Airport Anxiety

I woke up about 10am, very tired, but I somehow managed to get up, and stay up, which was good, as on past experience I could easily have slept for another two hours. I really hope I get this sleep disorder diagnosed soon!

It was a very grim and overcast day today, with lots of rain. We had to turn the lights on before 2pm, which made everything feel later than it actually was.

I did most of my packing (although there’s a bit more to do tomorrow, once I’ve finished with my rucksack for work) and tried to get documents ready for my trip. Virgin have an online thing where you can fill out paperwork and upload proof of vaccination to save time at the airport. Supposedly, anyway. My experience is that they make you go through it again at the airport. I wasn’t going to upload proof of vaccination, as I know they check it again, and I find doing anything technical on my phone a pain, but in the end I had a go to try reduce anxiety, but failed, because they rejected my vaccination on the grounds that the “manufacturer is not accepted” and I have no idea why. I hope it was just a glitch.

I can’t work out if they’ve rejected the vaccine or the NHS COVID app or the pdf I downloaded from the COVID app. In terms of vaccines, I’ve had two Astra-Zenecas, one Moderna booster and, last week, a Pfizer booster, all of which are accepted. The only thing I can think of is that my last booster was less than fourteen days ago and I’m worried they will stop me even though I should still be covered by the one before that. The CDC says:

You are considered fully vaccinated…

• 2 weeks (14 days) after your second dose of an accepted 2-dose series…

If you don’t meet these requirements, you are NOT considered fully vaccinated. A booster dose is not needed to meet this requirement.

This sort of implies that as long as I’m two weeks after the second dose of my initial vaccine I should be OK regardless of my booster situation, but I’m still worried. Bureaucrats, particularly immigration ones are not noted for their flexibility of mind and tolerance of error and confusion.

(Before anyone says just don’t show them the documentation for the booster, my experience is that they get me to open the NHS app on my phone and then take it from me and flip through it themselves.)

The email says that if I think the rejection is mistaken, I can go through this again at the airport, but it’s extra stress for someone who finds airports stressful and anxiety-provoking at the best of times.  I am now having worries about going into full autistic not understanding/coping mode at the airport and not being understood…

Anyway, I wasted a lot of time and energy on that and made myself very anxious. I ran out of time to go for a run, although it was raining so I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. I did go for a walk (in the rain) and did some Torah study as well as the packing, so I did quite a bit, I just wish that travel didn’t have to be so anxiety-provoking even without COVID. It’s the unfamiliar, sensory overload and lots of strangers in my personal space and the need to communicate with scary officials, not things I manage well, plus the risk of migraine.

Exhaustion and Leaving Home

On Thursday evening E was out for Thanksgiving, so we Skyped early, as soon as I got home from work, and for less time than usual. This did at least allow me more time for writing in the evening. I had a fairly unhurried evening and finished reading Accidental Presidents.

This didn’t stop me being completely exhausted again on Friday. I dreamt I was running late for Shabbat (the Sabbath), and when I woke up, I was. Tintin was in the dream too for some reason.

I dealt with an annoying NHS issue (yet another one). I had to phone to confirm that I would take the psychiatrist appointment they offered me, which would mean changing work days and probably missing volunteering that week, all because I was worried that if I didn’t take it, I would have to wait until February or later for another appointment. I also told them that I had noticed that both the letters they sent me recently had a letter for someone else at the bottom. It was actually another letter on another sheet, but I assume it was at the bottom of the file if it ended up on two different letters. At first they thought I was saying the letter was addressed to the wrong person and asked how I ended up with it, but I hope I clarified that my address was correct, they just added someone else’s details at the bottom, a breach of data protection. It’s like they haven’t got enough ways to mess stuff up in the natural order of things, so they have to invite new things to mess up. (They also spelt my very common first name wrong on both letters too, but I’ll graciously let that slide.) Now I’m worried they’re going to hold on to the words “mistake” and “address” and assume my address is wrong and send the letters somewhere else, probably to the person whose letter was sent with mine. That letter was about an appointment over a year ago, so goodness knows if that person heard in time. I’m imagining that letter and confidential information being sent out to random people for over a year now.

I did my pre-Shabbat chores in time and went to shul (synagogue). I was pretty exhausted by the time shul ended, but I waited for Dad and then walked home slowly with him and his friend, when I should have just gone home immediately. I was exhausted enough when I got home that I lay down for half an hour before dinner, which wasn’t particularly good. I did about an hour of heavy Torah study (Talmud and The Guide for the Perplexed), but it took more than an hour to do it, as I kept having to stop for breaks. Because of this, I had little time for recreational reading.

I started reading Science Fiction: The Best of 2001, an anthology I picked up in a second-hand bookshop last time I was in New York (that’s 2001 the year, not the Stanley Kubrick film/Arthur C. Clarke novel), but the first story was one of those stories that starts in mitten drinnen (that’s Yiddish for in medias res) with no indication of where or when the story is set, what all the technology mentioned does, who the protagonist is and so on. That’s not a problem per se, but I was too tired to cope with it, so I stopped after a couple of pages and had an earlyish night (with disturbing dreams).

Recent events have made me feel that I am (finally) ready to leave home. It’s just too much masking and coping with my parents’ conversation being so different to mine as some other things I won’t go into here. It occurred to me that some of my thoughts about being different and no one being interested in what I have to say come from growing up with my family as much as from school experiences. I seem to be able to talk to E and my friends OK.

I nearly fell asleep after lunch as I lay down for forty minutes or so. I probably would have fallen asleep had I not known that I had limited time to daven Minchah (say Afternoon Prayers) and eat seudah shlishit (the third Sabbath meal, which is very much a token thing at this time of year as it’s so soon after lunch). I did a little Torah study, but tried not to push myself too hard. That said, after Shabbat was over, I spent hours doing various chores, so I didn’t get time to relax again (or to write), although I do have less to worry about doing tomorrow now other than packing. I probably do prioritise doing chores and important-seeming things over relaxing, which is probably bad for autistic exhaustion. I do wonder what will happen if I can’t improve my energy levels after marriage.

I was going to write some reflections here on the medical and social models of disability and why I think they break down with autism, but I’m too tired now. It’s pretty much midnight, so I ought to go to bed.

More Shoulds

I woke up feeling depressed and self-critical again, although perhaps not as much as yesterday. E wants to try to help me feel less exhausted and depressed from activity, and I want to too, but I wonder if it’s possible. It depends if it’s from a sleep disorder (potentially treatable, although I’m not sure to what extent) or autistic exhaustion (not really treatable except through energy accounting, and I’ve mentioned my problems with that) or SAD (light therapy didn’t work so well in the past, but I’m trying again). It’s worrying. Reducing my meds might give me more energy, but might make my mood worse. Although I’m not sure how much I trust a psychiatrist regarding this, I plan to take the appointment offered to me in January (J let me switch work days) and I probably will ask to reduce clomipramine, but not to come off it completely.

On the Tube this morning I was sat opposite someone with a persistent, horrible cough. I changed carriage at the next station, but ended up in a carriage full of sniffers and coughers. I guess it’s winter. Did this worry me before COVID? I think so, but not so much. I was sat next to someone who sniffed the whole way this morning. It was probably just the warm air in the carriage after the colder air outside. I was less worried about catching something and more irritated by the noise.

My brain was not working well today. I missed out bits of very familiar tasks at work and found it hard to do any work. I did at least have various tasks in the morning, but I was just sorting old papers again in the afternoon, a job with no clear end in sight, and I’m not entirely sure I’m tackling it the best way.

I do wonder if changing job, if I pass the interview, would lead to renewed energy and motivation or if I would be just as miserable in a new places with new procedures to learn just as I was getting used to this job and its procedures.

I used my light box in the morning. It seemed to help a bit, although the effect disappeared soon after I switched it off.

I felt more self-criticism about writing. I think I need to JUST WRITE. I have written for four consecutive days this week, writing over 2,000 words in four hours or less. I have no idea how good it is and I feel guilty about leaving the other novel and writing this without a clear plan, like I’m cheating on my other, worthier, novel with a more fun, less serious one.

It’s hard to know if I “should” be writing or what I “should” be writing. I always feel obliged to try to do what God wants beyond what I want or what I think is right. This adds another layer of complexity to decision-making. I say “always”; that’s not quite true any more. Over the last five years or so, I’ve started to feel that some halakhahs are beyond me and that I can’t keep them now, or maybe ever, so I’m not trying. Then again, there probably aren’t many of these (listening to recorded women’s singing and hugging E are the ones that spring to mind). I should probably just not think about what God wants me to write and just write. At least I’m finding writing reviving rather than draining at the moment.

I miss E. At least I can see her in five days! However, we are worried that the government are going to crack down on immigration and arbitrarily refuse her visa request. I don’t think the migration crackdown will take effect that quickly, although E got scared by a Guardian headline that was probably just another attempt to make Suella Braverman look like a Fascist. Still, it’s a worry.

Calling Into the Void

After a good day yesterday, I’ve crashed again today, feeling exhausted, depressed and lacking in motivation. I feel really awful, probably a result of doing too much over the last couple of days (not that it felt like much), missing E, SAD, personal life news (see below) and real news (also see below). I’m not sure when I last felt this bad.

 I wish this wouldn’t happen. I guess it’s something you should just learn to live with, with an ongoing health condition, but I find it hard, even after all these years. I guess it doesn’t help that it isn’t clear whether it’s more down to autism or a sleep disorder.

I woke up at 10am and wanted to stay awake, but I must have fallen asleep again as the next thing I knew it was 11am and Dad wanted me to get up to help take in the Tesco order. I did that, and prayed a bit even though I was still in pyjamas as I didn’t have the energy to get dressed and knew it would be too late for Shacharit (Morning Prayers) if I waited until after breakfast. I had breakfast and messed about online, getting annoyed by how much of the internet is about hate. Even if it’s not actual hate speech, it’s people complaining about other people’s hate speech. At the moment I’m becoming more impressed with Chabad.org than with the other Jewish sites I follow, because, although it is too mystical for my tastes and has fewer articles that interest me, it rarely does an “Antisemites said X, how awful is that?”-type article of the kind that are common elsewhere, preferring to focus on meaningful Jewish content. I think this is a better response to antisemitism most of the time than “calling out” into the void.

At 12.30pm I got phoned by the job agency that sent me the job last week. Embarrassingly, I was still in my pyjamas, but I took the call anyway. I’ve got the interview, although I’m not sure when it will be, given that I’m away soon and that I work two days a week. I will go to the interview, although I’m not sure when I will prepare or if I even want the job. As I’ve said, it’s slightly less money for somewhat longer hours, but it would potentially be a job I enjoy and restart my library career, so I need to think carefully about it. It also just occurred to me that in my current job, because it’s for a Jewish organisation and is shut on Jewish festivals, I don’t need to take them out of my holiday time, which I would have to do in this job. So there’s a lot to consider, if I even get the job. Possibly this pushed my mood further down, although I was depressed before it.

