Sainthood Is Not In Your Future

I woke up at 5am with a headache. I took some tablets and watched James Bond for a bit. This probably wasn’t ideal headache viewing, even with the volume low (although it wasn’t a very bad headache, just an annoying one), but the DVD was in the machine still and I didn’t want to lose where I was up to. After fifteen minutes or so (OK, after the speedboat chase finished), the headache had gone so I went back to bed. I couldn’t sleep, but I stayed in bed resting until it was time to get up, about 6.15am.

Despite this, the morning at work was OK. J was supposed to have a meeting elsewhere in the building at lunchtime, but the chairman had asked to switch to Zoom as he was unwell. This had several knock-on effects, the most significant being that J had to be in our office for the meeting. As the meeting was confidential, that meant I had to be out of the office. I needed to go to the bank anyway, but when I returned, I ended up sitting around reading and messing around on my phone upstairs, waiting for J to text me that the meeting was over and I could come back.

I don’t know if this disturbed my workflow or mindset, but I seemed to make a lot of mistakes in the afternoon. I got into a mistake-self-doubt vicious circle, with mistakes leading to self-doubt leading to more mistakes and so on.

After work, I davened (prayed) in the shul (synagogue) where I work and I got annoyed by a lot of things that really I shouldn’t have been annoyed about, such as the shaliach tzibbur (prayer leader) reading much too fast (what I call Nusach Turkey, when what comes out is not words, but gobble gobble gobble gobble), people messing about on their phones during the service, mourners saying the Sephardi Kaddish (you should use the nusach (liturgy) of the shul where you are davening, not your own nusach, but few people seem to be aware of this law) and a devar Torah (Torah thought) that went on far too long to bear the rather trite moral it concluded with (if we’re going in the right direction, God will remove all obstacles in our path, apparently).I felt bad for being annoyed and distracted by all of these. Not all of them are even against halakhah (Jewish Law) and I can only blame my autism for my annoyance inasmuch as it makes me rule-obsessed. Nevertheless, I felt that I hadn’t connected with God. Whether I should blame other people or my own sensibilities, I don’t know, but I felt frustrated rather than spiritually connected.

***

Lately I’ve been using a phrase from the Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk) as a sort of affirmation/meditation: “Don’t look furtively outside yourself, don’t look furtively into others, don’t keep yourself in mind.” I understand this to mean (1) focus on what your inner self is calling on you to do, not what other people tell you or expect of you; (2) don’t judge others or compare yourself to them; (3) if this sounds narcissistic, remember that the motive for action is to help others, not yourself. I have had a little bit of success with this in reducing comparison thoughts.

Today in A Fire Burns in Kotsk [sic], I read, “’a pious person doesn’t have God in mind because he’s always full of doubts. Perhaps he didn’t pronounce a word properly, perhaps he didn’t wash his hands, his skullcap isn’t back far enough on his head… Meanwhile, he forgets the larger truth; he forgets about the final redemption.’” A Fire Burns in Kotsk is fiction, but many of the aphorisms quoted are genuine. I am not sure how genuine this is.

It makes me think that I should have read this when I was struggling with religious OCD, because that’s what it seems to describe. But it’s relevant now as I struggle to find a way to balance the level of halakhic observance I would like with the level E is comfortable with. More than that, we want to balance the level of observance we would like with a degree of spirituality and connection to God rather than rote ritual. (Lately I have had better kavannah (mindfulness) in davening (prayer), but I am not sure how.)

***

On one of the Jewish autism Facebook groups I’m on, someone asked why he’s always beating himself up. I wasn’t sure that I understood him correctly (he posted a whole long thing that I didn’t follow), but I posted the following response:

I don’t know if this is what you mean, but I can only work part-time. I’m in a job I’m over-qualified for, but which I routinely mess up. My peers are in better jobs and actual *careers*. I constantly beat myself up for this perceived failure as well as for not doing what I could/should/would like to be doing both religiously and regarding everything else (exercise, housework, writing etc.). As for *why* I’m like this, I think it’s mostly childhood stuff, some of which has nothing to do with autism and some of it is somewhat related to autism, particularly being bullied a lot for being “weird” and a geek, which left me thinking that if I could find the “perfect” way to behave, I would be accepted, or at the very least I would merge into the background and be invisible. So, I beat myself up in the belief that this will cause me to improve myself and become my best possible self, which is the only ethically/religiously/socially acceptable outcome, except that this strategy doesn’t actually work and not only do I fail, I feel miserable for failing too.

It occurred to me afterwards that maybe the inspirational stories told in the frum (religious Jewish) community about great rabbis and tzaddikim (saintly people) are counter-productive. Maybe allistics (non-autistics) hear, “Wow, what a great story, that inspires me to want to be better,” whereas autistics, who tend to lack nuance and can be overly literal, think, “Wow, what a great story, I have to be on that saintly level!” But sainthood is not attainable for most people, and striving for it can end in disaster.

There were actually some positive responses to this in the form of conversation, which was nice, as often on Facebook I just get likes, which I like, but which are not really the kind of social interaction I wanted to get when I rejoined FB.

My Autistic Self is Pleased That This Post is Exactly 888 Words Long (Excluding This Title)

Dad’s seventieth birthday party seemed to go well. There were eleven adults, plus Nephew. Aside from Sister and Brother-in-law (and Nephew), the guests were a mixture of extended family and Dad’s oldest friends. We ended up sitting with family at one end and friends at the other, which was easier for me. Even so, I struggled to say much or to feel comfortable, even to make eye contact. I walked Nephew for a while and was popular with Sister and BIL for getting him to sleep. I also tried to wind him, without much success, although he seems to be a difficult baby to wind in general.

The food was excellent and I probably ate too much. The party went on for a long time, though, about four and a half hours. I’m pretty exhausted now, and still depressed. I need to watch that and hope it’s not a result of reducing medication. I would hate to think that I have to be on clomipramine forever. I did OK, but not great at not envying Sister and Brother-in-law. My Dad pointed out the photo of E and me taken at our post-civil wedding party to his friends. Normally, I would cringe, but I was glad that it proved that E exists outside my imagination.

I went for a brisk walk after the party, but I don’t feel able to do much else. I started to watch James Bond (Live and Let Die), but timed it badly and only watched the first half. I’m not sure if I will be able to watch the second half before I go to bed as I need to be up early for work. I feel vaguely guilty about watching Live and Let Die yet again (it’s one of my favourites), when there are other Bond films, let alone other films entirely, that I haven’t seen so much. But I needed something light and entertaining that I didn’t need to think about and, while it may be one of the most politically incorrect Bond films from a 2023 perspective (whatever that’s worth), I find it one of the most fun. The bus chase! The alligators! Even the title sequence: music by Paul McCartney and Wings and women whose heads turn to skulls – this terrified me as a child! Also, I could be wrong about this, but I think it’s the only Bond film where the title music appears diegetically (inside the fiction): listen to the singer when Bond and Felix are in the Fillet of Soul restaurant.

***

A comment I left on JYP’s blog:

As I said on a previous post, I haven’t really encountered “authentic self” in the workplace, but I work in a very small, old-fashioned and relatively frum workplace, so that may be why. I’ve encountered a lot about being your “authentic self” elsewhere, particularly in the autism community, where masking is seen as a uniformly bad thing.

I’m not sure that it’s possible or desirable to be your authentic self all the time; too much of our sense of self is contingent on where we are or who we are with. I don’t think there’s a Platonic Ideal Me that I should be showing all the time. That said, it would probably be better if I was more myself in some situations, although the workplace isn’t that high on my list.

I post this here as a reminder to myself that it’s one thing to try to be present in situations; it’s quite another to think that there is some pure Ideal Form Self that I have an obligation to manifest all the time. It’s OK to show different facets of my life with different people and in different situations.

***

I’m on several Facebook “Jewish and autistic” groups. They’re mostly dormant. sadly. One has someone who works as an autistic life coach who posts quite a bit promoting his workshops, which is slightly annoying, but there’s someone else who seems to be in all the groups who cross-posts stuff across all of them, almost always quasi-political stuff about ableism. Sometimes it just seems like she wants to be angry about things. I think a huge amount of social media, if not the internet as a whole, is taken up by people who want to be angry about things. On the whole, I prefer not to be angry, even if something is objectively wrong.

Today she reposted, across all the groups,  something about not saying you give autistic children “extra” time, but rather “the time they need,” because saying you give them “extra” time implies they’re inferior and needy compared to neurotypical children (or something; I couldn’t read the whole post, which was long and aggressive). This may be true, but it sounded to me like searching for grievances. I’m just glad with parents who take their child’s autism seriously. Plus, as I’ve said before, I don’t really agree with the “autism is a difference, not a disability” model of autism. Some of my struggles are socially-constructed, but I don’t think they all are, and in a society where nearly 99% of people are allistic (not autistic), beyond a certain point, constructing things in a more autistic-friendly way will eventually make things unworkable for 99% of the population instead. In a democracy, 99% will beat 1% every time.

Only Simchas

The last couple of days have been hard and tomorrow will probably be worse. On Friday, I got an email saying the proofreading work I thought I had to complete by Sunday evening was due on Friday. I’m not sure how I got that wrong, but I might need to say I have a longer turnaround time on the site, because of my regular job, not to mention wedding, Shabbat (the Sabbath) and so on. I did get the last piece of proofreading done on time. Fortunately, it was written fairly well so that, even though it was about twice as long as each of the other pieces, I finished it about as quickly as one of the previous pieces and quicker than the other.

I somehow managed to go to shul (synagogue), even though I didn’t think I would manage it. I guess the work situation gave me an adrenaline burst. I was tired afterwards. Dinner was OK, but I found myself communicating silently, by hand movements, at times again. I’m not sure where this has come from, if it’s new or if I always did it when exhausted and I’ve only just noticed. I know sometimes I come home from work exhausted and just go to my room and avoiding speaking for a while (not so much in my current job, but in previous ones), but this is in a social situation where I suddenly can’t speak any more or don’t want to do so. Afterwards, I did a little Torah study, but not as much as I would have liked, as I was exhausted. I read Dune Messiah (the second Dune book) for a bit and went to bed early.

Despite this, I got up very late again. I found lunch hard. Mum and Dad wanted to talk about the wedding. I was taken by surprise by the discussion, which makes me anxious and then verbally aggressive, and I felt torn between my parents and E (who wasn’t there). I don’t have very strong views about the wedding and party. E and my parents do, but they don’t want the same things. I find myself caught in the middle. E knows more about weddings in the abstract, for reasons I won’t go into here, but my parent have actually been to a lot more of them. E wants a very small wedding and I concur. I think my parents have come around to this now, but they are still worried that our wedding is too small for practical reasons, that we won’t have a minyan  (prayer quorum) for the wedding blessings or that the number of guests who can come will be so small that the caterers will refuse to cater for the party.

Mum and Dad also pressed me to make decisions about a best man and ushers, which I don’t really want, not least because I don’t have any really close friends to offer these too. I had more or less decided in my head that I would give Brother-in-law a pseudo-best man role (e.g. holding the ring), but I didn’t really want to do more than that. I feel that offering a role to any of my other friends will feel forced as we’re not that close. I don’t know who will be able to come either, as it’s going to be fairly short notice. Being confronted with sudden questions I had not planned for and didn’t really want to talk about on Shabbat (when technically you shouldn’t talk about things happening after Shabbat, although even very frum people don’t observe this rule strictly), I confess that I became bad-tempered and snapped at them. I did apologise afterwards and suggested we have a scheduled meeting one evening this week, when we can actually write things down.

After this I felt overwhelmed and went to bed and wrapped myself in my duvet and weighted blanket for a while. I did eventually get up and do various Shabbat things (Minchah, seudah) and did some Torah study (half an hour of The Guide for the Perplexed, although this only amounted to a few pages again). By the end of Shabbat, I was feeling totally drained, struggling to think straight, and feeling depressed and overwhelmed, aware that wedding planning will get worse and that tomorrow will be another busy and social day with Dad’s seventieth birthday party. Thankfully, this is to be a relatively small affair, but will still involve talking to some extended family and a couple of Dad’s friends who I haven’t seen for ages and who I find somewhat overwhelming at the best of times. I don’t know if I will be able to go to my room if it all becomes too much. I don’t know how many people who are coming know I’m autistic.

After Shabbat, I watched an episode of The Avengers (1960s John Steed Avengers, not Marvel) and felt a bit better. After that, I booked an eye test, which I’ve been meaning to do for a month as it’s overdue (no problems/headaches, though). I bought one of the Daleks I was looking at on eBay and bid for another. I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Possibly I over-think things. I did a little bit of novel planning, but i was struggling with low mood again and it was difficult. I’m going to shower and go to bed soon and hope tomorrow is better.

