So it's been a shamefully long time since you've heard from me. My life is, once again, busier than ever, which I adore, because being that I'm a person who will push laziness to the limit and then get eaten alive with guilt, I love that I don't even have a choice - its just impossible for a college student in Manhattan to sit around doing nothing (at least, it is for me - except on Shabbos). The campus and the city is always pulsing with life, and its contagious. In school and outside, my eyes are forever widened by the wide breadth of life that I'm being exposed to, and it's so easy to see how every single experience I'm having is helping me grow as a person. I'm so lucky to be doing what I'm doing.
To top it all off, I now have an amazing editorial internship - and I'm actually writing stuff, not just fetching coffee for the real employees. So even though I now walk in the door on Fridays seconds before Shabbos starts and don't even have time to shower, after running through three subway stations at rush hour (which, if you've never experienced, is like Armageddon), its worth it, because my jam-packed week is, as one of my suitemates puts it, "pretty freaking RAD."
Nevertheless, the big hole where an orthodox community should be is still vacant and gaping. I still get frustrated when something really cool is happening on a Friday night after dinner and my friends call out to me (reading on the couch) as the elevator closes, "Goodbye our little Shabbos queen, we love you, you're holier than us!" (Yeah, they actually talk like that.) While its miraculous in itself that I have a group of friends who aren't frum but are so amazingly supportive, who have basically reconfigured large parts of their lives so that we can hang out together all the time and I won't have any issues of kosher, shabbos, etc, I just wish I could share it with them. And that part isn't changing. And, I'm getting more and more terrified of leaving this life for Israel next year.

Okay, and there's one huge part of my life that I can't say explicitly on here for privacy reasons, but its more burdensome than the community issue. So I'll just give you the gist, even though you're going to wonder why on earth this is the case and why I can't get out of it: for several hours a week I am forced to listen to several of the "brightest thinkers" in theology today tell me exactly why the Torah can't be real, and why, in essence, Hashem doesn't exist. Of course, I don't believe them, but the fact that I have to listen and struggle with it, and the fact that they ARE knowledgeable and convincing because they have devoted their whole lives to these ideas - its intolerable, and I'm not going to pretend that its not planting ideas and doubts in my head that I wish weren't there.
But in the long run, I really am grateful (?) that I'm going through all this. Because if and when I come out of it stronger than ever in my beliefs, I will have, first of all, exhausted every possible theological crisis or doubt in my mind, and second of all, know fully that my becoming religious comes 100% from a true and honest place in my heart, rather than a "weakness" or "needing to depend on a system or community to think for me," as I've heard before.
Is this wrong? How can I expect and hope that I will surpass this, when I've seen so many others fail to hold on to their Judaism, and the temptations are so strong?
I know that there will never be another way of life other than Torah which could satisfy me. I just feel so distant from the pure emunah I once had sometimes...I'm trying so hard not to let my environment, with so much good and bad in it, leave me "jaded."

I'm sorry. I really didn't meant to write another post like this, especially after so long....Blah.