I did eventually get up and manage to get dressed. I went for a walk and spent an hour or so writing. I’m not sure if this project is going well, and I’m trying not to think about it for now, or if I’m going about it the right way. Basically, I started my satirical novel without finishing the planning a few days ago, because I needed to write, but didn’t have a head for just sitting and planning with nothing to show for it. I’m not usually a “pantser” (a writer who writes by the seat of their pants i.e. without planning), so I’m not sure if this will be organic and natural or just a mess. It’s hard to judge comedy anyway.

I didn’t go to shul (synagogue) as I vaguely hoped to do and only managed about five minutes of Torah study, as I really am stuck in a black hole of despair today.

***

I phoned the psychiatric appointments line to try to change my psychiatrist appointment, which is supposed to be when I’m away. This is to replace the appointment that was supposed to be a few weeks ago, but was cancelled at the last minute with no explanation. I discovered I have a new appointment for 9 January, which I wanted to move, as I’m at work then, but the person on the phone said to change an appointment I had to phone back on a morning as “I don’t keep the diary, I’m just covering the phones.” Really efficient. My parents and E said it will be easier to change my work days that week rather than the appointment, which really shouldn’t be the case, but sadly is true. Moreover, if I try to move the appointment, I’m likely to get one in February and I would like to be seen by then, although if recent depressed days continue, I won’t be changing my medication anyway (the reason for the appointment).

***

On a theme of getting annoyed with public monopolies that other people seem to love, I wrote an angry email to the BBC complaining about their minimisation of violence against Israelis in their description of today’s twin bombings in Jerusalem as “rare” bomb attacks. My point was that this minimises the attacks and primes readers to see them as freak events, downplaying the two fatalities and pre-emptively implying that any Israeli response is an over-reaction. The reality is that over 2,000 attacks of varying kinds on Israelis have occurred so far this year, of which the BBC reported just thirteen (figures from CAMERA UK, who also stated “the BBC News website did not provide stand-alone or timely coverage of any of the 401 terror attacks – including three fatal ones – which took place during October. In contrast, a counter-terrorism operation in Schem (Nablus) was reported just hours after it concluded.”)

I doubt I’ll get a response. The Jewish Chronicle, which is running a major campaign against BBC bias in both domestic and foreign reporting of antisemitism and Israel, reports that complaints about Israel coverage can take up to a year to be answered by the BBC and are sometimes completely ignored, even though BBC guidelines say that all complaints should to responded to within ten days. I actually felt worse afterwards, like that calling into the void I mentioned earlier. The BBC have had enough criticism of their Israel/Jewish coverage for me to know that they won’t take my complaint seriously, and will remain entrenched in their narrative that Jews don’t belong in the Middle East and that the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is a clear-cut case of alien colonists persecuting non-violent natives, rather than a complex, long-running conflict between two different indigenous peoples that has seen violence on both sides.

I’m worried about posting this publicly, as I don’t want to be drawn into arid arguments about Israel’s right to exist, but I’m too depressed and exhausted to start editing or posting privately.

Masks

I did quite a bit today: volunteering in the morning (I got there on time despite oversleeping again), I wrote a bit for my new writing project (which I’m not going to speak about for now as it may not work out), got my COVID booster and cooked dinner. I feel better today, partly because I wasn’t at work, but also because I did a reasonable amount of things and had some achievements without trying to do so much that I failed to do everything I wanted and felt bad about it (although I did plan to do a bit more than I managed).

I thought a lot about some blog comments I got yesterday. I don’t really get a sense of who regularly reads this other than the half-dozen or so regular commenters (I don’t really trust the “likes” button, as some people just “like” loads of blogs in the hope of getting people to like their blog and some people read, but don’t hit “like”). Every so often, I’ll get a comment from someone I haven’t heard from before or (in this case) who I didn’t realise reads this regularly and I’ll be a bit astonished that people are that interested in my writing. This is particularly true if they are remote from me, either geographically or in lifestyle or outlook.

Sometimes I feel that I have the ability to communicate with people with very different lives to me. I’m not sure how I do this, but I do seem to manage it in a way that a lot of frum (religious Jewish) people seem unwilling or unable to do. This reminded me of something Rabbi Sacks used to say, that if we (human beings) were completely different we would be unable to communicate, but if we were completely identical, we would have nothing to say. Our ability and desire to communicate therefore comes from having both commonalities and differences. This seems obvious, but we tend not to think about it.

It also made me think a bit about masks. Like many autistics, in real life, I mask i.e. hide my autistic traits and try to pass as “normal.” I don’t even think about it, and probably do it more than I am actually conscious of doing. Masking is generally seen as a bad thing in the autistic community, and certainly prolonged masking can lead to lack of authenticity, exhaustion and autistic burnout, but some masking is probably essential to human interaction in allistics (non-autistics) as well as autistics. It’s not polite to say every thought that comes through your head, or to behave in front of company the way you might by yourself.

The Aviva Gottleib Zornberg Torah essay I’ve been reading yesterday and today (for Toldot) dealt with masking. She quoted a number of famous writers about masks, but didn’t quote the person who immediately came to my mind, Oscar Wilde: “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.” (The Picture of Dorian Gray) On my blog I’m masked most of all (I’m anonymous and can’t be seen) but I probably tell the truth more here than in most other places. Certainly I feel more authentic and more myself here than elsewhere.

The same essay also spoke about liminality, about being on the border or doorway between two places or experiences, which is definitely related to what I’m talking about here, about being able to move from one environment and set of people to another, which again is not something everyone can do. It reminded me of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and doorways (among other things) who had two faces, one looking forwards and one looking back. Being two-faced is usually considered a bad thing, but, as with masking, it is probably necessary on some level to function in society.

I feel like I should do something with this ability to connect with people, but I’m not sure what (except for blogging). It seems strange even to think about being good at connecting with people when I’m so used to thinking about being bad at it.

***

I like that E and I are both so geeky that what started as a conversation about what to do when I’m in New York turned into both of us reading the same article about attempts to backbreed the aurochs (an extinct form of Eurasian cattle that has the dubious distinction of being the only animal mentioned in the Bible to have subsequently become extinct).

Survival of the Normalest

I woke up in a self-critical mood, remembering how much I messed things up in my further education job (although it was four years ago) and being critical of my blog writing (I wonder why anyone at all reads it) and my fiction writing. At the risk of name-dropping, Matthue Roth (My First Kafka) told me off once years ago for calling my own writing “bilge” on Hevria, saying I was insulting myself, my history and my thoughts. I feel like I don’t care about insulting them.

At lunchtime I managed to locate the Hevria post where we had this discussion. Interestingly, nearly five years ago, I was already agonising over the fact that I have ideas for stories, but am unable to empathise with my characters and write them well, getting inside their inner lives, because I’m “somewhat autistic [I was undiagnosed at that stage and nervous of staking claim to autism under false pretences] and alexithymic (unable to feel or describe emotions)”. I asked Matthue whether he thought someone who can’t get in touch with their emotions could write good fiction or poetry, but I don’t think he understood the question (maybe he couldn’t understand that some people don’t understand or feel their own emotions) and spoke more about characters who don’t have emotions, which wasn’t really what I meant.

I do wonder about that still, whether I can get inside anyone’s head enough to write well. I quoted to Matthue something George Orwell wrote, that Tolsoy’s characters are so detailed that you can imagine having a conversation with them, and that I can’t really imagine a conversation with any fictional character. I mean, I struggle to imagine conversations with real people let alone those that only live in my head!

E suggested leaving my novels for now and writing a short story. She’s probably right. I had an idea for a short story recently, but I neglected to write it down and now I can’t remember it.

***

Work was dull. I spent the morning looking for missing invoices and the afternoon struggling with a mail merge. It doesn’t get much more fun than that. I felt depressed and self-loathing all day and unsure why: my job? The thoughts about my writing? Winter sunlight issues (our office is particularly gloomy and badly-lit)? Everything? Who knows.

On the Tube home, half a carriage was filled with young boys, all “manspreading” and some with their feet on the seats. I contrasted their unthinking possession of the world around them with myself, constantly apologising for getting in the way and squeezing myself into corners.

LinkedIn tells me someone I was at university with is now a “Publisher, writer and researcher”. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something like that? I see parents of autistic children writing on the autism forum and think, “Those children are struggling much more than I ever did as a child, why can’t I just get my life together? Surely it should be easier as an adult?” But I don’t think my functionality, such as it is, is down to my efforts, just to the grace of God.

***

The Aviva Gottleib Zornberg essay I’m reading on this week’s sedra (Torah portion) notes talks about “Isaac – in whom any obliteration of limits and distinctions rouses profound anxiety”. I’m not sure I see that in the Torah, but I do see it in myself, which is interesting, as I identify with Yitzchak (Isaac) more than any other Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) character, for reasons that are not completely clear to me. Later on in the essay she quotes the Zohar, that Yitzchak’s love for Esav (Esau) is not based on opposites attracting, but on similarities. She sees Esav as a proto-existentialist searching for meaning in a meaningless world, which also resonates with me, although I don’t identify with Esav much. (There were a lot of Hamlet quotations in the essay, actually.)

***

A blogger I respect who married in her early thirties (ancient, in her Yeshivish community) said that she only had a couple of criteria for a husband, but that she took “normality” as a given before those criteria came into effect. It made me wonder how many other frum (religious) women feel the same, and how many autistic people could pass the “normality” test, even with masking.

Given how much of the energy of the frum community is focused on finding a spouse, and how other interests and goals are postponed until after marriage, not least for fear they might scare off prospective partners, I wonder if the frum world is a sort of Darwinian “survival of the normalest” contest, where the people who can appear most normal find the best partners and bring up their children to be even more normal (conformist), breeding out more individuality with each generation. I am glad I am out of the dating game now (not that I was ever really in it in the frum world – the few women who were ever serious about me were not typical frum women themselves), but I worry about other autistic people stuck in it, and about what happens to a community that tries to breed all individuality and eccentricity out of itself.

You Had One Job, Hamlet

I feel somewhat depressed again today. It’s hard to tell if it’s SAD or missing E or both. I don’t think it’s general depression. At least, I hope it’s not.

My sister and brother-in-law came for lunch. My sister is less than a month from her baby’s due date. I’m vaguely worried the baby will arrive while I’m in the USA, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

I sent off my CV for the job I mentioned the other day, but I realised it’s actually less money for more work I’m not ruling it out at this stage, as it is a library job that could potentially restart my library career. My current job isn’t in the library sector and has no prospect for promotion or career development. Even so, I suspect the selection committee will be put off by the gaps on my CV, long gaps where I was working in non-library jobs, or not working at all.

I felt tired after seeing my sister and BIL and skyping my rabbi mentor for a while. I didn’t have time or energy to go for a run, and it was probably too wet outside anyway, so I went for a brisk walk. That and some Torah study were my main activities today.

***

Lately I have been wanting to read Hamlet again, or (given I have a stack of unread books to read) at least to watch the five hour Kenneth Branagh unedited film version again (I have it on DVD). I’m not sure if this is related to feeling depressed. I tend to think about Hamlet when I’m feeling depressed for some reason.

