Reality Bombs

I woke up at midday feeling exhausted. I didn’t think I’d done much yesterday to get so tired, but apparently I did. I do need to see a doctor about this, although I’m sceptical of what they might say. Autistic fatigue is not well known in medical circles, and there isn’t much idea of what helps deal with it. I lay in bed for half an hour feeling too exhausted to move, even though I knew how late it was. I’m not entirely sure how I finally managed to get up. I went back to bed after breakfast too. I just felt wiped out. Even bentsching, saying the grace after meals after lunch, which I normally would rattle through, was an effort. Likewise, reading a short devar Torah that would normally take five minutes was a painful effort to finish.

It got so bad that mid-afternoon I went to bed for forty minutes. I don’t think I dozed, but lying with my eyes shut in a darkening (as it was after sunset), quiet room did help me. As that’s my usual cure for autistic overload, it does make it seem that that was the problem, even though I didn’t really do much at all yesterday to make me overloaded.

I felt a lot better afterwards, but I’d lost most of the day. I did about forty minutes of Torah study and read over an article of mine that the Jewish website is publishing next week (see below), but that was all that I managed before dinner. I ate with my parents, as we usually do on Mondays, then joined the National Autistic Society forum because I thought it might be a way of connecting with other autistic people and asking advice, looking for moral support etc. In particular, I want to know more about autistic fatigue and coping strategies.

I ran out of time for novel research, novel writing, devar Torah writing, more Torah study or tzitzit tying. Sigh. It sometimes feels like things go on the ‘to do’ list faster than I can take things off it.

One other thing I did do was my ironing, while watching an awful not favourite episode of Doctor Who (Journey’s End). I am vaguely amused by the way Russell T Davies arbitrarily introduces magic ‘science’ to handwave his way out of trouble, then has to introduce more magic science to explain why the first handwave won’t work again to add the danger back (in this case why the Doctor can’t extend the TARDIS forcefield to protect himself against Daleks as in The Parting of the Ways). There’s a lot of plot handwaving here too, and posing of fake moral dilemmas for the Doctor. Logopolis is also overrated and not very good, but at least it had a more thoughtful take on the end of the universe. (Although Logopolis and Journey’s End end are so different, it’s hard to believe they come from the same programme. In a sense, they don’t.) Also, I am so sick of “Rose is special”; the Doctor shouldn’t have a favourite companion (and if he did, it should be one the ones the fans hate, like Dodo or Adric).

It has left me wanting to watch proper original series Doctor Who, but I don’t want to do that without E. I guess I could watch something that would be low down my list of stories to show her because most people think it’s rubbish, but I secretly love it (The Space Museum, The Invasion of Time and Delta and the Bannermen are all good examples).

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I did find a useful page on the National Autistic Society website. The idea of energy accounting sounds good, if I can find an effective way to do it (including dealing with work and not guilt-tripping myself into doing more than I have energy for). It’s similar to spoon theory. I do feel that autistic fatigue is my primary problem at the moment. I’m just tired so much of the time. I probably don’t relax ‘properly’ either. I try to push myself too hard to do ‘useful’ things (work, exercise, Torah study, prayer), then crash and do endless internet browsing/procrastination, which is not actually restoring, just time-wasting. Sometimes it makes things worse, if it’s stuff in the news upsetting me. I know just listening to a comedy radio show on my headphones the way home from work seems to have helped a lot with my after-work recovery.

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The Jewish website I wrote for previously are running a revised version of an article about religious OCD that I wrote some years ago for a geek website. It’s revised to bring it up-to-date and stress that I’m not still suffering with OCD. Despite saying that I’m better, I’ve had some OCD anxiety about getting takeaway later this week, in case the food is not packaged correctly for kosher takeaway. It’s not by any means the level anxiety I had a few years ago, but it is a reminder that the OCD thoughts never fully go away and I always have to be on my guard against them. Truly, the price of freedom from OCD is eternal vigilance.