Renaissance Man

Today was a fairly quiet day, busy enough at work to stop me getting bored, but not so busy that I was rushing the whole time. Plus, I had to go to the bank and the shops for work reasons, albeit in the rain, which is good.

Yesterday, however, was very busy, so busy that I didn’t have time to blog. So this is yesterday’s blog post today.

I started my proofreading job. I worry that I am too formal and pedantic for the professional blog posts I was proofreading. I feel my writing style is slightly formal (or stuffy, if you prefer). I know that a more informal style is considered acceptable even for some professional materials and try to adapt, but it’s hard sometimes. I let contractions go through, but struggle with “But” at the start of a sentence (twice). I know it’s done, it just seems wrong to me. I want to put “However” or “Nevertheless”. I can’t remember how I left it. I left “paycheck to paycheck” in as there isn’t really a British English equivalent without significantly re-writing the sentence. I think it probably makes sense to most English people, but I might add a note when I return it. I proofread two posts of about 500 words each and have one of 1,000 left to do, but one of the 500 word posts took twice as long as the other, so it’s hard to estimate how long it will take to finish.

In the evening we had a family Zoom call for my father’s seventieth birthday. This was a semi-surprise. We couldn’t think how to get Dad on the call without telling him it was happening, but he thought it would just be my parents, me and my uncle and aunt (Mum’s brother and sister-in-law; Dad is an only child). Instead, as well as all of us, there was E, Sister, Brother-in-law, Nephew and some of my first cousins (Cousins 1, 4 and 5). This was the first time Uncle, Aunt and Cousins had “met” E as well as the first time all of them bar Uncle had met Nephew. It was a good call, but E and I found it draining. My extended family are very boisterous.

In between these two things, I had therapy. It was a successful session. We spoke a lot about masking and trying to fit in to the frum world. I feel like I have two identities, a frum (religious Jewish) one and a worldly one. These don’t feel like they go together and I feel bifurcated. My therapist suggested I could see myself as a Renaissance man, one engaged with the world, but also deeply religious. This appeals to me as I studied the Renaissance at university. Figures like Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon and Johannes Kepler invented the scientific method while being deeply religious. Similarly Sir Thomas More was a courtier and writer (humanist in the sixteenth century sense of a student of the humanities) as well as devout Catholic, at least until it cost him his head for resisting Henry VIII’s break with Rome. My therapist said that even if the frum world doesn’t share my interests, I can still feel part of both the frum world and the wider world in this way.

This reminded me of a couple of things. One was a letter Rabbi Sacks  z”tzl referred to in one of his books. It was written by Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner z”tzl, a prominent twentieth century thinker and halakhicist (jurist). A young man who had studied in yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) for several years and was about to go to medical school wrote to him saying that he worried he was living a double life, religious and secular (career). Rav Hutner wrote to him to say that to own an apartment, but live in a hotel is to live a double life, but to own an apartment with two rooms is not to live a double life, but a broad one. Similarly, to have a secular career, particularly a socially useful one like medicine, is not a contradiction to a religious life, but simply a broadening of it. This is a letter that I have taken some comfort from for a long time, even if it is not really about engaging with Western culture (I’ve never had any qualms about having a career).

I was also reminded of a story (I have no idea if it’s true) about a famous nineteenth century rabbi (I can’t remember who) who was quite cultured. One day he was walking around depressed, having heard that the poet Johann Goethe had died. Some people asked why he was depressed and he said “Goethe has died.” None of the people knew who Goethe was, but they guessed he must be a great rabbi if their rabbi was mourning his death, so the community went into mourning for “Rabbi Goethe.” The story suggests that frum people may not understand me, but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily dislike me or oppose me; they might even support me, in their way.

We also spoke a bit about whether I underestimate other frum people and whether they might be more open to the outside world than I think. I remembered when a friend of mine from the more Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) shul (synagogue) I used to go to asked if I liked music. I said I didn’t, because I was worried he would find my musical taste (a lot of rock and pop) too modern. However, he listed some of his favourite musicians, who turned out to be people I like listening to, like Sting and Billy Joel (I haven’t listened to Sting so much recently, but I still listen to Billy Joel quite a bit). I had definitely underestimated him (this is someone who doesn’t own a TV, by the way).

***

I have lost a little weight, despite having largely given up on even token dieting. I’ve seen a couple of blog posts in the last few days from people who say diets don’t work and are dangerous, although they are both in recovery from eating disorders. I think the weight loss is probably due to cold weather and using more “fuel” staying warm, so I don’t know if it will stay off. I also ate ice cream yesterday as I felt I needed a reward for my busy day.

***

Novel-writing is on hold for now, which is frustrating, but I have other priorities: work, proofreading work (including setting up profiles on more sites) and especially wedding preparation. We hope to confirm the date in the next week or so.

***

For reasons that I don’t want to go into now beyond saying “wedding preparation,” I am looking to buy two toy Daleks, preferably one black and one white. I have been looking on eBay. The problem is that E and I are trying to avoid buying from China if possible (because of ongoing genocides and slavery), but 90% of toys seem to come from there. We’re not sure what to do about this. We are not fully consistent on this, as both of us do sometimes buy from China or from other unethical sources (like cheap clothes from Primark which is made in Third World sweatshops – ignoring for now the question of whether it’s better to patronise these and let people earn some money or avoid them and probably force them out of business rather than raising wages). It is a very difficult question. But we don’t feel that toy Daleks are sufficiently necessary to justify buying them. E feels that buying second-hand isn’t the same as buying new and she may be right. I’m not sure what to do and am procrastinating, as I always do when confused. It’s hard to be an ethical shopper.

It’s All Here Tonight: Wedding, Baby, Work, Social Interactions, Judaism

Today was busy, so busy that it feels more like a couple of days than just one.

I went to volunteering in the morning. I tried to make myself speak to people a bit more. I’m not sure how well I did, but I did try to sit with them when we had coffee. Initially I had ended up at the other end of the table to everyone else, but after a while I moved to sit with the others. I also asked to be put on the WhatsApp group. And we were given nice thick, warm fleeces with the organisation’s logo on it. They’re bright purple (the organisation’s colour) which is a bit more vibrant than my usual taste, but they look nice and were very warm.

Afterwards, I went with my parents to a potential wedding venue nearby. It was more or less ideal.  Nothing is ever perfect, but this was 99% perfect. As well as having the features we want, it’s relatively local, in an area I’m familiar with (I used to work down the road) which is probably good from an autistic point of view (dislike of the unknown), plus Sister and Brother-in-law live nearby, which will make it easier for them to bring Nephew. There are other venues that may be as good, but as E and I want to get married quickly, there doesn’t seem to be much point in looking at them, particularly as they would probably be not quite as good overall. So now the next step is to find a caterer that can do one of the dates we would like, then confirm with the rabbi and book the wedding!

A few emotional/autistic things that came out of this: I felt Mum and Dad drowned me out a bit when we were talking the site manager (I don’t know what her real title is, but that will do for here). I don’t mean that in a critical way, but they are quite loud personalities and I struggled to be heard, both literally and metaphorically. I needed their moral support there or I would have just frozen up, but it is my wedding and I felt that I wasn’t saying much. It doesn’t help that I notice they have a way of switching from “serious” to “joking” and back again in conversations of this kind that I just can’t do. I can do that with people I know well and trust, but not with a total stranger I only met ten minutes previously. I get stuck in “serious” then feel awkward when everyone else starts joking.

I am excited about the wedding, but I don’t think it shows much. When I was with my parents, I did feel a little excited, but it was only when I discussed it over Skype with E that I really felt it, although it probably still didn’t show much. I don’t know how much of that is just my personality and how much is alexithymia (difficulty feeling and understanding my own emotions). When we had the civil wedding last August, E’s mother filmed us when we were pronounced married. E starts bouncing up and down with a big smile on her face, whereas I look a bit confused and then hug her. When my cousin saw the video, she said I looked like I was happy, but didn’t know what to do, which is basically true. I don’t really know what to do with my emotions sometimes and it’s mostly the positive ones I struggle with, perhaps because I experience them less frequently or maybe because I feel there’s more social expectation around them.

After that we went to Sister and Brother-in-law’s house nearby. BIL was at work. We ate lunch and chatted to Sister for a bit, then she went to do work elsewhere in the house while we looked after Nephew. I held him a couple of times and helped feed and wind him (E thought it was funny when I said I winded him, so I guess it’s not an American usage. I mean to I tried to get him to burp). I ducked out of changing him this time. I am still a somewhat nervous uncle not used to babies, but I am becoming a bit more confident with him. I shook slightly while holding him, but not much, which is probably a sign of growing confidence. Nephew often has a somewhat startled expression, like he’s surprised to see the world’s still there, and is not entirely happy about it. Sister says at his age (not yet two months), he can’t focus on things that aren’t near his face. He did seem to make intense eye contact with me for a while, though.

Sister showed us the book she bought him. It’s made of fabric and is about farm animals. It reads, “Dog. Sheep. Cow,” with relevant pictures. I said I was impressed by the unexpected twist ending…

As if that wasn’t enough for one day, I have some paid proofreading work! It’s not much, and my rate is artificially low at the moment (well below minimum wage), but I hope that will generate reviews. It’s a slightly strange request for reasons that I don’t want to go into here, but it seems to be legitimate, but it’s left me with vague unease. I hope it really is legitimate.

***

A few days ago I emailed a rabbinic email helpline for people in the Orthodox Jewish community who have mental health issues. You can email a rabbi for advice on halakhah (Jewish law) as it pertains to mental health. The rabbis on the helpline have mental health training, unlike most communal rabbis. I asked about the way my autism leads to frequent exhaustion and difficulty in religious situations that are also social situations, and also how to cope with any religious obligations when feeling autistically exhausted. Autism isn’t a mental illness, but I felt out of other options for the kind of halakhic support I wanted.

I heard back from the helpline yesterday. The rabbi said that as autism is a spectrum and manifests in different people in different ways, so too halakhic adjustments can vary. From what I described, he felt I should not push myself to go to shul (synagogue) when exhausted or push myself to any social interaction related to a mitzvah (commandment) when I feel incapable and not to feel pressure regarding mitzvot generally. He said I could email him with more details of my situation for a more specific response. He also suggested davening (praying) at the same time as my shul even if I don’t feel able to go there, which is an idea I have heard before and tried to do during the first COVID lockdown, but drifted out of the habit of doing. I might try to go back to it, at least some times. The idea is that if you pray at the same time as the community, your prayer is still with them, even if you aren’t in the same building.

I’m not sure what I think of reply. It’s good that the rabbi told me that I shouldn’t force myself to do things that are just making me exhausted or burnt out. It’s not very specific, but I don’t really have very specific questions at the moment, just a general feeling of overwhelm at everything that’s expected of me religiously. I guess I feel that there’s a lot of grey area there inasmuch as it boils down to “Do what you feel able to do and don’t worry about the rest.” That’s probably my fault (“fault” isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean) because I didn’t ask very specific questions, but I worry it will just shift my worries from “Do I need to do more religiously?” to “Am I exhausted enough that I don’t need to do more religiously?” which might not be much of an improvement. I’m going to think about what they wrote and maybe write back if I can think of a more specific question.

Comparison and Fitting In

The last couple of days have been busy, but without a lot of concrete achievements as yet. I’m not going to go over everything as it’s too much and not interesting enough. I will say I got quite depressed at work today (the type of feeling that would be clinical depression if it persisted for two weeks), but I felt a lot better once I had come home, had some non-screen time, and Skyped E. I also have some potential interest in a proofreading job, which is good. Unfortunately, my computer seems to be dying, right when I’m trying to start paid proofreading. I need to check what was wrong with my old computer, which I still have. I think it’s very slow and the battery doesn’t work, so it has to be plugged in, but it does actually work, whereas this one has periods where it keeps freezing every five seconds (although it seems to be OK at the moment).

When I was feeling depressed, I was comparing myself and E negatively to other people, in the sense of thinking that we will always be earning less than my sister and our peers. I don’t mind so much for myself, as I don’t have particularly extravagant needs (food, shelter, WiFi and second-hand books and DVDs covers most of it. I wish I could buy more time and energy, though), but I feel E is sacrificing a lot to be with me and I don’t want her to be miserable, and I definitely don’t want our children to be the poor kids who can’t have good toys or holidays. There isn’t really a lot I can do about this right now, but it upsets me that I drifted so rapidly and deeply into comparison when I’m working on not comparing myself. I’ve been doing this more often recently, particularly with money, which didn’t bother me much in the past. To be fair, work today was difficult anyway, as I spent much of the day moving from task to task or from spreadsheet to spreadsheet which is never easy for someone with autism.

