Devorah’s anxiety

Devorah’s anxiety takes shape as bodily distress before she can identify it as fear. The memoir traces its emergence through the transition into marriage: a sheltered upbringing has left her unprepared for the sexual expectations placed on her, while religious rules and medical explanations increasingly determine how she must understand and manage her body. What she experiences as confusion, resistance, and physical illness is eventually identified by a doctor as anxiety, a diagnosis that reframes symptoms she had struggled to explain.

Background and the transition to marriage

Devorah’s account links the beginning of her bodily conflict to the marriage instruction she receives before her wedding. When she is told to search for her mekor, she follows the instruction reluctantly, uncertain about what she is expected to find. The discovery divides her sense of herself: before, she had understood herself as a girl living a chaste life; now, she must acknowledge that her body has a sexual purpose. She describes having been raised in Williamsburg to think of people primarily as spiritual beings carrying souls, with little preparation for confronting sexuality. The sudden demand to recognize and attend to her body feels not like a gradual change but an imposed new condition. In retrospect, she identifies this rebellion against the change as an early source of the unhappiness that would damage her marriage.

The first mikvah visit makes that conflict physical and public. Chaya takes Devorah by taxi because the women cannot walk there with their bags without attracting attention, and men are not supposed to know when a woman visits. At the mikvah, the receptionist recognizes Devorah as a bride by her uncovered hair and arranges for an attendant to help her. The ritual setting is presented as both carefully organized and exposing: Devorah is inspected, directed, and expected to comply. During the examination, she holds herself rigidly and tries to suppress her distress. In the pool, she completes the prescribed immersions and blessings, but tears break through afterward. The scene does not itself name anxiety; it shows how a religious passage into married life can also become an experience of scrutiny and helplessness.

Symptoms amid marital and medical uncertainty

After marriage, repeated difficulties and conflicting explanations intensify Devorah’s sense that her body is beyond her control. Following irritation and bleeding during attempts at intercourse, rabbis tell the couple to stop and rule that she is niddah, requiring her to count seven clean days before returning to the mikvah. In the same period, a persistent rash sends her to a crowded local clinic on Heyward Street. Dr. Katz is uncertain about the cause, estimates that it is probably a form of chicken pox, and prescribes an antiviral medication. Weeks later, severe abdominal pain and hours of vomiting lead Eli to call a friend in Hatzolah. At the emergency room, an infectious-disease specialist diagnoses orbital shingles and says she probably caught it in the ritual bath. Devorah recalls having believed that fulfilling a commandment could not expose her to harm. The diagnosis therefore unsettles not only her sense of health but also the protection she had associated with religious observance.

Her distress becomes more plainly recognizable during long baths in the couple’s new home. One night, after only a few minutes in the hot water, she feels as though her body is burning; the sensation rises toward her chest and head, her pulse races, and she begins vomiting. Because she does not understand what is happening, she initially suspects the food she ate, although Eli is unaffected. The episode marks a change in the pattern: physical sensations she cannot explain are accompanied by mounting panic rather than a clear illness she can identify.

The couple’s repeated attempts at intimacy create another source of strain. Their lives become organized around alternating periods of approaching one another and avoiding contact under niddah rules. Devorah describes feeling unwanted when the required separation returns just as she has adjusted to renewed closeness. Over time, she stops reaching out because she fears being rejected again. Her feelings seem fragile and repeatedly forced into hiding; she becomes emotionally cold, experiences other people as increasingly distant, and feels detached from her own body. The account presents withdrawal not as a deliberate solution but as a protective response that further isolates her.

Anxiety named and treated

Food and weight provide another measure of the escalation. Devorah says that vomiting has become frequent and that avoiding food seems the only way to prevent it. Her appetite disappears; a food that once tempted her becomes repellent, and she loses weight without first noticing the change herself. Clothes bought only months earlier grow loose, skirts slipping lower on her hips and sleeves reaching over her wrists. People comment on the change in her appearance. When she tries to eat, she may vomit and continue dry heaving for hours. Crowds can bring on a racing heartbeat and weakness in her limbs, leading her to fear that she has a serious illness. The symptoms disrupt ordinary activities and make her feel physically exhausted.

Her doctor orders tests, X-rays, and CAT scans before offering her Xanax. He explains that the pills are for anxiety, but Devorah protests that she is not worried and cannot bring herself to take them. His response—that her body may be anxious even when she does not feel worried—offers a new interpretation of the symptoms without immediately making it one she can accept. When she prepares to leave, he gives her a referral to a therapist. That exchange captures the gap between the distress she experiences physically and the emotional explanation proposed by medical care.

The referral also leads Devorah to a sex therapist recommended by Dr. Patrick. The therapist identifies vaginismus and explains that the mind can affect whether the body relaxes. A book she reads connects the condition with women raised in repressive religious environments and describes how learned muscular responses can persist even when a person consciously wants them to change. Devorah begins to understand that years of avoiding awareness of her body may have taught it to resist the intimacy expected of marriage. This explanation does not reduce her experience to a passing worry; it connects the conflict between upbringing, thought, and bodily response.

Practice, relationship, and significance

The book recommends gradual practice with a set of plastic dilators, breathing, and muscular exercises. Although Devorah is supposed to do the exercises in the therapist’s office, she finds that prospect too humiliating and orders a kit online. It arrives in a plain white box, with the tubes nested inside one another in a velvet drawstring bag. Each evening while Eli is at prayers, she practices alone. For the first two weeks, even beginning with the narrowest tube is a struggle; she must work on breathing and remain patient with a process she finds grueling and boring. The routine gives her a concrete task, but it also shows how much of her attempt to manage the marital problem takes place privately, without ease or public reassurance.

Devorah’s anxiety is significant not because the memoir offers a single cause or a quick cure, but because it reveals how distress can become legible only after the body has already been carrying it. The transition to marriage, ritual supervision, recurring illness, uncertain diagnoses, and cycles of closeness and separation form the circumstances in which her symptoms emerge. Medical professionals provide names and possible treatments, while Devorah’s own recognition develops more slowly. Her panic, food avoidance, withdrawal, and bodily detachment make visible the cost of a life in which intimacy is prescribed but self-knowledge has been withheld.