Wanting To Make Good Impressions

I went to bed early last night, at least for me, before midnight, but I couldn’t sleep, probably from having screen time too late, being up speaking to E. then blogging, then finishing the episode of Star Trek Voyager that had been interrupted by the Zoom call to my family.  I think I eventually fell asleep sometime between 12.30am and 1.00am.  As I expected, I didn’t wake up any earlier today or feel any better when I did wake up.  It’s hard to function when I can carry negative experiences over to the next day, but not positive ones.

I tried to do two hours of work on my novel today, thinking if I aim for two, I might regularly hit one, rather than aiming for one and ending up not doing anything.  E. says to regard writing as my career, but I keep feeling that it’s a hobby and I shouldn’t focus on it to the detriment of family stuff, religious stuff, exercise, job hunting and so on.

I’m also worried my female protagonist isn’t proactive enough.  I’m trying to make her story more clearly a kind of parabola of being sucked into an abusive relationship and then escaping from it.  Nevertheless, I spent about two hours writing (including some procrastination time, but I think my unconscious mind keeps working even when my conscious mind is stuck in ‘idle’), producing 1,000 words.

On a related note, I listened to the Intimate Judaism panel discussion on the presentation of Hasidic sexuality in Unorthodox, the Netflix TV series based on Deborah Feldman’s memoir of leaving her strict Satmar Hasidic upbringing.  I’m vaguely worried that in writing in my novel about issues like domestic abuse or mental illness in the frum (Orthodox Jewish) world, non-Jews will have an unfairly negative view of Judaism and Orthodox Jews will feel I’m doing a hatchet job on the community, which is not my intention.  The problem is that well-adjusted people living healthy lives with healthy relationships does not make for an interesting story!  Drama is built on conflict.  In later drafts I may deliberately expend some energy on more balanced secondary characters (I will need to work on secondary characters anyway; in classic autistic style, I’ve struggled to remember that my three main characters can actually interact with other people).

I remember when the book version of Unorthodox came out.  I think several other ex-Orthodox memoirs came out around the same time.  There was a lot of discussion online about them, and whether secular publishing houses were biased in favour of religious-to-secular-journey memoirs rather than secular-to-religious-journey ones.  While the former probably does make more sense to most potential publishers and readers, I suspect the lack of secular-to-religious books is dictated by the numerically small number of ba’alei teshuva (Jews raised secular who become religious) and gerim (non-Jews who convert to Judaism) and the fact that the Orthodox community simply does not put a premium on literature.  Our energies go elsewhere, rightly or wrongly.  In any case, it is hard to imagine a ba’al teshuva memoir that wasn’t reluctant to acknowledge negatives in the religious community or which didn’t create a stark moral divide between the Orthodox and secular worlds, the former positive and the latter overwhelmingly negative.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that I can’t see the type of people who write “how I became frum” memoir articles for outreach websites writing it.

Although I also worry that my book is going to finish to heavily in the “God” camp.  I’m trying to work hard to earn some measure of redemption for my characters, but it’s hard.

***

Other than that, I went for a forty-five minute walk, including a few minutes in Tesco.  I was worried to see that they have apparently ended the “one in, one out” policy they had in place.  I still got the milk we needed, but I will try to avoid going back there until after lockdown, although it’s not always possible.  I spent about ten or fifteen minutes finishing my devar Torah for the week and another half an hour on other Torah study (I’m hoping to do a little more before bed).  I also backed up my iTunes library, a task that I’ve been putting off for ages and was pleasingly easier than I feared it would be.

***

My omer beard itches like crazy, and we’re only halfway to Lag Ba’Omer.

***

My shul (synagogue) is doing a special Friday night thing tomorrow.  Starting with a lechayim (why must alcohol be involved?) they are doing a Zoom Kabbalat Shabbat, the early part of the Friday night Shabbat service, where most of the singing is.  Most of this can be said before Shabbat so computers can stay on.  This will stop before Shabbat so we can turn off our computers and then finish the service by ourselves.

I’m not sure what I feel about this.  It could be good to sing Kabbalat Shabbat in a group again.  However, I feel it might feel weird over Zoom, plus I do often find the service too noisy if people are banging on tables or clapping.  Plus, we would be starting extra early, which might make things a rush, especially if tomorrow I feel burnt out from doing so much today.  Still, it would probably be good to feel part of a community again, even if only virtual.  Hmm.

Napoleon

I had a weird dream about Napoleon.  Maybe I want to conquer the world.  Actually, I know I want to conquer the world.  I just wouldn’t know what to do with it afterwards.

***

I felt really apathetic today.  It’s easy to get sucked into depression, thinking nothing can change, even getting sucked into “I don’t want to be here” (meaning, “I don’t want to be alive, here in this world,” although not actively suicidal) type thoughts.  I have to remind myself that I want to build my relationship with E., that I want to write my novel, that I have friends and family who care about me…  It’s hard on mornings like today, when I’ve overslept and feel drained and exhausted and a bit lonely and wish E. was here and can’t face the day and am worrying how I will write my devar Torah (Torah thought) for this week and a whole bunch of other things…  Even after lunch the feelings didn’t go.  I had to force myself to do things when I really just wanted to vegetate.

I probably do have a negative tendency to seek not just perfection in myself, but brilliance.  In other words, not just to avoid errors, but to produce things (blog posts, stories, divrei Torah) that are outstanding.  This is probably just setting myself up to fail on two counts, because no one can be perfect all the time and no one can be brilliant all the time.  It occurs to me that the last year or two I have slowly been coming round to the idea that I’m never going to be a tzaddik (saint) and stopping trying to meet certain halakhic (Jewish legal) requirements that I simply don’t think are achievable for me at the moment, and possibly not ever.  I think I still want to be a serious literary novelist, but I don’t know if I have it in me or how to go about it.  Like I said, I want to be Napoleon, I want to conquer the world.

I did at least spend nearly two hours drafting my devar Torah.  It was very draining on one level, as I did a bit of research online, tracking down resources about honouring, or not honouring, abusive parents, but I was glad to get it done, although I still need to proofread it tomorrow.  I decided that I felt well enough after all that to go for a run, which was OK, but complicated by social isolating; I had to cross the road a lot to avoid people and at one point got stuck on a traffic island in the middle of the road, avoiding two dogs and owners on both sides of the road (although I would avoid dogs when running even without COVID-19).

I also joined in some of a Skype call with my parents and Israeli family.  I was a bit reluctant, as I get annoyed that it’s always assumed that I will join in with family stuff whenever it suits everyone else.  I know I’m the person least likely to have anything else going on, but it does annoy me.  I do have some kind of life.  To be fair, my sister couldn’t make it at all because it was short notice, so it’s not just me.  Anyway, I joined in.  It was a bit crazy, but not as much as I had feared.  My Israeli family are mostly extroverts and like being in the limelight; there’s a fair amount of diagnosed or presumed ADD/ADHD, so it can get pretty loud and distracting, which I don’t find easy either in person or on Zoom.  It did eat a chunk of my novel-writing time, though, thus further encouraging my nocturnal habits.

I suppose I feel vaguely resentful of losing quality writing time.  I worked on my novel for a bit, but late at night when I was tired.  I gave up at 10pm.  I was just too tired.  I lost track of how much I wrote today, but it wasn’t much.  It’s not my family’s fault, but it’s not my own fault either.  It’s not my own fault that I’m still depressed in mornings, that my devar Torah sometimes seems a big commitment (I didn’t mean to spend nearly two hours on it today), that exercise seems to eat up more time than it should with changing and showering, warming up and cooling down.  I wish I could be a normal person managing seven productive hours a day, plus family/social time, plus exercise time, plus religious time.

***

I got an email from the editor of a Doctor Who book I contributed to years ago, asking me if I want to write for a book on The X-Files.  I don’t know anything about The X-Files.  I wanted to try to get into it a few years ago, but reading about it online convinced me it was too scary for my tastes (I’m a wimp).  Said editor asks me to write for books on subjects I don’t know enough about every so often.  I wanted to be part of the second Doctor Who book he edited, but he didn’t ask me and I didn’t hear about it until all the slots were taken (so my Fear Her appreciation will have to go unnoticed by the world).  I pitched my Doctor Who book to the same publisher and got rejected.  There’s a moral there somewhere.  Speaking of which, the money for my Doctor Who book sales finally arrived in my bank account today.  I hope I get some more; right now I haven’t sold a copy to anyone not known to me personally.

I have a Skype therapy session booked for Monday with a new therapist…

Scenes from a Depressed Day

In no particular order…

I managed to get up at 11am, but somehow the morning depression, exhaustion, apathy, or whatever it is didn’t go away after breakfast or even after lunch.  I just felt heavy and unable to do anything all day.  Possibly I did too much yesterday, which upsets me, as it reinforces my feeling that I will never have a full-time job and a real life, or even a job as a writer and a real life.

After lunch I spent half an hour aimlessly browsing online and then went back to bed for forty-five minutes, some of the time listening to music, some not.  I just felt too exhausted to do anything.  Really burnt out, overloaded, shutdown, whatever you want to call it.

Eventually I forced myself to get up again and sort out the emails in my inbox (I don’t like it to get too full, preferring to file stuff in endless folders or delete).  It was a mundane and boring task, but necessary, and I felt a bit better for having done it.

I tried to work on my novel, but I just got overwhelmed.  I’m not sure how long I spent on it.  I was procrastinating online a lot.  I think I did write a three or four hundred words, but I’m not sure.  It was frustrating.  I feel like by working on it a lot yesterday, I paid a price today.  This is what always happens to me: even if I can achieve something one day, I pay a price for it in depression and exhaustion the next, so I can never achieve very much of anything.  I didn’t manage to do much else at all today.  I just gave up and watched a two-part Star Trek Voyager story (Scorpion).  I did literally five minutes of Torah study, just so I had done some today and that was it.  I didn’t go for a run or a walk because I didn’t feel up to and it rained most of the day anyway.

Whenever I have a day like this, the scary thing is not knowing how long it will last.  Not knowing if it will be just a day or if it will be a new episode of depression or a new depth of an existing depression.  I don’t have an answer to that yet.

***

I found the money I received from my Doctor Who book.  It was sitting in my paypal account.  I’m having trouble transferring it to my bank account, because nothing is ever simple for me.

***

The other day I finished the Doctor Who short story collection I was reading.  Then I started re-reading Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick.  Dick is one of my all-time favourite authors, but when I first read Martian Time-Slip I was nonplussed by it.  It’s considered one of his best novels, so I thought I should give it another go now it’s a decade or so since I read it, but after ten pages I realised I didn’t actually care about it and gave up.  This is a big thing for me, because I never give up on books, and E. thinks I waste my time reading stuff I’m not enjoying as a result.

Instead I started re-reading Decalog 2, another Doctor Who short story collection.  When I was reading lots of Doctor Who books, in the nineties, I felt that Doctor Who short story collections had less cachet than full-length novels among fans and I was never sure why.  It’s true that some short stories attempt to compress a hundred minute TV story into thirty pages, but then some novels try to expand one into 350 pages.  At least short story collections can have a diversity of styles and genres; Doctor Who‘s variety and experimental nature is one of the things I like most about it, and that’s reflected more in short story collections than novels.

***

I posted this comment on Rivki Silver’s blog: “Lockdown hasn’t been so different for me, now Pesach’s over… I’ve been unemployed for most of the last year, so sitting at home all day isn’t unusual. I live with my parents, so I’m not by myself. Mum is having chemotherapy, so I’ve been doing more cooking. But lockdown has been noticeable more in food shortages than anything else. I feel a bit like I’ve avoided the problems other people have… and a bit like I’ve been living with them for years already.”  I hadn’t put that thought into words before, but I think that’s been at the back of my mind for a while, the feeling that, on the one hand, I’ve got off lucky, but on the other, I’ve been coping with loneliness, anxiety, depression and isolation for years longer than most people.

Elsewhere on the net, I mentioned the short story I wrote to Rebecca Klempner on her blog and she said I should submit it for publication.  That thought had not occurred to me.  My gut instinct is that it isn’t good enough, it’s not clear where I could even think of getting it published and I haven’t got a head for the practicalities of publication at the moment.  Maybe I’m being too negative.  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know where I could even think of submitting it.

***

Regarding the therapy question, the fourth therapist got back to me.  She’s only working on Fridays at the moment.  That’s not so good for me in the summer and very difficult if I’m still in therapy in the winter.  Having checked how easy it is to get to the therapists post-lockdown if I want to see them in person and having my parents say that my gut instinct about the pushy-seeming therapist is not something to be dismissed and that trying a new therapist might be a good idea, it looks like I’ll be going with the first therapist who got back to me.  She does integrative, gestalt and existential therapies.  I don’t know very much about those approaches, but I thought it might be worth trying something other than psychodynamic.  I’m still nervous about choosing.  I don’t know why this seems a huge and final decision when the reality is that if I don’t connect with the therapist I choose, it won’t be hard to cancel and find another.

***

Tonight is the start of Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day.  Different communities act differently on this day, depending on whether they’re Zionist, non-Zionist or anti-Zionist.  There’s a lot of different permutations in terms of celebratory prayers added in or sombre prayers omitted (I know an amusing joke about this, but it would take too long to explain).  My shul (synagogue) usually does nothing, but is having a shiur (religious class) this year; I assume the change is due to the new rabbi.  Normally I would go to my parents’ shul which does celebrate, but not this year.  I can’t remember what extra prayers they would add in to Ma’ariv (the Evening Service).  I did what I could remember and felt able to do in my very depressed and exhausted state.

Busy Busy Busy

I did the usual today: got up late, did some shopping (panicking a little about social distancing not being observed/observable), walked a bit, cooked dinner while listening to Intimate Judaism, did nearly an hour of Torah study (very good), tried to work on my novel…  Most of that was successful, but there was no rice in Tesco and after walking, cooking and Torah-ing I was too tired to do more than twenty minutes or so of work on my novel and only wrote about 150 words.