I also find myself wondering about fitting in. I worry that I don’t fit in to the frum (religious Jewish) community because I’m too non-conformist and struggle with communal prayer and religious study. I wonder if I don’t fit in on the autism forum and the only reason I can find is that people find my mentioning of my Judaism off-putting. Or it could all be my paranoia. But I wonder why I can’t just say, “If they like me, good; if they don’t like me, and particularly if they don’t like me because of prejudice and conformity rather than because of who I am, then I wouldn’t want to be friends with them anyway.” It’s like part of me sees acceptance as a need regardless of whether I’m being accepted for myself or not. It’s probably better I don’t get private messages from the autism forum anyway, as I would probably end up giving out my blog url, and I do spend quite a bit of time here venting about the forum (there was DRAMA yesterday, but it seems to have resolved itself. Two people left owing to a misunderstanding, although one has now come back).

Tomorrow I have volunteering, am going to see a potential wedding venue and hope to spend some time with Nephew (who got taken on his first art gallery trip today, to celebrate Sister’s birthday). I also need some time to mull over a response I got from the rabbinic mental health email helpline about my autism and how far I need to push myself to meet various communal halakhic (Jewish law) requirements.

Halfway There Day

Yesterday was my half-birthday, for those of you who take note of such things. I don’t really see any significance, but my oldest friend was born on 19 January and another friend on 20 January, so the date leaps out at me. I am now closer to my fortieth birthday than my thirty-ninth, which vaguely troubles me, although it shouldn’t.

I also worked out that if E and I get one of the two wedding dates we’re currently aiming at, both in the second half of May, we’re more or less halfway now between the civil wedding last August and the chuppah (religious wedding). We should have more of an idea this week if that’s a realistic date.

***

This week was the baby blessing week for Nephew. I couldn’t go in the end because of difficulty finding somewhere suitable to stay. I was OK home alone. I didn’t go to shul (synagogue) on Friday night because I felt too tired, which was a shame and vaguely troubling in terms of how frequently it seems to be happening. The house was cold and I have chapped hands again, but otherwise things were fine.

I did some Torah study: Talmud and The Guide to the Perplexed, which is currently full of stuff about the Aristotlean view of the universe as a series of living spheres, one inside the other, definitely not made of atoms and definitely not containing any vacuum. It’s interesting from a historical point of view, but this bit is not really relevant to modern day theology. Hopefully it will get back to more relevant stuff (from a contemporary perspective) soon.

I finished reading Dune yesterday. I intend to go on to the second book, Dune Messiah. It was a good book, but hard to get into, and weirdly structured.

I slept too long as usual, about twelve or thirteen hours at night. I still went back to bed after lunch today, more because I was cold than tired. I think I drifted into that state of mind between sleeping and wakefulness and was late for seudah (the third Shabbat meal).

It was a struggle to do things after Shabbat. It always is, as I feel lethargic, even at 5.30pm. I did manage to tidy up and do a bit of Torah study. I did a little novel planning too. I would have done more, but I had a headache for a while.

***

I tried to friend someone on the autism forum a while back. We have some things in common (librarians, Doctor Who fans). He didn’t respond to the friending and accompanying message, but has chatted with me on threads since then. He’s got other friends. Friending doesn’t really do anything other than allow direct messaging, but I do feel weirdly unliked from only having two friends, both people who are not there any more and who didn’t stay on the forum long. But I’m nervous about friending people (in general and after this). I wonder if the friend request didn’t go through properly to this person and if I should send it again, or if that would make things worse if he was deliberately not responding to me.

I also wonder if it’s worth friending other people. I would be open to making friends on the site, which would realistically only happen if I friended people, but I don’t see it as essential. Still, I wonder what to do. I feel really self-conscious about being the only (open) Jew on the site, but can’t stop mentioning it. I don’t think anyone is antisemitic, but a lot of people have funny ideas about Jews, particularly if they haven’t met any (which is feasible as Jews make up about a half of per cent of the UK population, largely concentrated in just a couple of cities).

A Fire Burns in Kotzk

I’m not sure it’s necessarily a good idea to relate dreams, but I had a weird one last night based on The Twilight Zone episode Third from the Sun where a couple of scientists and their families flee imminent nuclear war in an experimental spaceship. We’re supposed to think they’re fleeing from contemporary Earth, but right at the end we discover they’re fleeing to it from a similar planet. (A lot of The Twilight Zone episodes reflect late fifties/early sixties nuclear war anxiety.) I think Doctor Who elements drifted into the dream too, but I don’t remember what. I was a bit surprised that the dream did seem to match the episode in broad outline, as I don’t usually dream coherent plots. I also don’t usually dream about fiction other than Doctor Who, I haven’t watched any Twilight Zone for months, and I don’t know why my unconscious is feeling anxious about nuclear war. Is it about Vladimir Putin? Or is it just a symbol for wedding anxiety? I mean anxiety about planning the wedding; I have no anxiety about marrying the wrong person.

I woke up a little early for work and not rested. I don’t know if it was from the dream or from not enough sleep. Work was OK. I got to go to the bank, which I like, but when I got back I had to do the Very Scary Task, which I dislike. I think I went into autistic and anxious incoherent speaking mode on the phone and gave some garbled instructions. In this situation we send a text afterwards to repeat instructions and give necessary contact details, so it wasn’t catastrophic, but I felt embarrassed.

***

The psychiatrist (or her secretary) seems not to have sent the letter about my prescription change to the GP and myself, so I can’t reduce the dosage yet, as the GP has to prescribe 25mg capsules for me to do so.

***

While I’ve been typing this, there’s been a “silly” thread running on the autism forum, with comments from many commenters flying much more quickly than usual, more or less in real time. It’s a deliberately silly thread, with a lot of joking and I’ve been contributing. I think I made a joke which could have been interpreted in a somewhat offensive way, although that was not my intention. I had a fan discussion with another Doctor Who fan and I then got into a discussion about Hebrew grammar with a Christian woman. I do feel as if I’ve become a bit more “accepted” there tonight although I’m still confused about the protocols for friending and sending private messages on there. I worry I upset someone or put them in an awkward situation because of that the other day.

***

I’m still reading A Fire Burns in Kotsk about the rebbes of Przysucha and Kotzk (I’m using my usual spelling of Kotzk for consistency except in direct quotes). It’s a retelling of oral traditions about the rebbes and their courts. It’s not an academic account and two of the stories in it, although well-known, have been debunked by academic scholars: the story that three rebbes tried to “force the end” (try to make God bring the Messiah) during the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars and the story that the Kotzker Rebbe apostatised and publicly broke Shabbat. It is true that the Kotzker spent the last nineteen years of his life as a relative recluse in his study, but he is now known to have had more contact with the outside world than was once thought. All that said, it’s interesting as an account of what these courts based on oral tradition (with the strengths and weaknesses that implies).

The Kotzker Rebbe is a very important religious figure for me. Of the “modern” Jewish thinkers (in Jewish thought “modern” begins after the publication of the law code the Shulchan Aruch in the sixteenth century), only Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl is as big an influence on my thought. This is very obvious if you read my divrei Torah (Torah thoughts), which quote them much more than anyone else.

A Fire Burns in Kotsk reinforced what I already suspected, that the anarchic atmosphere of Kotzk was not for me. The court was a weird cross-between yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) and secondary school locker-room, with intense Talmud study combined with what essentially amounted to hazing rituals designed to force new Hasidim to pay for alcohol and food for everyone. There was a lot of drinking going on and a general pushing of boundaries and lack of respect designed to see if Hasidim could reach a point of real disinterested spirituality, with no selfish motives at all and especially no arrogance. The Hasidim of Kotzk had a reputation for strong individualism and non-conformity, which I suppose is part of the appeal to me.

The other thing I couldn’t cope with, aside from the raucous nature of the court (which I think was unique to Kotzk), was the young Hasidim abandoning their wives and children for months on end, which was normal for early Hasidism.

It’s strange to think that the Kotzker Rebbe and his teachings are so important to me, yet even if I had lived in the mid-nineteenth century, I would have found his court and his Hasidim unbearable. I wonder, reading the book, if the Kotzker was autistic. To be honest, except for living in his study for nineteen years, I’m not sure he has that many symptoms, but he certainly didn’t like the numbers of people around him. Although if we want to play the “diagnose historical personages” game, bipolar disorder is probably a better fit for him.

I’ve mentioned before that the Kotzker represents the Romantic, ascetic, passionate side of my personality, the part that reads Kafka and Dostoyevski. Whereas Rabbi Sacks represents the calm, philosophical, Maimonidean side of my personality that values balance, harmony, and moderation. The former seeks to perfect myself, the latter to perfect the world around me. It’s not religion versus materialism, but a primarily introspective religious approach as opposed to a more outward-focused one. It’s hard to know how to get them to work together rather than to pull apart, although I think my writing comes from both of them.

Wedding Venue Scouting

I had some sub-OCD thoughts last night. I call them “sub-OCD” rather than OCD, because, while they were OCD-type thoughts, I stopped them turning into obsessions, let alone compulsions. I just refused to think about them, which is the correct way to deal with these kinds of thoughts. Nevertheless, it was a bit of an effort and, rather than reading Dune to unwind before bed as I intended, I watched The Simpsons instead as I needed something more light and distracting. The feeling that I had to concentrate on not concentrating on the thoughts (if that makes sense) was still present when I woke up this morning and I worried that I would have over four months of this until the wedding, but it subsided after a while, which was good.

Dad and I went to a shul (synagogue) in Central London to scout out its potential as a wedding site. It wasn’t really suitable. It was a pretty enough shul, but there was not enough natural light or room. Dad and I had some awkward moments getting there. Dad was running late and I thought I would be good for once and not nag him. After about twenty minutes, I thought I should say something. It turns out he was waiting for me, even though I was waiting for him. Then I thought we were driving there, as Dad had said that he had found parking round there, but we went by Tube. I didn’t realise until we were driving to the station (Dad doesn’t like walking) and I didn’t want to ask to go back to get something to read, but I was a little bored on the trip. I would have liked to have done some Torah study on the trip, as I haven’t had much time today, and I wasn’t dressed as warmly as I would have been if I had known we were not going by car. I read some news articles on my phone, including a very long, very scary article about the state of the NHS that avoided the usual knee-jerk responses (“Evil Tory cuts,” “Too many managers,” etc.).

I am still struggling to communicate effectively and politely with Dad. I realised today that it’s no surprise that I struggle to talk to people when my parents are so talkative and I have to really push and assert myself to be heard when they are around otherwise they dominate the conversation. It’s hard to know what to do with a realisation like that, because obviously my parents aren’t going to change (if anything, both have become more talkative in recent years) and my social anxiety isn’t going to go away by itself. Again, I think I’m just waiting until I leave home.

I got a headache on the way home. I suspect it was a stress headache. It didn’t last too long, but I hope I don’t get stress headaches any time I do anything wedding-related! Because of that, and the fact that we left late, I didn’t do much else, just some dusting and a tiny bit of Torah study. I put away some of my bric-a-brac, mementoes of things and wargaming miniatures (except a few that I thought I painted particularly well). It felt like getting my life ready for adulthood and a shared life with E.

***

Chaconia’s comment the other day has left me a bit nervous about changing my medication right before I get married. Of course, I tried to see a psychiatrist to do this months ago, when I was thinking there was lots of time before my marriage, not least because E and I were operating on a worst case scenario of a six month wait for the visa. I don’t think I’ve been clinically depressed or had clinical OCD for some years, even if I have bad moments or even bad days. Really there isn’t a lot I can do about it now other than wait to see what happens.

Volunteering and Wedding Planning

I overslept a little this morning. It wasn’t surprising, as I stayed up late last night eating. I often feel hungry at bedtime, but sometimes I feel incredibly hungry and can’t get full and that’s what happened. I’m beginning to wonder if this is really hunger or habit or some kind of interoception issue. I know interoception is my go to autistic issue at the moment, but even so it might be the problem here. I only overslept by a few minutes, but I felt I had to rush to get ready on time. Then the bus was late, but I did manage to get to volunteering on time.

Volunteering was cold. The food bank is in a large garage area with no proper doors, just gates, and it’s freezing at the moment. In the summer it’s hot (although cooler than outside), in the winter it’s cold and much of the time it’s damp. I pack tins and other dry food with two other men, there are three women who pack fresh vegetables and a couple of people who pack toiletries and things like kitchen towels. The women who prepare the vegetables were able to work indoors, but there wasn’t enough room for all of us and it’s not really feasible to carry all the tinned food (etc.) upstairs and indoors anyway. We were a bit slow starting as things were not set-up for us to start straight away either. This meant that by the time we stopped for our coffee break, later than usual, the drivers who deliver the food parcels had arrived, so we didn’t get much of a break. I did eat a very nice, but very diet unfriendly, chocolate brownie. At least it was very small. Everyone was pleased that E got her visa.

