Ok, here is the rant:
(adorable, I always like what you write, and it is a nice story, but I am going to blast it.)
Torah learning is hard. It is. Ask anyone.
I don’t think it is helpful to tell people who are struggling to do what is right, that they should be finding it easy. It cheapens what they are doing to be told it is easy.
I’m sure Edmund Hillary was well aware that what he was doing was really hard. And if you wanted to help someone climb Everest, you would tell them how hard it was going to be.
And learning torah is just not like climbing Everest. You don’t always feels that accomplished. It isn’t always that rewarding. Sometimes it is just a drag. Maybe that’s because we’re americans, maybe it is because we eat pizza, maybe its because of anything. But it isn’t our fault.
We were born and brought up this way. Our ????? in life is to make ourselves better than how we started, so the measuring point is from where we started. And this is where we started.
So I’m not very inspired when told that I should enjoy torah more than I do. Or that I’m “sick” if I don’t like torah.
Women: You should assume anything you were taught in seminary about learning is false. Because it usually is. The gra says that women have a taava for pritzus as strong as men have for bittul torah.
I don’t pretend to understand what you deal with as far as tznius (not to say I don’t have opinions about what is tznius).