“Are You There God? It’s Me, Luftmentsch”

I was very tired on waking today and struggled to get out of bed; then I had to rush to leave on time for work. This week I have essentially been working for three consecutive days: actual paid work on Tuesday and Thursday, plus volunteering on Wednesday morning alongside a stack of chores and therapy on Wednesday afternoon. Perhaps it is not surprising that it was a struggle to get up today. Next week J wants me to work on Tuesday rather than the Monday again as well as Thursday, plus there will be volunteering on Wednesday. I hope it won’t be so much of a struggle if I keep Wednesday afternoon free (at the moment therapy is alternate weeks).

I pulled some muscles in my arms and leg at volunteering yesterday, which didn’t make things any easier. My arms are OK, but I can’t walk up and down stairs without limping and experiencing some pain. Minor train delays made my journey into work more difficult and I was mostly too tired and depressed to do much Torah study on the train in to work, which I use as my main Torah study time, something that made more sense when my journey was longer.

As a result of all of this, my mood was lower today too, although it did improve once I got to work and especially after lunch. My work is not terribly interesting, but the pay is good given my hours and the environment seems fairly comfortable for me, in terms of autism and social anxiety, at least at the moment with hardly anyone in the building. So far working for a friend is going well, although I am still nervous about messing something up. I have made some small mistakes, but nothing unexpected considering it is a new environment. On the whole it seems positive, especially as working part-time means that I can spend more time working on my novel.

I spoke about spoons yesterday without thinking that I’ve picked up a lot of readers since I last explained “spoon theory.” Spoon theory was formulated by Christine Miserandino to explain what it’s like to live with chronic pain. Essentially, you start the day with a number of units of energy, represented by spoons (because she was in a restaurant while trying to explain to her friend and there were spoons handy). Over the course of the day, you expend energy (spoons) doing tasks. Once you’ve run out of spoons, that’s it, you can’t do anything else until you recharge, which will probably require a night’s sleep (and you may not recharge even then).

What she wrote about chronic physical pain applies in many ways to mental illness, and also to the way “difficult” environments are extra draining for someone on the autism spectrum (noisy, too many people, etc.). I think this week has cost me a lot of spoons and I’m looking forward to Shabbat to recharge.

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I wrote this in my devar Torah (Torah thought) for this week:

[Rav Steinsaltz] takes this a step further to an even purer form of love, which is love of God.  Here, a person may not (in this world) receive any overt signal or sign of God’s receptivity to the love.  The person may struggle through life, trying to be a good person and a good Jew, without receiving any direct indication that he or she is succeeding.  Perhaps we can see this as a call from HaShem to perhaps the greatest form of human love.

It only occurred to me afterwards that I was really talking about myself, about wanting some kind of sign that I am succeeding to be a good person and a good Jew.

PIMOJ asked me about this passage. She felt that God does speak to us and send us signs. I felt, although I did not say, that she is a mystic for whom God is constantly immanent, whereas I’m a Jewish religious existentialist (as far as I understand the term) for whom God is usually, if not always, transcendent and hidden. We had a WhatsApp text conversation about it, which was a big thing in itself, as I usually avoid contradicting people and discussing things with them for fear of rejection.

PIMOJ feels that we can see ourselves and our religious progress when we pray and study Torah. I do not feel this. She feels that we can intuit God’s feelings about us the way we can intuit the feelings of our parents, but I don’t feel I can do that either. (At this point I started to wonder if all my religious and political beliefs as well as my social intuitions are rooted in my experience of autism, social communication impairment and bullying… It’s entirely possible.) I feel that I can’t do “enough” because of autism and depression. So my parents and friends tell me to lower my expectations because I can’t expect to do so much. So then I wonder, am I doing enough of what I can be expected to do… It’s hard to tell and I don’t think I really made myself clear to PIMOJ. It could be an autistic thing again, that I want God to tell me “I want you to do X, Y and Z. You are doing X well, Y is OK, but you need to work on Z.” Real life doesn’t work like that.

To be honest, I found the discussion a little worrying, as I always worry that I’ll be rejected by people for having a different opinion, but PIMOJ said she found it enjoyable to speak to me about a deep topic, so I guess that’s good. She said I’m a good communicator too, which is good (good that she thinks I communicate well, as I worry that I don’t).

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Other than that, I’ve been feeling vaguely listless all evening. I usually watch TV when I have dinner, but I couldn’t decide what to watch. I told myself I would only watch Doctor Who episodes from the new series for a bit (Doctor Who was on TV from 1963 to 1989, then, bar a TV movie in 1996, it was cancelled until 2005), but after a couple of days I’ve run out of enthusiasm already. I like much of new Who, but it doesn’t satisfy me the way the original series does. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work out why that’s the case, and there isn’t really an easy answer. Some is nostalgia and familiarity, but a lot of it is due to stylistic changes in Doctor Who as well as in TV and in general culture.

I read over dinner instead of watching TV. I had been enjoying the novel (The Naked Runner – I hasten to add that the title’s a metaphor; it’s a spy novel, not one about someone who literally runs in the nude), but I failed to summon any enthusiasm for it. I did some ironing and watched the first two episodes of Daleks!, an animated Doctor Who spin-off made by the BBC, but available for free (legitimately) on YouTube. It didn’t really interest me much though and I didn’t watch episode three, although I probably will at some point. I guess I should be thinking about bed, but I feel I need to relax somehow. Maybe original series Doctor Who, or have another go at The Naked Runner. I just feel that I’m going to go to bed stressed and I know that if I do that, I struggle to sleep or to be refreshed, but I don’t know what I can do that (a) I will enjoy and (b) I can do at midnight when I feel tired.