There’s an internet meme about “You had one job,” mostly depicting badly-done practical workmanship e.g. handrails that go up while the stairs go down or toilet bowls placed so they stop the cubicle door shutting. But I feel that Hamlet “had one job” and messed it up too. All he had to do was avenge his father by killing his uncle. Instead, he procrastinated about killing his uncle; broke up with his girlfriend and then killed her father, driving her insane and ultimately to her death; nearly killed his uncle, but decided killing him at prayer would allow him to Heaven and decided he wanted to send him to Hell; got into a duel with his late girlfriend’s brother; finally killed his uncle, but was killed in the process; was also responsible for the deaths of his mother and late girlfriend’s brother at the same time; got a couple of his friends killed along the way; and finally handed over Denmark to the Norwegians. I feel that Richard III would have handled this job a lot better. Sometimes over-thinking doesn’t help.

Perhaps I empathise with Hamlet as I often get set simple tasks which I fail to do properly. Like Hamlet, I stand around trying to be clever and good with words, but don’t actually get the job done.

(No, of course I didn’t spend twenty minutes looking at silly “You had one job” photos online, why would I do that? That would certainly have been a waste of time and procrastination, not to mention making light of other people’s misfortune…)

***

I watched Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life last night. I had to buy a copy of the DVD, as I didn’t have one, unlike the TV series and the other two films. I think I thought it wasn’t funny enough. I enjoyed it more than I expected, more than my recent re-viewings of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian. I’m not sure why. It could be that I’m less familiar with the jokes from The Meaning of Life than the earlier two, which were quoted endlessly by my friends at school. The sketch format of The Meaning of Life is a double-edged sword: there’s a lack of engaging narrative to hold the attention through it, but it’s more similar in style to the TV series. I think the Pythons have subsequently said that they should have worked harder on the script to fuse the sketches into some kind of narrative, maybe the story of one person’s life, although I’m not sure how that would have worked.

It’s interesting that I’ve been watching Python for the first time in years now I’m thinking I should try to write my satirical novel, because I guess I want to have Python-esque feel, not so much in terms of surrealism or even sometimes bad taste, but in terms of mocking authority and saying things that society doesn’t want you to say.

Demons

I feel rather down today. Shabbat (the Sabbath) started OK. The good news I had yesterday was a job agency wanting to put my name forward for a librarian job. I need to update my CV and say yes. So that put me in a good mindset. I coped with shul (synagogue) despite the SHOUTING chazzan (cantor). I did some Torah study, including Talmud study after dinner, but ran out of time to do much recreational reading.

Today was much worse. Mum and Dad were out for lunch, which inevitably meant my getting up and getting dressed even later than usual. I spent a lot of time today in bed with the duvet and weighted blanket wrapped around me, trying to feel calm and comforted. I had lunch by myself, which was fine (I read about the last days of Franklin Roosevelt and the surprising unpreparedness of Harry Truman in Accidental Presidents), but across the day as a whole, my mood went down, with some loneliness, low mood (depression-low, although hopefully not lasting long enough to be depression) and missing E and fear that I’m not going to get that good new job as I haven’t worked in the library sector properly for years and have all kinds of gaps on my CV. I didn’t do much Torah study, and then Shabbat was over just after 5pm. And I have a headache that is resisting medication.

***

After Shabbat, I checked email and worried I’d upset someone with my political views. I would much rather hide my thoughts than express myself and risk upsetting people with different views. I suspect this is not considered acceptable these days of extreme individualism and self-expression, but maybe it would be better if more people did it. However, I see things that are wrong in the world, and I want to protest. I don’t really think most people can actually change the world (another unacceptable view), so I’d rather keep my friends, but there is a “demon” inside me (metaphorically; I’m neither a kabbalist nor a psychotic) that makes me want to write “edgy” or “provocative” things in whichever community I find myself, whether sexual material in the Orthodox world or anti-woke material in the wider UK mediascape where the Left does indeed have a monopoly on satire. Not that I really think of myself as “right-wing” (ugh) or even “conservative” in the way most people use the term. Maybe I just want to be sui generis. Either way, if I write anything I feel I’ll offend people. But I desperately need to write and am suffering from not being able to do so right now!

(As an aside, I had a friend at secondary school who was very clever, but also very lazy and badly behaved. He loved to mock or joke around. In retrospect, he may have been neurodiverse himself. I suddenly find myself wondering if this is how he felt, wanting to say stuff just because “Everyone” says you shouldn’t say it?)

There is a further problem that my satirical novel is not really ready to start writing yet. It probably needs a whole new plot (I haven’t had either time or courage to look at my notes). I may need to do research, although I’m in two minds about that. It’s not going to be detailed, realistic satire like Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister, but dystopian-science fiction-black comedy, inspired by things like Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Gulliver’s Travels, lots of Philip K. Dick novels, maybe the Blade Runner films, Brazil (the Terry Gilliam film), V for Vendetta (the style, but not the content), The Prisoner and Doctor Who stories like The Macra Terror, The Happiness Patrol and The Beast Below.

***

My biggest negative thought recently (going on for some weeks now, but particularly the last two days), is feeling that my autism has stopped me from being socialised into the frum (religious Jewish) community. There’s a LOT I could say here, but I’ll mention that autism, and related social anxiety stemming from autism-related bullying, made me skip all the experiences that socialise teenagers in the Anglo-Jewish community into the Jewish and frum worlds:  shul youth services, youth movements, Israel tour and yeshivah (not going to yeshivah was because of a whole bunch of reasons mostly unrelated to autism, but I think autism would have made it damaging for me if I had gone). I then had a weird relationship with the Jewish Society at university, until my breakdown/burnout when I moved away from it. I then struggled to find a way into the community as a young adult (twenties and thirties) dealing with depression, social anxiety and undiagnosed autism, feeling that I wasn’t able to talk to people at social events and increasingly reluctant to try.

I’ve never had many frum friends, although I have a couple. I find it hard to socialise at Kiddush and other community social events, because there’s too much background noise so I can’t hear words properly. I used to leave kiddush after five minutes or so; then someone criticised me for that, and for not going to shul much in the morning (which is due to social anxiety and possibly a sleep disorder). Then COVID hit, and I got my autism diagnosis. Whether it’s an effect of COVID and being isolated for so long, or of being diagnosed and more conscious of my needs, or just of getting older (there is anecdotal evidence undiagnosed autistics’ tolerance for noise and people declines with age), I now find being in big rooms with lots of people (or even just a few people) being noisy very difficult and am less inclined to put myself into those situations. But it’s hard to be part of the frum world without going to shul regularly, particularly for a man.

Lately, I find it harder and harder to go to shul, because of the noise and people. I think this fuels my social anxiety. There have been times during my burnout when I’ve stopped going to shul completely, which I suspect was autism-influenced, although it was before my diagnosis. Of course, there was a period of several years when I went to shul daily, or several times a day, led services and gave drashot (Torah classes) and I would like to move back towards being in that place, but I think it was the result of a number of circumstances that are hard to replicate now. I wish I could make lightning strike twice in this area, but I’m not sure how.

I honestly don’t know what I could do to make things better for me, though. I spoke to a rabbi about it over a year ago and I think he was frustrated that I didn’t have any practical suggestions for change, but I find it hard to think what would make things easier for me, let alone how to make them materialise.

I would like to post this somewhere, but I don’t know where. I think the autism forum would not understand it, and might use it to make anti-religious points. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to post it to the Orthodox Conundrum group. The Jewish autism groups I belong to are small and don’t post much, and I haven’t really introduced myself on them, so I’m scared what the result would be of posting out of the blue.

***

This doesn’t really fit anywhere in this post, but Virgin Atlantic got back to me and I don’t think they can offer me any help at the airport beyond the sunflower “invisible disabilities” lanyard and their own invisible disabilities sign. Again, I want things to be different, and maybe they could be, but if I can’t articulate them, they won’t happen.

***

I feel like I wasted the whole evening writing this post, and I still didn’t really express what I want to say. It’s horrible not really knowing what I feel half the time, let alone being able to put it into words (when I’m supposedly hyper-literate and good with words).

Sigh. Politics is a bore, autism is a bore, writing is not a bore, but feeling impelled to write things that I am more than a little suspicious of myself is a bore. And headaches are a bore.

Going to watch Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life for a bit, then interrupt and try to do some of the chores I set for myself to do tonight and which I haven’t started yet, if I can, then finish the film and try not to go to bed too late.

What Is Wrong with the World?

I actually had some potentially good news today, although I don’t want to talk about it yet, and it’s very early days. Otherwise it was a normal winter “early Friday” (Shabbat (the Sabbath) starting early, before 4pm today) i.e. a total rush to do everything in time. Just going to shave, shower and try to get to shul (synagogue), although I’m feeling quite exhausted. I wouldn’t have blogged except I needed to vent about the following:

The Jewish Chronicle today has a front page story about the BBC’s Arabic service approvingly broadcasting folksongs glorifying violence against Jews. Inside is a story about yet another prominent rabbi plausibly accused of sexual harassment. What is wrong with the world?

Bits and Pieces

I think I’ve put on all the weight I lost over the last few months, perhaps even some more. I really don’t eat that much junk! I do get hungry late at night (when I should really be in bed) and eat cereal and sometimes I eat too much when I get home from work as dinner is almost always late in our house. It is hard to make myself go to bed hungry, or deny myself one biscuit or small piece of chocolate after a stressful day. I’m not sure what else I could do to reward myself. If we’re talking empty calories, I also eat a lot of prunes (which I’m sure have a lot of natural sugar), because it’s the only way I’ve found to combat the constipation caused by taking clomipramine (sorry if that’s TMI), another reason I’m anxious to reduce my meds.

***

I did the second night of the sleep study. I slept a lot more first night than the second because of work. That shouldn’t make any difference, as they’re just checking whether I stop breathing in my sleep, but I am vaguely nervous, especially given the problems I had with the questionnaire, which asked a lot of questions that I could not answer, either because they required a “bed-partner” who knew if I snore or referred to my experience of fatigue while driving, which I don’t do. I wrote a whole long covering email when I returned the questionnaire explaining the situation. I just hope someone takes note of it. I would really like an accurate to answer to the question of whether my disrupted sleep and constant tiredness is at least in part due to a sleep disorder.

***

Some thoughts about chatan (bridegroom) class from last night: I knew a lot of the material that I was being taught, and even spotted the teacher’s mistakes on a couple of occasions. I am generally too polite to point out other people’s mistakes, but maybe I should have done so here to show that I was pretty au fait with the material.

The topic was mostly standard Jewish texts on love and marriage. I felt that I was told that I should love E as much as I love self, which I already knew (it’s from the Talmud), but that I didn’t get much advice on how to do this. (If I was teaching the class, I would have referred to Rav Dessler’s idea that giving rather than receiving generates love.)