I had a couple of moments that would have triggered kashrut OCD six years ago that I was unfazed by, which is good. I did unfortunately break a jar of jam. Someone had donated a bag of food that was left on a chair. I took out the packets of rice that were in there, but the jar of apricot jam rolled out of the bag and fell onto the concrete floor and smashed. My fault for leaving it on a curved chair. Odd donations of one or two jars of something aren’t hugely useful to us anyway as we donate in bulk, but I felt a bit bad.

***

I think there’s a WhatsApp group that the other volunteers are on that I’m not on, and I don’t know how to tactfully find out and ask to be put on it. I think I’m not on it because it was originally for planning a meal which I wasn’t going to, as it was going to be at a non-kosher restaurant, but now it’s just a communication channel. Suggestions for what I should do would be welcome.

***

I felt really tired by the time I got home. I must have been expending more energy than normal to keep warm as well as do the packing. It was a struggle to do anything in the afternoon. I did manage to cook dinner and to make a prioritised list of potential wedding venues.

***

More mistakes: I was cooking dinner and missed a step in the recipe. I managed to rectify it, and I tell myself I was tired and distracted, but it feels like yet another reason I can’t really function in the world like a ‘normal’ (read: neurotypical) person.

***

In the evening, we had a Zoom meeting to discuss E and my wedding: E, E’s parents, my parents and me. It went well. We got through a lot. We decided that getting married before Pesach (Passover) isn’t feasible, given that it will take a while for E to sort out her stuff and ship some to the UK, store others at her parents’ apartment and sell/donate the rest before she comes to the UK. It’s not permitted to get married for the first month or so after Pesach, so we will be getting married at the end of May (please God!), exact date to be decided on the availability of the rabbi and venue.

I did try to participate, but I found it hard to get heard sometimes. E’s father, who is more than a little like me, sent me a private message at one point saying something about us being quiet. I guess it’s good he connected with me, as I still worry that E’s parents see me as weird and overly religious. I’m not sure how to be myself while simultaneously appearing “normal.”

I did notice that when my Dad is speaking and starts to go off on a tangent, I start frowning quickly and automatically, which is probably why he gets annoyed at me for being inpatient. I’m not sure how I can fix something that is so instinctive.

***

I finished listening to an Intimate Judaism podcast I was listening to about sex and dating in the frum (religious Jewish) community in middle age or older (singles, divorcees, widows). They counted middle age as forties or above, so I just dodged the bullet on that one. Many parts of the frum community consider an “older single” any unmarried person over twenty-five.

E listened to the podcast too. She felt from listening to this that the frum community just makes people in this demographic needlessly miserable, by refusing to allow non-marital sex. I can see her point, and certainly some people in this demographic are miserable. I was miserable as a thirty-something celibate single before I met E, so I can only imagine what a forty- or fifty-year old single would how. That said, I’m not sure how much the frum community is contributing to this misery or how much the misery is just there from the situation. It’s not like sex-related misery, or celibacy-related misery, are unique to the frum world. I’ve seen plenty of men on the autism forum complain that they want girlfriends, or just hook-ups, but don’t know how to get them and so are really lonely. I think there are also autistic women who get pressured into sex they don’t really want (particularly via dating apps) in the hope it will lead to a relationship (doubtless these genders are sometimes reversed, but this is the way they usually present). Autistics are particularly vulnerable in this area because we often have poor social skills and a lot of naivety, but I think “single and miserable” is a wider demographic than any particular neurotype, religion or culture. Whether non-marital sex is allowed might help some people in this category, but not everyone, and for some it might make things worse by opening them to other pressures.

I don’t think halakhah (Jewish law) needs to permit non-marital sex, but the frum world does really need to do a lot more to include older singles, divorcees and widows generally, to accept them as adult individuals and active parts of the community and not as pity objects or people who are waiting to start their lives when they marry (or re-marry). In the Haredi world in particular, an unmarried forty year old is a “boy” or a “girl” whereas a married nineteen year old female (with or without baby) is a “lady” (the Haredi world prefers “lady” to “woman” for some reason, which I find slightly weird).

Mistakes

Today was difficult in some ways, albeit mostly fairly minor ones. I spent most of the day wrestling with some thoughts that I’m not willing to share here yet, triggered (not in the trauma sense) by an Intimate Judaism podcast I am in the middle of listening to. Both the Intimate Judaism and Orthodox Conundrum podcasts and associated Facebook page seem to be talking a lot about the links between sex, relationships and identity in the Orthodox world (LGBT, older singles etc.). Both podcasts are run by Rabbi Scott Kahn, the former along with Dr Talli Rosenbaum. It’s interesting, and I have things to say, but I worry about saying too much, or the wrong thing for a public forum. I am vaguely thinking about messaging Rabbi Kahn, but part of me feels I share too much with strangers online, and that people don’t really want to hear my thoughts and I shouldn’t look for other people to validate my life choices.

***

I sent a question about autism to the email helpline for people who want to ask mental health-related questions to a rabbi/religious expert trained in mental health. Autism isn’t strictly a mental illness, but I feel I need some specialist help and don’t know where to turn, even if they just send me a different email address to write to. I just want to discuss how much I can “realistically” force myself to conform or, alternatively, allow myself to depart from communal standards in things like communal prayer, amount of religious study and so on, given the things I deal with on a daily basis (more on that below).

***

The psychiatrist has reduced my clomipramine, but she isn’t sure whether the dosage she prescribed is actually manufactured. She gave me an alternative in case I can’t get 25mg tablets, but it’s annoying to be put in the situation of having to check this out when the reason I waited a week to hear from her was because she wanted to check this!

***

The main struggle today was with mistakes at work. I made quite a few, just when I was hoping I was getting the hang of things again (you may remember I periodically feel like this, then make a load more mistakes).

Yesterday, when I was doing proofreading at home, I spotted and corrected a number of very minor mistakes immediately (in text I hadn’t written). Today, in the office, I made loads of mistakes, both in written text and in terms of entering data wrongly. I’m struggling to understand why. I have a couple of suggestions:

• The office is quiet (just me and my line manager, with only a few more people in the building), but I get over-stimulated and sensorily overloaded on the commute in on the Tube before I arrive. It’s not as crowded as it was at rush before COVID, but it’s still quite a lot of people to deal with first thing in the morning, and the announcements go right through me (particularly the super-annoying “See it, say it, sorted” anti-terrorism announcement that they make every couple of minutes, which could probably drive someone to committing an act of terrorism just to stop it).  This puts me in the wrong mindset from the start.
• The lighting in the office is very bad, with minimal natural light and dull light bulbs (possibly LEDs, I’m not sure). I know autistics are supposed to prefer soft, muted lighting, but I find clear, bright light often more helpful for being in a work state. Dull light just makes me feel tired and struggle to focus (literally).
• The work I was doing at home yesterday was one, focused task. At work I have to switch between different documents and programs as well as between tasks, which raises the likelihood of executive function issues.
• Related to this, I don’t really take any breaks during the day except a forty-five minute lunch break (aside from toilet breaks). This is because I work somewhat shorter days and it feels wrong to take breaks if I’m finishing early. I’m beginning to wonder if this is a false economy and I should finish later so I can take longer lunches and maybe a mid-afternoon break to try to adjust between tasks better. I’m not sure if my line manager would want this.
• I’m probably too tired most of the time, which is partly my fault for going to bed late, albeit that my sleep pattern is largely fixed by things outside my control at the moment (e.g. being in a long-distance marriage with someone in a different time zone, so I’m online late at night Skyping). Hopefully this will change soon, although if I have a sleep disorder (the NHS hasn’t decided yet), there may be a limit to how much things can change.
• I’m distracted. There isn’t really a way around the fact that my job is boring and I only survive it by thinking of other things at the same time.
• Masking. I’m not sure if this is an issue. There is only one other person in the office with me, but I feel like I’m masking from the moment I step out the front door in the morning until the moment I get back in the evening (if not later, as I mask with my parents too, just not as much). It’s very draining even if there aren’t many people around at any given time and if anyone else does walk in, I feel even more tense.
• Not autism-related, but it is easier to spot mistakes in someone else’s writing than your own. With text you have written, your brain tends to read what you want to be there rather than what’s actually there.

My Family and Other Anxieties

I feel overwhelmed with emotions that I’m struggling to feel and understand.

I’m happy about E getting her visa, but frustrated it’s going to be a while before E comes to the UK, let alone before the wedding. E needs to spend time in the States working out what to take to the UK, what to ship, what to leave with her parents and what to sell. I’m also nervous about the stress organising the wedding and finding somewhere to live will involve as well as what it will be like living as a married couple with my parents, which we’re probably going to have to do at first in order to get married as quickly as possible and not rush into getting the first flat we see.

I feel mildly anxious, the kind of mild anxiety I used to get every Sunday evening before school (although I didn’t recognise it as anxiety at the time; if I had, it would have been an alarm bell regarding my mental health), so maybe this is just that “start of the work week” anxiety, but it’s more likely wedding anxiety. Mum and Dad are already throwing ideas at me, which is nice, but overwhelming. Mum said she’s worried about having another heart attack; I certainly don’t see her being that involved, or the preparation being that stressful (although what do I know? It’s not like I’ve organised a wedding before).

I’m also stressed about Nephew’s baby blessing, which is taking up far too much of everyone’s time and energy. It’s not that big a thing in itself, although it’s been combined with a birthday meal for my sister (her birthday is in a little over a week). My parents have found a guest house that seems to allow them to be Shabbat- (Sabbath-) observant and is quite near to Sister and Brother-in-Law’s house. Unfortunately, they only have one room for the time in question. This has led to me being asked a lot of difficult questions like, “Would you be happy sleeping on Sister’s sofa even though they have a night nurse with them at the moment?” (No, and I wouldn’t be that happy sleeping in a house with an eight week old baby even without the nurse) and “Would you be happy sharing a room with Dad in the guest house while Mum sleeps on the sofa?” (No, because if I’m going to the family meal, I need alone time afterwards, not time with Dad). Other suggestions were sleeping in Nephew’s room (and presumably being woken every couple of hours when he needs feeding or changing) or staying with brother-in-law’s uncle and aunt who live down the road (no. Just, no). So it looks like my parents are going, but I’m staying home, which I’m sort of relieved about, but also sort of a sad about, as well as irrationally guilty, like I’ve made all these problems myself to sabotage things. I just hope no one falls out with me over this. Just think, we have only thirteen short years to sort out bar mitzvah arrangements…

E can’t understand why everyone in my family is making such a big thing out of this. I think her family is a LOT less sentimental about these little life-cycle events than my family is. I guess I was told from a young age that life-cycle things, and even anniversaries of life-cycle things (good and bad) are hugely important. For example, while many Jews observe the yortzeit, the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar, of a death, my parents, while not exactly observing them, are very aware of the English calendar dates, as well as the death dates of other, less close, relatives and I think even the anniversaries of things like dates when people went into hospital, which is morbid, in my opinion. Dad was really excited when it looked like Nephew might be born on the date of my paternal grandparents’ wedding anniversary, which I didn’t understand at all. To be honest, I think my natural inclinations are closer to E and her family on this.

The other thing stressing me is that a few things in the last few days have made me conscious that my parents are at an age where they are going to get ill a lot. There’s nothing serious going on, but a few minor (at the moment) things have made me realise this. It’s three years since Mum was diagnosed with cancer and eight or nine months since her heart attack, and either of those things could easily reappear. I feel that at the age of forty (nearly), I should be in a position where I can look after my parents and I’m really not, either financially or practically. They’re still looking after me. And E isn’t even going to be in the same country as her parents, and she’s an only child. So it’s vaguely scary stuff.

***

I spoke to my rabbi mentor about some of these things and also about some of my thoughts about other people judging me religiously. We spoke a bit about other people probably not being that judgmental, and it not really mattering what they think anyway. I feel like it’s going to take some time for me to internalise this, especially as I feel I have objective proof from past experience that some people in the frum (religious Jewish) world are judgmental and not inclined to view me favourably, although you could ask why I would want to please people who have no real connection to me and who seem predisposed to be unpleasant to others.

This ties in a bit with what I was talking to my therapist about regarding unmasking, so I may bring this up with her too.

