I broke away from my traditional Amish community. Here's what grabbed me most in the modern world — and what I miss.

• Daniel Beiler grew up in an Amish community with few modern conveniences.
• He dreamed of a bigger world, and was excommunicated a decade ago.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Daniel Beiler, 33, an emergency medical technician and aid volunteer who grew up in a traditional Amish community in Pennsylvania.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, one of the main Old Order Amish places in the US. I grew up on a small farm in a little community surrounded by mountains and valleys — I was always hunting, swimming, and riding horses.

We didn't have video games or a TV. No AC and no electric heating — we used a wood or coal stove. We traveled using horses and buggies; if we had to go longer distances, we'd hire a taxi.

We had some rather intense family dynamics, but overall, the way I grew up was actually really neat.

You can go to 10 different Amish communities and they have 10 different ways of doing it. We didn't have Rumspringa — where the Amish youth go out and sow their wild oats, drugs, alcohol, sex, that kind of thing.

That's a reality in some communities, but we had no parts of that where I come from.

On the business side of things, the community is changing — by the time we left there, a lot of businesses used smartphones and computers. Some families were starting to have electricity.

The Amish recognized that where business is going in the world today, if we want to keep up and be successful, we're going to have to allow some things in.

I wanted answers, and I wasn't getting them

I was always a round peg in a square hole.

Growing up, I had a burning passion to see the world. I'd go hiking up the mountain. When I'd crest the top, I'd just want to cross the next mountain.

I grew up with this deep, deep desire to do big things. But because I was Amish, I couldn't even fly in an airplane.

Typically, the way the Amish operate, in my opinion, is you're taught to blindly believe what the elders tell you. I'd ask, "Why do we believe this way?

"We believe this way because that's what our grandparents told us," they'd say.

Well, shucks. I wanted answers.

I was inquisitive. There was a big world out there, and I was disconnected from it.

60 seconds from death

When I was 14, we set out for a sleigh ride in the snow. I tried to hook the horse to the sled, but he had other ideas. He reared up on his back legs and hit me right in the temple.

I had a fractured skull and a brain bleed. By the time they got in there for emergency surgery, the doctor said I was within 60 seconds of death.

After, I had ADHD, OCD, and depression. I had back issues, concentration issues, and seizures. I became depressed and had suicidal thoughts.

I got loaded up on medication, and met with psychiatrists, psychologists, and that's how I limped through my teen years.

I sat down with a Mennonite counselor one day. Mennonites are like Amish, but have vehicles, they are a little more modern. My life changed that day.

He taught me that there were other Amish people questioning things — and eventually the Amish system couldn't hold us anymore.

We either had to leave or be excommunicated. However, the community we come from does not do it as strongly or harshly as many others do.

I was 23, and I was getting married. The bishop waited till three days after the wedding before excommunicating us, so that family members wouldn't have to boycott the celebration. Kind of a way to say goodbye.

I have an excellent relationship with the community now. I can still visit, I can still talk with them — for the most part, it's not a big deal.

The open road

After we left, so much of life opened up.

I had the whole universe in front of me. We were married, and we were trying to figure out what life looks like without the restrictions of the Amish system.

When I started driving a vehicle, that was quite a wild moment for me — it felt liberating. It felt so freeing sitting out in the driveway, in a vehicle.

I remember when the realization hit me: You know what? I have wheels. I'm free to go.

That was a bigger deal than all the other aspects of modern life, including electricity and other tech.

We never had much time to plunge into modern America, because ten weeks after leaving, we traveled to Iraq to become aid volunteers.

I had never been on an airplane until we flew from Philadelphia to northern Iraq, where ISIS were running rampant.

On the plane, I was a bit scared it was going to blow up. I knew that most of them don't, but I had some fears to work through from 9/11.

For the next ten years, we flew from country to country, aiding crises in places like Ukraine, Syria and Bolivia, even as our family has grown to five kids.

We've now moved to Idaho, where I'll be an EMT for the firefighters working the huge wildfires there.

Life on the grid

We still identify as Amish, but now we're connected to the grid system. We have electricity, we have vehicles, that kind of thing.

And I still am challenged with it. When a storm comes through and the electric goes out, life kind of slows down, and I don't like that feeling.

It was actually a feeling of freedom to live off-grid before, when we didn't depend on the electric and we raised a lot of our own food. Who cared if there was a three-day snowstorm? It was no problem.

I still miss that feeling to this day.

Being that close to nature is something I believe is missing in society today, and I believe it greatly affects people.

I'm not saying we have to be in nature all the time, but if it's only concrete and video games, I believe we're disconnected from the raw organic thing that God made.

My family don't have any technological restrictions now, but we haven't embraced too much trash culture. I do like my phone though — social media is a guilty pleasure.

Funnily enough, at one stage I spent months binge-watching Tom and Jerry. I really don't know why.

We don't have a TV in our house simply because I'm really not interested in my children having that influence, but we do go to the movies and the kids watch YouTube, stuff like that.

We've noticed that if the kids get an extended amount of screen time, they tend to just get more cantankerous.

Those days we tell them, you know what? Just go play with the dogs outside, or go run in the woods.