I felt really tired by about 7pm and decided not to attend online depression group as I just felt too tired to “people.”  Depression group can be draining for me even at the best of times, doubly so on Zoom.  When I feel really exhausted and burnt out, I get this sensation of heaviness in my brain, like a dull ache, and it’s hard to think or speak to people or to do anything really other than vegetate in front of the TV or internet or lie down.  I won’t necessarily sleep, because it’s a different kind of fatigue, not so much a physical tiredness as an emotional/psychological one.  If it’s very bad, I end up in a state that I think is somewhat similar to autistic shutdown, just not doing anything.  That’s how I used to get after work in environments that were overwhelming from an autistic point of view; I would come home and just crash in front of my laptop, just browsing online or writing my blog to offload some of the thoughts.

After dinner, I felt a lot better and managed to spend rather more than an hour working on my novel (that’s more than an additional hour, excluding the work I did earlier in the day).  Overall I wrote nearly 1,000 words today, albeit that one huge chunk of text I wrote I later realised needs to be cut and then pasted back in quite a bit later in the chapter.  I did eat ice cream (cornetto) for dessert at dinner.  I’m not sure whether that contributed to feeling more energised.  It would be good to know.

I Skyped E. too this evening, so it was a busy day in all.  I was feeling good about things, but then I upset my Mum without intending to do so or really being aware that I was doing it, and now my mood has come down again.

***

I heard back from another therapist.  Of the four I contacted, one didn’t get back to me, one charges £40 a session and two charge £30.  Of those, one is the male therapist I feel vaguely worried about because (a) he’s male and I feel that I find female therapists easier to talk to (although I’m not sure how true that is or if it’s just a feeling); (b) he’s a psychodynamic therapist and I had a vague idea about trying a new approach; and (c) he sounded a bit pushy on the phone (which is very much an impulsive prejudice on my part).  So it’s almost the other one by default, but I’m worried about making a decision that way and so am procrastinating again.  (I also have a gut feeling the “default” therapist might be Jewish.  That’s totally unscientific and I wouldn’t bet on it being accurate, especially as I’m always telling my Dad not to make assumptions like this, but it might be true.  That would probably be good, but maybe not.)

In the Details

I had another late night last night, largely due to spending two hours writing a blog post that got out of hand.  I originally intended just to write vaguely that I had some agitated thoughts about religion, but as I wrote, I felt I kept needing to go into more and more detail.  I’m not even sure it was particularly coherent, or expressed what I wanted to say (if I even understand what I’m feeling well enough to say something coherent).  Maybe I should have a “no blogging after Shabbat in the summer” rule, but sometimes I need to offload thoughts or I fear I won’t sleep.  I struggled to get up and get going again this morning, which has become a repetitive mantra for me, but is true.  As usual, I said only the smallest part of Shacharit (morning prayers), at the last minute and with poor kavannah (concentration/mindfulness).

I felt depressed and exhausted for much of today, which isn’t so unusual.  More troubling was a feeling of uselessness.  My Mum watches a lot of property programmes on TV like Location, Location, Location and A Place in the Sun where people try to buy a dream home, sometimes in a foreign country.  The attraction of the programmes, I assume, is looking at the splendid and luxurious houses under consideration.  I feel that I will never be able to afford a house anything like that.  I worry that E. will have to support us single-handed as I won’t be able to hold down a job and we will never afford anywhere nice to live, or to be able to have children.  I can cope with being a house-husband, but I want to contribute more, but unless I can somehow manage to write a best-selling novel, that seems unlikely.  I think I probably could write a novel, but a best-selling novel is probably beyond me; even getting a book published by a real publisher seems impossibly difficult.  At times like today I wonder if I’ll even be able to finish a novel, or at least if I have more than one novel in me.

In the afternoon we had a family Zoom call with me, my parents, sister and brother-in-law.  It was a poor quality call with very patchy audio and I found it hard to hear and understand what was being said.  As is often the case with family meetings, I struggled to engage with my family’s chosen topics of conversation a lot of the time, although I’m not sure why.  My sister is younger than me, but I feel she has somehow overtaken me and successfully made the transition into adult life that I have only made partially, if that.  I left the call after an hour and a half.  I felt a bit bad for leaving early (albeit that in the end the call only lasted for a few minutes after I left), but then again, I lasted about half an hour longer than I expected.

I struggled to work on my novel, procrastinating endlessly online.  I wanted the interest of finding some new and startling idea or perhaps just to connect with another human being, having failed to connect well to my family.  I did eventually get a bit further into the novel writing, managing to write about 600 words in an hour and a quarter (the exact number is difficult to see as I was doing some redrafting too), which is above my daily 500 word target, so I did snatch some kind of victory from the jaws of defeat there.  I have very mixed feelings about the level of quality.  I certainly realised my writing is not terribly descriptive and lacks details.  In some ways it reads more like a film script than a novel, with dialogue, but limited description.  That’s something to work on in the coming days.  It probably stems from not having a good imagination for descriptive detail; I don’t see details of the story in my head, and when I read descriptive passages in a book, I struggle to focus on more than one or two details.  Although I do sometimes think in images, these are usually borrowed or repurposed from images I’ve seen elsewhere, on TV or in comics, and the images are usually pretty fleeting and lacking in detail; it’s often the emotional impact that stays with me rather than the detail.

I wonder if it’s possible to write a book from the skeleton outwards, like a house, building the infrastructure of plot and dialogue to get an idea of the shape of the story as quickly as possible and then going back in subsequent drafts to add the descriptive details and more complex character traits.  I suppose it’s as good a way of doing things as anything else.

***

I felt a tension inside myself today.  I’m not sure if it was depression, despair, anxiety or something else, but it was uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to do with it.  I’m trying to avoid turning to particular negative coping strategies that I’ve used in the past, such as eating too much, procrastinating endlessly online, watching too much TV or impulse-buying books and DVDs, but I’m not sure what else to do, other than tell myself to sit with negative feels and accept them for what they are rather than repressing or ignoring them.  It’s hard though.  It’s like being told to hold a burning hot object (a literal hot potato, perhaps) and not drop it, but just accept the painful burning sensation.

I went for a thirty-five minute run in the early evening and I felt a bit better while actually running, but my mood plummeted again on coming back home.  After dinner I had a Skype call with E.  We had decided to spend a Skype session studying a Jewish text together.  This was completely E’s idea, as she wanted to take an interest in the things that matter to me.  We decided on Pirkei Avot, the volume of the Mishnah (the oldest stratum of the Talmud) that deals with ethics and interpersonal behaviour.  Unlike the rest of the Mishnah, it is mostly presented as aphorisms or advice that can be studied in isolation rather than inter-related legal arguments (which neither of us are confident in tackling).  We went through several Mishnayot until I started getting a post-exercise migraine.  We just chatted for a bit after that until my head began to hurt so much I had to stop and take something for it.  I enjoyed this Skype call a lot and it did a lot to raise my mood.  I’m just glad I have a girlfriend like E. who is so supportive and interested in my life.

Eat Pray Read Sleep Fret

It was another ordinary COVID-19 Shabbat of eating, praying, reading and sleeping.  However, there was also quite a lot of agitated thoughts about religion.  I was thinking a lot about a few things, most notably Rambam’s (Moses Maimonides’) thirteen principles of faith and his understanding of reward and punishment.  These thoughts came from a number of things I’ve been reading recently, most notably Rabbi Joshua Berman’s Ani Maamin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth, and the Thirteen Principles of Faith and debates on the Rationalist Judaism blog about whether God can be meaningfully said to have “caused” COVID-19, which led me to re-read the appendix on Rambam’s view of reward and punishment at the back of Menachem Kellner’s Must a Jew Believe Anything?

Rabbi Berman’s book has left me wondering whether I really believe in Rambam’s thirteen principles in a way he (Rambam), and other Orthodox rabbis, would accept as truly Orthodox, mostly because lately I find myself drawn to some Medieval rabbis who believed that certain apparently anachronistic phrases and short passages in the Torah (e.g. the long list of Edomite kings which seems to cover more people than can easily fit in the gap from Esav’s (Esau’s) birth to the giving of the Torah) can be explained by saying that they were inserted by a later prophet or by Ezra the Scribe as an explanatory gloss, similar to a modern editorial footnote.  This seems logical, and more traditional than the answers proposed by modern biblical criticism, which see whole chunks of text as later insertions by otherwise unknown “redactors” (as this version is limited to just a few verses and still assumes some kind of prophetic source).  However, Rambam said Jews have to believe in the unchangeability of the Torah‘s text for reasons that Rabbi Berman ascribes to the influence Islamic polemics (basically, Muslims said that Jews had edited the Torah to remove references to Mohammed being the greatest prophet, so defending the integrity of the text became of paramount importance).

On the other hand, the more I think about Rambam’s view of reward and punishment, at least as explained by Kellner, the harder it is for me to see it as (a) authentically Jewish, (b) coherent in a world that no longer accepts Aristotlean metaphysics and (c) morally and emotionally viable, especially post-Holocaust.  As I understand it, Rambam’s view of the afterlife is based on Aristotle’s idea of the “acquired intellect”.  According to Rambam, the more we learn about God in this world (partly through Talmud study, but mostly through studying Greek philosophy, which he believed contained universal truths lost from Judaism in the exile), the more we perfect our intellects and join them to God’s intellect in the next world, which is the only true happiness or reward.  There is no get out clause for people who can’t do this for some external reason such as mental impairment or dying in infancy.  There is no mechanism whereby God can miraculously extend them reward.  So Rambam would say that there is no reward for the million children murdered by the Nazis.  He doesn’t believe in next-worldly punishment either, so at least they don’t go to Gehennom/Hell… but then neither does Hitler, whose only punishment was to live long enough to see his Thousand Year Reich destroyed by the Allies, which does not really seem enough.  It’s a hugely austere and elitist approach to life that in some ways I admire for its bravery and unwillingness to offer cheap comfort, but really it does nothing for me either religiously or emotionally.

As for why this upset me, well, there are two slightly different reasons, or rather the same reason in two slightly different ways.  I’m rejecting a belief, which of course leads to the fear that I may be making a mistake and rejecting true dogma and condemning myself to eternal non-existence, but I’m also rejecting communities.  Although both sets of opinions I’m rejecting were proposed by the same Jewish thinker, I’m actually rejecting two very different communities.

The first one is the mainstream Orthodox community, where Rambam’s thirteen principles are seen as the definitive Orthodox dogma.  In the Modern Orthodox community there is some debate about how they became accepted and what to do with the opinions of those rabbis who disagreed with them (and a lot did disagree – see Rabbi Marc Shapiro’s The Limits of Orthodox Theology (I haven’t read the book, but I have heard him lecture on when people stopped believing it was OK to say that God has a body (corporealism)).  Likewise, there is some acknowledgement in the Modern Orthodox world that there is no one perfect Torah text; there are minor variants out there and a history of rabbinic debate about how to preserve the text from corruption and deal with mistakes in copying.  But in the more Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world there is no legitimate academic historical interpretation in the sense that Rabbis Berman and Shapiro are engaged in, attempting to ask how beliefs became accepted and to what extent they were seen as binding at different times as well as placing them in their historical contest.

The second community is the one at the Rationalist Judaism blog.  There was a time when I felt very much a rationalist Orthodox Jew as opposed to a mystic, but over time I’ve moved on.  I’ve learnt that there are ways of understanding mysticism and myth that don’t involve anti-scientific beliefs about the world (as I explained a bit in this essay I wrote for Hevria) and I’ve moved towards a much more “religious existentialist” understanding of the world that has room for doubt, uncertainty and feelings of distance from God.

Still, it does feel a bit like I’m burning bridges in a way, because the idea of rationalism, at least in the rather simplified version discourse on the blog where it’s a shorthand for accepting evolution and an old universe and being opposed to the Haredi kollel system, was important to me once.  And Rambam is such a huge, towering figure in Jewish thought and Jewish history, sometimes seen as the most significant post-Biblical figure: jurist and legal scholar, philosopher, theologian, prolific author…  There’s even a saying that “From Moses to Moses [Maimonides] there was no one like Moses” – it’s just a huge thing to say that I disagree with his principles, even in a very small and non-committal way, given that I was brought up to see them as the essence of Orthodoxy (and despite Rabbi Berman’s arguing at length that Rambam himself walked back most of his principles in his later work, especially the one I’m most concerned about, the unchangeability of the Torah).

I haven’t felt like a member of the Rationalist Judaism blog community for a long time.  I was never a prolific commenter there and I have walked away from it at times from boredom, as it turned primarily into a prolonged attack on the Haredi world rather than a real examination of rationalist Judaism.  Still, I feel like I’m walking away on my own, trying to find where I fit.

Beyond that, there is, of course, a fear of what will happen to me after death, but I can’t pretend to believe something I don’t believe, even if I don’t at this stage accept the “prophets adding to the Torah” hypothesis either, I just find it hard to fully dismiss.  It just fits in with other worries I’ve had over time, wondering what will happen to less religious/outright atheist friends and family after death.  I believe that God is loving and just and I don’t believe that good people lose out on reward.  I also don’t believe that belief is everything.  I hope that that means some kind of eternal reward in the next world, given that good people often seem not to be rewarded in this world.

