Help, I’m Trapped in a Blog Post Factory

(Again, I don’t have much to say, but feel the need to reach out.)

I decided not to go to shul (synagogue) last night as I was too exhausted, so instead of putting on my suit after my pre-Shabbat (Sabbath) shower, I wore casual trousers. There was still quite a bit of time before Shabbat, so I watched an episode of The Simpsons, after which I felt less exhausted, so I hurriedly changed into my suit and went to shul. I got pretty tired there, but I was glad I went.

Shabbat was pretty good with my uncle staying with us, although there’s a certain family dynamic that I feel increasingly uncomfortable with and don’t know what to do about it. I’ve spoken to my therapist a bit about it, but I feel I should discuss it again with her and/or with my rabbi mentor. It has to be said, though, that our Shabbat meals, which are prolonged at the best of times, become even longer when my uncle is around due to certain family members going into talking overdrive. The result was that by the time we finished dinner and I did some Torah study and my hitbodedut and a little bit of recreational reading, I went to bed very late, then overslept in the morning (as usual). Then after lunch I wanted to stay awake and do some Torah study in the short gap before Minchah, but, perhaps from too much peopling, I was exhausted and lay in bed for a while, albeit awake, just tired.

It occurred to me over Shabbat that I have, or at least am developing, my own personal religious worldview. By which I mean, not that I’m abandoning Orthodox Judaism, but that I feel there is space within Orthodox Judaism to develop a personal view of God, Torah, Jewish identity and the world as a whole, based on teachings that appeal to me as an individual, and that I am doing that. I wonder if this is an achievement that many people in Jewish world (Orthodox or otherwise) do not manage, inasmuch as it seems to require a high degree of textual literacy combined with serious thought about oneself, the Jewish tradition, the wider world, and the interactions between all of the above as well as a willingness to think independently and not just parrot other people’s ideas.

After Shabbat my Mum logged checked her phone and discovered that her cousin had died this morning. This has shaken me a little. The cousin was about twenty years older than her, but it’s still an intimation of my parents’ mortality.

My Dad took some photos of E and I on the last night she was here and I just downloaded them. They’re pretty good, but I feel I look awkward and wooden in most of them, except for one where E blinked as the photo was taken.

My father, and to a lesser extent my mother, were in a bad mood as their football team lost. This caused me to wonder why they would put themselves through the stress of following a football team who lose a lot, especially as the ‘down’ of losing seems to be bigger than the ‘up’ of winning. Then I remembered that Doctor Who is back tomorrow, and I’m not hopeful of it being good, given the standards of the last two seasons, and given that I have rarely fully connected with the new series. I hope my twenty-five year old Doctor Who Magazine back-issue arrives soon…

Mental Hangover

I really just wanted to check in. I am OK today, just really drained. I am a bit down, but it will pass, but my mind feels scattered as sometimes happens to me when drained, where it’s hard to focus on anything or get energy to do anything. I wish I had more downtime, though. My uncle is coming to stay for the weekend, as he’s working in the UK. I like spending time with him, but he’s quite a personality and I’m not sure I want that right now. I’ve already ducked Sunday night dinner with him, my parents, my sister and brother-in-law at my sister’s and BIL’s house. It was just too much. I need alone time to process the last two weeks. I’m not sure if I’ll make it to shul (synagogue) tonight, I just feel too drained.

I wrote a To Do list, as I felt I have a lot of stuff to do in coming weeks and lists help me get a grip on things without anxiety. It’s a relatively short list, which is reassuring, but many of the tasks are repetitive and are going to be ongoing for a long time, particularly finding an agent for my novel and researching my next novel Some of the one-off tasks are scary too, like trying to sort out the situation with the autism-adapted CBT referral.

Post-Trip Blues

E is somewhere over the Atlantic. She will be landing soon. I was OK before she left and even in the car on the way to the airport (Dad gave her a lift and I came with), but my mood plunged on the way home and I’ve been low and irritable all afternoon and evening. My parents have borne the brunt of the irritability, but the low mood is mostly in my own head. I forced myself to keep occupied: write my devar Torah (on an idea I’ve shared here, about changing the narratives we have for our lives), go for a forty minute walk (longer than my usual walks) and do some ironing. I watched Twin Peaks, ate ice cream and bought a back issue of Doctor Who Magazine for retail therapy. I feel I should be able to regulate my emotions better without external aids.

The trip was definitely a success. E and I got on really well in person (we were vaguely worried that somehow we wouldn’t), even better than over Skype. E got on well with my parents, sister and brother-in-law and vice versa. E and I had some Serious Conversations about moving our relationship on and we seem to be on the same page as each other about that. We are both really happy about the way things are going, while nervous about subsidiary issues like immigration and finances. But we are very into each other, and I have to say we engaged in Public Displays of Affection, something that usually irritates me when I see other people do it.

I do feel vaguely bad that I got exhausted so easily and had to ask for time out quite a bit. This was probably exacerbated by wearing a mask on so many dates as I find even mild activity while wearing a mask leaves me uncomfortably short of breath. E was really understanding about my fatigue, though. I feel that if I had an obvious physical disability, I would be more understanding of it, but as I have an invisible and non-physical disability (autism and autistic fatigue), I blame myself and feel ashamed. It doesn’t help that autistic fatigue is so poorly understood. But it’s good that E understands, even more than I do.

***

I listened to a Normal Frum Women podcast about increasing a connection to Yiddishkeit (Jewishness). It was pretty down to earth, which was good, as it could have been either very preachy or very abstract. Listening, it occurred to me that while most people becoming frum (religious Jewish) are encouraged to live in a strongly Jewish community, my Jewish engagement was at its strongest when I was in a small and declining community where I was one of the most Jewishly-engaged and knowledgeable people there. I led services and gave drashot (religious talks) because there were so few people there who could do things like that. Once I moved to my current community, I stopped, because I felt intimidated by how religiously knowledgeable and competent everyone seemed to be. I suppose the ideal for me would be a small and mixed shul (synagogue), mixed in terms of religious knowledge and practice, in a vibrant wider community that provided the shops, restaurants and other facilities for everyday Jewish life.

***

I mentioned I bought a Doctor Who Magazine back issue on eBay for retail therapy. It was the tribute issue to Jon Pertwee after he died. Pertwee played the third Doctor in the early seventies and is probably the second most well-remembered original series Doctor among non-fans, after Tom Baker. In the fan community, his reputation has ebbed and flowed. Those fans who grew up with him loved him (fan wisdom has it that your favourite Doctor is the one you grew up with), but a later generation saw him as rude and even reactionary. Then, after Pertwee’s death, fandom seemed to make its peace with him and accept him.

He is certainly sharp with those he disagrees with and is the only Doctor to have a day job, with the military (even if it is a UN-run outfit dealing with the unknown rather than the conventional military). He is also one of the more straight-laced Doctors, with fewer eccentricities than others. You tend to know what you’re going to get with him. My own opinion has gone back and forth, but in stories like Carnival of Monsters and The Time Warrior he is very loveable in a ‘weird uncle’ way. The series encourages us to laugh at him sometimes, not something the new series tends to do, and the character’s flaws are probably more intentional than some fans credit, creating a more rounded character, something emphasised in Pertwee’s final story, Planet of the Spiders, which tries to deconstruct his character a bit.

I bring this up because E wanted to watch another old series story before we watch David Tennant’s final season and I decided to go for a Pertwee story, as E hasn’t seen one yet and I’m curious as to how she will react. I haven’t chosen the story, and we’re limited by what she can borrow from her local library, but I’ve got it down to The Daemons, The Green Death or The Time Warrior. I’m inching towards The Green Death, giant maggots (yuk) and all. It’s an original series story with the emotional clout associated with more modern stories, and also the slight environmentalist preachiness. It has some seventies groovy-ness too, and has a decent plot, and it showcases the ‘classic’ early seventies regular cast line-up.

Equanimity

More from The Quest for Authenticity: The Thought of Reb Simhah Bunim by Rabbi Michael Rosen (p. 206):

“Equanimity, which flows from the quest for authenticity, can be expressed both positively and negatively. Positively, it means, ‘I know who I am irrespective of how I am perceived by others,’ or possibly ‘I don’t care how I am perceived by others.’ Negatively, it means, ‘I am antagonistic to the whole apparatus which doesn’t judge a person for what he really is.’

The Yehudi’s view was: ‘If a person knows who he is, he isn’t frightened by anybody.'”

I’m not sure if “positively” and “negatively” here are reflecting value judgements for and against. I would like to know how to achieve this level of equanimity, as not being frightened by anybody sounds good.

