Finally in 2012, I thought I was ready to enter the wider world and transferred to Hunter College.

I enrolled in a course called Human Species, taught by Herman Pontzer, a lapsed Catholic in his late 30s from a tiny town in Pennsylvania with a Ph.D. from Harvard. The survey course covered our identity as Homo sapiens and how we, along with the rest of the universe, evolved. I sat in the front row of the auditorium lecture hall, intensely writing my professor’s words into my spiral notebook.

But the real learning came from our private sessions. I utilized an amazing service often ignored by my fellow students: office hours. Dr. Pontzer answered the dozens of questions I wrote in the margins of my notes during the lecture, information most American kids learned in middle school and high school, both in the classroom and in the locker room.

My parents had always supported my voracious reading, world exploration and intellectual growth. But they wanted my siblings and me to be very religious, and placed a premium on Jewish knowledge. They prized our Jewish observance and ability to live as observant Orthodox Jews, with all of Judaism’s rules.

My father maintained an idealistic view that we could have both deep religious competence and vast knowledge about the wider world. He sent us to yeshiva, but also took us to Pete Seeger concerts. During the intermediary days of Passover when I was 12 and off from school, we went to the temporary Vermeer exhibit at the Met. But there are only so many hours in the day, many of which were devoted to enriching my Jewish self. It came at a cost.

Ours was a culture of performativity and keeping up appearances. Everyone, it seemed, had a happy family, was financially comfortable, and was super religious. Some schools had parents sign a contract promising that they did not own televisions or have internet access at home. My parents broke with the community on that — we did have a TV and I had seen some of the shows that cleared up a few mysteries, but there was much that I did not know.