The reality is, of course, that whether or not there is an afterlife, and who gets to go to it, is nothing to do with me.  Still, reading these writers and other Jewish thinkers and historians makes me realises how small a place faith (in the Christian doctrinal sense) really has in Judaism, how much more focused on good deeds it is, and how present-focused it is.  There is almost no discussion of the afterlife in the Torah, while the Talmud contains three stories (Avodah Zarah 17a and 18a; I can’t find the third story, I think it may be in the Talmud Yerushalmi Ta’anit) about people who have led reprehensible lives managing to attain Olam HaBa (The Next World) with a single good deed or moment of repentance, leading Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (the editor of the Mishnah, the oldest layer of the Talmud) that some people can acquire Olam HaBa only after many years of toil, while others can acquire it in an instant (I think I’m in the many years of toil category).  Belief seems to play very little role in these stories, which are focused on kindness and repentance.  I view them through a religious existentialist lens, seeing them as being about repentance, encounters with other people and perhaps with God (which is not the same as straightforward faith) and personal authenticity (an extended analysis of one of these stories can be found here and here).

***

I thought about these thoughts a lot over Shabbat, sometimes in a rather agitated way.  Still, I don’t know if it qualifies as religious OCD.  I felt that it just wasn’t as powerful and obsessive as my religious OCD thoughts usually are.

Still, I feel exhausted now.  I meant to write this blog entry quickly and go and read, but I got involved, said a lot more than I intended and it has taken nearly two hours.  These thoughts have been brewing inside me for weeks, though, so perhaps it is just as well that I got them out of my system.

Struggling

I did not have a good morning.  I was woken at 10am by my phone ringing, but I didn’t recognise the number.  I assumed it was another therapist phoning me after yesterday.  I couldn’t face that having just woken up so I let it go to voicemail.  I feel asleep again, but had an upsetting dream and woke up before 11am, but was too depressed and exhausted to get up until I was forced to do so again, this time by a knock on the front door.  I knew that Dad was praying and Mum had gone back to bed because she was feeling very ill from chemo side-effects, so I had to answer it (it was the postman delivering new headphones I had ordered and which came in a ridiculously large box).  I tried to stay up and get dressed and I did at least manage to stay up, but I only got half dressed before deciding I had to eat before I could do anything else.

When I checked my emails I saw that another therapist emailed me, but she didn’t answer any my question about fees, just asked if I’d like to phone to speak or book an appointment, which makes me vaguely wonder if she’s going to be sensitive enough to social anxiety and autism issues.  I then checked my voicemail and saw that that voicemail message was from the same therapist who emailed.  Now I’ve heard from three of the four therapists I messaged.  I do feel uncertain what to do at the moment.  The voicemail therapist did seem less pushy than the one who phoned yesterday, but maybe that was because I didn’t answer the phone and so didn’t get put on the spot.

I struggled through the day with low energy, concentration and motivation.  I drank coffee mid-afternoon to wake myself up, which is rare for me.  I usually only drink coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon.  I had a Skype call with E.  She is also struggling.  I guess with Mum and E. both struggling today, it probably isn’t surprised that I was upset too, as I was worried about them both.  I was lucky in the end that Mum felt better in the afternoon, so I didn’t have to do the Shabbat cooking as I was initially expecting to have to do.  I would have struggled to do that and speak to E.

I ran out of time, energy and concentration for novel writing, but I did post my short story on a password protected post, so that was one achievement, aside from my usual pre-Shabbat chores and helping to deal with the big Tesco delivery that arrived while I was finishing lunch.

On the plus side, the Amazon Marketplace seller I contacted has offered to replace the broken Life on Mars DVD box set I had, which is good.

Protected: Short Story: Don’t Talk to Strange Men

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Darker Than Expected

I struggled to get going again.  It’s difficult.  Once I get going, I’m OK, but I really struggle with depression, exhaustion and motivation for the first couple of hours that I’m awake.  Today I was missing E. a lot and feeling quite overwhelmed and depressed.  Once I’ve had breakfast, got dressed and davened (prayed) a little bit (only a fraction of the morning prayers, and sometimes skipping straight to the afternoon ones because I’m too late for the morning) I do tend to feel better, but even then I don’t feel 100% until after lunch.  Even when I was working full days I had a similar situation.  I had to rush out in the morning and I managed that OK, somehow, but the mornings at work would pass slowly and not always terribly well, bolstered by coffee, and only after I had eaten lunch would I feel that I could really do any good work.

Then I wasted far too much time at lunch trying to answer one of the questions in the Doctor Who Magazine crossword and failing to get it.  I can usually answer about three-quarters of the clues fairly easily, others with some difficulty and a few I need to look up online, but I was really stuck on one today, even after looking at a couple of scenes from the story in question.  This sort of thing really irritates me.  I’ve only been unable to find an answer once or twice before!

I procrastinated a lot in the afternoon, partly at least because I kept getting hit by waves of anxiety and depression.  I did eventually manage to email the Amazon seller I bought the broken DVD box set from that I mentioned yesterday.  I also emailed four psychotherapists to ask if they have client vacancies and if they charge lower rates for the unemployed.  One replied promptly by email, which was good.  Another phoned me, which was not good!  I dislike talking on the phone at the best of times and I was taken by surprise, which meant my anxiety level shot up.  Then he tried to get me to commit to an initial appointment, when I was hoping to compare the different fees, but obviously I didn’t want to say that to him.  I asked for time to think.  Still, I guess it’s good to know he could see me next week if I want.  I felt that he was a bit pushy, but maybe that was because I was so anxious.  I’m not sure if I really want a male therapist anyway; I seem to be able to open up more to female mental health professionals than males, although there have been exceptions.

I tried to get back to work on my novel, but procrastinated and then got roped into helping my parents with some stuff.  I did eventually manage about thirty minutes of work on the novel, redrafting a chunk previously written in the first person into the third person.  It seems to work better that way, leaving questions for me about how to write the rest of the book.  I also went for a walk for thirty-five minutes or so.  Even when walking I drifted into negative emotions, particularly anxiety and depression, despite listening to a podcast for distraction.  I did manage twenty-five minutes Torah study too.

Writing this down, I see that I achieved quite a bit, but would have liked to have done more Torah study and novel writing.  I also feel like I’m struggling a bit with emotional regulation at the moment, inasmuch as there are a lot of strong, difficult and sometimes conflicting emotions in my head, but I lack the ability to get rid of them or do much other than acknowledge their existence.  I’m struggling to just sit with them.

I wasn’t aware of this so much during the day, but looking back Mum has been struggling a bit today and I think that was also in my mind on some level and adding to the anxiety and depression.

I watched Star Trek Voyager to unwind, but it was unexpectedly dark.  Basically, the holographic doctor wanted to learn to experience family life, so he made a holographic family.  But he made them too sickeningly perfect, so one of the other characters introduced some changes and random program elements, which meant that his wife now had a life aside from pleasing him and his kids were now rebellious.  So far, so good and I thought we would stop there with the holographic doctor having Learnt An Important Lesson Today About Real Life (not coincidentally, Real Life was the title of the episode).  Except there was another quarter of an hour left, and his daughter rather shockingly had a fatal sporting accident and he had to deal with that, which was quite a lot darker than I needed today, or than the previous three seasons of the programme had led me to expect.

After this I had my daily call with E.  I do find it frustrating that I can’t be there in person for her.  We both want so much to have a ‘normal’ relationship without coronavirus and without the Atlantic Ocean being in the way.  But, at least we have Skype and WhatsApp, without which we really would be too far apart.  I can’t imagine having even an email long-distance relationship, let alone an old-fashioned one via letters (taking weeks to cross the ocean in a steamer, no doubt).

***

I find it increasingly hard to deal with all the applause and plaudits for the NHS.  Today we had the weekly applause for the NHS and carers as well as the slightly bizarre Doctor Who thank you (also: Jo Martin is a ‘real’ Doctor, but Michael Jayston isn’t? Hmmm…).

I acknowledge that NHS staff are doing a huge amount at the moment, and some have become ill (including my sister’s former flatmate) or even died as a result.  At the same time, I can’t forget the often appalling way I feel I have been treated over the years.  In my experience, there is a big difference in quality between NHS psychiatric care and care in other front line areas like accident and emergency or oncology.

I feel like a child whose father’s appearances in his life were erratic, unpredictable and highly variable in quality suddenly seeing his father lauded as a diligent, conscientious and a great man.  It is hard to deal with the dissonance.

Autism and Gear Shifting

I’m still getting up at 11am, which is late, but earlier than previously, but getting going is proving much harder.  I have so little energy and motivation, even after breakfast.  I try to avoid going on my computer before getting dressed, but then I just check emails and blogs on my phone.  It’s especially hard at the moment, as I’m not listening to music because of the Jewish semi-mourning period of the Omer, when we don’t listen to music, even though music helps to motivate me.  To be honest, there is a heter (permission) for depressed people to listen to music in the Omer, and I do use that heter at times, but primarily when my mood is low, not when I’m lacking energy, which is silly because lack of energy is just as much a symptom of depression as low mood.

***

I spoke to my rabbi mentor today.  He was glad things are going well between me and E.  I opened up about some of my fears about the relationship, not specific fears so much of a sense that something will go wrong, that something always goes wrong for me and that God wants to continually test me rather than let me be happy.  We spoke about this in the context of my difficulties with bitachon (trust in God) and my tendency to worry in general and also about the way that in the last week or two I’ve been trying to re-frame my understanding of my life to see that it can be seen as a series of achievements and positive events and not only as failures and negative events.

Unfortunately, after speaking to my rabbi mentor, I lost focus.  I meant to continue my search for a therapist, but ended up drifting into researching and writing my devar Torah (Torah thought) for the week, which was not exactly intentional.  I have at least nearly finished it now, although it needs some polish and I need to look something up.

It’s interesting, I think that since my teens I’ve had problems shifting tasks.  Once I’ve done one thing, it can be hard to change and go into a different task.  It’s only relatively recently that I’ve learnt that this is a classic autistic trait.  Although I can be a fairly driven person, and at university before depression I was quite capable of working long days, including working late into the night even with no work due the next day, since my teens (at least – I can’t really remember earlier) I’ve had this problem with procrastination, getting down to work and changing tasks – things that involve “changing gears” from one mode to another.  Strangely, it never affected me at school.  I don’t know if that was willpower or if I used the routine and mini-break of “pack books and stationery; dismissed from class; leave classroom; walk to next class; wait for teacher (talk to friends); file into classroom; unpack books and stationery” to end one task and reboot.  I did struggle with attention for my homework at weekends (I know all teenagers do, but still), so maybe that routine and movement to a new location really did help.  I’m not sure how I could replicate it though.

I struggled with this in the work world, particularly manning the issue desk when I was working in a further education library, as I would be doing some work, then get interrupted by someone borrowing a book; go back to work, then get interrupted by someone needing help finding something or with the photocopier and so on and I really struggled with that.  When someone turned up to talk to me, I would often go completely blank for a second, as if my brain was literally rebooting.  I think my line manager noticed and that was why she was dissatisfied with my work.

And then I stopped to write this (to get it out of my head) instead of Getting On With Things…

***

I did eventually get on with the therapy hunt.  I still feel pretty overwhelmed by it and think the names I’ve picked out are almost totally random.  OK, not totally random, but still fairly random and arbitrary; likewise my decision not to look any more for now.  I picked four names from the nine or so I’d found to email about prices (specifically if they offer concessions to the unemployed, as otherwise I can’t afford it) and availability.

I also went for a longish walk with some shopping and listened to another Intimate Judaism installment and was feeling somewhat more focused in the evening.  I had planned to do more therapy hunting after dinner, but while eating I was watching Life on Mars and now the DVDs are jamming on the laptop DVD player as well as the TV one and they crashed the DVD drive.  I wonder if it’s some kind of fault from the factory, although there are what may be scratches on the discs.  I guess this is the downside of buying cheap second-hand DVDs online.  I’m going to have to return them and buy replacements.  Annoyingly, I managed to get these very cheaply, but the copies currently available on Amazon are more expensive..

***

I mentioned that I’ve been writing a short story lately.  I finished it and I’m thinking of putting it in a password-protected post so that some people here could read it.  If you’re interested in reading it, please comment on this post and I will post it on a locked post and email you the password.  I would give the to anyone who comments regularly and maybe also to some people who ‘like’ my posts a lot, but don’t comment, if I think they’re real people and not spammers.

Therapy Hunting

I got up at 11.00am again today, although as with the last few days I struggled to get going.  I wasn’t feeling overtly depressed in the sense of despairing, but I did lack energy and motivation, which I guess is still depression of a kind.

I weighed myself for the first time since Pesach.  I have put on weight, but not much (half a kilo), which is a weird kind of victory.  I feel fat though.  Some of my clothes don’t fit so well (despite buying some larger ones a while back) and I know I’m two or three kilos overweight, which I haven’t been able to shift for years, since I was put on clomipramine.  I did go for a run again today.  I ran for most of the thirty-five minutes without going into a walk much, which was good.

I discovered that my self-published Doctor Who book is now available from Barnes and Noble as well as Lulu.com and Amazon UK.  I still can’t find it on Amazon US though.  I had an email from Lulu on Friday saying I should receive payment for the copies I’ve sold so far, but the money hasn’t reached my account yet.

I finished the short story I was writing and sent it to E. to see what she thinks.  E. and I Skyped again as we have been doing most days since the lockdown started.  I did twenty-five minutes of Torah study too, although I would have liked to have done more.

***

I spent nearly two hours looking for a therapist online.  I tried the questionnaire to find a therapist at welldoing.org.  The questionnaire had a long, long, looooong list of possible issues and I could easily have ticked six or seven that pertain to me, but I was only allowed to click three, so I went with depression, autism/Asperger’s and interpersonal relationships.  I hope the latter can cover my relationship with my Mum and need to come to terms with her mortality as well as my relationship with E. and understanding the changes that could entail in my life.  Autism isn’t exactly something I need to discuss in itself, but it informs my thoughts about my relationship with E. in particular and I would like to get someone who understands it if possible.  I think in many ways I’d prefer a therapist who understands autism to one who understands Orthodox Judaism, as I have a lot of experience explaining the latter to people, whereas autism is much harder to explain, especially as I feel like I don’t fully understand how it manifests in me.