The Difficulty of Finding Joy in Connection to God

E and I wandered around the West End today and went into St James’ Park. The park has a lot of wild birds: aside from the inevitable pigeons, also ducks, swans, geese, crows and pelicans, the latter of which were rather mysteriously pink (they have been white on previous visits). People were feeding them, in violation of the various signs that said not to feed them. E says that if people can’t follow a sign about not feeding wild birds which gives four different reasons why not to feed them, then it’s no wonder that they won’t wear masks for COVID. It made me wonder if I should write a zombie apocalypse story where people refuse to hide in their homes from a “government and media zombie hoax” (although zombie films are bound to be cancelled soon on the grounds that they appropriate Haitian culture).

***

I’m re-reading The Quest for Authenticity: The Thought of Reb Simhah Bunim by Rabbi Michael Rosen, a book on three Hasidic rebbes, primarily Rabbi Simchah Bunim of Przysucha (Peshiskha), but also his rebbe, the Yehudi (“the Jew,” Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Peshiskha) and his disciple and successor, the Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk). I’ve read it several times before; with its emphasis on authenticity, individuality, spiritual freedom, personal growth and the balancing of prayer and Torah study, I find the form of Judaism it describes engaging and meaningful, and wonder where I could find it in the present (the rabbis lived in the nineteenth century).

Every so often I explore Hasidism, and the problem (or one of them, but this is the main one with these thinkers) is the focus on continual joy. It’s not quite the same as toxic positivity, but it’s not always easy to distinguish it. Rabbi Rosen writes, “In the world of Przysucha, joy is not some sort of palliative or ‘feel-good factor.’ Real happiness comes from being connected to the Divine, believing that there is an umbilical cord between humanity and God that cannot be severed.”

I feel I would like to experience real joy in life itself (not in objects or achievements), but it is hard to struggle through the anhedonia and alexithymia that I still feel even though I am no longer depressed. Moreover, this religious joy is, as Rabbi Rosen writes, rooted in feeling an unbreakable connection to God. I worry that my connection is not unbreakable, and that I have broken it, or at least strained it. Rabbi Rosen implies the connection is unbreakable in everyone, but it is difficult to think that Hitler or Stalin had a connection to God. The traditional Jewish response would be to say that Jews at least have an unbreakable connection to God, but the Talmud challenges this too. If someone can lose their connection to God, then I will still worry about losing my connection.

I worry about this less often now I am not depressed and my religious OCD is more under control. Still, I wish I could feel real connection. I would like to talk to Rabbi Rosen about it, but he died soon after the book was published.

Ironically, reading this passage and having these reflections seems to have brought my mood down, although the fact that E is only here for one more full day probably also contributed.

Open Endings

I’m still having a really wonderful time with E, but I’m still not sure I want to blog any of it. It just feels too personal. Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about a positive trend I’ve seen recently in Jewish websites.

I just read this article on frum (religious Jewish) website Aish.com about the author’s ongoing struggle with an eating disorder. It made me think of this ongoing series of articles on Chabad.org written by an anonymous Chabad rabbi whose daughter is struggling with ongoing mental health and addiction issues. What I think is so important about posts like these on Jewish sites is not just that they talk about mental health issues that were previously swept under the carpet in the frum community, but that they are open-ended. They don’t say “I had a mental health issue, but God and Torah helped me through it” as I think some previous articles on those sites said; rather, they show the mental health issue as something ongoing and with no clear end in sight.

I can see why the “Judaism got me through it” articles are written, partly because frum sites want to promote Judaism by showing it helping people and partly because people with mental health issues want to see that other people who struggled have got through their issues. I don’t want to deny people that reassurance. However, the open-ended stories are important too, to show that when we experience mental illness or addiction, we do not know how or when or if it will end or whether the outcome will be positive. We need to recognise and validate those feelings of uncertainty too, as when Leah bat Chana concludes her article by stating: “I’m sure God gave me this challenge for a reason… But when it is 10:30 at night and my husband reaches for my hand on the walk home, I just wish I could fully be present with him instead of ruminating on every kugel square, side dish, and lemon tart I wish I had left on the serving tray.” It’s really brave to write those open-ended stories in a community that sometimes demands happy endings and pat morals.

The Bureaucracy Carousel

While I was in the Tower of London yesterday, I got a phone call from the Jobcentre saying they needed to speak to me. I didn’t want to speak there, obviously, so arranged to speak this morning, as E was working this morning. Unfortunately, I crashed last night/this morning and was still in pyjamas when they phoned.

Apparently I should have spoken to them when I applied for benefits last year, but they didn’t arrange that meeting, I assume because of COVID. Today they talked me through various things. Apparently the Benefits Office, which I had written to about my change in work status (starting working for J), isn’t the same as the Jobcentre. I think I should have written to both. Bureaucracy, etc. The takeaways, which didn’t surprise me, are that I should have told them about my job (like I said, I told the Benefits Office, but not the Jobcentre) and I should have told them about my diagnosis change. I think either could lead to them stopping my benefits. I didn’t want to say, “I’m not depressed” as in the past I’ve had months of remission and then a relapse just when I think I’m back to ‘normal,’ but obviously they want to stop my benefits as soon as I feel better. I can’t lie directly, so sort of waffled about being less depressed, but struggling in the workplace with my autism symptoms, which is true, but I don’t know if they’ll allow benefits for autism; they will almost certainly want a new letter from my GP. I have a meeting in person tomorrow, which I didn’t really want to do while E is here, but I didn’t feel I had much choice. So the bureaucracy carousel goes round. I won’t be surprised if they stop my benefits, and it’s not such an issue while I’m working for J, but I hope they don’t make me pay back the last few months’ benefits.

Speaking of the GP and bureaucracy, no sooner had I got off the phone to the benefits office than the GP’s secretary phoned about my referral for autism-adjusted CBT. She said that the GP does not know how to apply directly to the CCG for funding for my treatment and wants a letter from the hospital telling him what he should do. So, more delay and more phone calls while I try to get a letter from the hospital. Round and round the carousel goes…

It was a pain having to deal with this with E here, but fortunately she had a work meeting this morning, so we would not have been doing anything together anyway. I’m not going to blog everything we’ve done together, but over the last few days we’ve visited quite a few bookshops, new and second-hand, and have ended up with less money, but more books. I bought two James Bond books (You Only Live Twice and Octopussy and The Living Daylights), a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery (Gaudy Night) and a Jeeves and Wooster book (Pigs Have Wings), all second hand. I picked up a free copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from the local book swap box too; perhaps surprisingly, I’ve never read or seen any of the Harry Potter books/films. A couple of books I ordered about sex and pornography addiction for research for my novel arrived recently too, so my attempt to keep the ‘to read’ pile to a manageable length has been set back a bit. E and my parents are getting on well and tonight she met my sister and brother-in-law, so that at least is a success.

Quoth the Raven

E has been here since yesterday morning. We’re having fun. I haven’t got the time or energy to blog everything that happened, and part of me is inclined to keep it between us anyway. But something happened today that I had to share.

We were at the Tower of London. I’ve been loads of times, but E had never been, although she’s spent a lot of time in England. If you go to the Tower, there are a lot of ravens. They keep them there because there’s a legend that I think goes back to the time of Charles II in the seventeenth century that if the ravens leave the Tower, then England will fall. I’m not sure if they have their wings clipped, but certainly they don’t really fly. I think they can fly a little bit, but mostly they hop around on their feet (talons).

I was sitting outside on a bench eating one of the home-cooked biscuits my Mum insisted I take (Jewish Mother Syndrome…) when a huge raven came up in front of me and started staring at me. It was about a foot from beak to tail and eight or nine inches tall. It was staring at me in a way that made me very uncomfortable (bear in mind that ravens are carrion birds; in the wild, they eat dead bodies, among other things). I think it probably wanted my biscuit, so I swallowed the last bite and got up from the bench and slowly moved a bit away, hoping it would lose interest. It sort of did, because it became fascinated with my rucksack which I had left where it was on the ground in front of where I was sitting.

I don’t know if it could smell the remains of our lunch inside, but it kept poking the bag with its beak and dragging it about. E thought it even had a go at opening the zips with its beak. (Ravens are very clever birds – see this article from National Geographic.) By this stage, there were quite a few people watching the raven trying to open my bag. Fortunately, it didn’t do it and after a couple of minutes it lost interest and I quickly snatched the bag away before it changed its mind. But it was a weird and slightly scary couple of minutes.

Otherwise, the Tower was empty, with no queue for the Crown Jewels at all. I guess tourists are still staying away. There’s even an advertising campaign at the moment advising people to visit the Tower now while it’s empty.