The teacher gave me a lift home. I felt embarrassed that I don’t drive. I don’t think he realised how old I am (forty next birthday), particularly as discussion of my university background and efforts to move into proofreading work made me sound as if I have joined the labour market relatively recently (and not because of years of depression and burnout). It’s not uncommon for Modern Orthodox Jews to meet their future spouse at university and get married soon after graduation and, as I mentioned the other day, I look a lot younger than I actually am. I also hid my MA, as I’m embarrassed about that too (the fact that it was not at a good university, that I had to struggle to get the degree and took three and a half years to do a degree that should have taken one year, and that my library career did not go anywhere afterwards).

On the plus side, the teacher is somewhat geeky and likes Doctor Who. Unlike me, he prefers the new series to the old. Like me, he thinks it has gone downhill lately. Unlike me, but like many other people, he thinks it’s too woke. I don’t really think it is that much more woke than it has been at other points in the past, and I don’t think being woke is necessarily a problem here. The problem is a lack of original, interesting, fun competently-written stories.

***

Today I’ve been struggling with having negative thoughts about other people and then obsessing over my thoughts and thinking I’m a bad person for not only thinking positive things about other people. I’m not sure where this has come from.

***

Work was a bit stressful. I had trouble with the very user unfriendly website we use for stationery orders. I also made some mistakes that were at least in part because J fired too much at me at once and I tried to multitask, which is something I do badly (autism).

I stayed for Minchah and Ma’ariv in the shul  (Afternoon and Evening Prayers in the synagogue).I got pretty overwhelmed by the noise and the people, and by thinking that not only does autism stop me functioning in the frum (religious) community, but no one even understands my problems because there are so few frum autistics (who I have come across, at least). I did think of posting something on the autism forum, but I’m not sure who would understand and it would just come across as bad mouthing my own community to people who know nothing about it and perhaps just reinforcing anti-Jewish/anti-religious sentiments.

I managed to do some shopping after work, but I’ve been pretty exhausted since I got home.

***

E and my therapist both said I should stop writing my novel for now, and, as a good Jewish boy, I know not to argue with my wife or my therapist (or my mother, but she doesn’t know what I’m writing). E encouraged me to work on the satirical novel I want to write in the meantime. I feel I should do research, but also that I don’t have the head for that with everything going on in my life right and now and that I should just jump in. How much can you research comedy anyway, even if it is satire? Unfortunately, while I feel confused and angry about much in the world, it’s hard to frame my confused and angry thoughts coherently in my head, let alone in a dystopian satirical novel. I also worry about the attitude (on the part of readers) of “If you disagree with X, then you must want Y instead” which isn’t necessarily true. I might satirise the extremes of X, but be absolutely in favour of it in moderation, but satire isn’t so good at reflecting that level of nuance, or the concept of moderation at all.

Therapy, A Cat, and Growing Up in the 1980s

I started my sleep study last night. I had to wear a sensor on my finger and stick another one to my neck (it was wireless). The instructions for the neck sensor were on the phone that came with it and not on paper (I thought they had forgotten to send it to me). I didn’t sleep so well and I think I woke up a few times in the night, probably because I was worried I would knock the sensor off, although it stayed in place all night.

I did spend some time working on a profile for myself as a freelance proofreader and researched what fees I could charge. I still feel nervous about this, but I’m getting closer to it.

In therapy, I spoke about the negative feelings that I think working on my novel is prompting inside me (inchoate feelings of guilt and anxiety, mostly around sex). E thought I should put my novel on hold until we’re married. My therapist agreed, suggesting I put it in a box for now (metaphorically) as engaging with ideas around sex is just “re-traumatising” me and triggering feelings of guilt and anxiety when I work on novel. (I’m not sure I would have described these feelings as “trauma,” but I’ll put that aside for now.)

My therapist also suggested that I label as “undermining” my thoughts of guilt and anxiety rather than paying attention to them. We spoke about focusing on “empowering” voices about the love, good communication and so on that E and I have in our relationship instead.

In the evening I had chatan (bridegroom) religious class. I’m not sure it was a good idea to agree to do this in person the night before work. I’m not going to write about the class itself, as I’m still processing thoughts from it. I will say I found it hard to concentrate at times, at first from the heavy rain falling on the skylight ceiling, then from tiredness, and also from the cat that was walking in and out all the time. At one point she jumped on the table, stood in front of me and stared into my eyes as if she was trying to work out who I was and what I was doing in her house.

***

This was a comment I posted on the autism forum in a discussion about whether it is better to live as an autistic person now or in 1980 that I thought might be of interest:

As someone a bit younger (I think) than other commenters here, I’m finding this interesting.

I was born in the early eighties, so not born online, but computers, and then the internet, slowly crept into my life in my teens.

Things are mostly better now, certainly in my personal life, but partly because of technological change. I wouldn’t have met my wife without the internet, or managed a long-distance relationship without Skype or Zoom. And, while I’ve never really felt I “found my tribe,” I have made good friends online and am a lot less isolated than I would be without it. Blogging has been good for me to process my emotions, but private journaling never worked for me; it’s the interactions with readers that help me to write. Plus, like Shardovan [another commenter on the thread] said [of himself], I was probably “born old” and wouldn’t have fitted in whenever I was born (most of the music and TV I like are from the 60s and 70s, and the books I read tend to be even older!).

Also, although it came too late for me, it’s good that high-functioning autism is picked up now whereas there was really no awareness of it when I was at school (hence I didn’t get diagnosed until years later).

The downsides are the total sensory overload from omnipresent “devices” nowadays not to mention video adverts in shop windows and on the streets and even more noise. I find this makes me very uncomfortable, more so as I get older, and I’m not sure how much is my resistance to it declining and how much is that there are just more noises and moving pictures now. Sometimes I would like to live in a quieter era. As an Orthodox Jew, I don’t use computers, TV, phones etc. on the Sabbath and it’s very calming, but I still end up back on them straight afterwards (the downside of having most of my social life online, and of my wife being stuck in the US until her visa arrives).

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like being a teenager in the era of social media. Would I have made friends online more easily than I managed at school? Or would the kids who bullied me at school just bully me at home via Facebook? It’s scary to think about. The secondary school I attended has had three student suicides in the last five years or so, which terrifies me.

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Weird Thoughts

I feel pretty overwhelmed today. Yesterday was rather stressful, but I’d hoped to do a lot more in the afternoon than I managed. I now have two To Do lists: my ongoing, long-term To Do list with things like wedding preparation, novel writing/submitting and trying to set up as a proof-reader, and my short-term To Do list from yesterday, which realistically is going to take a couple of days to get through. I feel miserable about this.

I know that getting married, moving house, and changing career are all typically overwhelming and that I’m trying to do all three in the space of a few months, while juggling autism, social anxiety and a possible sleep disorder plus working on a novel with another one I want to substantially rewrite when I get time (!) and plans for a third. Even so, I feel overwhelmed and more than a little inadequate.

I guess I feel like I’m in a hurry. E and I are in a hurry to get married by now, and I want to make progress with starting as a proof-reader (as we will need the money) and with my writing (as I want to get my thoughts out of my head, and at times at least feel that that would be a good thing for other people too). Plus, I’m nearly forty, I feel I should have something to show for four decades on this planet.

***

Work was hard too. Two of the other people in the building really don’t get on. It’s technically nothing to do with us, but one comes in periodically to vent to J. Today we had both of them in at different times, one threatening to resign. I’m not good at being around strong emotions like that. There are also building works going on which meant that there was a lot of noise (machine noise, but also frequent effing from the builders) and strange smells. Not good for autistics.

Some other stuff happened at work that was stressful, but I can’t really go into it publicly.

I somehow got a voicemail with no record of a missed call. It was the psychiatrist’s secretary saying my appointment tomorrow (about trying to reduce some of my meds) is cancelled. No explanation, typical NHS. They have booked me in for the earliest next appointment, which is 2 December, but I’ll be in New York, so I need to phone and get a new one. I’m going to volunteering tomorrow instead. I thought of staying home and trying to work through the short-term To Do list, but realistically I will just oversleep, so I might as well volunteer and do something useful and still start on the To Do list around 2pm.

When I got home, the apparatus for my sleep study had arrived. Unfortunately, they had not sent all the instructions, so I can’t start that tonight. I blamed the NHS, but, on inspection, I think this is contracted out.

***

Lately I feel that I’ve been having a lot of negative memories. They’re usually memories of stuff I’ve done wrong, from minor things no one except me noticed to times when my boss in my further education job got really annoyed with me. I can’t work out if this is new or if I’ve just become aware of it. I know I’ve had it in the past, but my subjective impression is that it got better for a bit and is now getting worse again. I haven’t had this so much recently, but sometimes the memories feel very intense, and I have the vague and irrational feeling that somehow I could re-enter that point in my life. (I don’t think this is anything to do with PTSD flashbacks, if only because having PTSD about being told off by my boss or misbehaving at school makes no sense.)

I’ve also been feeling more aware lately that other people are individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. I feel like this especially when I’m in a crowd. It inspires awe and also a bit of fear. One of my favourite Jewish teachings is that, when seeing a crowd of 600,000 or more Jews, we say a blessing thanking God who “knows secrets,” i.e. the secret thoughts of each individual. I find it interesting that when faced with a crowd we emphasise the individuality of everyone in it, not the size of the crowd as a whole. The Talmud says that, just as the people in the crowd have different faces, so they have different thoughts. The Kotzker Rebbe emphasised this by stating just as it doesn’t bother you that their faces are different to your own, it shouldn’t bother you that their thoughts are different.

It can be hard to do this, to think about other people being individuals without being bothered. I tend to assume that people with different thoughts would reject me. I personally can accept mutually opposing truths, even pride myself on my ability to “contain” different beliefs in a detached way, seeing multiple perspectives on a complex religious or political reality, but I worry other people can’t accept my beliefs if they disagree. I’m not sure how rational this is. People can be very judgmental and intolerant, but also most people are not going to want to analyse all your religious, political and cultural beliefs before deciding whether they like you.

Wedding Fair

I went to shul (synagogue) on Friday night. I’m trying to get there early, as I got fed up of always being late, and am trying to ‘centre’ and calm myself before services these days (this generally doesn’t work if I’m in a shul, as everyone is talking loudly until right up to the start of the service). On the way in, I saw Rabbi L, the rabbi of the shul, and the rabbi E and I have asked to marry us. He said he would like to catch up with me, then said something else I didn’t hear as he was walking away from me. This left me with mild anxiety throughout the service that he would want to talk to me afterwards. He dashed off after the service, so I emailed him today with details of where we are with the visa and wedding situation. Hopefully this was all he wanted.

I had some anxiety in general over Shabbat because of things going on at home. I am really ready to move out and live with E, scary though that sounds when I’ve spent most of my life either living at home or in the sheltered environment of Oxford. The exception was about two years where I lived by myself, but I used to go home for Shabbat (Sabbath) most weeks, so it wasn’t entirely independent.

I slept too much again and had a slight headache after Shabbat, so I didn’t do as much stuff as I’d wanted to do on Saturday night.