Narrowing down the list of therapists is difficult, especially as I would be willing to do Skype sessions and would have to start with them.  I know it’s slightly weird to say this, but I have had male and female therapists/counsellors and I find it easier to open up to women than men (despite having had one positive male therapist and my rabbi mentor being male).  So I found myself biased in favour of women, even though that’s somewhat irrational.  Although a disproportionate amount of therapists and counsellors are female anyway.

Aside for checking BACP (British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy) membership, so far I’ve narrowed down primarily by cost and partly by locality (just in case I ever want an in-person meeting post-COVID-19), and also by type of therapy.  I am quite clear that I don’t want CBT, as it has never helped me much (except with my OCD, but that’s a different type of CBT) and, having had a some psychodynamic therapy in the past (I think… therapists do not always make it clear) I was interested in trying a new approach.  I looked primarily at therapists offering existential therapy, although I know little about it.  I did this because of my interest in Jewish existentialist thinkers, although I’m not sure how much overlap there is (therapists would probably have heard of Martin Buber and maybe Emmanuel Levinas, but are less likely to have heard of other Jewish figures).  Existentialism generally focuses on issues like purpose, choice and authenticity, which obviously inform my thoughts on a lot of subjects I would like to address, like my relationship with E. and my attitude to my sexuality generally, my position in the wider world/working world and my relationship with the wider Jewish community (the latter two not issues I would bring to therapy per se, but which are likely to come up in passing).

Tomorrow I might try to find some other names and then narrow down the list to a few who I can email to ask for more information about their fees for unemployed people.  Most therapists seem to offer concessions for those in financial need, but I need to see if I would qualify and what the concession rates are.

***

Overall it was another good day and I’m glad to have made progress with the therapy hunt.  Now that Pesach (Passover) is over, I feel like I’m coping with lockdown quite well.  There are no jobs to apply for giving me time to help around the house and write and study Torah, although I probably procrastinate too much and I struggle with mornings and compensate by staying up late, which probably isn’t healthy.  E. and I have been able to Skype most days because of the greater flexibility she had when working from home which paradoxically may have been good for our relationship (not that I wanted her potential trip to the UK to be postponed).

Light a Candle

We haven’t stocked up on post-Pesach (Passover) food yet, so when I was hit by hunger late last night I sat up late eating matzah and jam because the alternatives were toast or cornflakes, both of which I had already had earlier in the day.  More matzah and jam was not the healthiest option, and I know I’ve put on weight again over Yom Tov (the festival).

I did manage to get up at 11am again today, although I felt quite sluggish and struggled to get going.  I went shopping and went for an extended walk on the way back.  I hadn’t been shopping in a supermarket for a while, so I was surprised to see the aisles measured out into two metre long blocks, although there were still bottlenecks at the tills and doors.

I cooked dinner, which was the reason for going shopping.  I cooked vegetable curry, even though I cooked it recently, as it’s pretty basic and I wasn’t sure what ingredients would be available.  As it was, I couldn’t get the beans I wanted.  We also had a load of potatoes, so I knew I could use some of them.  Cooking took longer than expected, though, and I didn’t have time for much else, particularly not looking for a therapist which I rashly said I would do today without considering my desire to go shopping and cook.

I attended (online) the weekly depression group lockdown session.  I think it’s useful for me to have the social contact, even though I don’t say much at these things.  I always feel self-conscious, or even more self-conscious than usual, with the online meetings and I don’t know why, as I’ve had Skype therapy and Skype dates, so one would think Zoom depression group should not be harder.  Some of it might be that therapy and dates were one-to-one, whereas with depression group there are eight or ten or people and the time lags and the cutting to the wrong screens based on accidental noise are more obvious.  Next week it has been suggested that we talk about books we’ve read recently.  I have an idea of a book to talk about, although it’s not one I’ve read recently, but I’m not sure if I’ll have the confidence.

During the short break in the depression group session I went downstairs and lit a yellow yortzeit candle for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day – the Jewish one, as distinct of International Holocaust Memorial Day in January).  The candle is in memory of a named child who was murdered; Dad said he was told we should also add in the children we lit for last year (this could potentially lead to very long lists of names in a number of years time).  There are four modern Jewish festive or memorial days at this time of year, Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron (Israeli Memorial Day), Yom Ha’Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) and Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day) and I have never been entirely sure how to celebrate or commemorate them, although this is a matter of discussion in the wider Jewish community too, generally with a Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist vs. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) split, but even in the Modern Orthodox/Religious Zionist world there are widely divergent opinions.  There was an online Yom HaShoah service tonight, but I decided depression group would be better for my mental health.  I don’t know how I would have responded to a one and three-quarter Holocaust memorial service.

After depression group I squeezed in a Skype call with E. and half an hour of Torah study, but I feel pretty tired now and it has got very late again, so I should get to bed, although as with yesterday I feel very hungry…

Victories

I had a number of  victories today: I got up before 11am (just).  I got a text this morning from one of my shul (synagogue) friends, checking that my parents and I are OK (he knows about Mum), which was nice, although it was only later in the day that I discovered that I hadn’t sent my devar Torah (Torah thought) properly on Friday, which was probably why he was concerned.

I did an hour or more of Torah study, a very difficult double sedra (weekly Torah reading), Tazria and Metzora (Leviticus 12-15), difficult in terms of length; repetitive and technical language; comprehension (in terms of simple understanding as well as deeper spiritual understanding); and lack of immediate relevance, concerning complex rules of ritual purity and impurity that have largely not been a practical part of Judaism for nearly 2,000 years.  At the back of my mind I was also trying to think of things I can say about this for my devar Torah later this week.

I spent over an hour (quite a bit over an hour) working on my short story.  I wrote 1,300 words, finishing the first draft.  I’m quite pleased with it, although I can see a lot of flaws, most of all the ending, which is the hardest thing in stories like this.  I don’t want to go into too much detail, though, as I might post the story in a locked post in the near future.  I also went for a fairly decent run and had a long Skype chat with E.

Overall it was definitely a good day.  I didn’t want to add a “but,” but… I do feel there’s a tension inside me that could easily explode into despair, anxiety, self-loathing, guilt and all the rest.  I already feel some anxiety and obsessive thinking creeping in.  Going for a run helped a bit, but I’m not sure for how long.  Hence my task for tomorrow is to take steps towards finding a reputable qualified therapist in the UK who sees people over Skype, is currently taking on clients and (the really tricky bit) is within my limited price range (my previous therapist used to charge some clients on low income below the market rate).  On the other hand, I don’t anticipate this being open-ended therapy (although I know how easily it can turn into that), so I potentially could afford more than with my previous therapist.

***

More adventures in malfunctioning technology.  The laptop touchpad issue seems to have provisionally sorted itself since the latest Microsoft updates downloaded last night, but my second-hand Life on Mars DVDs are not playing properly, with pictures freezing and pixelating at times.  At first I suspected damage to the discs, but damage to three discs in two separate box sets seemed unlikely, and one seems to play on my laptop fine (I neglected to note where the others stuck).  My video/DVD player is ancient (not least in having a video player), so it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s on the way out, but I can watch on my laptop for now.  Star Trek Voyager appears to play fine.

Groundhog Shabbat

Today was difficult.  I woke up and had a weird Groundhog Day moment when I realised it was Shabbat (the Sabbath) again.  Too many days lately have been Shabbat, Yom Tov (festival), Erev Shabbat and Erev Yom Tov (day before Shabbat or Yom Tov).  I just want some normal days, where I can write and Skype E. and go jogging and vegetate in front of the TV.

I was quite drained over Shabbat and didn’t do a lot of the stuff I would normally do.  I went for a walk and I did a bit of Torah study, but not as much as I would usually have done.  I have finished re-reading the first fifty Psalms in Hebrew, which makes me exactly a third of the way through the book, but it’s taken me a very long time to get here (about ten months, I calculate with help from Goodreads).  I did a bit of recreational reading too, but not a huge amount.  I slept a lot again.

I feel even more than before that I need to speak to a therapist.  I have a lot to process about the changes in my life: Mum’s illness, getting back together with E., continuing unemployment and the fact that I’ve dropped a mental health coping strategy without really having considered what the emotional side-effects would be.  I mean, I was right to stop it, as it was very negative, but I’m not sure how well I’m coping.  There’s probably a lot to say in therapy about my relationship with my parents, which I’ve spoken about before, but not regarding confronting their mortality, which has only just become a non-theoretical issue.  Likewise about my sexuality – I’ve spoken a lot about it in therapy in the past, but I probably did not say everything I needed to say or work through everything, and suddenly it’s more relevant than at most times in the past.  I mean about the way being single in a community that only permits sex after marriage forced me to repress my sexuality for so long, with a concomitant build up of guilt, shame and who knows what else, as well as interactions with other emotions and thoughts.  I’m not expressing myself clearly here, and that’s partly deliberate, but partly not – I don’t really know what to say about this other than things feel so difficult so much of the time.

Tonight I’m feeling listless again, and lonely.  It’s frustrating that my girlfriend lives on the other side of the world, although I worry I would mess things up somehow if she was here.  I’m in two minds about watching TV tonight.  It’s after 11pm, so I shouldn’t, but I need to relax and I feel too depressed and lacking in concentration to read.  I’m not likely to sleep soon anyway, given how much I’ve slept today.

I feel the interest of these posts is diminishing, if there ever was an interest to other people (apparently there was, but I find it hard to believe).  I’m just trying to dump my thoughts so I can move on from the evening and towards sleep.  I feel unless lockdown ends soon (which it won’t), even I am going to run out of things to blog, just endless lists of runs and books read and self-criticism about not enough Torah study.

I hope to use some of the energy that would have been spent on writing long blog posts on fiction writing.  I want to finish the short story I’m working on and then move on to the novel, away from the dull, but necessary bit I’m writing and onto the more interesting/disturbing stuff, although as I’ve said before, the novel isn’t exactly the type of thing I read, or want to write, but it makes sense to start with something semi-autobiographical.  I have so many images in my head so much of the time, but forming them into stories is really hard.  I suspect that most of them are pilfered from other books/TV/films/comic strips, but talent borrows while genius steals.

Listless

Today I just feel exhausted and depressed, a bit anxious.  I would like to be vegetating in front of the TV.  What I don’t want to do is be preparing for another bout of DVD-free Shabbat, but that’s where I am today.  I could really have done with a few more days before Shabbat.  I’ve done some TV watching anyway.  I don’t really feel up to writing or Torah study today, not even writing here.  I just want to crash.

***

I increasingly feel like I really need to see a therapist again.  I just feel a bit of a mess.  Some of that is post-Pesach mental hangover, but I feel I also need some help to process some emotions to do with Mum’s cancer, and to do with my relationship with E, which is good, but hard to process because taking me into completely new territory on multiple levels.  I think I want to stay in lockdown, on some level, because it stops me needing to engage with my life.

Struggling

I found the last two days of Pesach (Passover) a struggle.  I was still dealing with some religious OCD from earlier in the week.  Added to this was depression, anxiety and pure O OCD (obsessively worrying I’m a bad person who could do illegal things).  The latter has not been seen for a long time and I was upset by its return, although in many ways it’s easier to deal with than the other OCD.

I did the usual Yom Tov (festival) stuff: pray, eat too much, sleep too much, go for one government-sanctioned exercise walk each day, study Torah and read.  I didn’t do so much Torah study or recreational reading as last week, as I was feeling too depressed and anxious.  I finished The Ritual Bath, a mystery novel set in the Haredi community, and decided that I don’t like police procedural mystery novels as much as Golden Age mystery novels.  I think I prefer impossible crimes, locked rooms, bizarre clues and eccentric detectives to sordid crimes, gangs, detectives with dysfunctional lives and mundane police work.  I started re-reading Decalog, a Doctor Who short story collection that I know I have read, but about which I can remember very little.

After Yom Tov ended, I helped with the big tidying up, even though I felt very tired and depressed and drank Coke Zero (I prefer Diet Coke) and ate chocolate to try to get energy, without much success.  I accidentally broke a dish that previously belonged to my grandmother and that was older than I am (from the seventies).  I put it in a cardboard box that I thought was sealed at the bottom, but the sellotape had rotted or been pulled away and the dish fell through.

Eventually I became exhausted and had to stop helping, although I would have liked to have continued.

***

I have a feeling today that I’m not coping so well.  I had various coping strategies and some of them were very maladaptive, but I stuck with them for lack of alternatives.  Now I can’t use them and I wonder how I will cope.  Maybe I’m catastrophising.  I hope so.  I wish I was in therapy still.  I feel being able to talk to someone objective would help.

***

I had a weird dream where I stood for election as chairman of my shul (synagogue).  I only stood to see if I could get any votes, as I thought someone else would win, but there was a split vote between the two leading candidates and I won.  I panicked, thinking I couldn’t cope with this, especially not with my mental health situation and Mum’s illness, but before I could resign, I was removed by the community, who felt I wasn’t involved enough in the shul and that I didn’t rebuke people enough for break Jewish law.  Then the dream shifted into upsetting stuff about antisemitism.

***

There probably is more to say, but I feel exhausted.  I’m thinking of watching TV even though it’s really late, as I don’t think I’ll sleep, despite exhaustion, as I slept too much today, as well as drinking caffeinated Coke Zero.

Cargo Cult

I was thinking about something for my novel, and it turned into a wider thought which is this: there is a danger, probably in any religion, but certainly in Judaism, that it could turn into a Cargo Cult.  This refers to islanders in the Pacific who saw the US armed forces build bases and airstrips in World War II and, magically (it seemed to them), after they built them, big planes would land with boxes of food and supplies.  So after the war, the tribes-people cleared airstrips and built imitation military bases, thinking planes would come and bring them food, but, of course, they didn’t.

