Dejected feels like sitting in the aftermath of effort that didn’t land. Like giving your all – to healing, to davening, to parenting, to holding it together – and still feeling like you missed the mark.
I used to think that if I followed the “right” formula, the one I’d learned, absorbed, inherited, I’d feel okay. Say the tefillah, keep the mitzvah, share the vulnerability online, smile in real life. But when the anxiety kept coming anyway and the joy didn’t show up on cue, I blamed myself.
Dejection isn’t explosive. It’s quiet, slumped, sunken. It shows up in the sigh when Yom Tov ends and you feel more drained than elevated. In the way you stop asking the questions you once screamed at the sky. Not because you got answers, but because you’re too tired to ask.
It’s sitting on the bathroom floor with the candles still flickering in the other room, wondering if you’re broken or just finally honest.
Sometimes dejection becomes a turning point in disguise. It forces a reckoning. A pause long enough to ask yourself, is the way I’m doing this actually working for me?
That moment matters. Even if it hurts. Even if no one claps for it. Even if all you do is sit still and stop pretending.
Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is put down the weight you were never meant to carry alone.
