"I started coming out when I was about 15. I wasn’t even sure what I was coming out as. I knew I liked men, but I also knew I liked girls. Or I kinda wanted to be a girl. Or at least I wanted to wear girls clothing. I didn’t know what I was, but I was figuring it out over long, late-night phone calls with a couple of close friends in similar situations." Read the full post here: http://neshamas.com/back-in-the-closet/ Voice acting by Josh Rubin

Neshamas

Back In The Closet

This podcast is a recording of the pieces on Neshamas.com, a site for anonymous Jewish writing. Each piece is done by a voice actor who has generously volunteered his or her time to this project. Our goal? To give voice to the people who feel they do not have one. We do it on our site, and now we're doing it with actual voices. About Neshamas: Neshamas was created because of a need we, the creators of Hevria, saw in the Jewish community: to share what’s deep, down in our souls without the added pressure of putting our names behind the work. For reasons that vary, from communal pressure to internal shame, publicly published pieces about subjects like abuse, conversion, identity, and more can be incredibly intimidating, even dangerous. But the value of sharing our souls, our true selves, is incalculable, and essential to the process of inner growth and acceptance. And so we created Neshamas, a place where any Jewish person can share their souls absolutely anonymously. In writing, art, or any other form. There will be no judgments here. No determinations of quality of work, or whether you “deserve” to share what your soul is dying to express. You are automatically accepted just by being here, whether you’re a reader, a sharer, or both. Everyone here is judged as a neshama, in other words. A soul, not a body. Valuable simply for existing. Names do not matter here. Only souls.