Other than that, I went for a walk (I decided I had too much to do to go for a run) and did some proofreading (unpaid, to try to get a review) and a bit of Torah study (I lost track of how much). I feel annoyed that I didn’t do much else, particularly as I really need to dust my room and would  have liked some time to work on my novel, although realistically that’s going to go on the backburner for the next few months.

The Visa

The good news: E’s visa has arrived! So now we can plan the wedding in earnest. It will be a while before she can even come of the UK, as she needs to work out what she’s shipping here, what will stay with her parents and what will be sold/given away/thrown away. It’s a bit frustrating, as I was focused on this stage for so long that I almost forgot there was a long way to go afterwards and that she wouldn’t be able to get here for a while. At least now we can begin to move things on.

Otherwise, it’s not been a great couple of days. I was exhausted yesterday. I still made it to shul (synagogue), but felt really tired afterwards. I did more than an hour of Torah study after dinner, but, once I’d also included time thinking about the implications of what I was reading, I didn’t have long to read for fun before feeling too tired and having to go to bed.

I don’t think I slept well and I woke up exhausted again, after dreaming that the next episodes of Doctor Who were really amazing (which I do not currently expect it to be, given the return of David Tennant, Catherine Tate and Russell T Davies). I managed to avoid sleeping in the afternoon, but did lie down for forty minutes and felt like I struggled to do much Torah study, although I think I actually did a reasonable amount.

I struggled a lot with feeling religiously inadequate over Shabbat (the Sabbath). I won’t go into the whole train of thought. I realised a lot of it is related to how other people see me, which is probably due to autism and social anxiety as much as how religious I actually am. I know that it doesn’t matter what other people think, even if they are important rabbis, but I find it does still matter to me.

After Shabbat was over, I found the text E had sent me about the visa and sent out some texts and emails about that. I was feeling tired and surprisingly a bit low, which I think is primarily exhaustion, and I just wanted to vegetate in front of the TV. I ended up watching GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan’s debut James Bond adventure. It has a slightly uncertain tone as the film makers tried to work out where James Bond fitted in a post-Cold War, post-feminism world. Nice character parts for a young-looking Robbie Coltrane and Joe Don Baker (still being typecast as eccentric CIA agents a decade after classic BBC eco-thriller Edge of Darkness).

As for baby blessing news, it continues to get more and more complicated. Watch this space. The uncertainty is stressing me out, as are some health concerns my parents have (both have separate concerns). I don’t want to go into details, but it’s confusing and potentially worrying and I don’t know what to feel right now.

Sex, Friends, Books (No, the Genie Didn’t Give Me Three Wishes)

I had my last chatan (bridgegroom i.e. marriage) class last night. I think there might be another one closer to the wedding (no, still no news on the visa). I learnt more than in the previous one, although I still struggled to work out if I was expected to say anything and if so, what. I did wonder what someone who isn’t already committed to observing at least some of the laws of taharat mishpacha (family purity) would make of it, particularly if they were already having sex with their fiancée, as, realistically, many couples getting married through the United Synagogue would be. I don’t know whether taharat mishpacha contributes to keeping marriages fresh the way that it’s often claimed. Probably it sometimes does, but not always. I’m committed to the idea for religious reasons, regardless of any other benefits. I am, as a rule, sceptical of the idea of non-religious benefits from mitzvot (commandments) such as the purported (and mostly spurious) health benefits of kashrut (the dietary laws). Inasmuch as I see non-religious benefit in taharat mishpacha, it’s to stop men pestering their wives for sex when they’re on their period. I guess my view is different to most people’s anyway; if you’ve been celibate until the age of thirty-nine, abstaining from sex for two weeks a month doesn’t seem particularly daunting. It’s the being able to have sex for two weeks a month bit that is novel.

***

This morning neither of my alarms went off, for some reason, so I overslept by quarter of an hour, although I hurried and got to work on time. Work was busy again as it’s the time of year when most people pay their membership fees. I went to the bank and paid in fifty cheques to the astonishment of the clerk until she realised we are a charity, not a business, although we’re not a typical charity (“communal organisation” would probably be a better term), hence the membership fees.

I came home and intended to spend some time unwinding without screens, but went online instead. Big mistake. After a while, I felt ill from too much screen time, which was my fault, and from not eating which was not my fault, as dinner was very late. I hope E’s visa comes soon so we can set up home together; like me, but unlike my parents, she prefers to eat dinner early.

I would have liked to do some more Torah study or novel work after dinner, but felt too exhausted. I’d like to read some more of Dune before bed (I’m about three-quarters of the way through now), but don’t know if I’ll have the energy/brainpower. I’d rather not push myself too hard and burn out tomorrow, although it may be too late for that by now.

***

In therapy we touched on a subject that I’ve discussed a bit with E, about the fact that I mask my autism (as a general rule, masking in autistics tends to result in burnout in the end). I try to be what people expect me to be, to do what is “normal” or “right” rather than – well, I don’t actually know. I can’t really say “rather than what I want to do,” as I don’t actually know what I would do without masking, because I’ve been doing it from a very young age, maybe four or five, but more so from adolescence.

I don’t really know what I would like to do or who I really think I am. I remember Ashley saying a while back to imagine how I would behave if I was on a desert island just with E. It’s hard to tell, as I’m not terribly imaginative in that way. I probably wouldn’t be that different from how I am with E now, but it’s hard to map that on to interactions with other people. I would probably be a bit freer to voice opinions, including controversial ones, to make jokes or explain things to people.

***

The flipside of this is the online autism forum, where I’m beginning to wonder if people are deliberately not “talking” to me. Other people seem to have conversations, but that rarely happens to me. There’s a core of people who seem to connect and refer back and forth to each other and I can’t seem to get “in” to the group. Possibly they comment a lot more than I do, I’m not sure, so maybe it’s a visibility thing. I try to only say things if it’s going to be helpful or incisive, I don’t just joke around. And, as I mentioned the other day, I tried to “friend” someone on there, but he didn’t respond and I don’t know if he didn’t see it or didn’t want the contact.

The worst thing is, because I’ve mentioned being an Orthodox Jew a number of times, I wonder if that’s why people aren’t responding, not so much from antisemitism, but because they have an image of Orthodox Jews being judgmental, ascetic, humourless, and who knows what else. In a word, “Other.”

Probably I should stay away from there. I feel I’m on the forum and the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group too much at the moment, trying to get noticed, in a “I want to be friendly and talk to people” way, not an ego way, but I don’t think it’s really working. I look forward to E being here; hopefully I won’t need to feed my social needs in this unhealthy way when we can interact normally like most couples instead of through WhatsApp texts and limited Skype time.

***

I found a substack by someone who experienced child abuse in the Jewish community. I am not sure whether to follow it. I don’t know why I have this fascination with abuse survivors. Is it because I dated one? I suspect not. I think I became more aware through being in group therapy-type spaces (support groups etc.). It made me realise how many survivors are out there, and how invisible they are unless they tell you what happened to them.

I worry that it’s some kind of morbid emotional vampirism, as I’ve mentioned before. I think a more likely reason is that for decades, I’ve been aware of myself on the margins of the frum community because of neurodivergence and mental illness. Somewhere along the line, I got interested in other people on the margins of the frum world, and abuse survivors are about the most marginal people there, often actively thrown out by people who don’t want to believe that abuse happens in the community, and that it’s often the most powerful, influential or “religious” people who perpetrate it. Hence, I am more interested in survivors from frum backgrounds. What I have experienced isn’t anything like what they have experienced, but I see some similarities about feeling unwanted in the community, feeling anger at being marginalised, wanting to fit in, but not knowing how, feeling shame just for being who you are…

“Tali Steine” writes: “My light speaks to me, enveloping me with goodness, with beauty, with love. You aren’t bad or worthless, she says. This wasn’t your fault… You don’t have to carry this shame.” I feel if she can tell herself this, then I should be able to tell myself. But somehow I can’t. I feel, “If I suffered as much as she did, I could say it wasn’t my fault, because it would clearly be disproportionate to anything I might have done, but I haven’t, so maybe it is my fault.”

I’m still not sure what to do about the substack.

***

I’m a bit stressed at all the books on my To Read shelf, particularly those in series. Herewith, a list of book series I’m in the middle of at the moment. To qualify, it has to be a series where there is reasonable continuity beyond one recurring character and I have to want to read the whole series; I’d like to read all of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Poirot stories, and all of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey stories, but the links between stories in these series are slight and the series are long enough that I doubt I’ll read all of them (I think Christie wrote something like seventy-nine mystery/thriller stories, plus half a dozen pseudonymous romances and a couple of memoirs).

James Bond: I figure these just about have enough continuity to qualify. I’m reading them in a completely random order, for various reasons. I’ve got about two thirds of the way through the series in two years or so, so I guess I like them… I currently have copies of Live and Let Die and The Spy Who Loved Me on my To Read shelf, then there are another three to read after that. In recent years, a bunch of people have written other James Bond books, but at the moment I only plan on reading Ian Fleming’s ones.

Dune: I just started this a few weeks ago, but I do want to see how it plays out, even though it consists of two trilogies (or one hexalogy) of very long books.

Harry Potter: I’ve read the first two and I have most of the others and I will read them, but I’m not in a huge hurry, as I felt the first two were a bit over-rated. On the other hand, I like the word “Azkaban,” so I’ll probably read book three sooner rather than later.

A Wrinkle in Time: I’m not sure what the overarching title for this is, so I’ve just gone with the title of the first one. I read it a couple of months ago. It was OK, but I’m not sure whether I’ll read the others. As with Harry Potter, it seems to clearly be a children’s series and I wonder a bit why so many adults read it.

Robot/Galactic Empire/Foundation: in the 1940s (I think; I’m too tired to check), Isaac Asimov wrote three science fiction short story series, collected into books: the Robot, Galactic Empire and Foundation series. The three series were totally unconnected (technically, you could argue that he originally wrote two very different series of a robot stories, some short stories and longer murder mysteries with a human and robot detective team) [EDIT: Wikipedia tells me that there were light connections between the Galactic Empire and Foundation stories from the start]. Then he stopped writing them for decades, but in the 1980s, he went back and expanded the Robot and Foundation stories and tried to join them together, with the Galactic Empire stories in the middle, into one big future history sequence.

I’ve read the Robot and Foundation series and I keep thinking I should read the Galactic Empire books (there are only three novels and a short story), but I’ve never been that enthused by the concept. The Galactic Empire was the only series he didn’t later expand to make the connections clearer and I feel it will be disconnected and galactic empires don’t really grab my attention, unlike the premises of the Robot and Foundation series. But I also feel I should read them while re-reading the other books, as a lot of the connections between the books and the overarching narrative went over my head on first reading (I’m not actually sure what the best reading order is: internal or external chronology). I should also say that, as an end to this massive series of about fifteen books over five decades, Foundation and Earth was really weird. Not exactly bad, but weird, with a strange “The end… or is it?” moment just when it seemed finished that makes me feel vaguely negative about the whole sequence. On the other hand, Asimov is a light read, so I could probably get through fifteen of his books in the time taken to read the six Dune novels.

Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy: technically, I haven’t started this yet, but I got the first two volumes from the free book box a few weeks ago and I’d like to read them, but I feel I ought to make progress on some of the other series first.

Richard J. Evans’ Third Reich trilogy (I didn’t say this was only for fiction series!): I still have the third book in this series to read, The Third Reich at War but I know it will be the hardest, given that it deals with the bloodiest war in human history and is permeated by the Holocaust (the Holocaust has its own chapter, but Evans says in the introduction that it’s really present in every chapter because it was so tied to the Nazi war aims and conduct). I actually have a big book on the Soviet Union to read afterwards, because I told myself to concentrate on one totalitarian dictatorship at a time! Thankfully, that’s a one-volume history.

Pathetic

Because I saw the psychiatrist yesterday, I went in to work today instead. This meant that I was there without J, who usually works from home on Tuesdays. It wasn’t as lonely as it can be when I’m there by myself as it was very busy. I struggled with a number of autistic issues: getting distracted when the phone rang or people came into the office and forgetting what I was doing; mishearing people on the phone and sounding, I fear, incoherent myself (I planned what I was going to say, but then got confused when the other person didn’t say the “right” thing, so I ended up asking for someone’s name after she had given it to me); and jumping with shock whenever the phone rang (is that a sensory thing?). I didn’t get time to do anything else, so I didn’t try switching J’s phone with mine, but I was listening to a text sent to J’s phone (you can do this on some phones) when my line started ringing. It took me a few minutes to realise and get there, but when I picked up the receiver, it was dead, so either the person rang off exactly as I got there, or there’s a problem with my phone.

