press her beneath two slides of glass and magnify the settings on the microscope. When I reach the age of thirteen, I am required to pull out a telescope and trace my path across the sky like a shooting star. And my current self I am too close to inspect—just as I would be to those girls should I connect to them in any way whatsoever.

I grew up in a tight-knit community and a family that used to feel like a tiny continent at war. Through the microscope, I can tell that I didn’t realize just how much of myself was determined by the opinions of others, by the conventions that would turn to swarming anxieties behind closed doors—my cellular membrane was constructed of the bows and ribbons that classmates wore, my mitochondria a prism-like thing that reflected back whatever surrounded me. I was scared to ask too many questions, though they coated my tongue in layer upon layer of sugar, so thick that cavities festered. I used to throw beautifully prepared lunches in the garbage because they were too different from the white bread and chicken that was being eaten around me. I was a Jewish girl, but no one had ever told me what that meant, because you can’t explain that to a six-year-old in a place that dealt in facile answers to complex questions. I was a kid, and it was impossible for me to see outside of myself, so “Jewish” became synonymous with “everyone else”—and because the more I grew, the more I found it impossible to fulfill that specific set of requirements, I began to resent the very idea of Judaism, hated the rituals and the holidays and the history.

This bitterness at my disconnect with my religion fixed a very ugly disposition in me. At seven, eight, nine, I had taken on the burden of avid defense in favor of non-Jews, largely at the most inappropriate moments. There was an abject struggle inside of me to reconcile the fact that the only people I had ever known growing up—Jewish people—were an oppressed group when they ostensibly oppressed me. The connection that this proclivity towards sameness was in fact a survival instinct, residue from thousands of years of victimhood, was not made by me. So I yelled. I was told off and judged. My sisters regarded me with distaste; my teachers furrowed their brows and cocked their heads. I didn’t care. I had found an outlet for my pent-up creativity in pseudo-antisemitism, and the relief greatly outweighed the consequences.

It wasn’t that I was surrounded by a dearth of critical thinking. It was that an intrinsic tenet of critical thinking is creativity, and while, to some extent, the intellectualism in that particular community was contingent on a certain kind of critical thinking, the thinking was circumscribed by their standards of convention. As someone who had come from a household that contradictingly valued fitting in as much as it valued creativity, the nuances of a balance between the two were lost on me, and I sat very comfortably on a polarized end of the argument—though perhaps that, too, was a consequence of growing up in a place that seemed to disregard certain strains of logic: the loss of nuance. There is a distinct correlation between close-mindedness and fearing nuance, fearing exceptions to what is the moral absolute.

At eleven these values had corroded what seemed to be integral parts of me, and in terms of insularity, I was equal but opposite to those around me. I refused to pray, never blessed my food before I ate it, paraded around the fact that I didn’t want to get married or have children (when I did, in fact, wish to do those things), and, most horrifically of all, had developed an interest in science. Subsequently, I was very bullied at school, and the Hebrew teachers seemed to regard me as a lost cause—at least until sixth grade.

In sixth grade I had a teacher who declared that I didn’t have “a drop of Judaism inside of [me],” then proceeded to push her way into my attitude towards Judaism as much as possible, pressing a siddur into my hands and urging me to relearn the words. She inculcated within me that insouciance towards schoolwork was not the appropriate attitude and urged me to do better academically. By the end of the first semester, I was the teacher’s pet—and I had entirely reversed my belief on what my future would be. From down here with the telescope, I was envisioning a household brimming with children and warmth, a home wholly bound by me. I was cradling a baby while rocking back and forth before Shabbat candles. Without nothing more than a teacher’s support, I could fully see the other side; there was a comprehensive system set up, imbued with its qualities of comfort and stability. I finally just—I just got it.

There is something deeply relieving about having one’s entire future planned out, especially if they feel mediocre or in despair over what the modern world requires. Yes, it requires the price of buying in—and selling one’s critical thinking, opposing political ideals, and anything that falls into the category of “different”—but for people who don’t know who they want to be, having a ready-made identity is cathartic. And I didn’t know who I was. Thus far, I was constituted solely of iconoclasm; my personality was molded by heated reaction. Nothing came from a genuine place because I was under the impression that earnestness was a bad thing, yet another product of growing up in a place rife with contradiction.

I played the part, albeit poorly. There was just so much that had been implemented early on by myself that I had to start changing, so much that I wondered if it was impossible. I didn’t really care about material things because I felt that my appearance was a futile project. My humor was raucous and yes, drew laughs, but often left me feeling as though I was providing a service rather than building connection. I wasn’t graceful and I had no rhythm and I dropped out of the play once I found out that I was in ensemble. I desired to be feminine but had stumbled upon the idea that femininity was reliant on externals, so I resigned myself to the bare minimum. When I glance through the lens of the telescope, this is a comet, flickering. I fluctuated so often between fear of not being one of them and the desire to be, I was an amorphous gray puddle of a person.

Like a historian, it is easy for me to generalize about parts of my life by their zeitgeists and worries. Sometimes these fears were so all-encompassing that it felt like I was the only person alive. There’s a poem by Emily Dickinson on her observations of children’s education: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant —/Success in Circuit lies/ Too bright for our infirm Delight/ The Truth’s superb surprise/ As Lightning to the Children eased/ With explanation kind/ The Truth must dazzle gradually/ Or every man be blind —” (Dickinson 1263). As the poem dictates, inundating every child with the whole truth is an impossible, possibly harmful task—it is likely the correct move for educators to ease kids into their knowledge. But from an early age I could pick up on the fact that “telling the truth slant” was conflated with oversimplification, blatant insulation, and the overtly positive attitude towards polarization. Those around me praised the extremes, but in doing so, they asphyxiated our abilities to pick up on nuance and the value of compromise and balance, sending us reeling in future situations where those exact values were in necessity.

At seventeen, I recognize the positives and negatives of growing up in a place that seemed to have a strange approach to critical thinking and differentiation from large groups. For one, while I was perhaps the exception to this experience, it’s very safe to have a foundation, even if it exists for the sole purpose of building oneself up off of it. For another, I was exposed to a distinct kind of logic unique to Rabbinic literature and was instilled with the value of, at the very least, learning something. But like I said before, at seventeen, I’m too close to myself to know what any of that really means. All I know is that seeing myself now, parsing out the positives and negatives, approaching scary situations with their pros and cons in lists in my head—it feels like an entirely new era in my history.