Commonplace: Spiritual Freedom

No full post tonight, but a commonplace book note to myself:

“The most profound aspect of the Kotsker [sic] Rebbe’s path was a striving for spiritual freedom. Spiritual freedom means: flattering no one, neither oneself nor the world; not being subservient to anyone, neither to the self nor to society.” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted in Rabbi Michael Rosen, The Quest for Authenticity: The Thought of Reb Simhah Bunim p.166

I need to remember that more often.

Opening Up

Today was a dull day at work. I went to the bank, which was about the most exciting bit. On the Tube, I finished reading both The Righteous Mind and Faith Shattered and Restored. I probably won’t read much over the next week and a half, with E here, so I was glad to finish them. I re-read the essay My Faith: Faith in a Postmodern World in Faith Shattered and Restored and I struggled to see why it had made such an impression on me when I first read it a month or so ago, as it left me more with questions than answers about how to live a life of self-acceptance and moral creativity. Strange. Maybe it just chimed with things I was thinking when I first read it about trying to live more in the moment, especially religiously.

J ask what I’m going to be doing on my week and a half off work, so I told him about E. He asked some questions including about where she will be staying (with us, which is not something I really wanted to advertise to frum people even if she will be in the spare bedroom), how long we’ve been going out (either three years or six months, depending on how you count the on/off nature) and whether we met online (yes, but not on a dating site, but via my blog). It was the first time I’ve told someone from my shul (synagogue) community about E. It went reasonably well. J is probably towards the more modern end of the shul spectrum (even if he doesn’t have a TV). People do date long-distance in the frum community, but I think they try to move to marriage faster than E and I are likely to be able to do. The whole idea of being in a ‘relationship’ is a bit un-frum (unreligious). People in the frum world date. If they connect, they get married pretty quickly; if they don’t, they break up quickly.

It only hit me later that it’s the first time I’ve really told a work colleague anything very personal about my private life, aside from stuff about depression, anxiety and autism that I felt I had to tell them to explain my behaviour and struggles. It felt a bit weird, but OK, better than I expected.

I’m going to get an early night as I have to be up early to meet E at the airport! I’m not sure that I’m going to blog much over the next week and a half.

Stress, and Political Narratives

I haven’t posted for a couple of days as not much happened. I’m trying to reduce my blogging. I started this blog as a mental health blog, and it became an autism blog. I feel that, as my mental health has improved (although it’s not perfect) and I’m getting more used to my autism diagnosis and what autistic life means for me, there is less to say, albeit with the caveat that whenever I’ve spoken about blogging less in the past, something has happened to push me back towards it.

Certainly today was a bit of a mental health-straining day. I woke up just before 7.00am. I lay in bed wondering whether I should get up, as I’m trying to force myself to get up if I wake up early (not with much success so far). Then I started thinking about E’s trip to the UK and got into a complete panic about whether we had booked the right COVID tests for her. It took me half an hour of searching online to confirm that we had booked the right tests. By that stage, I thought I should stay up. I had breakfast, but went back to bed afterwards, probably because I was still overwhelmed with anxiety that I had not discharged. Inevitably, I fell asleep again and woke up late. Then when I was davening (praying), I had intrusive OCD-type thoughts, albeit not with OCD levels of anxiety, but still some anxiety. I hope I’ll feel better once E is actually here safely.

At lunch time one of the circuit breakers went and kept switching off whenever we reset it, but we couldn’t see why. Then, a few hours later, we found a leak in the garage, which has probably got into the electrics somewhere. As a result, we’re going to have a plumber and an electrician here later in the week, which is not ideal consider E is staying with us, but there isn’t much we can do about it.

Other than that, things were pretty good. I gave my bedroom a thorough dust before E comes to stay, I did some Torah study and went for a run. I got an exercise headache again, but I did have the best pace I’d measured since May.

***

I’ve nearly finished The Righteous Mind. Jonathan Haidt argues that, “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor. Everyone loves a good story; every culture bathes its children in stories.” He quotes the psychologist Dan McAdams that people create “life narratives” to understand their lives. The narratives may not be objectively true, or at least not entirely, but that isn’t really the point. The point is to shape an understanding of the self and the world. Haidt brings this to explain why people who are predisposed to one sort of political worldview by genes or upbringing (yes, our political views are partly genetic, he argues) can end up with a very different worldview in the end, influenced by the narrative they create to explain their world.

This made a lot of sense to me, and helped me to understand the way my political views have evolved over time, particularly the way I started somewhat left-of-centre (probably in part because of my family and friends), but increasingly felt that “people like me” were not welcome on the left and drifted rightwards, even though I don’t strongly identify with all conservative ideas and especially conservative attitudes and parties, including on Haidt’s multi-polar six ‘flavour’ model of morality.

On a non-political level, it underlined to me that my improved mood in the last eight months or so is at least partly from having my autism diagnosis, which enabled me to create a new narrative about myself, one where I no longer perceive myself as a person repeatedly failing at simple tasks for no obvious reason, but as an autistic person doing my best with tasks that are not always suited for me. I think that more than anything has stopped me drifting back into depression (well, that and E).

That said, I think Haidt perhaps focuses a little too much on politics as ideology or values rather than pragmatic factors. I feel strongly about caring for other people (which Haidt sees as something liberals feel more than conservatives, although he says conservatives do feel it), it’s just that my experience of the NHS and the benefits system led me to believe that the state is often inefficient and even counter-productive when it tries to help people.

***

Ashley was asking how people chose their blog names and I thought some people here might like to see what I responded (slightly amended from what I posted there):

“Vision of the Night” is a quote from Job. I wanted to write a Jewish mental health blog (having blogged about mental health in a not very Jewish way previously) and was looking for something biblical and somewhat depressed-sounding, but not taken by other people. This was what I ended up with.

I find thinking of titles generally hard and titles for blogs more so (I mean the title of the blog, not the particular post). My most obscure blog title was one of my Doctor Who blogs, which was called “From Lime Grove to Beyond the Sun” which is a very obscure Doctor Who reference, Lime Grove Studios being where the earliest episodes of Doctor Who were filmed, and Beyond the Sun being an abandoned title for the story fans refer to as The Daleks. I think it sounds quite good as a title.

In case that wasn’t crazy enough, it had a subtitle for a while, “The blog for fans of Cliff, Lola, Biddy and the older man with a character twist” (the idea was I would change the subtitle periodically to something funny). Doctor Who doesn’t feature anyone called Cliff, Lola or Biddy. They were suggestions for characters in the early proposals and story guides from before the series was filmed; by the time of transmission, they had become Ian, Barbara, Susan as well as the Doctor (older man with character twist). I think I was trying to reach out to the cognoscenti, but it didn’t really work. I see it as very much part of my mindset of trying to write stuff that could have been in Doctor Who Magazine in the late nineties rather than what was actually going on in fandom at the time when the series had been revived and had suddenly become popular with people who were only vaguely aware that it had a history before 2005, let alone shown the obsessive background knowledge developed by fans who were around for the wilderness years when it wasn’t on TV.

The Hive Switch

I’m still reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. I had a bit of a paradigm shift reading it, which I think ties in to one I had a while back reading Rabbi Shagar. Haidt talks about people being 90% chimpanzee, 10% bee — not in a literal, biological sense, but that most of the time we are individuals who compete against each other (chimpanzee), but occasionally we can form a group that cooperates to compete against other groups (a bee hive). The competition doesn’t have to be violent, just in the evolutionary sense that we compete for resources.

Haidt talks about “The Hive Switch,” a metaphorical switch in our brains that can shift us rapidly from individual mode to group mode. Examples of things that can flick that switch include: ecstatic religious dancing (once common in every society except the individualist West); raves (the contemporary Western substitute); being in nature (I think similar what Freud termed the Oceanic Emotion, the awe on seeing nature); group singing; marching in formation with others; going to a political rally or protest; and taking hallucinogenic drugs. These things promote group identification, enhanced empathy for group insiders[1], improved morale, improved cooperation and increased willingness to die for comrades [2]. They are also connected with a religious sense of connection to the Infinite and intense love for everything.

(Incidentally, you can see here that the only contemporary Jewish movement really plugging into this is Hasidism, which has very much been about group singing, ecstatic dancing and alcohol (no hallucinogenic mushrooms in Poland or the Ukraine) since its origins in the eighteenth century, very much the return of the Jewish repressed, although even Yeshivish or Modern Orthodox weddings can get a bit like this.)

