Marianne Ayala/Insider
- Strings Attached is an essay series for Personal Finance Insider about the money struggles of people who left insulated communities.
- I want to give these writers the opportunity to talk about their struggles in their own words.
- My hope is to encourage greater empathy and shed light on an issue that isn’t often discussed.
I spent a lot of time online in the early days of the pandemic. I missed being able to go out and socialize. I had loved going to bars and parties and meeting new people, but I couldn’t do that while cooped up in my lonely apartment.
So, I got into the habit of cracking open a beer at the end of the day, and going on Twitter to talk to strangers that caught my interest. This is how I met the woman I now plan to marry.
Samarah, who I refer to as Sammie, is an incredibly funny, warm, and intelligent person who is extremely easy to get along with. She lived a few states away, but told me she was planning to move to New York soon.
The only thing that prevented us from getting together smoothly was the fact that Sammie was living in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community without a cent to her name, and a second grade education.
“You don’t have a bank account? Like, at all?” I asked Sammie incredulously over the phone, after suggesting that I could send her some money for her move.
“AJ, I don’t even have a non-driver ID. I couldn’t open an account if I wanted to at this point,” she replied.
She then went on to explain that it’s actually quite common in her community for people to not have legal documents that the outside world would deem necessary, or bank accounts, because they feel that they don’t need them. It did not occur to me that there are many adults living in the United States right now who don’t know what a Social Security number is, or how to apply for a job online.
That’s why Personal Finance Insider published a new series diving into the financial reality of leaving an insulated community when you don’t have the financial support to do so, and where every dollar you can get while inside comes with conditions: Strings Attached.
The vast majority of people simply don’t understand how hard it is to leave communities like these
When I met Sammie, I figured I probably knew more about Ultra-Orthodox Jews than the average person, because I grew up around them. While the largest concentration in the United States lives in Brooklyn, there are also huge Ultra-Orthodox communities just outside of New York City in Orange and Rockland counties, where I spent my formative years.
I knew that these communities were very insulated, and that the people in them did not ever get close to anyone on the outside. They have their own schools, fire department, police-styled community watch, and social welfare system.
What I didn’t realize, however, is that the way the community operates is so vastly different from the secular world that it makes it nearly impossible to leave and make a living outside of it.
In the same way that I met Sammie, I began to meet other people with similar stories of leaving other insulated religious communities — especially gay ex-fundamentalists leaving Christian communities, who described very similar issues of not understanding how to get by in the secular world and facing severe financial struggles that the average person might have a lot of difficulty understanding and relating to.
We could all use a little more awareness and empathy
This lack of understanding became most apparent to me not while Sammie was leaving her community, but in the first year after she left. I would often find myself in situations with her, explaining to others what her background was, only to be met with questions and comments that I often found to be incredibly rude, thoughtless, prying, and insensitive.
Or, even more irritatingly so, I would hear Sammie be given very unhelpful advice about starting a career that takes completely for granted how difficult it is socially and financially for someone to leave her community.
My goal with Strings Attached was to allow people who come from insulated communities like this to talk about their struggles with money and their previous experiences in their own words, and to put honest, human faces on these kinds of stories.
By placing an emphasis on empathy for the subjects of these types of stories and increasing awareness of their current struggles and needs, I hope to address a gap I’ve noticed in docuseries like “Pray Away” and dramatizations like “Unorthodox.”
Some of the writers I recruited for Strings Attached expressed shame over their stories, embarrassment about where they came from, and fear that no one would care about this part of their story. Many of them wanted to use pseudonyms, out of fear of retaliation from their families and former communities, worried for their safety.
I would like to believe that interest in these narratives can extend beyond voyeuristic curiosity about dramatic traumas, and make those of us who are unfamiliar with these groups think a little harder about the ways that we can all try to make the outside world a more welcoming and friendly place to start a new life.
Read the stories of Strings Attached here:
After a fundamentalist childhood full of unpaid labor, I’m still learning how to value my work
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