Today I went to a Jewish wedding and bar/bat mitzvah fair with my parents. When we got into the hotel where it was being held, I was immediately hit by the loud music.  A DJ or singer was advertising himself very loudly. I wish someone had told him to turn it down. My whole experience there was overload, from the music, the people, the expectation to speak and my lack of knowledge of organising or even going to parties. My parents did most of the talking, not least because I could barely hear anything or think of even basic stuff to say. This was good, because I don’t know what would have happened if I’d gone by myself (I would probably have just picked up some business cards and left without talking to anyone), but bad because I think people wondered why I wasn’t much/anything. I was wearing my invisible disability sunflower lanyard, so maybe people thought I was deaf or had some other issue (I mean, I did have another issue). My parents are organising an anniversary party for themselves, so they did have a reason to be there independently of me.

It was worth going overall, but it made me wonder how I went so many years without being diagnosed autistic. I guess I used to think that I didn’t like loud music because I didn’t like the genre of music or music in general, or that I didn’t like busy places because of social anxiety rather because of sensory overload. My parents and I spoke about my uncle’s wedding, when I was six. I really hated the party and for decades afterwards everyone assumed I was in a foul mood and determined to make everyone’s life miserable. Now of course we know that I was probably suffering social and sensory overload, as well as confusion about what happens at parties and frustration from not knowing when it would end. At my sister’s wedding in 2017, we were prepared and made sure there was a quiet room for me to go to when it got too much.

Someone at the fair thought that I was still at university! This was because of my Oxford-related email address (not an actual university one, but it looks like it). I guess I was flattered that I look twenty years younger than I am. It’s thought that autistic people often look young; it’s speculated that we show our emotions on our faces much less than allistics (non-autistics), so we don’t wrinkle as much.

I went for a run when I got home and got an exercise headache again. Between the headache and the fair, I didn’t do much else, although I did have a longer-than-usual Skype call with E, talking largely about wedding plans. I only managed a little over ten minutes of Torah study, which is disappointing. I did no work on my novel aside from a few minutes of research reading, and few of the long list of chores I wanted to get through today.

I tried to see if I could get help at the airport when I go to New York because of my autism, but I couldn’t find anything for autism, only for physical disabilities. I was looking for help navigating the airport with sensory overload, sometimes leading to difficulties hearing what staff are saying, as someone on the autism forum says he manages to get help (of course, he may have a physical disability too for all I know).

It’s got very late, but I feel I need to watch some TV to unwind after an overloading day, otherwise I won’t sleep and/or will be in a bad state tomorrow.

Exhaustion and Annoying Social Media

I was listening to a shiur (religious class) from Aviva Gottleib Zornberg from before Yom Kippur that I hadn’t had time to hear yet. It made me think, not for the first time, that it’s strange that the religious approach that resonates most with me (Jewish religious existentialism) is one of other-awareness and relationship (between God and myself and between other people and myself), yet I have a disability that makes forming relationships and perspective-taking difficult. Or maybe that’s the point: I have to do it consciously, because I can’t do it automatically.

Other than that, I was pretty wiped out today. I slept in late and didn’t do much other than listen to that shiur (it was pretty long, nearly an hour and a half) and go for a walk. I wanted to submit the religious thoughts I wrote a couple of months ago about the death of the Queen to a Jewish magazine, but on reading what I wrote again, it was very closely tied to that time, not just the Queen’s death (which they might potentially write about in their next issue, as it’s quarterly, so probably hasn’t been published since her death), but also to the time of the year, right before the Jewish High Holidays. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to see events in the world and suddenly get an idea of what to write about them and then quickly produce usable copy. I need time to think and plan and then I need to get time and energy to write, fitting around work and other obligations. It is difficult when so many Jewish publications seem to like very timely material. I don’t know how I can get inspiration faster.

I also wanted to work on getting together a profile to try to set myself up as a proof-reader, but ran out of time and energy, although doing this a couple of weeks before I go to America may not be a great idea anyway. I did have a Zoom chat with my parents and E about some things related to E and my future finances that was helpful and reassuring and E and I had our daily Skype call afterwards. I feel pretty video-ed out now.

***

Ugh, social media is awful. I’ve backed off from my tentative idea of friending more individuals on Facebook. I’d say it’s because of politics, but I’d be OK with calm and rational discussion of politics. It’s more because people online are over-excitable and looking for reasons to be offended. It’s like they regress to toddlers on a sugar high, complete with tantrums. I’m sticking as a member of some (fairly quiet) FB groups, but I was dismayed by how many people answering the “inspirational twentieth or twenty-first century Jewish book” question I posted about yesterday have listed books by Meir Kahane, the far-right, racist, anti-democratic, theocratic, pro-violence religious leader and politician who was for a long time beyond the pale in Orthodox Jewish circles, but who is now being posthumously rehabilitated in Israel.

It also seems that a lot of Doctor Who fandom is on video/YouTube now, which isn’t a format that I like or easily find the time to watch. I prefer fan thoughts in text form. So it seems unlikely I will be getting much further back into Doctor Who fandom. Even aside from a stupidly political fan blog post I saw today (there was a lot wrong with it, but I’ll just mention that it tried to argue that Doctor Who should only be produced directly by the state-funded BBC because capitalism is evil, then ended with a request to tip the author via his Patreon account, which seems a tad hypocritical).

Inspiring Jewish Books

Late last night I was very hungry and couldn’t stop being hungry, no matter what I ate. This occasionally happens to me and I don’t know why. I had hoped to get an earlyish night, but I couldn’t because I was eating. Inevitably, I struggled to get up early this morning, the third consecutive early morning (some people do this every day).

At work I had to make phone calls asking people for outstanding payments again. The more I did, the easier it got, as per exposure therapy, up until the point where I ended up with an extremely angry person who said we hadn’t sent her an invoice. She shouted at me a lot. I got quite upset, but stayed on the call until J (who was on a different call on the other line) signalled to me that I should tell her he would call her back.

Afterwards, it occurred to me that maybe I forgot to send her the invoice. There was no invoice in my sent mail folder. Perhaps I had sent it in the snail mail and it got lost in the post, but perhaps I had just forgotten to send it. To be fair to myself, she did admit she booked the event through a third party, which is not what people are supposed to do (they are supposed to call us directly), and they apparently did not make the charges clear to her either. So perhaps it was not my fault. But as, after this, I got confused when I had to multitask through several things at once, it’s not hard to believe that something similar happened.

On the plus side, after dinner I managed an extra half-hour of Torah study (in addition to the half-hour I did on the train in to work) and fifteen or twenty minutes of novel research. Then I got a really weird response to a comment I left on a FB post. I honestly don’t understand what it’s saying, whether it’s broadly agreeing with me, disagreeing with me, arguing with me, something else entirely. No idea.

***

A while back, the Tube started displaying posters saying that non-consensual touching or staring is sexual harassment and will be prosecuted. This resulted in a degree of ridicule, with people saying that the police often refuse to investigate serious crimes, even rape, because they say they don’t have the resources to do so, so are they really going to prosecute people for staring on the Tube?

Today I saw a Tube poster calling on passengers to intervene if they see sexual harassment. There was a disclaimer about only intervening if you can do so safely, which just introduced an element of mixed messaging and confusion. When I told E, she suggested that, in the absence of more funding, perhaps the police were starting a deliberate policy of encouraging vigilantism. I guess we’ll soon be having amateur Sherlock Holmes-types crawling over murder scenes while the actual forensic police officers fill in paperwork.

I have often wondered about this idea of intervening if I were to see some kind of harassment (sexual, racial, homophobic, transphobic). I see stories about harassment in the news and wonder what I would do if I saw that happening. Regardless of what the poster says, I am disinclined to do anything. I can see that sort of confrontation escalating very quickly and ending in my getting hit or stabbed. Unlike America, it’s unlikely that I would get shot, but the number of stabbings keeps rising and no one seems to know what to do about it.

***

On the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook page, Rabbi Kahn asked for twentieth and twenty-first century Jewish books that have inspired us. This is what I wrote (reformatted for WP):

Hard to narrow it down to just a few but:

Rabbi Lord Sacks: many things, I’ll name Radical Then, Radical Now and the Torah commentary essays.

Rav Soloveitchik: The Lonely Man of Faith

Rabbi Michael Rosen: The Quest for Authenticity: The Thought of Reb Simhah Bunim

Chaim Feinberg: Leaping Souls: Rabbi Menachem Mendel and the Spirit of Kotzk

Arthur Green: Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav

Abraham Joshua Heschel: A Passion for Truth

Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits’ essay: A Jewish Sexual Ethics

[End of passage from FB]

A few things that strike me from this list.

1. In a list of books from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I picked four books about nineteenth century rabbis. I’m not sure what this says about me. Possibly that I can’t answer a question in a straightforward way.
2. Out of eight books and essays, three are wholly or partly about the Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk). I was thinking about my autistic special interests the other day and trying to work out what are autistic special interests and what are just interests. I felt Judaism probably isn’t a special interest, but the Kotzker probably is. This list seems to confirm that.
3. Pretty much every text on this list is by or about someone who is considered a Jewish religious existentialist or proto-existentialist (I don’t think Rabbi Berkovits is, but in the essay he talks about Martin Buber and I-Thou encounters, so that probably counts on some level).
4. I am a virgin, yet I picked an essay on sexual ethics as one of the most inspirational to me, and I wasn’t trying to be funny, sarcastic, clever or anything like that. That essay has really shaped how I view sexuality and what I would like it to be for me when E and I get married, and even by extension how to have meaningful non-sexual relationships.

Tribes

Not much to say today. I’ve gone from worrying about the Israeli elections (which ended as badly as everyone feared they would) to worrying about the American ones (which might well end as badly as everyone fears they will) even though I’m not American. Margaret said it’s because I have an American wife, but I think it’s more that America’s ills tend to spread throughout the Western world. I think we’re ending a weird transition period as the American Empire ends (and I know most Americans insist they haven’t got an empire, but that’s half the problem) and the world wobbles on its geopolitical axis, combined with the fact that every forty years or so the political paradigm shifts, and we’re pretty much due for that the last shift being in the eighties with Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. (I heard this idea attributed to James Callaghan, who lost the 1979 election to Mrs Thatcher during the last paradigm shift.)

Other than that, I had a busy day: volunteering, cooking dinner (vegetable curry) and even a little evening novel work, although it wasn’t terribly productive.

***

I had a slightly weird thought about not finding my ‘tribe’ or fitting into online spaces. I wonder how much is not due to people or politics, but to not relating to slang words and phrases and pop cultural references? My knowledge of popular culture is pretty poor. Granted, now I’m nearly forty, that’s not surprising, but it was bad when I was a teenager too. And even at school I didn’t understand a lot of the slang the other kids were using. I don’t think this is an autistic thing, as other autistics seem to use slang OK, unless it’s non-literal.