Reading this argument, I was struck by seeing two of my major struggles, as recorded in this blog, connected: my struggles to connect emotionally with God and my struggles to connect with other people. You can even locate the two at once in the ecstatic dancing in shul (synagogue) on Simchat Torah. I assumed that both problems were unrelated. My social struggles and anxiety often occur within the Jewish community, but I assumed that was simply because that is my main social environment. But Haidt suggests (although he doesn’t explicitly state it, so I could be wrong) that having experiential encounters with God/the Divine/the Infinite/whatever you want to call it is the same sort of thing as feeling accepted as part a group of people.

Now, I have had that Hive Switch flipped at times, but generally in ways that are hard to replicate. Paradoxically, I had it sometimes when in a period of suicidal depression, where I sort of got overwhelmed with how awful the world seemed and emotionally exhausted by my thoughts and feelings (and sometimes physically exhausted by anxious pacing or walking) then felt an intense feeling of God’s presence. One year I managed to get into Simchat Torah and really enjoyed the dancing (I’ve never worked out how I did that or how to replicate it). I have had it a bit with being in nature and maybe a tiny bit at pro-Israel rallies, although I usually feel out of place at any kind of political event, even if I agree with the platform. So it is possible to flip my Hive Switch, just very difficult. Incidentally, Haidt says the switch is an analogue slide switch rather than a binary on/off switch, meaning it’s possible to be a bit groupish and a bit individual; it’s not one or the other at a given time.

So this makes me wonder if autistic people, the mentally ill or maybe even all introverts have difficulty moving this switch along. I know that when my switch gets pushed, it sometimes encounters resistance. When I’m somewhere where people are bonding over shared political, religious or cultural views, a voice starts up in my head with opposing views (an extreme version of Rabbi Lord Sacks’ idea that the Jews are the question mark in the margin of the record of the conversation of mankind). I probably have some resistance to God too, which is probably a strange thing for a religious person to say, inasmuch as I’m resistant to miracle stories and proofs of God’s existence; for me, God has to exist alongside the Abyss, at least in this world.

The focus on awe in nature and very ‘real’ emotions reminded me of the essay My Faith: Faith in a Postmodern World by Rabbi Shagar (Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg), which I read over Sukkot and which had a powerful affect on me. I want to re-read it before I feel I fully understand it, but the main thing I took away from it was the idea of faith being experienced in what Rabbi Shagar terms ‘the Real.’ This is a term from Lacanian psychology, referring to the early stages of infancy, where the baby can not distinguish between different people and objects, but experiences the world as a sense of wholeness, not as separate objects. Not only that, but he doesn’t experience himself as a body or identity, but as “an amalgam of organs, energies, and urges.” Faith is rooted in experiencing the world as the Real and is about acceptance of the self, which is not narcissistic if accompanied by unity with God; or, alternatively, a creative search for meaning of one’s own. (I would have liked greater detail here.)[3]

I had been trying to live more in the moment, without really knowing how to do it. Then, when I read Rabbi Shagar’s essay, I started trying to note down if I felt myself to be living in the moment and experiencing absorption in the Real when doing anything, or if I feel any connection to God (my hypothesis being that if I experience God, then I’m in the Real even if I don’t know it). This is obviously hard to notice, because as soon as I notice it, I am coming out of it. I find it hard to experience it for more than a few moments and it is impossible for me to go into it deliberately. It’s also hard to tell if I’m really in the Real, so to speak, or if I feel I should be in there, or I want to be there, or I expect to be there. The easiest way to get there seems to be prayer or hitbodedut spontaneous prayer/meditation, but the connection only comes intermittently, maybe every few days, and often for no more than a few seconds. It doesn’t come so often with formal Torah study, but does happen sometimes (often on Shabbat evenings), when a creative interpretation of a passage of Torah, Midrash or Talmud suddenly comes to me even without formally studying the texts.

Being in the Real and flipping the Hive Switch seem to go together, although I’m not sure what is cause and what is effect yet. I would like to know how to trigger them both in myself, and whether I’m always going to struggle with that from autism, introversion, mental illness, personality or anything else.

[1] I think Haidt thinks that, contrary to what is often stated, groupishness doesn’t automatically lead to reduced empathy for outsiders, but I haven’t checked.

[2] Haidt’s argument is that soldiers in battle are willing to die primarily for the fellow soldiers in their unit, rather than nebulous ideas about nationalism or political ideology.

[3] Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz said something similar about the Talmudic statement about babies in the womb learning the whole Torah, which he understands as referring to experiencing God as a nurturing, undifferentiated whole.

***

Other than that, it’s been a fairly quiet couple of days. I somehow got up early yesterday and today. I went to bed early yesterday too, but I was very tired at work this morning. I submitted my manuscript (or the first ten pages of it) to another literary agent. It took me two hours to fill in the online submission form, but I guess it’s good experience even if I don’t get accepted. I do worry that the early parts of my novel (the bits agents ask to see) aren’t interesting enough to capture the attention of anyone not predisposed to like it.

I did various bits of chores and Torah study yesterday and today and I had work today. We had an audit of various valuables the organisation owns. If ever I wanted to see a demonstration that autism is not the same as introversion, it was this. J is typically quiet and introverted like me, but he had a long ‘small talk’ conversation with the external auditor, while I hardly said anything to her that wasn’t an answer to a direct question.

Overwhelmed, and Overwhelmed Friend

I woke up drained again today. I had gone to bed early (for me) last night, but I’d done a lot during the day and I overslept and woke up late. I felt overwhelmed for much of day. I feel bad about this, even though I know I wouldn’t if I had a physical illness (actually, given how I behave when I have a migraine, I possibly would feel bad about the effects of physical illness). I just feel I could/should do more despite autistic fatigue or the remnants of depressive fatigue or whatever it is.

I had my flu jab today. I don’t usually get one, but the NHS still seems to consider my Mum as vulnerable and I was offered one as I live with her. It seemed sensible to take it. I shook a bit when I was injected. That happens a lot when I am injected or have a blood test. It’s anxiety, not about needles, but about shaking; fear of shaking ironically triggers shaking. In the past I would breathe deeply to calm myself, but with a mask on that makes things worse if anything. The nurse got a bit worried about me and insisted that I sit in the waiting room for a few minutes. I think she was worried I would faint.

I cooked dinner while trying to listen to a podcast E had been on for her job, but I struggled to multitask and abandoned the podcast after twenty minutes. I struggled during the afternoon and evening with intrusive thoughts about antisemitism (not helped by watching an episode of The Twilight Zone about a former SS officer being put on trial by the ghosts of the people he killed). I don’t know why I sometimes get focused on this and can’t stop thinking about it.

My other main achievement, aside from planning E’s trip here with her over Skype, was writing my devar Torah (Torah thought). I wanted to write something about the balance of universalism and particularism in Judaism, but I couldn’t work out what to say, so I wrote about Sarah’s handmaid Hagar, mostly taken from Erica Brown’s Return: Daily Inspiration for the Days of Awe. It was one of those divrei Torah that I’m less proud of, where I’m taking my ideas from one (credited) source, rather than mixing sources or adding my own ideas.

I decided not to go to volunteering tomorrow, as I feel like I’m still recovering from the Yom Tovim (festivals) and have not made any progress on finding an agent for my novel, which is my main task for tomorrow. I did spend a bit of time planning the second novel, so I guess that’s another achievement. I do still feel a bit overwhelmed. I’m trying to focus on the positives, namely that E will be here next week (God-willing, COVID-permitting) and also on my excitement at writing my second novel, although with all the planning and research I want to do, it will probably be a long time before I sit down to write it.

***

I’ve been emailing a friend who is also on the spectrum who I hadn’t communicated with for a while. She is struggling with her job. She has been working at home because of COVID, but her employers want her to return to the office. She feels that public transport during rush hour is more than she can bear and would have left the job earlier if COVID had not allowed her to work from home. She sounds very overwhelmed in many aspects of her life.

I don’t know what to do about this. I feel I should do something to help, but I don’t know what. Although she is working full-time and I am not, her autism is worse than mine in many ways. She is much more sensitive to noise and crowding and perhaps more rigid in her needs and her ability to find solutions. Also, English is not her first language and I struggle to understand her sometimes. She has already contacted AS Mentoring. I don’t know how I could help her and I’m wary of taking on her troubles and overwhelmed feelings in addition to my own, especially as she is not a close friend. I suppose if I had some idea of what might help her I could see if I could take on some of it, but I’m wary of giving her a blank cheque. But I feel really bad at not helping someone else on the spectrum.

***

If I go into the artists section of iTunes and click on the label for George Harrison, iTunes shows me a photo of John Lennon. I guess, it’s understandable that in 2021 someone working for a massive music related company can’t tell the difference between Harrison and Lennon; it’s not the like The Beatles are the most successful band in history or anything. I like to think it’s the ghost of Lennon trolling from beyond the grave.