So there’s a danger of thinking that “I keep Shabbat, I keep kosher, I pray, I learn Torah therefore I’m a good Jew.”  Whereas Shabbat, kashrut, davening, Torah etc. are preconditions for being a good Jew, they hopefully help send us on the direction to being a good Jew, but they are not the same as being a good Jew.  One needs to have a whole bunch of other emotions and intuitions towards God and towards other human beings: love, awe, compassion, enthusiasm, self-denial, generosity… the things that frum (religious) Jews label as good middot (character traits).  One needs in particular to have the emotional connection with God.

I struggle with this, partly because of alexithymia and not understanding my own emotions very well, partly because perhaps I don’t have such a road map or checklist of things to do, which is not good for my autistic mind.  Autistic mind copes fine with Shabbat, for example.  Shabbat is thirty-nine forbidden (primary) actions not to do and a couple of positive commanded actions to do.  Oneg Shabbat, the delight of Shabbat, is another matter because that’s an emotion.  It comes from keeping the forbidden and commanded actions, but it’s possible to keep all those commands without experiencing it.  As it happens, I usually do experience Oneg Shabbat these days, but there have been times in my life when I didn’t, even though I kept all the Shabbat laws, because Oneg Shabbat is an emotion, and I was not in a good place emotionally, so I had no Oneg Shabbat and Shabbat seemed more of a chore.

There are categories within the halakhah (Jewish law) that delineate these ideas, concepts like naval bereshut haTorah, a vulgar person with the permission of the Torah, meaning someone who acts over-indulgently, but within permitted bounds e.g. gluttonously eating kosher food; or the hassid shoteh, the pious fool, who focuses on the wrong issues in a clash of values, the classic hassid shoteh being a man who won’t save a drowning woman because he doesn’t want to see her in disarranged dress.

It’s something to think about anyway.  I do want to have that kind of emotional connection with God, but I’m not sure how to go about it or if it’s even possible to consciously move towards it.

***

Otherwise it’s been a slightly stressful day with religious OCD.  I’m just trying to tell myself that I’m not responsible for the behaviour of other people; that it’s unlikely that any of the things I’ve seen are a serious breach of religious laws; and that I’m trying to do the right thing and even if I’m making a mistake, it’s a genuine mistake and not a deliberate attempt to break the Pesach laws.  It’s hard though.

Off for another two days of Yom Tov (festival) now…

Defensive and Anxious

I felt really defensive on waking today.  I think it was because I dreamt about one of my secondary school Jewish Studies teachers last night.  He was telling me off because I had come to class without shoes, as I had left them in the P.E. changing room locker.  In reality, this was the teacher who really introduced me to Torah study at a more advanced level, the level of Mishnah and Gemarah (Talmud).  I guess he also made it seem possible to be frum (religious) while still being a ‘normal’ person with a sense of humour.  He was an important person in my journey to becoming frum.

I know I disappointed him and some of the other Jewish Studies teachers by not going to yeshiva (rabbinical seminary) after school, although it wasn’t really where I was on my journey of religious growth or personal development when I was eighteen.  I think the dream came about because I assume he would not approve of my relationship with E. either, that he would want me to marry someone more conventionally religious.  Like I said, this left me defensive today.  I could not articulate my reasons for not going to yeshiva when I was eighteen, but I don’t think I would have been ready, realistically, at that age, particularly given what I know now about how I function, or don’t function, in high stress academic environments, social environments, and especially noisy social environments (yeshiva is really noisy, because everyone studies out loud, in pairs, arguing loudly to be heard above everyone else arguing loudly).  I also think that E. is right for me, and that frum people who haven’t had issues with mental illness, high functioning autism and difficulty fitting in socially in the sometimes narrow and conformist frum world shouldn’t judge our relationship.  Ashley Leia asked the other day if the idea of bashert (destiny, especially a destined soul-mate) affects my thinking about E., and really it doesn’t, but inasmuch as I believe in bashert at all, I strongly suspect that E. is my bashert and people who haven’t been through everything I’ve been through in the last twenty years don’t really have a right to judge me for thinking that (cf. Pirkei Avot 2.4: “do not judge your fellow until you have been in his place.”).  Plus, as E. said when I told her about this dream, it’s not fair for people not to support me in the community then turn on me for dating someone from outside it.

Reading the last paragraph back, it seems very defensive.  I guess I feel defensive today, maybe because I feel anxious and depressed.   I’ve never been one to follow fashions and I’ve always been myself privately, but it’s hard to openly break with one’s community.  I do find it hard to be frum socially a lot of the time, even though I am objectively very religious.  I guess being in frum society brings up a lot of fears about where I stand religiously, where I should stand, am I good enough and so on, as well as fears about my relationship with E., what the stresses would be with that and so on.  E. was saying that she’s enjoying a Jewish book I recommended for her, but that its description of how Jewish communities should work does not match her experience of how they do work in reality and she has a point.  I guess I’ve always just tried to get on with my own stuff and not worry about fitting in so much, except that I get lonely and now I feel that I do need to put down roots somewhere where I fit in.

***

As for activity, today I worked on my short story for an hour or so, writing nearly 900 words, which was very good.  I spent half an hour writing my devar Torah (Torah thought) for the week.  I stopped when I felt I had run out of energy.  Soon afterwards I started feeling very depressed.  I went for a run (thirty-five minutes, mostly running with little walking), but while I was out I started feeling really anxious.  I wish I was in therapy at the moment; there are so many things that are making me anxious and I can’t tell which ones are legitimate and which aren’t.  I suppose all anxieties are “legitimate” in that it isn’t “wrong” to have an anxiety, but I feel some would worry anyone and others are more pathological and unique to me.  I would like to be able to talk things through with someone objective.  I speak to my rabbi mentor sometimes, and he is a trained counsellor, but I feel like I impose too much on him and it isn’t always easy to find time to talk, plus it’s hard to do it long-distance.

My sister and brother-in-law came around to drop some stuff off and have a socially distanced, two metres away conversation on the doorstep, which was nice, particularly for my parents.

I decided I needed a break from the weekly COVID-19 depression group Zoom meeting.  I just didn’t have the energy and mindset to relate my feelings and listen for long periods to other people’s experiences.  I feel that I’m still recovering from Yom Tov, plus my worries at the moment are mostly religious OCD/Pesach-based rather than COVID-19/lockdown-based.  Perhaps I’ll participate again next week.

It was a reasonable day for Pesach OCD worries.  I feel bad that this year has not gone as well as last year, but that was probably unfeasible, given everything happening to my family and in the wider world.  I’m still better than all the years where I ended up a quivering wreck of anxiety at some point before or during the festival.

Re-framing and Brokenness

I realised I was so busy complaining yesterday that I forgot to mention two bits of good news.  One is that I will be getting Employment and Support Allowance (ESA – benefits, basically) for a year, assuming my employment position doesn’t change, which is something of a relief after all the hassle I went to in order to claim.

The second is a more positive thing that came out of the seder experience.  I can’t remember exactly how it came about, but I realised that I could re-frame the narrative of my life in a more positive way.  It possibly came from something by Rabbi Lord Sacks that I read out at seder about Moshe (Moses) using his speech immediately before the exodus (in Shemot/Exodus 12) to focus on the idea of how to tell the story to our children, which Rabbi Sacks used to talk about the idea of telling our own personal story in a way that supports us.

In the past I have cast the narrative of my life in a very negative way: school, Oxford, my MA, work, dating, religious growth, I have presented all of them in a very negative way, focusing on the difficult times I had and the lack of clear progression to where I wanted my life to be, in terms of marriage, career, community, a certain sort of religious life and so on.

I realise that there were some positives that came out of all of these things.  For example, I tend to present Oxford as the worst time of my life, but I did get my BA in end, with a decent mark, and I made a number of friends that I’m still in contact with fifteen years on.  And it was a worthwhile experience that I learnt from, even if it wasn’t often a happy one.  I won’t bore you by going through the whole list of life events, but I can sort of see that I can do this positive re-framing for most of my life if I try hard enough.

***

I read Giles Fraser’s latest essay on UnHerd (here, but don’t bother to read the comments which are tedious “God does/doesn’t exist” arguments by people who have missed the point of the article…  I already regret wishing that UnHerd had a comments section and they’ve only had it a few weeks).  I find Fraser’s articles interesting and provocative for me, as much of his Christian theology resonates with me, and yet much of it seems utterly alien, from a Jewish point of view.  Usually both at the same time.

The engagement with brokenness and vulnerability in Christianity as opposed to in secular liberalism is something Fraser has written about a lot.  It makes me wonder how much this acceptance is present in Judaism.  One would expect it to be present in Judaism, given how much of Jewish history has been written in tears of exile and persecution, but I’m not sure how much it does appear, at least not on a personal level.  There is Iyov/Job, as Fraser says; there is some of Tehillim/Psalms.  Perhaps you could count Eichah/Lamentations, but that’s really about national brokenness, not individual brokenness.  Which is kind of my point.  Judaism is a lot more about communal or national experiences than private and personal ones.  Unsurprisingly, because Christianity is pitched as an individual quest for personal salvation, whereas Judaism is at heart a national quest to build a social utopia (even if many religious Jews appear to have forgotten that).  That’s why (topically for this time of year) the key event of Christianity is Jesus dying on the cross, whereas the key event in Judaism is a nation of slaves leaving for freedom.

This can make Judaism a difficult source of support for someone dealing with private, personal pain as opposed to communal disaster.  While there are plenty of Christian conversion stories along the lines of, “I was at rock bottom, but I opened the Bible/heard a preacher/accepted Jesus into my life and suddenly felt loved and accepted,” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a religious Jew offer a parallel story using Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) or the Talmud, nor have I ever come across kiruv organisation (outreach organisations attempting to make non-religious Jews more religious) using such tactics.  Kiruv organisations prefer a mixture of intellectual engagement with supposed proofs of the truth of Judaism, which are really a pretext to encourage people to experience celebrating Shabbat or going to Israel, particularly in a group.

(The reverse is true: I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Christian parallel to the outpouring of concern and love that Jews of all stripes and religious levels share when there is war or terrorism in Israel or antisemitism in the diaspora; many Western Christians seem utterly unaware of the persecution of their coreligionists in much of the Middle East, let alone upset by it, something that is simply unthinkable for the global Jewish community.)

I’m not familiar enough with the rabbinic literature, the Talmud and the Midrash, to know if there are many more stories of individual brokenness there.  I can think of one or two.  This one comes to mind (Talmud Brachot 5b, translation from the Steinsaltz edition via Sefaria – the bold text is direct translation of the original, the non-bold text is explanation):

The Gemara relates that Rabbi Elazar, another of Rabbi Yoḥanan’s students, fell ill. Rabbi Yoḥanan entered to visit him, and saw that he was lying in a dark room. Rabbi Yoḥanan exposed his arm, and light radiated from his flesh, filling the house. He saw that Rabbi Elazar was crying, and said to him: Why are you crying? Thinking that his crying was over the suffering that he endured throughout his life, Rabbi Yoḥanan attempted to comfort him: If you are weeping because you did not study as much Torah as you would have liked, we learned: One who brings a substantial sacrifice and one who brings a meager sacrifice have equal merit, as long as he directs his heart toward Heaven. If you are weeping because you lack sustenance and are unable to earn a livelihood, as Rabbi Elazar was, indeed, quite poor, not every person merits to eat off of two tables, one of wealth and one of Torah, so you need not bemoan the fact that you are not wealthy. If you are crying over children who have died, this is the bone of my tenth son, and suffering of that kind afflicts great people, and they are afflictions of love.

Rabbi Elazar said to Rabbi Yoḥanan: I am not crying over my misfortune, but rather, over this beauty of yours that will decompose in the earth, as Rabbi Yoḥanan’s beauty caused him to consider human mortality. Rabbi Yoḥanan said to him: Over this, it is certainly appropriate to weep. Both cried over the fleeting nature of beauty in the world and death that eventually overcomes all.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Yoḥanan said to him: Is your suffering dear to you? Rabbi Elazar said to him: I welcome neither this suffering nor its reward. Upon hearing this, Rabbi Yoḥanan said to him: Give me your hand. Rabbi Elazar gave him his hand, and Rabbi Yoḥanan stood him up and restored him to health.

Still, these type of stories do seem to be the relatively rare in Judaism and I do feel like I struggle for inspiration and guidance on how to connect with God through my suffering and depression.  I think that’s why I’ve re-read Arthur Green’s biography of Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav three times, because it deals extensively with his bouts of despair and self-criticism (possibly the result of bipolar disorder, undiagnosable and untreatable in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries).  Rebbe Nachman’s own stories are also important to me; they also deal a lot with longing and spiritual desire.  Still, I would be interested in finding more sources of Jewish inspiration and acceptance of brokenness.

***

As for my day today, I did half an hour of Torah study and went for a half-hour walk.  E. and I tried to do a virtual museum tour as an online date, but the picture resolution was poor, as was the navigation, and there wasn’t any text to explain what we were seeing.  We found the experience disappointing and switched to a straightforward video date after a while.  We spoke for over an hour and a half.

I found I was exhausted this evening, I think from the emotional stress of the last three days more than from my activity today.  I would have liked to have done more Torah study, or to have written my devar Torah (Torah thought) for the week or to have worked on my short story, but I’m just too exhausted.  I’m also intermittently anxious (OCD anxiety mainly, although some general anxiety) and depressed; anxiety and depression tend to worsen when I’m tired, as at the moment.  I am going to turn off my computer and watch TV and read before bed, because I don’t feel I can do anything else, sadly.  I’m just trying to stay afloat and not end up too exhausted and depressed tomorrow.

