my confession

This is my confession.

In many ways, in many concerns, I am an extremely arrogant person. From an optimistic, positive perspective, this can be interpreted as confidence, but in reality, it is a very fine line between arrogance and confidence, and that line is often defined by how much the one making the judgment likes the individual in question. So I will adjust: depending on whether or not you like me, I am generally a confident person, or an arrogant one.
In many situations, this often extreme level of self-assuredness can be beneficial, if not truthful; it helps a person to overlook what might be meant to offend, to condescend to others instead of to doubt one’s self, etc. On the other hand, this self assuredness can be very dangerous, in the time when something that the person could not control and could not predict comes to fruition, and it crushes.

I. was. not. accepted. to. the. internship. at. the. bundestag. in. berlin.

I found out last Tuesday. Two letters arrived, one from the consulate in California, the other from Berlin, to inform me of this. I guess they thought one letter alone would not convince me, but that to make the job clean, they needed to reject me twice. And return my application, in order to completely terminate my applicancy. As the letters were delivered to my home in New Jersey, I found out through an email from my father, in which he endearingly typed up the German rejections. Although he could not read, he knew what was being said—I wonder if it is harder to receive bad news about yourself, or to have to literally type the bad news, which you know will be painfully received, to someone you love? Abgeordnete Frau Dagmar Freitag thanked me for my interest, ensured me of the overwhelming number of qualified applicants, and wished me only the best of luck in my future endeavors.
I read the email in the morning, sitting at the table waiting for class to start. I silently shut my computer, left the room, and went upstairs to my room. I had felt so good about my chances, so good about the prospect, so confident in the position being a part of the greater plan of my life. Even though it was just before 10am in Jerusalem, making it just before 4am in New Jersey, I called my father, and began to cry as he answered the phone, knowing already why I was calling.
I think that the whole thing may have been nearly as hard for him as for me, especially since he could not be here to help me through it, and I can’t say enough how meaningful his support has been through this.
As I sat on my bed, the arrogance poured out of me in disbelieving sobs, slowly shifting to shocked gasps, and trickling away in hurt, betrayed tears that leaked from me steadily for the next hour, and resurfaced for the next day and a half whenever anyone asked me if I was okay, and still manage to spill over whenever I need to think or speak about it directly.
If I had not been so confident in my chances, the rejection would not have hurt so much. But how could I have gone as far as I had without that confidence? How could I have asked for the recommendation letters, write the application, tell people what I was doing, FLY TO BERLIN FOR THE INTERVIEW.
Mayanot (my yeshivah) was also in shock. The girls who had davened for me at the time of my interview felt sorrow, disbelief. Rabbi Levinger was surprised, had no words. Chaya asked me if I was embarrassed to tell people.
I sat upstairs for two hours. I decided to come back to class; sitting alone and missing what I was here for would not change the reality. It was a lie to tell people I was fine. It was impossible to have to tell people the truth.
When Hayley saw me and asked me if something was wrong, I couldn’t even stay in the room. In the bathroom, I confessed to her. I spent the next two hours in class distracting myself with the internet. During lunch and the following afternoon, she sat with me in my room, playing phase ten. She is hooked on the game, even though I won.

I am still in mourning. I think that even the initial mourning process will fairly take at least a week. I have realized that what I am grieving after more than anything is not the job, but the life that I had been reestablishing for myself in Berlin. The relationships I had assumed would have more time, the friendships that would become a more regular part of my days, the dynamics that would have had the time to be developed, this was all the life there that I had already begun to live, to plan there and now will not have. I am mourning for my stillborn life in Berlin, dead before living.

What have I learned from this all? Everyone here tells me that Hashem has a plan. What about my fucking plan?
I don’t really mean that. I do believe that things happen the way they are supposed to, that we may not understand what happens but that we should trust that what happens truly is for the best. But at the moment, I don’t want to hear that.
In truth, has this made me any more humble? Do I feel that I wasn’t qualified enough? No, not really. And maybe that is better, that I don’t think that the rejection means I am lacking…maybe that is one of the benefits of being arrogant.