Anticlimaxes

My parents’ suspected COVID has turned out to be a heavy cold, fortunately, although I’m still hoping to avoid it. I’m actually not particularly susceptible to colds and viruses, so I’m hopeful. It would not be good if E comes to the UK and I’m too ill to leave the house!

I went to bed early last night as I had had an exercise headache after running and was not feeling 100% even though the pain had subsided. However, I couldn’t sleep. I’m not sure if I couldn’t sleep because I was worrying, or if I just had time to worry because I was lying in bed unable to sleep. I thought I would write down my anxieties and possible plans for dealing with them. I didn’t want to go on the computer in case the light made the insomnia worse, so I wrote it on paper. I tried to write some suggestions to deal with the anxieties too, rather than just rehearse them.

Looking over it today, some of it seems catastrophising. It’s true that the publishing industry leans somewhat progressive/woke, and that few books (fiction or non-fiction) presenting the Orthodox Jewish community (or other conservative religious communities) in a positive light exist. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t find an agent or a publisher for my book, especially as I think the Jewish non-representation issue is as much a problem of supply as demand; there aren’t enough good writers in a community that does not value artistic creation highly. On a practical level, as I am struggling to send query letters to five or ten agents in one go each month, maybe it would be more realistic to send to two agents a week.

I do also worry that the novel I am planning will get me a terrible reputation for writing about sex and pornography use in the frum (religious Jewish) community, but I feel driven to write the novel regardless. A bigger problem is my fear that I won’t be able to pull the whole plot together and created rounded characters, but I have no way of knowing except by trying. I also fear that writing about sex when I’m a thirty-eight year old virgin is not the most sensible thing to do, but I guess I have a unique voice, and writing about pornography addiction is not exactly the same as writing about sex (not that I have experience of addiction either, but I’m researching).

More realistically, I was worried that COVID would disrupt E’s trip here. That’s less likely now my parents’ tests came back negative, but it’s still possible. It’s just something we (= the world) will have to learn to live with.

My biggest worry last night was actually the easiest to resolve today. I was worried about talking to J about mistakes at work, but when I did that today, he seemed laid back about it. On reflection, I think it’s only one or two tasks where I continually make mistakes and J seems to think I will improve with experience.

Other than that, it was an ordinary day at work, but I managed to do about an hour of work on my new novel in the evening! I wanted to plan out the story, but realised I needed to work understanding the characters first. It’s that idea of knowing if I can do it by trying. I have a better idea of character and plot now. I don’t think I’m going to get much time to focus on it in the immediate future, though, with E coming here soon and the fact that I want to spend some serious time finding an agent for my first novel. But I’m glad to have made some progress, as I want to get some kind of an outline written for the novel soon, so I can see if it has potential before I invest too much time in it. I would have liked to have spent even more time on it, but I got too tired.

I probably shouldn’t write too much about my creative process here, for fear of killing it, but it helps me to process things to speak a bit about it.

Ego Depletion

I woke up about 8.40am today, got up to go to the toilet and then tried to stay up, but gave in too easily to tiredness and went back to bed. I finally got up around 12.00pm. I could have done with using an extra two or three hours time today, so I really regretted going back to bed. The problem is that my will power when tired first thing in the morning makes me behave uncharacteristically. Normally I am the type of person who will defer pleasure to focus on necessary, unpleasant tasks, sometimes to the point of discomfort or worse, but when I wake up, I mostly just want to sleep until the last possible moment. If I could work out how to make my sleep more refreshing, maybe this would change, but I am not sure how to do that.

I would have liked to have had more time to write a query letter to an agent, for example. However, the one I found on Friday, who dealt with Jewish-themed fiction, turned out to have retired from agenting to become a school teacher. I’m going to look for agents who deal with general literature, but if I can find one who deals with minority characters or settings, that might be helpful. Although diversity-orientated people tend to see Jews as “white” and not in anyway different to white Christian/atheist people, which is not helpful or realistic (just read my blog), but there you go.

As it is, I did a few chores today, including writing to my GP about my autism-adapted CBT referral. The surgery seems to have no email address, or not one they publicise, so I will have to physically post it through the door. I went for a run and came back with a headache, which further limited what I was able to do. I did about an hour of Torah study, with head aching too much to find much of interest for my devar Torah, and that was about it.

***

My parents both have what we all hope are heavy colds, but they went for COVID tests all the same, just in case. Mum works with vulnerable people, so it’s a reasonable precaution. I couldn’t have a free test, as I don’t have any symptoms, but I’m worried that if my parents do have COVID, I will have to have a test and will test positive despite being asymptomatic, which will disrupt E and my plans for her trip here soon. I guess I should hope that my parents just have colds.

Shabbat with Rav Shagar and Rav Kook

Friday felt like the first “early Friday” of the winter, when sunset, and the start of Shabbat (the Sabbath), are early and Friday is just a rush to get things done. I woke up late, at 10.40am, and jumped out of bed as I was Skyping my rabbi mentor at 11.00am. I don’t usually oversleep that badly if I’ve got an actual commitment (rather than just wanting to get up to get an early start or to daven (pray)). I felt awkward at talking to him before having davened, but I didn’t have time. The conversation was good. He reminded me that we have only just had one ‘normal’ week after all the autumn festivals and that it’s normal to still feel overwhelmed at this time of year, even without the nervous excitement of E visiting soon. He also suggested that I should talk to J about my work mistakes and see if he has any suggestions. Even being able to take a five minute break every hour might help with concentration. J sometimes talks to other people who work in the same building (including his father) who come into our office on pretexts or just to chat, but I generally stay out of the conversations because of autism and social anxiety, as well as feeling I should work, but, as my parents said, I probably do need breaks. I am pretty nervous about the conversation, although it’s unlikely that he hasn’t noticed the number of mistakes I’m making, even if he hasn’t made a big thing out of it.

I decided I would go to shul (synagogue) early after all, contrary to what I said in my last post, as I felt guilty about not helping to set up. However, E had a last minute problem and I prioritised helping her and so didn’t make it to shul early after all. I still felt overwhelmed by all the table thumping and clapping during Kabbalat Shabbat (part of Friday evening prayers). I wondered if it has got louder in the last year or if I just can’t cope at the moment. Autistic tolerance for noise can vary a lot based on factors like tiredness and general well-being. My parents pointed out that the layout of the room has changed twice in the last year and a bit, first when it was rearranged to socially distance everyone after the first lockdown and then when a third of the room was walled off by the school who own the building, so that may have changed the acoustics somewhat and made them more overwhelming.

I struggled to sleep again. I’m not sure why, and on Fridays it certainly isn’t screen time before bed. I wonder if I do need a new mattress. I read more of The Righteous Mind, and, when non-fiction got too heavy for me, half a Doctor Who graphic novel. I did eventually fall asleep, I think around 3.00am.

I didn’t go to shul today, morning or afternoon. I do feel that I’m drifting away from it and I don’t know what to do about it. I have so much to focus on at the moment and I’m trying just to narrow it down to a couple of things, otherwise it’s not achievable, and shul doesn’t seem urgent or important enough right now. I slept late in the morning and napped in the afternoon, so I’ll probably struggle to sleep tonight too.

***

I was reading Faith Shattered and Restored: Judaism in the Postmodern Age by Rabbi Shagar (Shimon Gershon Rosenberg) over Shabbat and found a couple of interesting quotes.

One was in the essay Love, Romance and Covenant:

The romantic metaphor for intimacy is one of self-discovery. But the self cannot be grasped, and neither can the Other, the object of love. At best, the self will briefly flicker into view, always through its attributes, which may bear the imprint of the other’s uniqueness. Like the hidden God who reveals Himself only through His actions — “You cannot see My face, for man shall not see Me and live” (Ex. 33:20) — so too the self. The very attempt to grasp something obstructs intimacy. Paradoxically, only through distraction can the self be discovered. (p. 141)

This made me think less about romantic relationships and more about my search for a sense of self, and for a sense of God. It suggests I can’t find either directly, only grasp them briefly, while doing something else, and probably through things I say or do or God says or does rather than from seeing myself or God directly. This connects with other thoughts I’ve been having recently based on my reading of Rabbi Shagar that I’m not ready to share here yet, but connected with the idea of finding God ‘in passing.’