***

A question that is bothering me, but which I’m reluctant to ask more widely for fear of being misunderstood: what is the additional number of COVID-19 deaths?  Because while over 100,000 people have died globally, a proportion of those, statistically speaking, would have died anyway from something.  The people most likely to die from COVID-19 are also largely the people most likely to die in general (elderly, seriously ill, having compromised immune systems etc.).  I would like to know what is the number of deaths so far over and above what we would expect for a normal first quarter of a year?  I am not trying to be callous or to say that it doesn’t matter that they died as they would have died anyway.  Obviously any death is a tragedy.  I’m just curious to know what the global scale of COVID-19 is likely to be.  Are we talking thousands more deaths, hundreds of thousands or (God forbid) millions?  How does that compare with normal mortality rates?

I heard that when the ebola virus was at its worst in Africa, there was a sudden increase in deaths from malaria, because resources that would have been used in the fight against malaria were diverted to fight ebola, because it’s a “scarier” (or perhaps just less common) illness.  I am wondering if anything like that could happen here.

I think they are legitimate questions, but I’m afraid they make me sound callous and uncaring.  The autistic part of me has learnt that some genuine questions are off-putting emotionally to many people, however intellectually justified, just as the politically aware part of me is aware that people with strong political opinions generally see the world through the lens of their opinions and don’t always like questions that probe that too deeply or challenge their core assumptions.

***

The annoying computer problem I used to have, where the mouse touchpad would default to tapping mode whenever I turned the computer on and it would last until I went to turn it off, whereupon it would switch off before I got to the screen where I should have been able to turn it off, is back.  I’m not sure what to do about that.  It’s another step in the protracted decline of my laptop, but I’m hoping to, um, protract it some more as I can’t really afford to buy a new computer right now.  If anyone knows how to deal with this, please let me know!

Post-Yom Tov Post

I’m breaking with my usual post-Yom Tov (festival) habit of trying to catch up on blogs and stuff in the hope of getting to bed before 2am.  For the same reason, this is going to be more of a summary of the last three days than a blow-by-blow account.

The shortest version is that the first two days (Yom Tov proper) where an emotional rollercoaster, but I was broadly coping, but Shabbat (the Sabbath) was just too much and I was not good.  To be honest, three day Yom Tovs, or “Three Day Events” as my parents call them, are pretty draining for everyone even without COVID-19 disruption and without depression and OCD.

As for the more detailed version… well, the first two days I was up and down.  At times I was worried or depressed about some things, but mostly I was able to calm myself by reminding myself that my rabbi mentor told me not to worry about chametz (leaven food, forbidden on Pesach) smaller than an olive (although I know he is being lenient with me here, so it doesn’t always help) and by reminding myself that I’m not responsible for what my parents choose to do.  I think there was probably in the background the usual current worries: worries about my Mum, her cancer, and her risk of COVID-19 infection; worries about COVID-19 in general; worries about E.; worries about my relationship with E. (which is going well, I hasten to add, but is at a crossroads, which is exciting but also scary, or was at a crossroads until COVID-19 put our plans on a back burner).  And so on.

The sederim went quite well, considering there were just three of us, although it felt a bit weird.  Usually we would have about ten or so people in total one night; the other would be me, my parents, my sister and my brother-in-law.  This year it was just three of us both nights (“Why is this night so different?”).  We did have some more discussion than usual, which gives me an idea of how to do things differently in the future.  I had a migraine on the afternoon of the first day, but it had subsided by the second seder, which was good.  I still struggled to learn anything new at the seder, and to connect emotionally with the ideas of the night.  I still end up over-thinking things and not feeling them.  I wish I could get more out of seder, and out of Judaism in general.  The only real feeling of connection I had was via guilt and anxiety when I did something wrong (see below).

One interesting thing while I was eating the matzah (unleavened bread) was a strong feeling that freedom is being able to “just go,” which obviously connects with the story of the matzah in the Torah, that the Israelites did not have time to bake bread before leaving slavery in Egypt, but is interesting in terms of my usual procrastination and my awareness that my relationship with E. is going to require quite a bit of risk-taking and adventurous departures if it’s going to work.

I made some mistakes, in terms of forgetting to do a few things.  Most of them were rectifiable, but in opening some celery I had forgotten to open before Yom Tov I tore some writing on the packaging, a big no-no on Shabbat and Yom Tov (it’s considered erasing).  I felt very upset about this, and then managed to do it again the next day on something else (that was less obviously my fault though).  As I say, I felt upset, but I did manage to move on.

And then we got to Shabbat…  It was going well, and then there was an Issue.  There was an oversight in the kitchen (I won’t go into the details which are fairly complex) and potentially we had messed up the Pesach kosher-ness of some food.  I was 80% sure it was OK, but still couldn’t bring myself to eat it.  I didn’t argue with my parents, but they did eat it, and put it on our plates, which meant that the plates were now potentially problematic.  I tried to stay calm, but it was hard to do that with all the worries I mentioned above in my head plus the minor Pesach worries and now plus this.  I tried not to eat anything potentially ‘contaminated’ for the rest of the day, but it was hard to keep track of what cutlery had gone where and by lunchtime on Saturday I was de facto relying on my opinion that the food was OK (which at least had now grown to 90% certainty).

After Shabbat we emailed my parents’ rabbi and he said what I had thought: it was OK, we had just infringed a protective measure intended as an extra level of safety.  But it’s hard to spend Pesach every year wrestling with feelings that God is going to deny me any reward in the afterlife because of confused and panicked decisions I take at Pesach, especially as those are motivated more by a desire to avoid arguing with my parents than some selfish desire to eat chametz on Pesach.  I thought I was past this stage, but apparently not, or at least, not in this crazy year.

It’s hard to treat OCD at a time of the year when we are supposed to be worried about what we eat.  I suppose the analogy would be to someone who had germ contamination OCD and was trying to treat it with exposure therapy, but now has to deal with COVID-19 and suddenly being told to wash her hands all the time.

I also ate a load of junk over the three days and little fruit and veg, again because of a complicated religious/not-arguing-with-parents reason (I usually eat a lot of fruit and veg).  On the plus side, my biscuits tasted good, despite the cinnamon balls turning into macaroon shape and the almond macaroons ending up as a solid block that my Mum had to hack into smaller chunks.

Other than that it was the usual Yom Tov mix of over-eating, oversleeping, praying and reading.  My parents more or less forced me to go for a half-hour walk each day, which I needed.  I worked through a couple more Tehillim/Psalms in Hebrew and read more of Ani Maamin as well as more than half of a murder mystery set in a Haredi community, the first in a long sequence.  I’m enjoying it enough to stick with it to see how it ends, but I’m not sure if I’ll be reading any more.  It’s not really as interesting as I thought it would be, maybe because the Haredi community doesn’t seem so exotic; if anything, it seems less strict than my own community, which probably wasn’t the intention.

***

I should really go to bed.  I’m already violating my “No screens after 11pm” rule just to write this, but I’ve been struggling for the last few days with trying to keep going without being able to off-load.  I feel like I need to watch some TV to unwind.  I know it might keep me awake, but not relaxing will also keep me awake and I don’t really feel like reading any more.

200 Hours (Approximately)

… being the approximate length of time from the start of the Pesach food restrictions to the end of the holiday (in the diaspora).

Firstborns are supposed to fast the day before Pesach, but it’s generally accepted that they can go to a siyum (party for finishing studying some Torah) to avoid it.  I woke up at 7.00am as intended, got up a little later than I wanted, but “went” to an online siyum.  I had trouble logging in and missed the first half, although this is all kind of stringent this year anyway as no one should really be fasting in a health crisis even if they didn’t get to a siyum.

I fell into OCD anxiety while eating breakfast.  I mostly got it under control by the time Mum got up, but then she was sick, which set up a whole load more anxiety – worry about her, worry about getting everything ready on time for Pesach.  Once I start worrying, I can worry about everything, so I started worrying about me and E., feeling that the history of my life shows that good things rarely happen for me and never last and worrying that something will stop us being together, even though I don’t know what.  E. is basically the best thing that ever happened to me, so I’m terrified she’s going to be taken from me somehow.

We did get the house changed over to Pesach mode on time.  Having done the negative side of the festival (removing forbidden food), we are now busily doing the positive (cooking and preparing Pesach food).  I am struggling intermittently with OCD and anxiety.  I am washing my hands far too often, even for COVID-19.  I have to keep telling myself that I’m doing my best and that that’s all that God can expect of me, and also that I’m not responsible for what other people choose to do or not do.  I tell myself that God is probably more like my rabbi mentor (empathetic, understanding, patient, forgiving) and less like [insert name of any fire and brimstone clergyman].

We’ve got about an hour and a half until Pesach now.  My parents have excused me from further food preparation, as I’ve been helping all day, and I only got about five and a half hours sleep last night.  I’m going to shower and get into my Yom Tov clothes and probably chill in front of the TV for a bit so that I’m in a reasonable state of mind for the seder service this evening, the centrepiece of Pesach celebrations.  It’s tempting to try to continue helping now, or do more Torah study or something, but then I’ll be a mess by this evening, so I’m going to take my time off knowing that I will be doing a lot to help the smooth running of the seder later.

I will be out of contact for three days now, until Saturday evening, as we engage in what Ze’ev Maghen refers to as Judaism’s annual Existential War on Leaven Bread.  Chag kasher vesameach to those celebrating.  Stay well to everyone else.

Pesach Fail/OCD Success?

I got up about the same time as yesterday, which was good.  I felt very anxious and struggled with some OCD thoughts, but avoided asking my rabbi mentor about most of them.  I told myself that I was 90% sure what I was doing was OK, and if I was wrong, it was a genuine mistake, and that not asking unnecessary questions is a positive thing for me, otherwise the OCD gets out of control.  Nevertheless, I felt intermittently overwhelmed and struggled to get going.  I tried to focus on gratitude for my family and friends and especially for E.  I guess I do still worry that I’ll scare E. off sooner or later, either with my issues or my religiosity, but she cares about me more than anyone except my parents.

The one thing I really struggled with was kashering the kitchen sink.  This involves purging the sink of any trace of food by pouring boiling water over it.  There are quite strict rules about this.  The water has to be boiling, not boiled, so you only get a few seconds to do it before the kettle is considered too cold.  Also, only water within a couple of inches of where the spout of water hits the sink or drainer counts as close enough to still be boiling.  And you have to hit 51% of the sink and drainer in this way.  And, of course, it’s impossible to tell just by looking what was hit in this way and what was not because the water just flows everywhere.

The truth is, I didn’t feel like I managed it this year, but I was also worried about getting stuck in a OCD spiral of doing it again and again and again, trying to get it “perfect”.  So I tried to make sure I got each part of the sink once (which still took several goes) and then I left it.  I just sent my rabbi mentor an email asking if he thinks that was the right approach, especially as we don’t actually put anything directly in our sink on Pesach, which mitigates the need for this somewhat.  As I said to my rabbi mentor, my intuition is that this is the best possible option available, and I also note that, while writing that email to him and writing this blog post and accepting what I’ve done, I can feel my confidence level about the sink rising a little bit.

Did I do the right thing?  God knows (literally).  I tried my best, and probably did as good as most people would, but they wouldn’t agonise over it.  I think we have a good enough solution for now, with the caveat that we may need to ask a rabbi a question if anything drops into the sink over Pesach.  At the moment, looking for “good enough” solutions is all I can do.

There then followed a slightly frantic hour or so as I tried to make dinner for all of us in a kitchen that is half unusable (because in Pesach mode, not in everyday mode, where we still are).  I could feel anxiety rising in me from the sink, but also about Pesach in general, what time I will go to bed tonight, if I will sleep, if I will get up on early tomorrow morning as I want and really need to do…  I’ve had stomach pains again this evening, which seems to be an anxiety thing and which hasn’t been present for the last few weeks.

I’m currently waiting for my parents to be ready to do the nocturnal search for chametz (leavened food), done the night before Pesach.  I hope not to get to bed too late, although that’s somewhat up in the air at the moment.  I did a bit of Torah study today, but not much, but I think I was doing important things for the family.  I didn’t go for a walk in the end though which I would have liked to have done.  I want to get up early in the morning (although it would take to long to explain why… another complicated religious thing), so would like to get to bed reasonably early.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to blog tomorrow.  It’s the busiest day of the year.  If not, I won’t get the chance to blog again until Saturday evening, so Pesach kasher vesameach to those celebrating, and stay healthy to everyone.

Anxiety Mostly Contained

I did quite a lot today, although it was mostly Pesach (Passover) preparation, so not terribly interesting to record here.  I went shopping and extended my walk home a bit for exercise, although not for as long as I would have liked if I hadn’t had so many other things on today or been nervous about staying out with COVID-19.  I kashered the hob for Pesach, which basically involves boiling pots of water on each burner until it all gets really hot, then, when it’s cooled, covering the tops of the grates in aluminium foil.  I cooked some biscuits, almond macaroons, which spread too much and turned into two giant biscuits.  I think Mum cut them back into biscuit shape; from a baking point of view they were fine.  I cleaned the kitchen sink thoroughly to kasher it tomorrow and printed a load of signs so we can see where the Pesach and non-Pesach stuff is in the rearranged kitchen (then discovered we had some from last year).

I’ve been trying hard to fight the Pesach OCD that worries about the special dietary laws of the festival and the necessity of cooking not just different food, but in different utensils and with purged work surfaces, sinks, ovens and the like.  I’ve been trying hard not to give in if I want to physically check something multiple times; or email my rabbi mentor to check I’ve done something correctly; or to look up a detail that I know about, but want to double-check; or to ask my parents if they’ve washed their hands before touching Pesach food stuff…  It’s hard to do exposure therapy for Pesach OCD because unlike my ordinary kashrut OCD, where I was able to gradually expose myself to my irrational fears until the anxiety subsided, I’m not able to expose myself to Pesach OCD over a prolonged period of time.  I just have to sit with the anxiety and push through things despite it.  Dialing back the handwashing is harder, though, as Pesach and COVID-19 team up against me there and it usually feels like at least one of them mandates washing my hands in any given situation.  My hands are cracked, itchy and sometimes painful, but, to be honest, I’ve had worse Pesachs from a chapped hands point of view.