***

The psychiatrist phoned while I was on the Tube home. She left a message, but didn’t say what I should do to reduce my medication. I suppose she wants to make sure I can understand. She only works on Mondays and Tuesdays (many NHS doctors have a private practice some days), so I will have to wait until next week to hear. I hope she doesn’t phone when I’m on the Tube again. I also need to remember to leave the volume up on my phone, as I usually have it on silent in the office. I can see this going on for weeks. She called from a private line so I can’t phone back or text back to explain any of this. I can’t even phone the main switchboard and leave a message for her (not that I would expect it to be passed on…) as I can’t actually make out what her name is.

***

After I mentioned Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig, who is trying to promote mental health awareness among the rabbinate, E suggested I emailed him about my questions about Jewish practice with autism, even if autism isn’t strictly a mental illness. I had coincidentally been having similar thoughts. I couldn’t find any contact details for him online, but I did discover that the organisation he set up has an “ask a rabbi a mental health-related question” email service. I intend to send an email, although I need to work out what exactly I want to ask.

***

The latest in Nephew’s baby blessing saga: Mum and Dad contacted the only hotel in the area that has vacancies for the Shabbat (Sabbath) of the baby blessing. They asked if we could come in without using electric key cards as we don’t use electricity on Shabbat and the hotel said that we should just ring the electric buzzer. Not very helpful. And we can’t try to attract someone’s attention as the reception is on the sixth floor (the hotel is above a shop and some offices). I’m a bit surprised this hasn’t come up before as an issue because it is quite a Jewish area.

***

I got upset by something on the Orthodox Conundrum group. There was a post asking for questions for Rabbi Kahn’s other podcast, Intimate Judaism (about Judaism and sexuality), which is going to be about “older singles” (which in the Orthodox world is anyone over the age of twenty-five), divorcees and widows. Two people immediately said that this was a terrible idea as it would be promoting extra-marital sex and that “older singles” have the choice of “pathetic celibacy or transgressive intimacy”. This annoyed me, as celibacy has been my avodah (religious work) for decades. While I felt myself to be “pathetic” at times, I don’t think my celibacy was pathetic. I recognise that heterosexual marriage is the cornerstone of Judaism and millennia of persecution has led to disparagement of clerical celibacy, but I feel my celibacy was (is, as E and I aren’t being intimate until our religious wedding) somewhat noble, albeit in a very unconventional way for a frum person. (I think it’s obvious by this stage that I am not conventionally frum.)

(There is probably also an argument to be made about the religious priorities of someone who insists on saying “intimacy” to avoid saying “sex,” but is willing to publicly brand a whole bunch of Jews as either “pathetic” or “transgressive,” but I’ll leave that for now.)

I was going to give an angry response, but I feared getting into an argument with one of the most argumentative people on the group. Then I was going to make a general “thank you” post to Rabbi Kahn and Dr Rosenbaum, but I decided it made more sense to wait for the podcast to drop. I do still feel angry, and hopeful that E’s visa comes soon so we can get married (again) and start our life together properly.

***

Looking for an anniversary card for my parents, it seems that “six month anniversary” cards are now a thing, because presumably the card manufacturers haven’t made up enough fake holidays so far. Although E thinks it’s weird that my sister and I get Mum and Dad anniversary cards, so obviously my resistance to Big Stationery could go further.

***

I’ve been trying to avoid Prince Harry. For someone who says he just wants to live a quiet life in obscurity, he is in the news a lot. Possibly someone should tell him that not saying controversial things about his family might be a better way of avoiding press attention. I’m hoping the success of his book will lead to republication [1] of other books supposedly written by royals, such as Charles I’s Eikon Basilike (published ten days after he was beheaded, so Harry got off lucky) and King Alfred’s Old English translation of Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy (definitely bestseller material). I can’t remember the title of the book Henry VIII supposedly wrote. I think it was arguing that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon should be annulled. Extracts from Queen Victoria’s diary were published during her lifetime. They sold well, but Harry would probably find them dull. You could probably put together, if not a library, then at least a little bookshelf of them.

[1] I think Harry wants it to lead to republic-ation.

Failures on the Road to Developing Character and World Domination

I had an appointment with the psychiatrist today to review my medication, as I want to reduce the clomipramine a bit. I had to wait well over an hour to be seen. All the receptionist would tell me was that the psychiatrist I was supposed to see had not come in. In the end, a different psychiatrist, who had not prepared, had to see me. The NHS sends out letters in envelopes that say each missed appointment costs £140 (I think that’s the figure, although it must be an average as I can’t imagine a five minute blood test costs as much as a long appointment with a specialist). I once estimated that, by that standard, the NHS owes me £1,000 or more for appointments they’ve missed.

At least I did eventually get to see a psychiatrist this time. I went over some of my case history. This stretches back over twenty years now, so I simplified parts of it. I explained that I’ve been feeling better and want to reduce the medication to try to lose weight and sleep better. I mentioned the sleep study and that I might have a sleep disorder, but I haven’t got the results yet. They might not come for another month or more. I said I’ve had a couple of not so good days lately, but said that I think that’s from the lack of sunlight and being separated from E and she agreed, although we didn’t really discuss it at length. Because she saw me at short notice, the psychiatrist has to check some details about reducing clomipramine. She only works on Mondays and Tuesdays and said she would probably phone me tomorrow or next week, but it looks like I might be able to reduce the dose a bit. Hopefully that won’t negatively impact my mood.

Weirdly, she asked if I’d always been autistic. I would have thought a psychiatrist would know that you can’t suddenly become autistic, it’s always there even if not diagnosed. It doesn’t make me feel that confident about her.

***

I tried not to spend so long on the autism forum or on Facebook today, but it’s hard. Aside from the addictive quality of social media, I reach out for social contact, especially with E in the US and my parents both at work today. I should probably find something else to look at when in “bored, procrastinate” mode while sitting at my computer.

I did spend some time on FB for work reasons. I managed to send a promotional post for my FB page for my proofreading profile. I sent one to LinkedIn too, although so few people follow me in either setting that it probably won’t do much, and I’m not sure how to get more (and more relevant) followers. I don’t even know if it’s a sensible thing to try to get more FB friends. I don’t think I know enough people for that strategy to work and I doubt that many of them even remember me.

There are a LOT of people advertising proofreading services on the site I’m using, some for less than £5 for one thousand words or even two thousand words (minimum wage in the UK for adults is £9.50 an hour). I’m not sure how to undercut them or get noticed. Some people have very professional images on their profile pages (logos, headers, photos). I’ve just got a photo and not a brilliant one (not professional and the lighting is not great). I’m wondering how I even get started. E offered to let me edit some of her writing so she could write me a review and give me a rating, but I’m not sure how ethical that would be. I don’t know how else to do this.

I guess one thing to do would be to use PowerPoint to make a somewhat fancier page. I don’t have Photoshop or anything like that to make something really impressive. And then I guess work for below minimum wage for a while. I just slashed my asking price from $15 per thousand words to $5 (it’s an American site so you need to price in dollars and you can only charge increments of $5, but that’s just under £5). By the time you take the site’s cut out, that’s going to work out to just over £3 per thousand words, which is nothing! But if it gets me some positive reviews, it will (hopefully) be worth it.

I do also find it slightly sinister that, if you look on your stats page on the site, there’s a world map that shows where your orders are coming from marked “World Domination”. I’m sure it’s someone’s idea of a joke, but it sounds like something from a James Bond film.

***

The autism forum allows you to “friend” people. The main purpose of this, so far as I can tell, is to send direct messages. There was a thread about this in the past where people explained what they use it for. Only two people have ever friended me, both people who didn’t stick around on the site for long. I tried friending someone a few weeks ago, but he never responded. The friending functioning has not been working well, so I told myself that was the reason, but I doubt it. I feel that other people seem to connect on the site and talk about having friends there and I don’t. I wonder what people think about me. I can get paranoid, wondering if they avoid me because I talk about being a religious Jew, not that they don’t like Jews per se, but that they don’t like religious people or think all Orthodox Jews are intolerant or fundamentalist. We don’t have the best PR, which is sometimes our own fault, but not always. There are maybe two million Orthodox Jews in the world out of eight billion people so it’s not always easy to control our own narrative. Many people with strong views on Orthodox Jews have never really met one (actually, that really applies to all Jews).

The next bit isn’t really anything new, but I think I’ve expressed it in a clearer way: I feel that being autistic and frum (religious Jewish) means I have extra challenges, whether it’s the expectation of communal prayer multiple times a day, an ideal of religious study in group settings (paired or Beit Midrash/study hall), the expectation of having been to yeshivah (rabbinical seminary), which is not a healthy environment for autistics and so on. Mitzvot (commandments) and frum life are meaningful to me, but also hard and I struggle not having anyone to compare notes with. I worry that people on the forum wouldn’t understand or would encourage me to leave observance.

I also would like rabbinic guidance on exemptions. There are a number of exemptions from religious obligations for mental illness sufferers that I wish I had known about earlier, when my mental health was very bad. I wonder if there are exemptions I might use now, even if just to avoid beating myself up about not managing to do what I “should.” I have mentioned Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig who is trying to improve knowledge of mental health among rabbis, but I don’t know if he is doing much for the neurodivergent.

***

I feel an obligation to do something with my life. I won’t just let myself be. It is partly (at least) a religious impulse. I believe that people have a purpose in life. I struggle to believe (as some Orthodox Jews would) that “just” fulfilling the mitzvot (commandments) and studying Torah is enough to fulfil that purpose. I feel I need to do something more. When people talk about having a purpose or mission in life, it’s probably meant in a positive way, to suggest possibilities for fulfilment, but for me it becomes another rule that my autistic, rule-obsessed brain has to obey.

I read an article today by Lionel Shriver where she that argued that nowadays identity is seen as something innate that you discover and which other people should affirm, whereas when she was younger, identity (or “character”) was something you developed by reading and by doing things (sometimes badly), and what other people thought about it wasn’t terribly relevant. I feel that the “develop character” approach is more realistic than the “innate identity” model, but it just reinforces my “I need to do things” mindset.

Fear and Loathing

I somehow got up at 10.15am, which isn’t early, but is early for me on a non-work day. I was feeling frustrated early on from seeing the conversation on the autism forum. I really need to psych myself up to write a post on the autism forum called, “Some of my Best Friends are Neurotypicals”. I feel there is a lot of prejudice or even hatred of neurotypicals on the forum and assumptions that their lives are perfect, which is obviously not true, and also that they are all shallow and inauthentic, which is also not true. There also sometimes seems to be a belief that neurotypical behaviours are inherently inferior to autistic ones. I’m not sure you can really argue that autism is a value-neutral difference to allism (non-autism) while also arguing that autism is better than allism.

I see the same thing in some Jews who have negative views of non-Jews. For example, some Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews will insist that non-Jews are incapable of acting from true altruism, even towards their own children. It seems likely that any persecuted minority group is capable of turning around and hating the out-group, which is not necessarily completely synonymous with the persecutors.

People on the forum would probably say that I have internalised ableism, which may be true, although I think it’s more likely I don’t feel comfortable asserting myself or disappointing people.

I do feel that Judaism is a more important part of my identity than autism, which would probably also get me in trouble on the autism forum, where relationships with “neuro-kin” are seen as stronger than with society at large. I was born Jewish, but on some level I choose to be Jewish every day, whereas autism is something that has passively happened to me. Also, Judaism gives me a sense of purpose, whereas autism just is how I interact with the world automatically.

I’m wondering if I should step back from the autism forum and FB for a bit. Not completely, but a bit. Even aside from the neurotypical hate, I feel I can get sucked into too much. There was a thread on the autism forum about a teenager with delusions where I don’t know if I suggested the right thing; certainly other people suggested very different things. People sometimes ask things that strangers on the internet can’t really answer, although I suppose they’re desperate.

***

I spent fifteen minutes or so changing my LinkedIn profile from one primarily for an academic librarian to one primarily for a proofreader and copy editor. I feel a bit of a fraud about this, as I haven’t had any paid proofreading work yet and am not sure I can market myself aggressively enough to get any. I also quietly removed the university where I got my library MA (a not-very-good university) from high on the profile so that my BA from Oxford is more prominent, although the MA one is still there in case I look for more library work. Fortunately, my current employer doesn’t have a LinkedIn page and is unlikely to get one, so people can’t see that it’s unrelated to either of my “careers.”

The whole of this process made me feel like an incompetent fraud who hasn’t really achieved anything since finishing at Oxford, if not earlier. I think I probably peaked in my first year at university, where I was two marks off a first (first class result, the highest possible) in Mods (Honour Moderations, first year exams for historians when I was there). I honestly don’t know how I turn my work life around.