Also, even if something is not political, if I see a lot of terms that have entered the mainstream via identity politics (e.g. “safe space,” “consent,” “diversity,” “inclusive”), I start wondering if I need to hide my opinions (not that they’re usually public) for fear they will hate me. This may be paranoia on my part, but I’m used to people (from my family and friends outwards to unknown people online) making sweeping statements about conservative people being evil. Even if it is paranoia, it does distance me from the site or group inasmuch as it jolts me out of the context of the piece of writing into wondering what the author would think about me if they really knew me. Sometimes I feel I should have a sign that says, “Just because I have some somewhat conservative opinions doesn’t mean I hate poor people! I volunteer at a food bank and before that I used to volunteer at a drop-in centre for asylum seekers! (Please don’t hate me.)” That’s quite long for a sign, though.

Franklin Roosevelt, Pitt the Younger, Orpheus, Abraham and Me

At work, J sent me to get some spare keys cut (the ones I couldn’t get cut last week). I found somewhere that would cut them, but for more than he was expecting. I wasn’t sure if J was back in the office or still in shul (synagogue). Logically, I should have phoned, but social anxiety, phone anxiety, executive function issues around making an on the spot decision and conflicting ideas about showing initiative versus asking permission resulted in my getting the keys cut, then retroactively texting to check if that was OK, which was not a good way of handling it.

On the way to get the keys cut, I passed Franklin Roosevelt’s statue in Grosvenor Square, although only from behind (I couldn’t justify the detour to look at the front). There are six US Presidents with statues in London: Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan and George Washington (the latter of which I think is pretty broadminded of us, all things considered). E and I might try to do a walk to visit all six in one day. But not on a wet November day.

I passed Pitt the Younger’s statue in Hanover Square too. There was a seagull on his head. He deserved better.

***

I feel like I get “friend crushes” on people when I think I would like to be their friend, online or in person. I am generally no better at managing these than I was at managing my real crushes in my single days. I don’t know what to do about this.

***

I was thinking today about Orpheus in the Underworld, and how I similarly think that if I do one thing wrong, I will lose E forever. I mean one thing wrong religiously, that God will punish me by taking her away from me, rather than that I will scare her off. I’m pretty sure she’s seen most of my negative side by now. There is also a fear of losing any reward I might have earned in the Next World by doing something wrong here, probably something fundamental about my life’s priorities e.g. writing if I’m not supposed to write; not writing if I am supposed to write; or not involving myself enough in the community.

I was also thinking, inevitably for the week of parashat Vayeira, of the Akeidah, Avraham (Abraham) being told to sacrifice Yitzchak (Isaac). I’ve worried a lot over the years that, even if I get my life sorted, or just a bit better, at some point God will want me to sacrifice it all for Him. I have never been able to get away from this fear, even though I vaguely intuit that if I asked a rabbi, he would say it’s a ridiculous fear. I think of people who lost everything in the Holocaust, even though that may not be a sensible comparison.

This is probably all over-thinking, but I can’t stop doing it.

***

Thinking about conversations here about whether God will “make allowances” for my autism and mental health issues made me wonder if I assume that if the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) insist I can work (as they do) then (1) I have no legitimate reason not to work or even to struggle and (2) that God will be as strict as the notoriously strict DWP when assessing my life.

I have also noted that I am uncomfortable with the “ableism” discourse that sees autism as a difference rather than a disability and blames all of autistic people’s struggles on “ableist” neurotypical society. There are several things I find uncomfortable with this, but for now I will just note that I feel (and I think social psychology evidence supports me) that responsibility is healthier than a culture of victimhood, just as gratitude is healthier than privilege-checking. Nevertheless, I do fall into the mindset of victimhood at times.

I am not sure if seeing myself as disabled rather than different or a victim of ableism is part of this victim mentality or not.

***

As an example of my victim mentality, someone I’m following on Facebook posted about the nasty things her peers wrote about her in her yearbook when she was fifteen and was an undiagnosed autistic. I posted the following comment, but now I worry it was too self-pitying and passive aggressive. I find social interactions hard, even with other autistic people, even online. I probably am passive aggressive when faced with autistic people who are “living their best possible life,” or something even vaguely approximating it, doubly so when they’re significantly younger than me and have a lot more “best possible life” to look forward to than I do.

Yearbooks are an American thing we don’t have in the UK, but when I finished GCSEs (age 15-16), my peers wanted to do it anyway because of Hollywood. The teachers stopped them, supposedly because those making the yearbook wrote nasty things about me and my geeky friends (I don’t know what they wrote, just that it was nasty). After A-Levels (age 17-18), they had another go and this time got it published, but I don’t know what they wrote, as I didn’t want to waste my money buying books about people I had no desire to remember. I’d love to say I’m living the sort of joyous, meaningful life that is the best form of revenge, but, sadly, I’m not, but I’m glad that you are!

“The red-eyed scavengers are creeping”

I kept waking up this morning and not getting up. I don’t know why. This left me feeling bad when I finally did get up around midday. I don’t know how much is habit, tiredness, autistic comfort or something else. I did get woken up about 7am and kept awake for a while by the rain – not by the rain itself, but by something (I guess a gutter or something similar) that was dripping loudly and regularly and was driving my autistic brain crazy. But eventually I did get back to sleep.

I feel pretty bad today, very depressed. I felt like I was fighting back tears a lot of the day. I know it’s too early to say if I’m having a few bad days or relapsing into depression, SAD or autistic burnout, but I worry that I am, and how that will make things so hard for E. I’m trying to stay focused and in the present, but it’s hard when I just want to curl up and sleep. I’m supposed to be seeing a psychiatrist on the 15^th of November to discuss cutting my meds, but it looks horribly like I may have to stay on them, and who knows when I’ll get to see a psychiatrist again on the NHS?

I went for a run, just to do something. I hadn’t been for a run in nearly two months. It was a poor run, but I knew it would be; I’m just glad I managed forty-five minutes and nearly 5.5km (far from continuous running, though). There was very loud music playing, I think Jewish rock. Then, suddenly, about five o’clock, the music stopped and a lot of frum (religious Jewish) parents appeared with children. I guess there was a big birthday party nearby. Seeing the children made me feel vaguely bad that if E and I manage to have children, we’re not going to be able to afford a lot of stuff for them. I know loving your children is more important than giving them toys or expensive holidays, but it’s sad for the children, who won’t appreciate that at a young age, and who will have to deal with the school bullies for not having the fashionable toys.

Now the noise is all Guy Fawkes Night fireworks. I guess I should be glad people are still celebrating it, as I thought everyone had switched to celebrating Halloween (not a major event in the UK when I was growing up), but it’s not necessarily good with an exercise headache and autistic reactions to loud noises. I tried to do some Torah study, but it just made my head hurt more. I will try to do a little before bed, if I can.

I still felt depressed after the run. While running, the line came into my head, “The red-eyed scavengers are creeping/ From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green” from T.S. Eliot’s A Cooking Egg (I got the quote a bit wrong, but corrected it here). I probably shouldn’t quote it, as it’s antisemitic. The “red-eyed scavengers” are almost certainly Jews (or “jews” as Eliot would have written it; as Rodger Kamenetz pointed out, Eliot repeatedly denied the Jews the dignity of a capital letter), as Kentish Town and Golders Green were (and Golders Green still is) very Jewish parts of London. Strangely, the material I’ve found about the poem online doesn’t mention this (you can be sure they would have pointed it out if he’d used a slur against various other minority groups). Even so, the line is powerful and I feel comfortable repurposing it to refer to the scavengers of depression, anxiety and OCD trying to creep in to my consciousness (or unconscious) when I’m exhausted. It’s an effort to keep them out, but if I make that effort, where will I get the energy needed to work, do household chores, fulfil religious obligations, write, exercise and so on? In short, how can I have a life if all my energy and brainpower goes on staying mentally healthy and vaguely functional?

***

It’s also harder and harder every day to function without E.

***

Responding to a comment from Adventuresofagradgirl (is this how you would like to be referred to here? Please let me know!) on my last post that God wants us to be good and to be happy and whether I write or not is secondary, I wrote:

I want to be good, but I feel I would find it easier to be good if I wasn’t on the spectrum. But presumably God dismissed that thought for some reason. I don’t know if God wants me to be happy, or how to achieve that. I worry that God wants me to write for some purpose, and if I don’t achieve it, that will be consider sinful or at least negative. But if I’m not supposed to write and devote time to it that should be spent on Torah study, volunteering, family, etc., that will also be considered sinful. It’s hard to know what to do or how other people navigate thoughts like this.

***

I want to post the following on the autism forum, at least the first point if not the second, but I lack the courage:

It’s over eighteen months since I was diagnosed autistic and I feel that I’m still processing what that means to me.

I still feel that autism is a disability to me rather than a difference and definitely not a “superpower.” My autistic traits are mild enough to be irritating and somewhat disabling, but don’t come with any benefits I’ve found yet. The only partial exception is my ability to spot errors of spelling and grammar. I would like to use this to work as freelance proof-reader, but I worry that that will involve a lot of skills I don’t have for networking and self-promotion. Autism is a drawback for those things. (My proof-reading skill doesn’t work so well in the office either, for some reason, and I make mistakes there.)

I want more than anything to write serious literary fiction, but I struggle with creating and motivating characters as well as using metaphorical language (I can understand non-literal language, but I seem to struggle to write it). I also think my writing tends to be overly-formal.

Also, unlike many people on this forum, I don’t feel that I’ve found my “tribe.” Autistic people seem to be too heterogeneous a group, and many of them too different from me, to be a group I can fully identify with. I dislike the term “intersectionality,” but my struggles seem to be primarily located at the intersection between autistic identity and Orthodox Jewish identity. I struggle with my autism particularly because I’m trying to live in Orthodox Jewish spaces, resulting in issues other autistics don’t have and I struggle with my Judaism because I’m practising it while struggling with autism, resulting in issues other Orthodox Jews don’t have.

Orthodox Jewish identity is fundamentally communal, whether regarding prayer (private, individual prayer is definitely considered inferior to communal prayer), religious study (which is ideally done in pairs and often in noisy, crowded rooms full of people arguing) and acts of kindness. As the title of an anthropological study of the shtetl (semi-autonomous Jewish towns in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust) notes, “Life is with People”. It is not clear what can be done in the community for people who struggle to be around other people. This is before taking into account that Jews are, culturally, often loud and social, sometimes intrusively so (a generalisation, obviously, but rooted in reality, I think).

Orthodox Judaism lags some years behind the trends in the secular Western world. It is still catching up on awareness of mental illness; it will probably be some years before people begin talking about provisions or adjustments and leniencies for the neurodivergent. I’m not sure where I go in the meantime.

***

Facebook has been good and bad today, with some angry spost I didn’t really understand and a question on the Orthodox Conundrum group about non-Jewish books that have spiritual value. I probably over-thought this, and also realised that while I think Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov have spiritual worth, I don’t remember enough detail about either to really justify recommending them, which is sad (especially as I’ve read Hamlet twice, once without notes and once with, and seen it (on TV) twice). In the end I went  for The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (on the dangers of playing God) and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. One plot thread is proto-Zionist, but it’s actually the other one, about a not-very-good person who’s made big mistakes trying to live a better life that is more spiritual (and more engaging, I thought).