The other is a passage, actually a quotation from Rav Kook, in the essay Mysticism, Postmodernism and the New Age which needs some introduction. The “Shattering of the Vessels” is the kabbalistic (Jewish mystical) creation myth. It differs somewhat from that in Bereshit (Genesis) (I think the Shattering of the Vessels is thought to have occurred before creation as described in Bereshit). According to this, God poured His “light” into “vessels” that were not strong enough to contain it, shattering and sending sparks across the now-created universe. The myth functions in part as an explanation of the problem of evil: how can evil exist in a universe created by a benevolent God? In answer, it suggests that evil was a by-product of the shattering of the vessels. The universe is broken and in need of repair. However, this provokes another question: why did God not make the vessels stronger to begin with? This is where Rav Kook begins:

Why does the shattering of the vessels occur? For, as the Godhead provides according to Its capacity, while the recipient is limited, the benefit would be limited as well. That is why He provides influence without limit, according to His aspect… even thought the created recipient cannot receive it without shattering completely, and then rebuilding himself through his desire to return to his unbounded source… And thus the created can make himself and attain the perfection of a creator, and transcend the limitations of the created. (Orot HaKodesh, quoted in Rabbi Shagar p. 127)

Rav Kook takes this in a mystical way and Rav Shagar uses it as part of an argument about postmodernism, but I want to use it in a psychological way.

We (those of us with mental health issues or trauma) are like the broken vessels. Previously, we were formed (in childhood) by nature and nurture, our DNA and childhood experiences. As we grew, we were overwhelmed by something we could not contain (trauma or mental illness triggers), like vessels shattering from the Infinite Light. However, the breakage is not irreparable. The process of therapy and recovery allows us to actively rebuild ourselves, instead of passively accepting our identities. In this way, we become (self-)creators and not passive creations.

“It’s all about telling stories. Nothing else matters.”

“Move fast and break things” was Mark Zuckerberg’s motto. Today I tried to move slowly and not mess stuff up. I went slowly over my work and checked it all slowly when I finished it. Even so, I made mistakes. One might have been because J didn’t tell me what to do properly, or I didn’t take it all in. The other was just absent-mindedness. Or perhaps concentrating too hard: I was so focused on getting one thing right, that I got something else wrong. I find there is so much to keep in mind at once when flipping between different spreadsheets and databases. It didn’t help that I struggled to sleep again last night. I can’t get by on four hours and several cups of coffee. I don’t have that ability to survive on low sleep the way some people do. It doesn’t help that I don’t know why I can’t sleep, although my Mum has been saying for a while that I should switch my mattress with one that, while as old as mine, hasn’t been used nearly as much. (My mattress is something like twenty years old.)

Sometimes I feel like I’m in the wrong job, although I don’t know what the right one would look like and I don’t want to give up the working hours that allow me time to write and the supportive, easy-going boss. J hasn’t said much in the way of rebuke for my mistakes, but he hasn’t made my contract permanent either, so I feel stuck in limbo.

Recently there has also been some office politics of the “X hates Y and comes to Z to complain about her”-type, which brings me down further. I don’t thrive on conflict.

I had a recruitment agent contact me to ask if I’m looking for a job. I am, inasmuch as I still glance at adverts every day. And I’m not, inasmuch as I have totally lost confidence in my ability to successfully do things in return for money. I feel that I mess stuff up so much that I have to do things for free, either because they’re voluntary or because they’re not monetary transactions (being a son and a boyfriend).

Reading The Righteous Mind made me feel I’m not “autistic enough” today too. Apparently if I like reading fiction over non-fiction, that makes me empathetic and less likely to be autistic. I just like the stories. I don’t think Jonathan Haidt meant it as an either/or thing, just to show tendencies on the spectrum, but reading it probably didn’t help my mood today. Haidt seems to be basing himself on Simon Baron-Cohen’s research, and Baron-Cohen is somewhat notorious in the autistic community for having a view of autism that many autistic people feel is limited and overly-focused on the idea of autistic people having “extreme male brains.” Many high functioning autistic people feel that they are more able to feel empathy than is presumed. We can feel emotional empathy, sharing other people’s moods; we struggle with cognitive empathy, predicting other people’s thoughts.

Looking back over the last paragraph, “I just like the stories” reminds me of something late 1970s Doctor Who producer Graham Williams said in an interview about, “It’s all about telling stories. Nothing else matters.” That’s really what is keeping me going (in terms of work thoughts, rather than knowing that E and my family care about me), the thought that I might one day write stories professionally. As to whether I have the skill to do it, or the skill to get published [1] — I go back and forth on that. It seems so daunting, just thinking about sending out more query letters, and somehow it drifts down the priority list.

***

My shul (synagogue) wants people to volunteer to help set up before Shabbat (the Sabbath) and tidy up afterwards. The teenage boys who usually do it can’t do it this week. I feel torn. I used to help with things like this, but on days like today I feel like I’m struggling just to keep my head above water. I also feel like I have ‘autistic help disorder’ — with the best will in the world, unless someone gives me a specific task, I just sort of mill around not being sure what to do and getting in the way (Amanda Harrington described this as typical Asperger’s behaviour, although the name is my own). I don’t feel comfortable enough in shul to say, “Please give me a specific task.” I wouldn’t even know who to ask.

***

Looking at birthday cards on the Card Factory website, it astonishes me how unfunny most of the “funny” ones are. The best ones are feeble puns; the worst just insult the recipient. And that’s without the sexual “humour” cards available in their high street shops. There’s a lot of cards about getting blind drunk, as if that’s the only way people celebrate. Who buys these things? No wonder the trend seems to be to make your own card from photos pasted onto a template.

***

[1] The skill to get published is definitely different to the skill to write. I suspect some good writers do not know how to get published, while some mediocre ones do. At the moment, I’m not sure if I have either skill.

Back to the NHS

I struggled to sleep again last night. I think I need to be strict about no screens after 10.30pm, except for texting E good night, but I’m not sure how much that would actually help, as I sometimes struggle to sleep on Friday night, when I haven’t been on screens for hours.

I waited for an hour at the doctor. I was about to ask the receptionist if I had been forgotten, when I got a text saying I had missed my appointment! I showed that to the receptionist who said she had checked me in when I arrived. I don’t know what happened, but somehow the doctor didn’t know that I was sitting in the waiting room. I probably have confirmation bias about the NHS being useless, but sometimes it’s hard not to feel it. Atypically for me, I didn’t have anything to read, as I’ve noticed lately I don’t read in waiting rooms any more, as I seem to have too much social anxiety. I’m not sure why this has suddenly come about. It’s possibly partly fear of the meeting itself and partly fear of being caught in the middle of reading something and creating some kind of social faux pas through carrying on reading.

When I saw the doctor, she couldn’t see anything wrong with my ears (which are still ringing and a little muffled), except my eardrums were “cloudy” (I think that was the word she used). She seemed pretty stuck for solutions. She said to do “steam inhalation” — basically breathe in steam from boiling water for five to ten minutes twice a day for two weeks and see if that clears the Eustachian tubes, which might be congested. (I think Eustachian Tubes sounds like a character from Victorian literature, probably an obese parson.)

The doctor hadn’t spoken to anyone about my autism-adapted CBT referral either. She seemed to be a relatively new and junior doctor, so I can see she didn’t want to do anything without knowing all the case history. Still, it’s frustrating. Technically the practice doesn’t let patients have a specific doctor that they always see, but I’ve usually tried to get one particular doctor if I can and he handled the previous round of discussion about the autism-adapted CBT, so Dad suggested writing to him. I don’t have an email address, but I could email the practice and mark it for his attention. Or even write an old-fashioned letter, address it to him and stick it in the letterbox. It’s better than just waiting and casting myself on the tender mercies of NHS bureaucracy again.

Other than that, it’s been a low-key day. I did some more work on my devar Torah and a couple of chores, notably investigating the UK and USA travel and testing requirements for E. I had therapy too, which was good, but I don’t want to say much about it here. Maybe I’ll say more about it tomorrow; I need to process a bit for now.

OK, going to watch Doctor Who and then inhale some steam…

“Real” Results

I went to bed early and slept for about fourteen hours (this was after only sleeping for about four hours the previous night). I woke feeling really refreshed in a way that I rarely am, but I had lost half the day. Granted, I was catching up from having abnormally low sleep the night before, but it does seem to suggest I need a lot more sleep than most people. I’m not sure how to get that sleep in a healthy way. Going to bed earlier would be a good start, of course, but when I sleep late, the temptation is to stay up late catching up with things I should have done in the day (as today).

I phoned the doctor’s surgery, to try to get an appointment about the ringing in my ears and my autism-adapted CBT referral. I had a phone appointment with a doctor (not one I’ve seen previously and I think new to the practice) a while later. She wants to see my ears, so I’m going for an in-person appointment tomorrow, which seems weird now as it’s so long since I’ve had a medical appointment in person. The doctor wasn’t sure what to do about my autism CBT referral and said she would talk to her colleagues. I hope she manages to do that before my appointment tomorrow morning. I have worries about the NHS bureaucracy doing its stuff and the GPs and the hospital each insisting that the other should write the referral and nothing happening while I run between them, trying to get one of them to do something.