***

Similarly, I had more, “I don’t have enough ideas for my novel, I’m a terrible writer, I’m never going to get a novel finished to the standard I would like”-type angst. I try to tell myself I’m writing for myself, but then I hit the barrier of, “If I’m writing for myself, isn’t that selfish? Shouldn’t I do more of my religious obligations (learn more Torah, daven with a minyan more often, do more chesed (kindness)) or something that might bring in more income for E and myself when we marry?” There isn’t really an answer to this, except that it seems I need to write for my mental health (including research reading and novel reading to continually learn how to write), and that’s that.

I guess because I’m a perfectionist, it’s hard to write knowing not just that this won’t be the greatest novel ever written, but that it may not even be publishable, or that I might not even finish it.

***

There was plenty of aimless internet surfing, which I know is a product of loneliness as much as boredom. I miss E. I did manage to do some Torah study and cook dinner for tonight and tomorrow (lentil dal) and made some time to work on planning my novel, although in the last week or so, my computer, which is about eight years old (that’s about ninety in computer years) has slowly started dying, suddenly freezing periodically. The problem I’m having writing is that my autism wants to plan every detail before I start writing, so I know I won’t run out of inspiration, but my writing is better when semi-improvised, particularly for humour.

***

There seems to be a hole in my bedroom wall through which rainwater is coming…

***

I spoke to my sister about the baby blessing. I feel a bit better about it now. She said I didn’t have to come, as Brother-In-Law’s brother and his family aren’t coming. Paradoxically, this makes me feel better about going, as it feels less of an order now and more something I can choose to do. I guess I don’t like feeling I’m being taken for granted.

***

I’ve been listening to The Beach Boys a lot recently. I’ve never really liked them, and the topics of their songs (hedonistic teenagers in California in the 60s) don’t really resonate (unusual for me, as the lyrics are usually very important to me), but I like the actual music, which is mostly upbeat and cheers me up. I tend to listen mostly to music that can cheer me up.

Same Old Scene

I struggled a bit with Shabbat (the Sabbath) again. I got to shul (synagogue) on Friday night despite feeling very tired. I found dinner with my parents exhausting. I know “selective mutism” is something a lot of autistics suffer from. I don’t really experience it, but I have noticed that when autistically exhausted from peopling (rather than just tired), I can become monosyllabic. By the end of dinner, I was communicating in gestures more than speech. It wasn’t conscious. It’s a bit frightening.

I fell asleep for an hour after dinner and then was too tired to move for an hour after that, so I didn’t do as much reading as I would have liked. I spent an hour reading The Guide for the Perplexed, but only managed a few pages as it was based on Medieval neo-Aristotlean philosophy which I didn’t really understand so I made slow progress. I’m not sure how much relevance those passages really have for contemporary Jewish thought. I also wonder how they were understood in Early Modern and Modern Eastern Europe, although not many people would have been reading it there – not many rabbis, let alone laymen. The Kotzker Rebbe is supposed to have said of the Guide that “If you are wise, it is a guide; if not, you will be perplexed,” which is probably true. I read a few pages of A Fire Burns in Kotsk and a couple of chapters of Dune, but not much else.

I slept late again this morning. Mum and Dad were out for lunch, so I ate by myself, reading the latest Doctor Who Magazine. I’m not at all optimistic about the return of Russell T Davies, David Tennant, Catherine Tate and others, or the deal with Disney. I worry it’s just a return to the worst aspects of Davies and Tennant’s first run, with added Big Business. As when Davies was showrunner previously, DWM is now full of coy preview articles that tease the new episodes without giving anything away, which I just find irritating. I don’t like spoilers, but just being told endlessly that the next series is going to be amazing when I’m not going to see it for a year or more is annoying, even if I wasn’t convinced that it won’t be amazing. I skim DWM more and more.

I dozed off for a bit after Minchah and ate seudah (the third Shabbat meal) after sunset, which is not ideal. I was too tired to do very much at all in the afternoon, although I did some Torah study (Shoftim/Judges in Hebrew and with a modern commentary) after Shabbat and also some work on the plan for my novel, but I mostly got distracted and procrastinated online. I think the beginning of my book is quite good, but after about chapter five, when the plot really kicks in, I run out of incident and jokes, which is not good for a satirical thriller. I’m not totally out of ideas, but there are definitely fewer as it goes on. I sort of want to just start writing (I feel like an athlete with muscles tensed to run, but unable to go yet), but I want to do more research to generate more ideas, both external research (reading relevant books) and internal research (thinking about my characters and how their world works). I’m feeling pessimistic about this actually resulting in a readable full-length novel, but I’m trying to tell myself I’m working for my own amusement. Then I read stuff online, as I did tonight, where people are saying, “We want more positive frum characters in books and TV” and I want to do something towards that, even though I think setting out to produce a “positive” image of the frum community would backfire badly (and this book is much lower than previous ones in frum content). I think/hope once I actually start that will generate more ideas. As I’ve said before, I’m a bit of a “pantser” in that some of my best ideas come up once I’ve begun writing, but it’s uncomfortable to bet on that.

***

I thought quite a bit about that post on the autism forum about connecting with people (where a lot of people said they connect with animals and soft toys more easily than they connect with neurotypicals) and also the lukewarm response to my post on the Facebook group about being autistic in the frum (religious Jewish) community. I feel it’s not really an option from me to cut myself off from other Jews or other people in general. I feel a specific religious commandment to try to love other Jews and people in general. Plus, I do feel connected to other Jews, whether I like it or not. I’ve been angry for days at the new Israeli government and I know that’s because I identify as an Orthodox Jew, and if other Orthodox Jews are corrupt, self-serving, racist or homophobic, I feel that my identity is attacked. If nothing else, people will assume I’m the same. So there is a connection there whether I like it or not.

I do wish I knew how to move forward with my life, whether that involves the frum community, the autistic community or both, or whether it involves my writing or proofreading or something else. I do know that, realistically, I should wait until I’m married before really doing anything new, but it’s so hard waiting without knowing when that will be or even when E’s visa will arrive. It feels SO HARD waiting and being separated.

I watched an episode of The Simpsons tonight where Homer complains he hasn’t done anything with his life at the grand old age of thirty-nine. That’s how old I am! At least he has a full-time job, three kids and a wife who he actually gets to live with! I am nowhere near as fat and I’m not bald (not even thinning) so that’s something.

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

I have heard that we have a fixed amount of self-control. You can practise self-control to increase the amount you have over time, but at any moment there are limits to how much is open to you (I wonder if this is still considered valid or if it’s one of those social psychology findings that’s been found to be unrepeatable).

I feel like I’ve been struggling with self-control for the last few months, in terms of eating more junk (not a huge amount, but I really would like to lose some weight, even if my weight gain was from medication) and going to bed later. Probably buying books too. I think I’m using up all my self-control waiting for E’s visa to arrive and lose control on other areas. Have I mentioned that I miss E?

***

I’ve been in my job for over two years and I still can’t use the phones properly. When someone calls, the call automatically goes through to the phone on J’s desk. Only if he’s using that does the phone on my desk ring. This means that if the phone rings while he’s out, I have to hurry over to his desk, answer the phone and then often transfer it back to my phone so I can do stuff on my computer for the caller. Except, as happened today, I still can’t get the hang of how to transfer calls. I cut someone off twice; the third time, she gave me her number and asked me to call her back, which was embarrassing.

My phone doesn’t work properly anyway and we were going to experiment with moving the phones around. I’m in without J next Tuesday, so I might play around with them, but I’m worried we’ll end up with my phone as the default and I’ll have to take all the calls. I guess it will be good exposure therapy for my phone anxiety, but most of the calls are for J and I worry I would cut them off transferring to him.

***

I led Ma’ariv (Evening Prayers) in shul (synagogue) today. I didn’t really shake, but I was glad we were in the small Beit HaMidrash and not the larger main shul so I didn’t have to project my voice.

***

I feel that I’m being drawn slowly towards autism activism in the frum (religious Jewish) community without knowing what to do or how to do it and without feeling that I have the time, energy or skill-set to do it. I also feel the word “activist” is overused. Every journalist, writer, artist, musician and academic claims to be an “activist” these days. As they said on the Deep Meaningful Conversations podcast I listened to the other day about Sarah Schinerer, sharing something on social media does not make you an activist!

Dare I say it, I think the world might be in a better shape if there were fewer people being active and more being still and thinking. Don’t just do something, stand there.

***

I was thinking a bit about spirituality and alexithymia (inability to recognise or understand one’s own emotions, which I have). I struggle to define, understand or experience spirituality. Maybe it’s a nebulous, abstract concept that many autistics would struggle with. Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) and meet super-spiritual religious leaders who could give me experiential proof of it. Or maybe alexithymia stops me recognising when I experience spirituality or simchah (joy) e.g. simchah shel mitzvah (the joy of performing a religious commandment) or simchah shel Yom Tov (the joy of a festival). I feel my religious life is performed without joy, yet it doesn’t exactly feel “joyless” in a painful way, so maybe I’m feeling something I can’t recognise.

It doesn’t help that the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world sees spirituality in withdrawal from the wider world, while Modern Orthodoxy sees spirituality in bringing Jewish values to the wider world. I prefer the latter, but perhaps this is harder to notice and feel; it’s certainly in many ways harder to do. (This is the fundamental internal conflict of the Jewish people, the conflict between Leah and Rachel, which is later the conflict between Yosef and Yehudah (Joseph and Judah) and then between the Southern Kingdom of Yehudah and Northern Kingdom of Yisrael (Israel), but I don’t have time to elaborate.)

***

On the autism forum, someone asked who or what we identify with. Almost everyone who responded put animals or nature, then the marginalised and disadvantaged. Most people responding felt that they struggled to connect with most other human beings.

I think my response will not be popular:

The short answer is “Almost no one.” The longer answer:

As Franz Kafka said, “I have hardly anything in common with myself”.

1. My wife. She is genuinely the only person who really “gets” me and is on the same wavelength, so I can unmask with her.
2. Intellectuals, particularly ones who are dead, eccentric and/or Jewish, most especially those who were probably neurodiverse or mentally ill.
3. Lonely people. I would say “marginalised” etc., but it sounds awkward.
4. Children (but only quiet, well-behaved ones).
5. I do genuinely try to care about everyone and feel obligation to care for them.

I don’t feel any connection with animals. They often frighten me. I find them unpredictable, especially dogs. I didn’t have any pets (except fish) as a child, plus I’ve been attacked by dogs and by a duck and twice had apples stolen from my hands from goats, so maybe that’s it.

I should really have put “Other Jews” in there before “everyone,” but I didn’t want to get into an argument about whether it’s OK to care about some people more than others (Judaism says it’s human nature to extend compassion outwards from the family to the community to the nation to the world, but lots of people would disagree).

I suspect there is a part of me that wants not to fit in, that looks for difference and existential incomprehension instead of finding common ground. I never feel more Jewish than when with non-Jews or less autistic than when with other autistics. I need to find a way to move past this if I want to make close friends.

***

Ugh, I’ve been online too long and now it’s midnight and I’m exhausted (QED regarding staying up late due to poor self-control). It will be good when E comes to the UK and at least some of my life can move offline.

Leadership

I spent most of my time at work today stuffing about 300 invoices into envelopes, sealing them, putting stamps on them and posting them. I also processed six credit card payments over the phone and dealt calmly with a phone call from someone who was angry over some stuff that she really should not have been angry about. I did at least get to listen to some podcasts while stuffing envelopes. I had forgotten I would be stuffing envelopes, so hadn’t saved up podcasts, which meant I listened to some that had been sitting on my iPod for a while, unloved.

One podcast that was more interesting than I thought it would be was about Sarah Schenerer, who founded the Bais Yaakov network of Jewish girls’ schools in twentieth century Poland (it’s now a global network). I didn’t realise that she had so little support for her school initially or that she was a divorcee. It was mentioned in the podcast that Jewish men define themselves by the yeshivah they went to. This was not exactly news to me, but did make me feel an outcast again.

The podcast also said that we should all be trying to be leaders. Rabbi Sacks z”tzl used to say this a lot too. I’ve never felt like a leader and wouldn’t know how to be one. The podcast said that, if nothing else, we should be leaders in our families. I am not sure I know how to do that either, although if ‘leadership’ in this context means ‘encouraging others to have more of a Jewish identity and/or religious observance,’ then I suppose I’ve done that without really knowing how.

Interestingly, my rabbi mentor said something similar on Sunday, not about leadership, but about my writing being a “gift” and part of my mission in the world (I can’t remember if he used the word “mission,” but that was the idea). As I think I said the other day, he explicitly said I should take time from Torah study and other religious requirements to devote to my writing, although I’m not sure how much exactly to take. It is reassuring, and flattering to know that he feels that way about my writing, although naturally I feel that I’m not all that gifted and that my current writing is far from anything that might be considered Jewishly relevant.