The other thing I had today was another depression group online meeting.  I found myself feeling very anxious during this meeting.  Some of it may have been residual anxiety from Pesach preparations, but I think a lot of it was social anxiety.  I can find the in-person depression groups challenging sometimes, but I find the online meetings so far much harder.  I’m fine Skyping E. one-to-one, and I’ve had one-to-one Skype therapy and meetings with my rabbi mentor, but a group meeting (and this was a slightly larger group than last time) seems to be exponentially harder.  I think I feel self-conscious with my picture on the screen, I don’t always talk loudly enough for the microphone to pick my voice up and the problems I have in sessions in terms of judging when I can speak and what to say somehow seems even more difficult to deal with online.  I still struggle with what I feel comfortable talking about and feel self-conscious of not expressing myself as clearly and as confidently as I would like.  I would like to continue going to these meetings as the lockdown continues, but I need to think about the best way of dealing with them.

It also occurred to me in the meeting that I’ve been completely focused on getting Pesach done despite COVID-19 and Mum’s cancer.  Soon, Pesach will be over, but the two Cs (as Mum calls them) will still be here and I will probably need to think of a new coping strategy or at least something else to occupy my time.

***

This post on trans-generational trauma was interesting.  I was interested because the case study is of a Holocaust survivor and his family.  My family had surprisingly little Holocaust connection, thankfully, although I’m sure every Jewish family suffered from institutionalised or persistent violence and persecution at some point.  I don’t think anything was passed down my family in that way, but perhaps because I take my Jewish identity very seriously I feel a sort of inchoate responsibility for the world in general and the Jewish people in particular and a desire to change things for the better without really knowing how, beyond a vague hope/fear that my suffering will somehow achieve some kind of vicarious atonement.

***

I feel a bit bad, as I just did give in to the OCD on a relatively minor thing, but I could see it spiralling out into something bigger (with OCD once you give in to one doubt or anxiety, it often snowballs into something much larger) and drew a line in the sand.  But it does indicate that I am too tired to function.  I will do a few minutes of Torah study as I haven’t done any today and don’t want to go a whole day without even five minutes, break my “No screens after 11pm” rule even further to relax a little for twenty minutes, and go to bed.

Golden Ages

I’ve mentioned before my feeling that the “J-blogosphere” (the Jewish blogosphere) that I used to be a part of has declined in recent years.  Yesterday I came across this list of the “Top 50 Jewish Blogs and Websites to Follow in 2020”.  I was surprised that a lot of them are institutional rather than personal blogs, and many of the private blogs are defunct.  I don’t want to read too much into this, as I don’t know how the list was compiled and I think it’s just another online list, but it does reinforce my feeling that the thriving J-blogosphere that I was a part of (or at least, slightly more than a spectator to) ten or fifteen years ago has gone somewhere else, but I’m not sure where exactly.  Probably Facebook and Twitter.  It’s strange that I mourn it now, as I never really felt that I fitted in to it, but I miss particular blogs and feel a sort of wistful regret that I could express my Jewish identity online, and to talk with people whose Jewish identity, however defined (Orthodox, Reform, secular, Israeli, diaspora etc.) was more instinctive and natural than my own.  I don’t think I really appreciated that when it was available.

It occurs to me that I tend to get nostalgic for communities that I was never really a part of.  I participated in the J-blogosphere, but while I commented on some blogs and read others, few (no?) Jewish bloggers read my blog, so far as I could tell.  Similarly, I can get hugely nostalgic for the Doctor Who fandom of the “wilderness years” when the programme was not on air (1990-2004) and when fandom was a kind of club for people who found Mensa insufficiently geeky and obscure, mixing quasi-academic analysis with juvenile humour, yet my active involvement in fandom was limited both in scope and in time.

I don’t really know why this is the case.  Perhaps it’s easy, when looking at my current struggles with socialising, to look back to a “golden age,” but I don’t think there ever was one for me.  There were social groupings that I wanted to join, but I never really managed to infiltrate them (not really the right word, but in many ways exactly the right word).  But, as the Doctor said (Doctor Who: Invasion of the Dinosaurs), there never was a golden age; it’s all an illusion.  Perhaps I should take that as my starting point when trying to make friends.  I am at least slowly making friends and getting known in my shul (synagogue), or was before coronavirus hit, albeit possibly just in time to move somewhere else with E.

Perhaps it’s related to my tendency to avoid categorising my religious, political and cultural opinions, to always opt for the “Yes/And” rather than the “Either/Or.”  To see myself as someone who doesn’t fit into convenient boxes, but rather who unites opposed points of view.  It’s a sense that I’m too big for anyone else’s categories, which is probably self-aggrandising, on some level, as well as providing an overly-convenient explanation for my failure to make friends (“They don’t understand my complexity!”).

***

Good news for the day: my oldest friend got in touch to say he’s read my non-fiction Doctor Who book and really enjoyed it.  He even paid me the biggest compliment you can pay a writer: he stayed up later than intended because he couldn’t put it down!  I feel really pleased about this.  I may ask him to write a review on Amazon or Lulu although he must be incredibly busy at the moment (he’s a rabbi).  Of course, my negative thoughts are already trying to discount his praise…

(This also means that I’ve sold at least one copy more than I thought, and than Lulu.com’s tally suggests.  Possibly Amazon sales take time to register?)

***

I actually got up early today.  Well, earlyish, for a Sunday, when I hadn’t slept well.  I got up just after 10am.  Considering I’ve been getting up around midday for weeks, this is an improvement.  I hadn’t even slept well.  I shouldn’t have watched Life on Mars late last night, as the blue light stopped me sleeping.  I just felt I needed to relax, but I should have read, or rather should have just read, as I read too.  I did eventually fall asleep, but woke just before 10am from a nightmare where my “Dad” (in inverted commas, as it wasn’t my real Dad, but some violent thug) was fighting with me.  I didn’t want to go back to sleep after that.  Maybe I need to have a nightmare every day.

Unfortunately it did take me a while to get going.  I felt tired and got distracted online.  Once I got going, the day was mostly taken up with Pesach (Passover) preparation: cleaning fridges and freezers and cleaning the hob.  I got very tired by the late afternoon.  It’s a continual source of frustration to me that I can only do much less work in a day than most people, because of lack of energy and depressive procrastination.  I would have liked to have done a whole day’s work today rather than just an afternoon’s.  Still, I did manage to go for a decent run in the twilight for about half an hour and had a Skype call with E. that was very enjoyable.  I think I laughed more with E. than I have since the coronavirus hit.

I felt less anxious about Pesach preparations today and more able to keep things in perspective and resist the religious OCD.  What the logic of the Jewish dietary laws, and the special Pesach dietary laws, might be is a subject of debate and from the outside I imagine that they don’t seem to have much logic at all.  Nevertheless, there is an internal logic to how it all works, an understanding of how food or its taste might be passed on that holds true across all the Jewish dietary laws.  As I understand this better, it becomes less a vague and fear-inspiring superstition (“I think that’s wrong, but I don’t know why”) and more something I can assess and analyse for myself and decide if it’s a problem without asking a rabbi.  I still have a long way to go, but I am getting better at this.

One thing I’ve learnt to look out for with OCD (I think it probably applies to any OCD with compulsions) is doing things multiple times.  The mindset of, “I think I’ve done this, but I’ll do it again to be sure” or simply “I must do this X number of times” with no clear explanation.  I fell into that a little bit today while cleaning, cleaning things multiple times, but I have become wary of it.  Similarly, I need to avoid checking things: asking questions of a rabbi when I know the answer or looking through old emails where I’ve asked questions to check the existing answer.  It’s very hard though.  Really the difficulty of OCD is resisting this desire to check things, whether it’s locking doors and windows, or washing hands repeatedly or checking about ritual performance.

The Seeking is the Finding

Shabbat (the Sabbath) was fairly normal, at least according to the new normal (no shul (synagogue)).  I finished the Doctor Who book I was re-reading, The Scales of Injustice.  It was better than I remembered, but I think the open-ended ending annoyed me when I first read it as a teenager.  I think there were semi-sequels that continued the story, but I don’t feel particularly motivated to seek them out.  It has to be said that I’m not entirely sure what the point of the story was.  I’m slightly scared to elaborate though.  From being someone who used to be quite willing to review things online, including (what I felt were) justified negative reviews, I’ve become reluctant now I realise that it could be my work being reviewed.  I know other frum (religious Orthodox Jewish) people who will only write positive reviews for fear that negative ones contravene Jewish law about gossip and negative speech.  I was not convinced by that argument in the past, but now I wonder about it, worried that one day all the negative things I’ve said will crash back on my head in bad reviews of my writing.

Mind you, part of me would be glad of negative reviews if it meant people were buying my book.  So far sales of my self-published book are stagnant.  I’ve sold six copies, two to myself (one a proof copy and one to send to Doctor Who Magazine when things are more normal as a review copy), one to my parents, one to E. and two to fan friends.  I need to publicise it better, but am not sure how especially as I won’t link to it here, as it’s published under my real name.  WordPress won’t let me back into my Doctor Who blog which is the logical place to publicise it.  I’m not good at publicity and marketing anyway.  Someone said I should set up a Facebook page for the book, but I’m not sure what good that would do, given that I don’t have a personal Facebook account and have no intention of going back into that bear pit just to sell a few more copies of my book.

***

In terms of Jewish stuff, I read some more of Ani Ma’amin: Biblical Criticism, Historical Truth and the Thirteen Principles of Faith by Rabbi Joshua Berman.  There was some interesting stuff about the improbably large numbers of Israelites in the exodus from Egypt and what those numbers might really be signifying.

***

I know I say here I struggle being Jewish in some ways.  Not so much through doubts as lacking inspiration and connection.  Judaism is important to me, but depression just wipes out my passion and enthusiasm and social anxiety gets rid of anything that’s left.  I see people at my shul (when we were allowed to go to it) who seemed to really connect to God in prayer or Torah study and I can’t do that, at least not for long.  It’s possible other people are faking it, on some level, but I’m not cynical enough to believe that everyone is faking it all the time.

I thought about a passage in the Talmud that says (I’m quoting from memory) if someone tells you they have sought and not found, don’t believe them; if someone tells you they have not sought, but have found, don’t believe them; but if someone tells you they have sought and found, believe them.  I’m not going to discuss the first two clauses, but on the third one, the Kotzker Rebbe said, many centuries later, “The seeking is the finding.”

I was thinking about this and that it does seem to apply to me, that I’m more conscious of the existence of God when I feel very far from Him.  It’s pretty much in the tradition of religious existentialism, which I’ve mentioned in the past that I used to be quite into.  I read it a lot less nowadays, but it still influences my worldview, and I feel that’s what is happening here.  I just feel so far from God so much of the time, yet when I feel consciously very far from Him, I feel on some level connected, whereas a lot of the time I’m not even thinking about Him.

There definitely is something to be said here about being able to feel things rather than just thinking them, but I’m not sure I really have the vocabulary to say it.  Judaism is a very intellectual religion, but I increasingly feel that I can’t cope with pure intellect and need to engage better emotionally, but I don’t know how.

The Banality of Lockdown

I’m mostly doing OK today, but I’ll be going along, doing what I need to do, and then suddenly feel sad or anxious for no obvious reason.  Fortunately it seems to shift after a while.  Credit that to Shabbat (Sabbath) and sunshine.  I’m not sure what will happen next week when Pesach (Passover) preparation goes to the next level and rain is forecast.

I went out to do some shopping earlier, to pick up my prescription and some fruit and veg.  The didn’t have my lithium tablets in 400mg dose tablets, only 200mg.  I accepted those (although I didn’t think the pharmacist was supposed to change dosage like that, although maybe these are special times), but it means taking four lithium tablets an evening instead of two, alongside two clomipramine, one olanzapine and some vitamin supplements, plus of course my three morning tablets.  It’s frustrating, but I’m glad to have got the tablets at all, as I don’t know if I would be allowed to go to a different pharmacy at the moment, at least not without difficulty.

I had to wait outside the greengrocer’s for a long time as they were only allowing two people in at a time.  By the time I had finished there, I was feeling extremely anxious.  I’m not sure how much was health anxiety, how much social anxiety (I had to ask the shop assistant some things) and how much is just me beating myself up for stuff that isn’t my fault, in a borderline pure-O OCD way (not Pesach OCD for once).  I could have got home in about five minutes, but I took a detour for fifteen minutes to get some kind of walk as exercise and to fight off the anxiety, but it wasn’t particularly effective.  I would have liked to have gone for a longer walk, but I didn’t as I wanted to do some Pesach preparation alongside my Shabbat preparation.  Now the clocks have gone forward, Shabbat starts later, so as well as Shabbat chores and shopping I’ve done some Pesach preparation, which hopefully will “buy” me some time to bake or exercise next week.

Mum it seems is on the high risk COVID-19 list after all, although this is not completely clear to me.  However, we’re struggling to have the government website to recognise her as such, which we would need to get priority for shopping delivery slots.  The automated phone line flatly refused to recognise her NHS number.

This post seems banal even by my usual standards and I’m not sure that anyone will be interested.  Coronavirus seems to have given us a lots of time to talk, but nothing to talk about.  Aside from Pesach preparation, I’m not really being upset (I’m trying not to use the word ‘triggered’) by anything.  I just feel surprisingly lonely, and worried about E. and frustrated at being so far from her at this time.

Feedback Loop

Yesterday finished badly.  I went to bed earlier than usual (although still late) because I felt tired and depressed.  I tried to do my hitbodedut meditation/prayer/talking to God, but got overwhelmed with guilt, anxiety and despair halfway through and had to stop.  At least I was feeling something, lately it’s been hard to feel anything while doing it.