I spent some time reading Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agents. It tried too hard to be funny and didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know about agents and query letters. I was hoping for help on writing the latter to attract the attention of the former. However, the book is mostly a list of literary agents, so might prove its worth yet, if I write to some of those and one takes my manuscript. ‘If’ is a big word. Anyway, I didn’t actually submit to any agents because I used my writing-related time reading this book. I feel a bit disappointed, as I wanted to send query letters to five agents today. Jeff Herman’s suggested sending to ten agents a month, so I feel I can catch up later in October.

I went for a walk. It was already getting dark at 6pm; a part of my brain thinks it is still August and not getting dark until closer to 9pm. It didn’t register that the nights were getting longer when I spent a month focused on Yom Tov (Jewish festivals). It didn’t help that I had got up very late so the world went into night mode before my brain was ready to do so.

Other than that I did a few other things: wrote most of my devar Torah (which went in a somewhat different direction to where I intended), cooked dinner and Skyped E. I did do quite a bit today, but I feel a little frustrated as (a) I could have done more if I had got up earlier and (b) the doctor’s appointment was left unresolved, I didn’t make much tangible progress with sending out more novel query letters, and my devar Torah isn’t quite finished, so it feels like nothing I did today led to a real result (yet), except, I suppose, for Skyping E, which doesn’t really have an ‘outcome’ as such, and cooking dinner, which did have a good result (macaroni cheese), but which only took twenty minutes or so, as if I feel it would only be worthwhile if I spent longer doing it. I guess I do pressure myself not just to do things, but to get very particular results from doing them.

Grief and Love

I didn’t post yesterday because I was busy, but wasn’t having any particularly interesting, troubling or autistic-ey thoughts. I achieved quite a bit, but the sudden decision to go for a late afternoon run left me with an exercise headache and nausea for much of the evening. As a result, I went to bed late and I couldn’t sleep when I got there. I’m not sure why I seem to be struggling more with insomnia lately, albeit not to a huge extent.

At work today I was still making mistakes. Well, technically I made the mistakes previously and J told me about them today; hopefully I didn’t make any today, but it’s likely that I did. It’s like I can concentrate enough to do 80% of a task, but not 100%, and the bits I forget vary each time. It’s not a case of just reminding myself “Do X” because sometimes I remember X, but forget Y. I have to have five or six spreadsheets and databases open at once for some tasks, going from one to the other. I know what to do, but the multitasking aspect (not something autistic people are good at) leaves me confused and I forget what I came to a spreadsheet for and do the wrong thing, which then makes me forget the thing I should have done after the right thing. It’s an executive function issue. I don’t think I’ve fully persuaded my father that this is an autistic thing, so I definitely don’t feel able to tell J. Besides, if I can’t do this and I can’t do the Very Scary Task, it begins to look like I can’t do this job at all. My best answer for now is, instead of, or as well as, checking as I go along, wait until the end and go over the whole task from scratch, piece by piece, spreadsheet cell by spreadsheet cell. That would make it take much longer, but if it’s more accurate, it might be worth it.

This kind of concentration and multitasking issue makes me worried about learning to drive too, although I told E I would at least try to take some lessons at some point soon(ish). I should say I have high, and possibly irrational, anxiety of being in an accident and killing someone (being killed myself doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much).

By the afternoon I was feeling pretty overwhelmed again and near tears at one point. I’m not sure why. It’s not like J got angry at me, although he probably would have been justified in doing so. I just don’t like feeling incompetent, plus the more incompetent I feel, the less confident I feel that I will ever be able to earn enough money to help support a family or have the levels of emotional and practical competence needed to have children.

One thing I have been trying to do lately at work is to write down J’s instructions instead of trying to remember them. I think that is helpful. But if anyone has any tips or ideas for improving concentration and memory in the workplace or adjustments that might help, I’d be glad to hear them.

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JYP has been writing about grief lately (latest post in the series here). It prompted some thoughts in me. I’m writing here because what I want to say seems too distant from the topic of her posts and I don’t want to take over the comments with my feelings or make it all about me.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really experienced grief for someone dying. I cried when my paternal grandmother died, the first time someone close to me had died, but I don’t think I did when any of my other grandparents died. Maybe when my maternal grandfather died, I’m not sure. When my paternal grandmother died, people told me not to bottle things up, but I didn’t have anything to say. I did tend to fall into episodes of depression or autistic burnout (it’s not always clear which in retrospect, and it could be both) after the deaths of grandparents, and I fell into a very deep depressive episode a few weeks after the death of my maternal grandfather, which involved a lot of crying for no apparent reason. Maybe it was just a delayed response.

I find it hard to put my feelings about my grandparents into words and I haven’t really spoken much about them in therapy. When my paternal grandfather died, the psychiatrist I was seeing rather brutally told me that I wasn’t close to him, because we didn’t have deep personal conversations. On that criterion, I’m not really close to anyone except my parents and E, and even those have only been in recent years (I share more with my parents now than I did as a teenager).

I wonder sometimes what I feel for my parents and my sister and how I would cope without them, not just in the practical sense (I do need a lot of help), but emotionally. It’s as hard for me to articulate love as it is grief. I instinctively feel that I would feel something if they weren’t there, but it’s hard to know what, or how I would cope. I worry that I would either shrug bereavement off unfeelingly or, conversely, get stuck in it for years.

A lot of this is probably due to alexithymia, the inability to feel and understand my own emotions. (I have never been ‘officially’ diagnosed with this, but one therapist did point out that I struggle with this even if she didn’t use the term.) A lot of the time I don’t know what I feel about things, even very broad things like if I’m happy or sad. It’s part of the reason I write here, to try to process my feelings better, or at least more consciously. It’s hard to know what I feel about my parents or my sister. I can see that there would be a hole in my life without them, but it’s hard to work out what I feel, let alone put it into words. I think this is a common autistic issue, but I’m not sure how other people deal with it. Perhaps some of them don’t care (I’ve met some autistic people who seem to be pretty uninterested in others.)

When I was with PIMOJ, I didn’t feel much of a ‘spark.’ I felt that I was finally experiencing a mature relationship without “crushing,” but the reality was that I didn’t feel much towards her, she just seemed a good match on paper. With E, I feel positive feelings when we Skype or even when we text, but it’s hard to analyse or quantify those feelings. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe they don’t need to be analysed. It’s hard not to, though, as I analyse everything (overthinking, you may have noticed). It’s kind of a calm feeling that I have with E, whereas my crushes were anxious feelings, constantly trying to work out if they liked me or how I could make myself more likeable/fanciable. However, it’s not too calm, as happened with PIMOJ, where I had to constantly remind myself why I liked her. There’s passion and desire with E, and playfulness, which is very rare for me.

OK, I’m going to stop now, as I’ve wandered very far from grief and into areas that are really between me and E and not the whole internet.

Alexander the Great and Me

I’m still feeling overwhelmed. I had hoped for a quiet Shabbat (Sabbath) and one where I wouldn’t need/want to blog much afterwards, so I could use the Saturday evening for chores, writing or relaxation. I did have a fairly quiet Shabbat, but it brought up a lot of thoughts, not all of which I’m recording here.

I went to shul (synagogue) on Friday night, but not today. I felt in shul that I’m drifting away from the community. I stopped going to shul so much when I moved from my old community in 2016, partly because of social anxiety about attending a new shul and then because I changed jobs in 2017 and was working longer hours. By the time that job finished in 2018, I was back in depression for a while. COVID has pushed me further from regular attendance. I’m out of the habit, and I no longer feel the connection to my community that I once felt.

In a way this is good, as I can’t see E feeling comfortable in my current community. I think E would prefer a United Synagogue community. The problem is, I would not feel fully comfortable. Nothing like the US (United Synagogue) really exists in the USA or Israel. It’s a type of community where the official hashkafah (worldview) is Modern Orthodox, but many of the rabbis are Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), while most congregants are not particularly religious and don’t keep Shabbat or kashrut (the dietary laws), to the extent that I would not feel comfortable eating at their houses. It leads to a weird type of community where a core of congregants can be very religiously knowledgeable and involved, while most aren’t interested at all and see shul as a social or traditional thing more than a religious one. In the past, I’ve been one of those very knowledgeable and involved people. I guess it gave me a role, but I didn’t have many friends, although that was at least partly because there were so few people my age in that community. I wanted to be in a frummer (more religious) community, one where people cared about davening (prayer) and Torah study as my previous shul struggled to get a weekday minyan (prayer quorum) and had few shiurim (religious classes). In reality I feel (perhaps not accurately) that I’ve struggled to be accepted in a frummer community, so maybe I would be better in a US shul. However, the local US shul (my parents’ one) is not right for me, too large and impersonal and too many people who know my parents and think of me as my parents’ son rather than a person in my own right.