There was political stuff (actually economic stuff) I wanted to disagree with on a blog, but I just didn’t feel up to getting in an argument. As I’ve said before, I think people rarely change their minds based on internet debate. I don’t like feeling people think I’m cruel or callous for decisions that are taken for pragmatic reasons when they know nothing about my thoughts, feelings or wider life (volunteering, charity, etc.). I do wish economics was a compulsory school subject, though.

It occurs to me that by avoiding discussion, I am perpetuating the problem, as well as potentially avoiding views that contradict my own and that may be true (although, to be fair, I do read some opposing views, I just don’t vocalise my responses. I think I’m probably better than most people about listening to the other side of the debate and being open to criticism of my own views). But I don’t really have the stamina to get into fights and there are not many places that I feel are safe for this kind of discussion.

***

I finished reading The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who over Shabbat. It wasn’t bad, I just wish there could have been a more balanced presentation of late seventies Doctor Who.

On to Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide. In the introduction, the authors (Paul Cornell, who would go on to write for the revived TV series, plus Keith Topping and Martin Day) state, “We only mock Doctor Who because we are here to celebrate the fan way of watching television, a close attention to detail matched by a total willingness to take the mickey.” I feel that this doesn’t exist any more, or at least that I can’t find it. It’s possible that character limits on social media prevent such a complex way of engaging with a text.

Then a few lines later they state that calling stories with no name on screen by their official name on BBC paperwork rather than by the names common in fandom, “might be a mark of strict accuracy, but it could also be a sign of elitism” which, aside from referring to a now largely subsided fan argument of the nineties, shows that making something completely non-political into a angry and self-righteous political point for no good reason was happening even twenty-seven years ago.

Cause Without a Rebel

There’s been some anxiety hanging around over the last few days, partly around social media use and whether I should try to make friends on it, if I just make a fool of myself trying to connect with people, if we’ll argue about politics and so on. When I went back on Facebook, I intended to use it mainly for groups to avoid this kind of drama, but I guess inevitably as I get to know people in groups, I will want to connect with them outside the groups.

Another worry is that I feel I want to get to a place where my life is ‘sorted’ and stable, at least for a while, but that may never happen. At least I have E, even if she is on another continent at the moment, but I want my life to be stable so our life together will be stable and easier for her, but I think we both have too many ‘issues’ for that. I just feel that E is having to sacrifice so much for me that I just want to make things easier for her.

Shabbat (the Sabbath) was OK, but not great. I got to shul on Friday night for the first time in a couple of weeks. I was feeling somewhat down, not literally clinical depression, but colloquially depressed. I spent a lot of time in bed, as usual, not just at night/morning, but after shul (synagogue) on Friday night and again after breakfast this morning and twice in the afternoon. Going to bed was more seeking autistic sensory comfort than from tiredness; I wrap myself in my duvet and/or weighted blanket and/or curl up in the foetal position and it calms me down.

I spent a lot of time (in bed and outside it) thinking about autism, disability, autistic superpowers and whether I would be better off without being autistic and this probably contributed to the depressed feeling. I know I’ve written about this before, but I just can’t share the view that autism is merely a difference or even a strength and that the only struggles from being autistic come from the supposed “ableism” of society. In the end, I concluded there were too many variables to meaningfully describe what my life would be like without autism, and that God clearly wants me to be autistic. Even so, without knowing what my mission in life is, what He wants me to accomplish by being autistic, it is hard to work out if my focus should be on paid work, writing or religious obligations.

I really missed E a lot too.

Other than that, I ate far too many pretzels (the little kind) and probably too many biscuits (although not nearly as many as the pretzels) and had a very mild, but persistent headache intermittently from Friday night until an hour or so ago.

After Shabbat, I discovered I had a begging letter from the University of Oxford again, this time from the History Faculty (my BA was in History). I get them every so often, because even Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world and one of the most prestigious and highly-rated, has money trouble (within reason. A lot of the colleges are vast landowners and completely loaded). To be fair, the cause they wanted to raise money for is worthwhile (to increase access for students from poor backgrounds), but I had a miserable time at Oxford and prefer to send my money (a) elsewhere and (b) to causes that are more ‘life and death’ e.g. food for refugees or those on the breadline. But getting these begging letters just reminds me that I went to Oxford and I should therefore now be a super-successful, super-rich hot-shot lawyer, politician or high-ranking civil servant and not a poor, part-time office administrator. It’s sad that, so many years after making me more miserable than I have ever been in my life (I very nearly attempted suicide), Oxford is still making me miserable.

Other than that, I’ve spent too long this evening writing this post and reading autistic forum and autistic relationship FB group posts, and I’m not entirely sure why. Something about trying to connect with people and understand myself as well as deal with fears that being autistic means not being able to manage relationships. I don’t think this is the case, but it’s disturbing to read, on two different forums (fora!), two different people talking about essentially being verbally and emotionally abused by their autistic partner, who says everything they do wrong is down to autism and therefore (they argue) beyond reproach.

On one forum someone wrote about getting meltdowns from, “seeing everything in great details, hearing every minute sound at the same level, pretending to be happy when inside they are dying and not liking the fake people surrounding them, smelling everything that each person has used in bodycare/fragrance/hair products etc, feeling exhausted from the pointless chat about weekends to a point where disassociation happens, feeling like people training you are talking but you can’t hear it because you feel so stressed and in shock that your mind cannot connect” and more. I’ve experienced some of this, but I don’t really get meltdowns. Very rarely I get panic attacks that probably verge on meltdowns, but I haven’t had one since knowing more about autism to be sure.

I wonder why I don’t get meltdowns when so many autistic people do. Not that I want them, but not getting them reinforces the feelings I still occasionally get that I’m not “really” autistic, or that I’m not autistic “enough” to justify the work and social problems I have. Maybe I’m just good at masking and then end up burnt out. I do get shutdowns, but, again, not as bad as some people get.

***

A couple of thoughts from things I’ve been reading/listening to lately:

Both a devar Torah (Torah thought) I read from Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl and an Orthodox Conundrum podcast about Rav Shagar z”tzl spoke about parents and the need to differentiate from them, and then later to realise how much you have in common with them and how much you are indebted to them.

As a teenager, I never really tried to rebel. I just spent all my time in my room, working and driving myself to a breakdown/burnout. But I didn’t have much in common with my parents either. Now I find it can be hard to find common ground with them. Some of this is living at home into my late thirties, some is being autistic with allistic (non-autistic) parents and some is me having classic “first generation to go to university” differences from them. Some is probably my being more religious and more Jewishly-educated, which often creates a dynamic where my parents look to me for Jewish education and halakhic (Jewish law) guidance. There’s a Jewish saying that when a parent teaches a child, both laugh, but when a child teaches a parent, both cry, and I feel that a bit sometimes. I’m not sure how to explain it to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. I had a psychiatrist who said that I never really bonded with my parents as a child and therefore could not rebel as a teenager, and now I can’t separate properly from them which is probably true. It’s only with marrying E that I’m really trying to move away from home. I did live in my own flat for two years when my OCD was bad, but I deliberately lived within walking distance of my parents’ house and I used to come home for Shabbat. I don’t know what I can do about this at this stage.

***

On the same Orthodox Conundrum podcast, R’ Zachary Truboff spoke about Rav Shagar thinking that the problem with Orthodoxy is that it’s Orthodox: i.e. that, as a society, it’s driven by what other Orthodox people think is appropriate, not by what God wants. He said there are things that are against halakhah and ethics that do not lead to people getting thrown out of the Orthodox community (he didn’t say what, but tax and benefits fraud spring to mind). He didn’t mention, but could have, that there are things that aren’t violations of halakhah or ethics, but which can get you thrown out of the community all the same (this varies from one community to another, but in some communities for a teenager to talk to someone of the opposite might fall in this category, or even refusing to marry a particular person in some communities). I think this is my biggest struggle with the Orthodox community. Aside from the moral aspects of this, being on the autism spectrum means I’m OK with clear rules (halakhah), but bad at intuiting, let alone following, unspoken social conventions.

***

Anyway, my parents are noisily watching No Time to Die, the latest James Bond film, in the room below me, which is a bit distracting as I can hear incidental music and bangs. I wasn’t tempted to re-watch it with them, as, while technically accomplished, I found the film overlong, confusing and too sad. James Bond isn’t supposed to be sad! I much prefer the supposedly “silly” Roger Moore films. I could probably find ten reasons why the much-maligned Moonraker is a great film, not in “so bad it’s good,” but actually good.

Always Winter and Never —

I’ve mentioned before about not being in touch with my emotions. Today I’m not even that sure how the day went. Either a good day in which quite a few stressful things happened, or a stressful day in which nothing really bad happened.

J wasn’t in the office today. He’d picked today to drive to one of our other sites, but it turned out there were floods from the heavy rain and he couldn’t get in, so he went home and worked from there. I go in on the Tube, so it didn’t affect me. There wasn’t a lot to do, so I ended up phoning people who hadn’t paid their membership fees yet. It led to some awkward calls, although no one got angry with me (which has happened once or twice) and I did get two credit card payments and a couple of other people promising to pay soon, including someone who didn’t realise she’d cancelled the standing order to us, thinking it was going to somewhere else.

It got a bit lonely in the office by myself. I felt overwhelmed by the afternoon, which might have been the phoning or the several cups of tea I’d drunk. I probably drink too much caffeine at work, given I have low-level anxiety much of the time there. I have a cup of coffee at home over breakfast, a second when I get to the office, and sometimes a third if I feel really tired. Then a cup of tea for lunch and three or four more during the afternoon to keep myself going. I could drink decaf tea, but I sometimes find it tastes funny to me, plus part of me feels I need the caffeine, even if it makes me anxious.

I usually struggle with winter, but I feel much worse than I usually do at this stage. We’re still in the midst of autumn, let alone actual winter (in my head, winter starts in December) and already I feel I can’t cope. I miss E a lot. We’re not likely to get married before spring, which makes it (spring) seem impossibly distant. Winter usually feels like it won’t ever end, especially once we get past Chanukah and the bank holiday season and it feels like endless January followed by interminable February. Starting chatan and kallah (groom and bride) classes yesterday should be a step forward, but somehow it doesn’t feel that way. I guess I still can’t believe I found someone who wants to marry me, with all that entails and feel it will somehow go wrong, because “obviously” I can’t be happy.

At the moment we’re waiting nervously for E’s visa. There shouldn’t be any issues, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any, especially given the Home Office is not the most efficient (or compassionate) organisation, and it’s under stress with Ukrainian refugees and the stuff in the news about over-crowding in refugee centres. At least I have my trip to New York at the end of the month to look forward to, even if there may be a very long wait until we can see each other again afterwards (I couldn’t go later in the year for fear I would miss my sister’s baby being born).