Then today started badly.  It was a real struggle to get up.  I woke up around 10am, but fell asleep again.  I eventually got up around 12.30pm, after an indeterminate amount of time lying in bed feeling awful, just depressed and exhausted.  I’ve been having weird dreams recently too.  There was one that involved Hitler’s head (in a They Saved Hitler’s Brain sort of way, but I don’t remember the details), and last night I dreamt about people from shul (synagogue) coming round, but just sitting in the lounge silently studying Talmud.  In the dream, this seemed like a success, as they seemed to think I was on some level capable of Talmud study.  There was also a ten year old boy who I managed to speak to in Hebrew, at least to offer him a drink.  I’m not sure what any of this means.

Events today were mostly trivial, but also somewhat frustrating or upsetting.  I’ve put on weight, about 1kg since I last weighed myself.  It’s not surprising, as I’ve only had time/energy to exercise intermittently and have been eating more junk than usual since the coronavirus lockdown started.

Then the latest Doctor Who Magazine arrived.  They didn’t print the letter I had sent them, which isn’t a surprise as I admitted to not enjoying the most recent series.  They don’t print negative letters any more, even one like mine which basically argued that Doctor Who is large and diverse and if some fans don’t like the current version, they can just focus on what they like and not throw their toys out of the pram on Twitter.

Writing this down, it doesn’t seem like so much, but I felt very overwhelmed and really just wanted to go back to bed and start the day again.

I didn’t have much to do today, in terms of Pesach preparation or anything else, so I wrote my devar Torah (Torah thought) for the week, which ended up being quite a bit shorter than usual, from lack of inspiration as much as depression.  This week’s sedra (Torah portion) has some long legal passages about the sacrificial laws and a description of the inauguration ceremony of the priests, which had been previewed a view weeks ago in Shemot (Exodus), so it can be hard to find something interesting and relevant to a contemporary audience.

I went for a run, but as I was too depressed and exhausted to run for more than a few metres at a time, it was mostly a walk.  I passed a bunch of six teenagers, split up on both sides of the road so I couldn’t safely pass while keeping two metres distant from both groups.  I think this is the first really flagrant lockdown breach I’ve seen.  My uncle says that the Israeli lockdown is stricter, with people limited to a 100m radius area around their residence and police and army enforcement.

I’m struggling with religious OCD, in some ways more so than yesterday, wanting to email my rabbi mentor to chase up the answers to yesterday’s questions.  I did email in the end, and although I turned it into a general venting email, it really was to seek reassurance, which I know is wrong with OCD.  It is hard to do exposure therapy for Pesach OCD when exposure therapy requires repeated exposures over time and Pesach is only one week a year, plus a week or two of preparation beforehand.

Despite being at home with my parents, I felt lonely today.  I don’t always find it easy to communicate with my parents when I feel very depressed (or even when I don’t feel depressed).  I felt alone.  In the evening I actually did some social (or virtual-social) stuff: a massive thirteen person extended family Zoom call (which was basically certain family members shouting a lot and others of us sitting quietly) and a Skype call with E.  I was glad to speak to E., but I just had a knot of anxiety in my stomach the whole time and worried I was going to alienate her somehow, even though I knew this was irrational and that E. cares about me a lot.  I think at times like this my anxiety just transfers from subject to subject depending on what I’m doing at the time so that I always feel anxious.  I did speak a bit to my parents about my anxieties in the end, which was good.  I’m lucky to have them, and to have E.  I don’t know where I would be without them.

***

There was an interesting discussion today over on Ashley Leia’s blog about whether the term “high functioning” is a useful descriptor for mental health.  I would say not, and most if not all commenters there agreed.  Certainly in my case functionality is not static and binary, but fluctuates with time, with different situations and with other factors like tiredness and hunger, as well as the interaction of different aspects of my issues (so today high anxiety/religious OCD anxiety and depression are feeding back into each other and making things worse).  The same goes for my high-functioning autism.

There can also be a judgmental element to functionality, where high functional people are not allowed to have bad days/episodes or are not given adequate support because it’s assumed they are coping and that high functionality equates to mental stability and consistently positive mental health.  I function well inasmuch as I get dressed every day, look after my health and hygiene needs, eat reasonably healthily, exercise, look for work and so on, but whenever I get a job, my stress levels rocket up and I’ve had trouble meeting all my work obligations; I think at least two previous managers thought I was incompetent and probably regretted hiring me.  I don’t know if I’ll ever manage to work full-time.  So it’s hard to see myself as functional, even though I know that I am compared to some people, or even compared with myself as I was from circa 2003 to 2009 or so.

The Exponentially-Expanding ‘To Read/Watch’ List

Today’s Pesach (Passover) task was cleaning the ovens in preparation for kashering them (cleaning and heating them for Passover use).  It was easier than I expected, but still took me about two hours.  I felt exhausted afterwards for the rest of the day.  I listened to another livestreamed online shiur (religious class) by Rabbi Lord Sacks (he seems to be doing them weekly at 5.30pm during the coronavirus crisis) and I did one or two small tasks, but that was all I really managed today.  I didn’t even get out for a walk.

This has been a time of forcing me to confront things.  I’ve taken on more of Pesach preparation in recent years anyway, but now I’m doing even more.  So far I have been OK with the religious OCD.  I have asked some questions of my rabbi mentor, but generally not panicked, and I’ve been OK with stuff that would have made me anxious even last year.  That said, I was worried about some things earlier today.  I can sort of see that they’re probably OK, but also I worry that they’re really not OK.  This is better than in the past when I would be a mess; also, part of my anxiety this time was from tiredness and hunger, which I know make the OCD anxiety worse.  At least I managed to deal with some things that would have induced ordinary kashrut (dietary law) OCD anxiety in the past without really giving in to it.

The hunger went after eating dinner and the OCD anxiety subsided a little, but I still feel tired and listless, but not sleepy (anyway, if I go to bed early, I know I’ll just sleep even longer than usual).  I wanted to do more Torah study or to write this week’s devar Torah (Torah thought), but I just don’t have the energy.  Ditto for working on that short story I started at the weekend and haven’t touched since.

It doesn’t help that I’ve got vaguely bored of the books I’m reading.  I’m reading a non-fiction book on the Russian Revolution, one of those small study aid-type books aimed at A-Level students and undergraduates.  I started reading it because I was trying to alternate between fiction and non-fiction and thought it would be a quick read, but I don’t really feel like reading non-fiction or heavy fiction in the lockdown.  I’m just struggling too much emotionally for anything heavy.  The other book is a Doctor Who spin-off novel that I’m re-reading, The Scales of Injustice, an attempt to mix the down-to-earth style of the 1970 series of Doctor Who with The X-Files conspiracy-type stories that were the rage when the book was published in 1996.  I was enjoying at first, but now, perhaps because of feeling overwhelmed with depression and anxiety, or perhaps because of unclear writing, I’m struggling to work out who the characters are in relation to each other, or what exactly is going on.  I am sufficiently involved to want to finish it, but I’m not sure how much of the remaining eighty pages I will actually understand and may need to look the book up on TARDIS Data Core (online Doctor Who encyclopaedia).

I actually feel like I’m swimming in Too Much Stuff rather than too little.  Aside from the DVDs I panic-bought when the lockdown started… and apart from the huge stack of unread fiction and non-fiction on my bookshelves… and apart from the blogs that are still posting despite the lockdown…  so many individuals and organisations are sending out things to read or watch.  Are most people just reading or watching stuff all day on lockdown?  The experience of me and my family is struggling with housework, minimal shopping, Pesach preparations and (for my parents) working from home, without much time/headspace for other things.  Admittedly a huge chunk of my day is taken up with sleeping because of depression, and my parents have to fit in regular hospital appointments, but I do still wonder how much free time other people have.

I’ve got four different emails from The Jewish Review of Books to read, some with more than one article in them.  I’ve got a whole free stand-up comedy show to watch from the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) comedian Ashley Blaker, who last week sent out a 100+ page joke book, which I’ve now read (admittedly most pages had just a couple of jokes on them).  I’ve got a couple of articles by Rabbi Lord Sacks to read, in addition to the livestreamed shiur I watched earlier. UnHerd.com is still updating with multiple articles every weekday, although I’m increasingly trying to avoid it, or be more careful about what I read, as a lot of the articles are scary coronavirus speculation that I can’t do anything about and might turn out not to be true tomorrow.  The same goes for the BBC news site, which I only really glance at anyway as the BBC’s idea of what constitutes a story and mine are not the same, even aside from political differences.

It’s hard for me to just skip or delete stuff.  Most of what I’ve mentioned above is likely to be interesting or amusing (E. won’t want me to link to a long piece of writing by her that I just read, but it was very good – I know you’re reading!).  I feel bad about missing things.  E. thinks this is something I should work on.  She has been urging me for a while to give up on a book partway through, something I almost never do.  I suppose there is fear of missing something.  With fiction, it’s wanting to know how the story ends, even if I’m not enjoying it.  Also complex feelings of obligation.

I feel a little better now, but I was naughty and ate ice cream to cheer myself up.  I’m also going to watch Life on Mars in a minute even though it will go way past my 11pm screens deadline, as if I don’t do some passive relaxation, I won’t sleep.

Thinking Versus Feeling

Possibly I did too much yesterday, as I felt very depressed on waking again today and struggled to get up and get dressed.  I felt a bit lonely today, despite my parents being around, and I miss E.  We don’t know when we’ll get to see each other in person again, which in some ways is no different to before coronavirus, except that previously E. was supposed to be coming to the UK for work reasons and now that’s been postponed indefinitely.  I didn’t really feel like doing anything, but my parents were depending on me for dinner, especially as Mum was feeling quite ill today with chemo side-effects.

Even once I had worked through the initial depression, or some of it, I had quite a lot of anxiety.  Some of that was Pesach (Passover) related.  Some was listening to another Intimate Judaism podcast and worrying about my relationship with E., although there isn’t any rational reason to do so.  Worrying that our religious differences would be too big to bridge despite all the other similarities.  Wondering if we will ever get to move our relationship forward, and how.  Wondering when we will be on the same continent!

On the plus side, I dropped the parev (neither dairy nor meat, according to the kosher food laws) measuring spoon into the milchig (milk) sink and calmly rinsed it off and moved on rather than going into a religious OCD panic and emailing my rabbi mentor as would have happened a few years ago.

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In terms of achievements, I cooked dinner (while listening to the podcast) and helped look after Mum who, as I say, was quite ill today.  I also went for a jog.  I jogged for longer than usual both in terms of time (another five minutes or more) and distance (over half a mile more) and my pace was reasonably good; I think it actually improved in the added bit as I got my second wind.  I did end up with an exercise migraine, though, and I hurt my foot somehow, although both feel better now.  I Skyped E. and did about twenty-five or thirty minutes of Torah study; I don’t seem to be able to do much more at the moment except on Shabbat (the Sabbath).

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I feel a bit like I should be volunteering at the moment.  In a way I am, because I’m helping with housework and especially cooking now Mum is ill and we don’t have a cleaner.  Still, I feel I should do more for the wider community, but the sad truth is that I’m barely coping with everything I have to do as it is (in fact, I’m not doing stuff I would want to do, like write fiction) and the Pesach stress is only just starting; next week will be much harder.  It’s hard just to keep going at the moment with depression and anxiety.  The clinching argument, of course, is that volunteering would probably expose me to coronavirus and other contagious illnesses that we’re trying to keep away from Mum at the moment.

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I watched a(nother) silly Star Trek Voyager episode where the ship was attacked by a virus that has grown to macroscopic size and is now a foot long and flies through the air attacking people with its stinger (?!).  Maybe coronavirus isn’t so bad.

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Two religious thoughts I’ve been thinking about:

1. Although a lot of Judaism is intellectual and text-focused, much of it is emotional and experiential, especially the festivals, none more so than Pesach with the symbolic foods we eat and the foods we deliberately don’t eat.  Given the problems I’ve historically had accessing and accepting my emotions, it is perhaps not surprising that I struggle with this.  On seder night, the first two nights of Pesach, when we tell the story of the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and eat the symbolic foods of matzah (unleavened bread) and maror (bitter herbs) and drink the four cups of wine (grape juice in my case, because of medication interactions), I seem to end up thinking hard about the symbolism rather than emotionally connecting to it.  Possibly if I could stop thinking about things (things in general) and just experience them, my life, and especially my Jewish life, would be much better.  I need to focus less on thinking and more on feeling.

(An aside: the Kotzker Rebbe was once confronted by a Chabad Hasid who waxed lyrical on the Chabad mode of prayer, all emanations and unifications.  But where, said the Kotzker, is the pupik (literally the belly button), where are the emotional guts of the matter?)

2) I have historically struggled with bitachon, trust in God.  In particular, the idea that good can come of my long mental health history is something that I struggled to engage with emotionally, even if I could vaguely see it intellectually (that thinking-feeling dichotomy again).

Lately, as E. and I have tried to make our long-distance relationship work, I can sort of see how some negative or difficult things brought me to where I am now, where I’m in a relationship with her.  If I hadn’t been depressed, I would never have set up this blog and I would never have met E.  If I had been better integrated into the frum (religious Orthodox Jewish) community, I probably would not have contemplated being with E.  If I hadn’t struggled growing up with being more religious, or at least wanting to be more religious, than my parents were, I wouldn’t have learnt how to handle such conflicts in my relationship with E.  And so on.

Still, even though I can see that maybe there was a reason for all those things, I’m still terrified that things won’t work out for E. and me, that this is setting me up for another disappointment, the worst one yet.  I’m trying to trust, but it’s hard.

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It’s also late.  My “No screens after 11pm” rule has been broken flagrantly this evening, but I am up late partly because I was being a good boyfriend and a good son, talking to E. and looking after my Mum, so I don’t feel too bad.  I am tired though, and hungry.  So hitting ‘Publish’ now.