K. Sherman grew up in US. She hailed from a very practicing Jew family and came from an upper middle class family of second generation Americans, tracing roots back to Russia and Poland. Here in this first part of her three-part story, she describes how she at times cried to seek Truth and how she embraced Islam.
I AM 39 years old now, with four children. I was born in New York City in 1973. My children were born in the Middle East (three of them). Every day I thank Allah that my children will never experience the nightmare that I did during my formative years, growing up in the US. I come from an upper middle class family of second generation Americans. We trace our roots back to Russia and Poland. My grandparents on both sides were practicing Jews, but by the time I came along our family had mostly left religion behind.
We moved often every four or five years, first from New Jersey to Maryland to Illinois back to New Jersey and finally to Ohio, where I met and married my husband (We moved abroad when our son was 20 days old). Back in Maryland in seventies, life was cool. I was 4, and my sister was 7 when our parents sent us to private Jewish school (as the local public school had a bad reputation). This was my first exposure to organized religion. We offered prayers before and after meals, and at other specified times. We were expected to observe a dress code and behave respectfully at all times.
It was a wonderful time, when my life had structure and meaning. As I grew up, and we moved to Chicago, and I changed schools, and I made new, unreligious friends, I missed the closeness I had once felt to God. Home life was disintegrating, too. My parents got divorced when I was twelve. And I had a stepmother at age thirteen.
I became very uncomfortable with myself; from then on I felt my innocence had gone. I was forced to grow up all too fast. I felt like I had to take complete responsibility for myself, as my sister had been on the verge of insanity for years, and my stepmother wanted nothing to do with us kids. I missed my carefree, picture-perfect youth of only yesterday. I longed for my place back as the apple of my parent’s eyes.
I longed to feel special, and loved, and cared about again. So I looked for it where most lonely, emotionally starved American teenagers would look: In members of the opposite sex.
Little did I know that however many boyfriends later, you’re never any close to feeling truly good about yourself (and I’d venture to say you’re much, much farther away). So I took the roundabout route (which, in retrospect was unavoidable) by making many of life’s most terrible, regrettable mistakes and I’m here to tell all about it, to save others from following the same painful and humiliating path I did.
It was dark, dark time for me, I’d rather not remember the details. My life had become so difficult, so impossible, that by age 18 I was admitted to a mental hospital for a week. The diagnosis: Severe clinical depression. The doctor put me on antidepressants. I was definitely at a low point, probably my lowest.
But my definition, I reasoned that being at one’s worst must necessarily mean there was also a best that one could attain to. So what was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I at my best, and how could I be? Why did I no longer find any pleasure, meaning, or significance in my life? For sure the only way to go was up to that point.
I was plagued with extreme, overpowering feeling of guilt and shame (for no obvious reason). I had such strong inner conflict going on, I felt like I was being pulled in a thousand different directions. Life was a dark, gloomy, unrelenting tunnel of despair, with no light coming in.
Just getting from morning to night was a daily struggle. No matter how often they adjusted my medication, it never seemed to make a difference. It didn’t help me, or hinder me. Nothing mattered, not even if lived or died.
While I personally never considered suicide, I can easily see how someone in my situation might have. I was attending at Miami University at the time.
I would regularly schedule appointments with the resident psychiatrist, without results.
I would roam around campus, pondering nature, pondering my soul, wondering; observing silently, pensively. Why was I here? Why we’re all here? To run around, have fun, party, sleep, eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”?; to no avail? Was it all for nothing? Do we really have a greater destiny than that? If so, what was it? I had to know.
I was all-consumed with the idea of finding out. So I threw myself down on my dorm room floor and cried, “I’m lost. If there be a God, please find me. Help me. Rescue me. Comfort me. Let me know you’re out there. Show me my way.” With that I picked myself up and went on over to the campus library.
There, I asked the librarian for a book that would reveal to me the truth of our existence. Admittedly, it was a strange request but she took my query very seriously and explained that she was a Buddhist. Buddhism, she said, had the answers.
Next day, I attended a meeting at her place. She and her husband were actively involved in spreading Buddhism around campus. I stuck with my new Buddhist practice for about two weeks, sincerely trying to glean any sort of spiritual fulfillment from them, which never came.
(To be continued)
n Courtesy of islamicbulletin.org
How I struck gold — my conversion story