After shul was dinner. I spent some time after dinner doing Torah study (quite a lot, about an hour and a half, I think) and also reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion — very interesting so far, with the caveat that social psychology as a discipline has a replication problem (i.e. famous experiments have not yielded the same results when repeated by other researchers).

I went to bed late, but couldn’t sleep. Eventually I read a Doctor Who graphic novel for a bit as I didn’t have a head for more Righteous Mind. While I was lying in bed, I had the following thought. I only recently heard the term “rainbow baby” for a child born after a miscarriage or stillbirth. I don’t know if it’s a new term or American English or if I just hadn’t heard it. It occurred to me that my Dad is a “rainbow baby.” His mother had five miscarriages before he was born, which is a lot. Then he was three weeks late and a breech birth; he had to be delivered by emergency caesarean at a time when this was still somewhat dangerous. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that he was basically a miracle child, his parents doted on him. They were kind and gentle people anyway, but I think that made it impossible for him to do wrong in their eyes. He was very close to both his parents, but especially his father. It occurred to me that I am wary of having positive self-regard in case I become “narcissistic” or “selfish.” Yet my father has a strong positive self-regard from his stable and loving childhood, but he’s a very generous and caring person and not at all narcissistic. I’m not sure what conclusion to draw from this, exactly, but it made me think.

Today was a pretty normal Shabbat. It feels like an autumn/winter Shabbat both with bad weather and Shabbat finishing earlier. I did some Torah study and reading. I wanted to stay awake after lunch and drank coffee to help, but I still dozed for a while. Eating a heavy lunch just makes me tired these days and maybe I have to accept that. I just hope I don’t have insomnia again tonight.

I struggled all day with wanting to work on my novel, which obviously I could not do on Shabbat, but even after Shabbat, I’m not sure where to make my first move, so to speak. I really want to start writing it, for reasons that are probably wrong. I think it’s a story worth telling, but I think I also want to use it to help understand and process my emotions and personal history, which may or may not be a good idea. I think I have a lot of research and planning to do before I write, but I’m burning up inside; just the idea of this novel has triggered so many thoughts connected with parts of my life that I’ve repressed as well as childhood — I don’t want to say “trauma,” as it wasn’t the type of trauma other people I’ve met have carried, but therapists have presented it to me as traumatic, at least in the colloquial sense. Maybe I need to take this to therapy first, before I do anything with it.

With my previous novel (which I have to keep reminding myself is not yet published and I need to make sure I don’t forget to keep looking for an agent and a publisher just because that bit involves too much rejection), I had some support in building on my own experiences, which I have a bit here, but nowhere near as much. I guess I feel excited and nervous about this project at the same time, like Alexander the Great when he woke up one morning and said to himself, “You know what might be a good idea? Conquering THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD!”[1] And then I think what that will entail, and how long it will take, and that no one will pay me until after it’s all finished, and that writing about sex and porn addiction in the frum community might lead to people making all kinds of assumptions about me, and I think, “Do I really want to do this?” Yes, I do, but it’s still scary.

I bought some books I want for research tonight. One was for research, but also touches on the area of “trauma,” or pseudo-trauma, in my own history that I wanted to confront. I also cleared out my email inbox, which wasn’t directly relevant to my writing project, but was something I needed to do, and I set some goals for this week, which may need refining, but hopefully will get me doing chores AND looking for agents AND doing research without overloading me. I won’t be going to volunteering this week, though, as I need time to focus on myself after Yom Tov. So I think I’ve made a good start on things, but it’s gone midnight now and I ought to be thinking about winding down for the night.

[1] Or, if you prefer The Pinky and the Brain: “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” “The same thing we do every night, Pinky: try to take over the world!!!!!”

Choosing Other Challenges

The Talmud says that all beginnings are difficult. I’m feeling that today: beginnings of days, beginnings of the Jewish year, beginnings of my novel.

I went to bed early last night (before midnight) as I was shattered, unsurprisingly, as I had only had about four hours of sleep the night before due to insomnia. This morning I kept waking up, having terrible thoughts that overwhelmed me and stopped me getting up, and then falling asleep again. The thoughts were about the Sarah Everard murder case, which has been in the news yesterday and today. For non-UK residents, Sarah Everard was a young woman who was abducted by an off-duty police officer who staged a fake arrest, then raped and murdered her. The police officer was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday. I was thinking about this on and off all evening yesterday and I’m not sure why; when there are murder stories in the news, I have to struggle to stop the “Could I murder someone?” fears get out of control and turn into moral scrupulosity OCD. I kept thinking about this case whenever I woke up and I had a nightmare about police officers who were actually murderous drug dealers.

Because of this, I was not in the best place when the phone rang. Unbelievably, it was someone from the Very Scary Task from last week. This was supposed to be done and dusted by now. I think he just found an old voicemail from me from last week and wanted to check it wasn’t new, but then he was asking me about something else and I said he should phone next week when I was in the office and it was only after I rang off that I realised that he didn’t know that I wasn’t in the office and that I only work part-time. So I hope he doesn’t think I was being rude, but I couldn’t really claim to have only just woken up at 11.30am even though it was true.

Tishrei, the first month of the Jewish year, is always crazy too. It’s Yom Tov, Yom Tov, Yom Tov, Yom Tov (Jewish festivals), then suddenly it’s nearly Rosh Chodesh (New Moon) and the end of the month and one-twelfth of the year is gone (actually one-thirteenth this year, as it’s a leap year and Jewish leap years get a whole extra month). The Yom Tov cycle is over, but it’s nearly Shabbat (the Sabbath), which feels the same, no work when I desperately need some time that is not paid work, but also not religious sacred time so that I can catch up on various chores and on my writing, as well as making plans for E’s visit later this month (later this secular month rather than religious month this time).

There were little things as well: the milk was off and my Mum told me what I already knew deep down, that I need a load more formal shirts and polo shirts as the ones I have are wearing out. I dislike clothes shopping and the thought of restocking half my wardrobe does not fill me with joy. It’s not much in itself, but combined with all the other things I’m worried about at the moment (finding an agent for my novel, starting work on my next novel, planning for E coming, work and other routine things), I just feel overwhelmed again. ‘Overwhelmed’ seems to be my default setting at the moment, which is better than when it was ‘depressed’ or ‘anxious,’ but still not great to live with. I need to take a deep breath, break things down and make some plans, but with Shabbat starting in a few hours, I won’t get a chance to do that until Saturday night or Sunday.

Not only was I feeling overwhelmed, but it got to nearly the end of the time for Shacharit (Morning Prayers) and I hadn’t davened (prayed) yet, even though really I should have done so hours ago. I felt that people in the frum (religious Jewish) community would look down on me for just not coping with life.

Then I had a weird thought. There’s a Jewish folk belief (as far as I know not something in a written source text) that, if God let us choose our challenges, we would end up just picking the ones we already have. I’ve always been sceptical of this idea. While there is some truth to the idea that we get used to our challenges and develop coping strategies, I think there are people who would choose different ones. There are some challenges that no one realistically wants. But this time I flipped it around and thought, “No one else would choose my challenges. Therefore they can’t lecture me on how well or badly I’m coping with them.” I think that helped a bit.

After lunch I had to get on with my usual pre-Shabbat chores, plus I had to do some ironing. I watched the Doctor Who episode 42 while ironing. I used to hate it (the episode, not the ironing), but this time it seemed OK. It had many of the things I dislike about that era of Doctor Who: it’s too interested in the companion’s family and not particularly interested in the science fiction aspect of the story; it’s illogical; it has overly-loud and dramatic incidental music; and David Tennant does his SHOUTY EMOTING!!!! But it was diverting enough once I silenced my inner critic and it was directed well by Graeme Harper (the only director to have directed episodes of both the original and new series). It also raises the curtain on perhaps the best run of episodes in Russell T Davies’ time as showrunner, which I’m looking forward to watching with E (Human Nature/The Family of Blood, Blink, Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords).

I did a little tinkering with the plot for my second novel, but I think for now I need to wait until I’ve done some proper research for it. The new novel is probably going to have to take second or third place behind spending time with E and finding an agent for my first novel for the next month or two. I want to write, but it’s just not the main priority right now.