***

Yesterday in therapy I somehow got on to the subject of wanting to share controversial political views with people online. I say I don’t want to do it, then I seem to seek out people who don’t share my views and read what they post online as if I’m daring myself to disagree. (I didn’t say this in therapy, but another view comes to mind, which is that I’m trying to “collect” online friends with all sorts of different views to my own to prove to myself how tolerant and broadminded I am. I hope this isn’t true, because it’s basically using people for my own ends.)

I mentioned that earlier this year, I got annoyed about an antisemitic news story and wrote a two or three page satirical squib, a dystopian satire, to let off steam. It started connected strongly to the news story, but grew to take in a lot of other stuff I don’t like. E loved it and said I should expand it to a novel and for a while I did think about it, but I was already working on my current novel and decided to leave it for now. I am collecting ideas for it, though, and I would like to have a go at it at some point.

The fact that I was working on a different novel (although not far enough to absolutely have to stick with it) was a good reason to leave it for now, but I was also scared. I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to keep being funny for 80,000 words. I’m learning tricks to jump-start narrative and character development in my writing when I get blocked, but I don’t know how to do it for humour. I guess I feel there is no way of doing it for humour: you’re either funny or you’re not. And I worry I’m not. I know this is the voice of the school bullies, and, as my therapist said, a bunch of teenage boys are probably not the best arbiters of whether something is really funny. But it’s hard to turn that voice off.

A bigger worry is offending people or upsetting people. I would really like to write a Swiftian satire parodying everything I hate about the modern world and that’s bound to upset people in our intolerant and cancelling age.

My therapist asked if there was an image that summed up my thoughts about creativity and putting controversial or satirical ideas out there and immediately I thought of the traditional sign for the theatre, with two masks, one smiling for comedy and one miserable for tragedy. It’s like I’m only allowed to use the tragic one (actually, tragedy can be comic e.g. Hamlet). The therapist suggested satire as a bridge between tragedy and other forms of comedy. It’s an interesting idea to play with, but I’m not sure where it will take me.

 ***

Doctor Who time: E and I are watching The Invasion (1968). It’s ahead of its time in that it’s about an evil Big Tech genius who wants to take over the world – so far, so 2022 – but it’s of its time in that the focus is on innovative hardware, not software (as it would have been in the eighties or nineties) or algorithms (as it would be now).

There’s a weirdness about some Doctor Who stories of the late sixties, in that the Doctor (a time-traveller from a super-advanced civilisation) doesn’t like computers. It’s never made entirely clear why, but it seems to be on the spurious (to us) grounds that they’re inhuman and inauthentic, stifling true creativity and humanity. The Ice Warriors is the story where this really comes to the fore, but it appears in others too, including this one. It’s where the programme shows its roots as primarily Romantic and concerned with emotional authenticity rather than scientific progress per se. This is why the Cybermen are the most frequently-appearing foe in this era, as they represent technology without humanity.

Although my main takeaway so far is that the music and sound effects in this story are really good. Sixties Doctor Who was more about the sound effects than the visual effects, with the late sixties stories blurring the lines between incidental music, sound effects and ambient atmospheres. This story has a score that sounds like a Western and sound effects that sound unearthly.

“I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones”

I went to bed late last night. It’s hard having E in a time zone behind me, as it makes going to bed earlier hard, although I’m pretty good at staying up too late even without that and indeed was online late yesterday blogging and social media-ing. I wanted to watch an episode of The Avengers yesterday (I’d say the John Steed and Emma Peel Avengers to distinguish from Marvel, but I wanted to watch a Cathy Gale episode), but I ran out of time and ended up reading instead. I recently started Accidental Presidents, a non-fiction book about the eight men who succeeded to the American presidency via the vice-presidency when the elected incumbent died. It’s interesting and not particularly heavy-going, but it assumes a greater knowledge of nineteenth century American politics and history than I have, and the writing verges on the clichéd, with some weirdly anachronistic metaphors (e.g. saying President Tyler’s plans hit a “speed bump”). It probably wasn’t hugely relaxing to read at night, though.

Whether I did too much yesterday or didn’t relax enough or both or neither, I was exhausted this morning. I had to get out of bed at 10.30am to help with the Tesco order and stayed up afterwards to daven (pray) before the time for Morning Prayers was over (now an hour earlier due to the clocks going back). But my mind felt “scattered” and unfocused the way it does when I’m feeling exhausted, and my mood was low. I revised my plans for today, as I didn’t think I had the time or headspace to listen to the hour and a half shiur (religious class) from Aviva Gottleib Zornberg that I wanted to listen to today (the only one of the LSJS’ pre-Rosh Hashanah shiurim that I haven’t listened to yet).

I did manage half an hour or so of novel writing, but I found it hard to focus. I had therapy. It was a good session, but the sadness came back afterwards. I went for a walk and listened to some of a religious podcast in lieu of Torah study, which I really couldn’t face.

I still feel vaguely obliged to help people on the autism forum, and slightly guilty if I can’t. A teenage girl posted something there today, but I could barely understand it and I had no idea what to say to a troubled, possibly suicidal and psychotic (her words), teenage girl with a personality disorder that would help her. Admittedly it’s hard to know how to help someone whose post title is a string of swearwords directed at people trying to help her, but I still feel sad and vaguely guilty.

I’m also beating myself up for general social media use and difficulty knowing how to communicate with people online. I hope this is just another bad day and not the start of depression or SAD. 

***

People write about famous people with autism (supposedly) e.g. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Dan Ackroyd, Elon Musk, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and so on (to be honest, I find the historical attributions speculative at best and often fanciful. The fact that someone was clever and a bit eccentric doesn’t automatically mean they were neurodiverse). I find these lists difficult to read, as it suggests I could succeed like them. Which makes me feel that if I can’t succeed, it must be my fault, rather than because autism manifests differently in different people and they got lucky with traits that helped them do what they wanted to do, rather than holding them back.

Related: it occurred to me that many of the frum people I know who had mental health issues ended up not frum. I don’t know if there’s causation there or just correlation, and my survey is certainly not statistically significant, but it makes me feel good (that I stayed frum) and bad (that having mental health issues correlates with leaving the frum world and there’s no guarantee I will stay frum in the future, particularly if my depression comes back). I don’t really know enough Jewish people with autism to tell if there’s a correlation with leaving frumkeit there, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

  ***

Reading about the Israeli elections (the likely return of Netanyahu, the success of the far-right) just made me feel worse. I felt I should write something to say that Itamar Ben-Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich don’t represent me, as an Orthodox Jew and Zionist, but really I was too depressed to face up to it. I just felt awful.

***

It’s extra hard being away from E when I feel like this. I need hugs, really.

***

The good news: my sleep study apparatus (if that’s the right word) should be sent to me next week, so hopefully that will help me move forward with working out what (else) is wrong with me. It can take up to twelve weeks to get the results. And E’s other birthday present arrived today (I ordered her two books, but only one arrived last week). It really is coincidence that I keep buying E books that I would like to read as presents! Or rather, it’s less coincidence and more a reflection that we do have a lot of shared interests. She was pleased with the present, but she won’t get to read them for a while.

E and I also had a Zoom marriage class in the evening, which this week was about the structure of the Jewish wedding ceremony. I learnt a few things, which was good. I feel less depressed now, so maybe some of it was anxiety. I’m very tired though and going to bed soon. The class did make me marvel again at how allistic (non-autistic) people can often chat and make small talk so easily. Talk about super-powers…

Social Media and Politics

Moodwise, today was somewhat better than the last few days. I didn’t think about Ashley so much, although I’m glad I still have therapy booked for tomorrow, as I think I will still have things to say. There is still grief when I think about her, but grief is the price we pay for caring about people.

I went to volunteering. I overslept a little, but got there on time. I felt a bit faint when we were having coffee at the end and ate a biscuit, even though I usually don’t. The diet still hasn’t recovered from Yom Tov: I ate chocolate last night and cheese for lunch today. I did finally take my blood pressure with my parents’ gauge (? Whatever it’s called). My pulse was OK, but my blood pressure was “high normal” (according to the NHS website), which surprised me a bit as it’s usually a bit low. Possibly the process of taking it was stressing me out. I should exercise more, I know, and probably drink less caffeine.

Aside from that, I did some work on my novel, re-formatting it in line with the submission guidelines I got a while back, re-reading the last chapter I wrote (this all took about an hour) and writing new material for half an hour or so. However, I do feel torn between writing this novel; researching this novel; re-formatting and pitching my first novel (probably not a priority, as I think it really needs a drastic rewrite, but it seems wrong to just leave it sitting there for now); and, on a completely different track, moving forward with setting myself up as a freelance proof-reader. On the other hand, because of all this, I did not have time to cook dinner or help Dad with something he wanted help with, so I felt a bit bad about that.

***

I’m in “social media anxiety” mode again (or AGAIN). I won’t go into the whole thing, but between feeling obliged to help people in distress on the autism forum, but not knowing how; people having a bizarre and rapidly personal argument about Halloween (of all things) on a Jewish FB group; and  trying to work out whether to follow a person who posts some Jewish, autistic and Doctor Who stuff that is potentially interesting, but also has rather different politics and just seems to use social media in a way that doesn’t really work for me.

I feel like I’ve never got the hang of social media, that I would like to connect with people, but struggle with the aggression social media brings out in some people and also struggle to connect with all aspects of some people when I only connect with a part of them. There are people who I probably would get on with in real life who seem overwhelming on social media, either because of the volume of posts or the stridency of their views in writing, probably more so than in person. I find this frustrating, as usually I think of text and online communication as being easier for me than in person.

I also probably over-think political differences. The reality is that, over the years, I’ve been friendly with people with different political views to me, but I fear being stigmatised for my views, which pushes me to be silent, which does not always work out well. I don’t identify with any conservative political party (far from it, I hate most of the ones I’m aware of), but my temperament (not exactly what I mean, but I don’t know a better word) is somewhat conservative, at the very least with a small ‘c’. Still, I am used to hearing (from family, friends, acquaintances, the media, social media, etc.) that conservatives are rich, privileged, cruel, uncaring, even evil… I feel uncomfortable with this, but because I am conflict-averse, I just keep quiet. But this probably does not do my mental health any good.

These days I do pretty much assume that anyone with strong progressive views would hate me if they “really” knew me, so I say nothing. The irony is that, as I said, I dislike all the conservative political parties I know; I refuse to vote according to a party line and always try to think critically about parties and issues before coming to a decision about anything; I try to be open-minded and think for myself; and I think it’s a bad idea for any party to be in power for more than two terms, that sometimes we need more conservative policies and sometimes more progressive ones and that it’s bad to be too doctrinaire about parties and policies, but that we need to be willing to be pragmatic and flexible.

I also feel that when people present their political views in a very dogmatic way, they can become incredibly pompous and it’s hard not to laugh, which isn’t polite. Watching a lot of Monty Python lately has given me heightened awareness of how silly so much of life is and how ridiculous it is that so many people take themselves so seriously when they are so silly. I guess I find a lot of what I think of as “performative wokeness” very funny and that makes it hard for me to take people seriously sometimes, even if I agree with what they’re saying. I actually agree with people with very different political views more often than you might think, but the “packaging” can get in the way.