"I Can Barely Breathe": The Most Honest Prayer I Ever Prayed

There is a harsh voice inside me that says: As you are right now, in your current situation, without any of the children disappearing, without moving to Honolulu, without your kids suddenly becoming even one gram more organized and disciplined than they are today, and without changing even a comma, you could be living completely differently.

With these exact circumstances, you have the ability to experience real happiness.

And if you are not, the voice says, then it's your fault. You're failing.

Even though that voice causes me tremendous pain and often feels like salt being rubbed into an open wound, I don't silence it completely. There is some thread of truth in it, something I apparently am not willing to let go of.

Underneath the accusations and the crushing tone, another voice is speaking. A quieter one.

It says: You really can. It is possible for you. One day, you will get there. Not somewhere else, under different circumstances. Right here, exactly as things are, one day you will live differently.

What I Actually Said to Hashem

What I actually said to Hashem was this:

"You created me with a deep inner search, and You know that I suffer because of it. You know how hard I work, that I still don't find satisfaction or happiness through all that effort, and that I feel guilty for not having arrived where I think I should be. But more than anything, I simply don't feel that I am standing in my true place.

"Good Hashem, there are people who will always prefer organizing their closets to organizing their hearts and minds. That's fine. But me? Not me. I truly, truly want to illuminate my darkness with the light of real understanding."

A deep, suffocating heaviness settled over me. Even now, it is difficult to describe it in words.

"I believe it is possible to work from the inside," I continued. "I believe everything starts from within, and there is so much pain there. So much confusion. I feel blockages, mistakes, old fears, frustrations, unresolved emotions, chaos. So much chaos.

"But instead of working on that, on the inner life that would eventually change the outer reality, I spend my days running around like a frantic cockroach on burning asphalt. Doing and doing and doing. Dying from all the doing.

"Enough. I have no energy left.

"Why is it that You, who created me, don't take me to do the real work? The work that feels truly important? Why do You let me run around all day with my nose in the mud?"

Are Tears Worth Anything?

I cried to Him.

And while I cried, another thought passed through my mind: Are the tears of a tired, confused creature full of questions worth anything in Heaven?

I've learned that tears of prayer can open gates. But for some reason, it always seemed to me that those stories belonged to other people. There are people who cry during prayer.

I wasn't crying during prayer.

I was just wailing.

I spoke straight from the heart. I apologized over and over for not thanking Him properly. But somewhere in the middle of one of those apologies, words came out that surprised me.

"I would like to thank You. I really would. I simply can't right now.

"I can barely breathe. And when someone can barely breathe, You don't get angry that their manners aren't perfect, right?

"Good Hashem, I don't want to be ungrateful. I'm not a bad person either, really. I'm just blocked. Locked up and clenched tight because the world does this to me sometimes, with all its pressure and constant running.

"I'm sorry for speaking this way. Your world is wonderful. You are not to blame.

"But I'm not to blame either.

"There is something here that is genuinely difficult. Something genuinely difficult to live with. Some kind of grinder that keeps crushing the mind and the heart and everything else along with them.

"And it hurts.

"It hurts terribly."

The Best Repair Shop in the World

I literally begged Him to help me. While I was talking and crying, I was so deeply inside the experience that I wasn't stopping to analyze it or check whether it sounded reasonable, spiritual, logical, or appropriate.

Later, I was a little surprised by everything that had come out of my mouth. But something inside me knew there had been nothing wrong with it.

Something hurt so deeply that it bypassed the mind completely. The anthropologist who lives inside my head twenty-four hours a day, observing, analyzing, and commenting on everything from a comfortable chair, finally stopped working. Apparently the flood of tears drowned him.

Amen.

I came home after only an hour, but I felt like someone returning from another world. As though I had taken everything off my shoulders for a little while: the burdens, the heaviness, the aches, the responsibility that sometimes settles on the heart in tons.

Someone had taken care of me.

Not the kind of care a psychologist, therapist, massage therapist, and acupuncturist could provide together in a month. The kind only He can provide.

I left the house a crushed rag and came back after a five-thousand-mile service. They filled me with fuel, changed the oil, recharged the battery, pumped up the tires. I have never undergone such an engine overhaul in my life.

Hashem Is Looking for You Too

Afterward, I could simply go back to my life. To my wife. The children were asleep, work was still waiting for me, the street outside was still noisy, and the phone I had abandoned on the table started ringing the second I walked through the door. Of course it did.

Nothing around me had changed.

The same life was waiting for me on the other side of that conversation.

I was the one who had changed.

"Hey," I said to myself, genuinely stunned.

"Hashem is making a move toward you.

"Look.

"Hashem is searching for you too.

"And He's finding you."