I’m still thinking about what I can do for frum (religious Jewish autistics/neurodivergents/misfits in general). I’m still struggling to find anything that is both practical and within my capabilities. I also wonder if, beyond a certain age, these people either find a way of settling in the community or they leave (or get forced out) and that’s why I can’t find them.

***

Today was a fast day (the fast of Tevet). As I was at work, I went to shul (synagogue) for Minchah and Ma’ariv (Afternoon and Evening Services). I had not been to a fast day Minchah for so long, from general shul avoidance and specific fast day avoidance (I’m not allowed to fast on the minor fasts for medical reasons, but I don’t want that to become obvious if they try to call me to the Torah and I have to turn it down), that I could not remember what extra prayers we say. This is not good.

***

When I got to the Tube station on the way home, the down escalator was broken, but I didn’t realise this until I was on it and there was a crowd behind me, so I had to walk down on it. The staircase might have been easier, especially as I got stuck behind someone walking slowly with a stick and someone else carrying a bulky case. About five years ago I nearly had a panic attack/meltdown on a very long staircase at Kings Cross Tube Station and ever since I’ve been nervous of walking down the long stairs on the Tube. I get fear of heights-type feelings if I look too far down or over-think things. I just try to look at my feet and keep going at a steady speed, neither too fast nor too slow, but it’s hard when stuck in a slow moving queue of descending people. I did manage it, but I’m wondering if I should start walking down the stairs even when the escalator is working as a kind of exposure therapy.

***

I didn’t have such a stressful day, but foolishly went into the charity shop on the way home, ostensibly because it would get me out of the rain for a few minutes. The result was buying one of Dominic Sandbrook’s history books, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974. It was only £2 for a hardback that looks very interesting! The money is not an issue; time (to read) and space (to store it) are. Sigh. And this, when I’m intending to buy a load of books for novel research soon. I think I need to find some books to donate to the charity shop in return; I already have a couple of ideas.

***

I had some more ideas for my novel today. It’s strange that I can spend an hour trying to think up ideas and getting nowhere and then, when I’m working and not trying to think about writing, they just keep coming.

Midwinter Blues

Trigger warning: reality

“Human kind/Cannot bear very much reality” — T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

While it is, technically, the middle of winter, I actually always feel like the new year is less the turning point towards spring and more the start of the worst part of winter, January and February. The days still feel as short as ever, the weather (in the UK) is even worse and, unlike December, there are no festivals to look forward to and create a general atmosphere of cheer. And then I have the awareness that the end of winter (which I want) is marked by the two hardest Jewish festivals for me, from an autism and mental health point of view, Purim and Pesach, which makes the onset of spring more challenging than simply the advent of longer days and warmer weather.

***

I stayed up late. I can’t remember what I was doing. Probably looking at the responses to the Facebook group post I made or just trying to process the answers I got. I was too tired to watch the whole of Ghostbusters: Answer the Call. It’s not really a good enough film to be split over three evenings, let alone four, as may still happen.

I slept a long time again (ten or eleven hours) and woke up feeling tired. When I woke up, I couldn’t move at all at first. This happens to me periodically. I used to think that I wasn’t fully awake, or I was dreaming I was awake, but wasn’t really, but I’m pretty sure I was at least somewhat awake this time and I’m wondering if it’s sleep paralysis. I did mention this in the questionnaire for the sleep study, as I’ve been aware of it for a while, but I can’t remember how much emphasis I placed on it, because I wasn’t sure if it was “real” or not. I recall that the questionnaire placed more emphasis on things like, does your “bed-partner” report snoring (I don’t have a bed-partner. I did have a room-mate (E) for a week who reported that I snore a little, but that was after I sent the questionnaire back).

I couldn’t get going once I got up either. I’m not sure why. I didn’t feel physically drained, but maybe emotionally drained. After a while, low mood set in, or maybe I only just noticed it. I struggled with low mood all day. I’m monitoring my mood at the moment to check that I’m not becoming clinically depressed. I don’t think I am, but I am having some monstrously bad days, like today. Being off work so long probably doesn’t help, as it’s too easy to get out of the habit of doing anything productive and to avoid contact with people other my parents. And missing E is so difficult.

I didn’t revise my proofreading profile as I wanted. I did do some work on planning my novel. It’s hard to see it as productive as the productive bits (ideas) were just a few moments out of an hour and a quarter of mostly procrastinating (plus another fifteen minutes or so typing up notes) BUT I probably need the procrastinating time to let my brain tick over and the ideas were, I think, reasonable. There’s such a long way to go, though.

I did a little Torah study, but not much else. I’m trying to be kind to myself and not beat myself up for not managing more than I did (and not for not reading any more of Dune either – I’m enjoying it, but feel frustrated that it’s a book that needs to be read slloooowllly, and it’s really not a good book to read when down), but it’s hard.

***

I think discussion has died out on the Orthodox Conundrum post I wrote about neurodiversity in the frum (religious Jewish) community. I got some supportive responses, and ‘care’ likes (or whatever they’re called; I’m not great at emoji), but no practical suggestions and I only found one other actual neurodiverse frum Jew (with ADHD). And someone said I shouldn’t call myself disabled and I decided to let it go rather than get into an argument. I’m not sure if that was the right thing to do.

The hard thing about the response was that a couple of people said that the frum world isn’t going to change and one said I should consider finding a less frum community or less frum friends. This was painful to hear because, having seen them comment on other posts (and one is a well-known activist in the Anglo-Jewish community), I know these are the more tolerant, inclusive people in the group, the ones who advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and abuse survivors’ rights in the frum community. While I don’t think they were saying I should leave, they did seem pessimistic about any kind of change in the near future.

I am a member of a couple of Jewish autism FB groups, but they aren’t very active or very frum and some are pretty American-centric. Either way, there don’t seem to be many people specifically struggling with autism issues in the Orthodox community. Part of me wonders why I don’t just walk away. I guess I do sometimes, to some extent, but I always come back. I have some kind of loyalty that goes beyond just belief. And I guess I feel there must be other autistic Jews in the frum community, even if they’re masking, even if they don’t actually know they’re autistic. I would think in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in particular there it would be considered shameful and there would be the desire to hide it “for shidduchim” (marriage prospects), for those of siblings as well as the person with autism. I feel I should do something, but I don’t know what. I’m not really an activist-type person and autism by its nature makes it hard to know what to do in a social context like this.

***

Someone on the autism forum was asking about positive traits we have from autism. I find this kind of question hard to answer, but I tried anyway:

I really struggle with this question, as I find it so hard to tell what is because I’m autistic and what would be the same if I was allistic. Or is that even a valid question? I don’t know. It’s also hard to separate nature and nurture. I guess there’s part of me that is reluctant to ascribe positives to my autism as I still experience it primarily as a disability (which I know is not a popular opinion here).

Anyway, in the hope that this will make me feel more positive about my autism, I feel it at least contributes towards my being:

Intelligent;

Independent-minded;

Empathetic;

Honest;

Diligent;

And perhaps also resilient.

(Several of these factors helped me stay religious in a culture (Orthodox Judaism) that isn’t always accommodating to difference, neurodiversity or mental illness, so I’m grateful for that at least.)

***

I’m feeling depressed about the state of the world too. American and Israeli politics have both been like watching a car crash in slow motion for many years now. At least I’m saving E from America’s post-imperial self-destruction. I worry about Israel. There’s nothing I can do, but I care. It’s frustrating that I probably know people who voted for the crazies in both country. At least in the UK our politicians are “merely” incompetent, hypocritical and sometimes mildly corrupt. They aren’t racist, theocratic and seriously corrupt as a matter of course.

(This thought triggered by this Times of Israel blog. Compared with some things the new Israeli government has promised to do, allowing unlicensed therapists is pretty trivial, but it’s just the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.)

***

Is anyone else sick of “journey” being an all-purpose metaphor for everything? When I was working in further education, the college used to refer to the students’ “Learning journeys,” which used to drive my boss crazy. “They aren’t on a “learning journey,” they’ve gone to college!” She wasn’t always an easy person to work for, but I did think she was right there.

***

My Ghostbusters marathon has revived my one of my earliest career ambitions: to be a ghostbuster! The problem is that I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t really believe in anything supernatural other than a (rather Maimonidean) God (who I think isn’t supernatural in the way ghosts would be supernatural). Although maybe I could claim this as proof of my ghostbusting skills. “How many ghosts have you seen? None? Well, that just shows how good I am at catching them!”

Neurodivergence and the Frum Community

I’m still feeling torn between my Jewish and autistic identities. They don’t automatically conflict, but they do pull in different directions, autism towards solitude and quiet as well as extreme individualism, Orthodox Judaism towards family, community, the notion of religious obligation and structure which can run counter to individualism and (let’s face it) noise and sensory overload. It’s hard to even describe to one group the “other side” of my identity or to feel that they would even be interested in knowing, let alone care about how I feel. The online autism community also contains a fair amount of anger towards allistics, which to me seems to run across religious obligations to love others and not bear grudges or get angry.

 ***

I spoke to my rabbi mentor today. He encouraged me to raise the issue of autism in the frum community online, and to keep writing fiction even if it reduces time or energy for religious observance, which was reassuring. Also with his encouragement, I posted something on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group about being autistic in the frum world.

This is what I wrote:

This is something that has been on my mind for a while. I was diagnosed with autism in 2021. It was a late diagnosis, when I was aged thirty-seven. Obviously it had been present all my life, I just didn’t know.

Diagnosis explained a lot about my difficulties fitting in to the frum world from my teenage years onwards e.g. I struggled to fit in at the youth minyan at my shul and soon went back to davening in the main shul; I refused to go to Jewish youth movements; I didn’t go to yeshivah; I had a difficult time fitting in to the frum student group at university; I struggled hugely with dating and I’m only getting married now at the age of thirty-nine (and to someone who is also not part of the mainstream frum community).

All these things were at least partially a result of my autism and co-morbid mental health issues that I’ve struggled with all my adult life, particularly depression and social anxiety, as well as my experience of being bullied a lot at school, like many autistic children. Even when I did go to shul, shiurim or frum social events, I struggled to speak to anyone and fit in.

I feel my lack of attendance at so many events and institutions that socialise young people into the frum community mean that I really struggle to fit even now. I definitely feel there were points in my life where I could easily have stopped being frum had my commitment to Judaism not been so great, because I felt so socially isolated and depressed.

I have a lot more I could say about this (e.g. my troubles with shul attendance and with chevruta learning), but I would like to hear what other people think first. Do you have experience of neurodiversity in the frum world? What challenges have you or those you know faced? What would you like to see done differently? What is already positive?

So far I’ve had some pleasantly empathetic responses, but only one fellow frum neurodivergent (someone with ADHD) and no advice or support beyond, “Find a less frum community with more tolerant people who probably didn’t go to yeshivah,” which is sort of what I discussed with my rabbi mentor t his morning (we discussed that E and I are looking at a less-frum community, partly for financial reasons, partly because I know I’m more likely to participate if I’m one of the more knowledgeable and frum congregants). However, put that bluntly it feels a bit like I’m being kicked out of the frum world for being broken and not a good enough Jew.

Someone else spoke about the frum world being rigid and unwilling to make exceptions for its rules. This is most obviously true of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world, where I think, if they were honest, the leaders would admit to accepting that a certain number will have to leave (for a whole bunch of different reasons) in order to preserve a stable community for the 85% who stay. To be honest, most human societies in history have functioned like this, putting the needs of the collective before the needs of the individual, and most non-Western societies still do e.g. China, Iran. It’s still depressing, and hard when I don’t want to leave, particularly as the Modern Orthodox community is supposed to be more welcoming. The Orthodox Conundrum group is, on the whole, very supportive of minority rights in Orthodoxy (women, LGBT, abuse survivors), so it feels even worse being met with this muted response from them. Neurodivergence is a lot less problematic, in terms of Jewish law, than LGBT rights.

E asked if I thought that this was why I struggle to find frum autistic Jews, that they just can’t cope with the community and leave, so there simply aren’t many frum autistic Jews around. The thought had already occurred to me, and also about mentally ill Jews. When I was involved with a Jewish mental health charity, I met a couple of people who had become more religious, then had mental health problems and decided, for their mental health, to go back to being non-religious. I’m sure they aren’t the only ones (and realistically some people become religious because of mental illness, or because of traumatic events that are going to lead to mental illness down the line). Mental Health Shabbat is becoming an established annual event in Modern Orthodox communities, but there’s still a long way to go with that, and acceptance of neurodivergence has even further to go than acceptance of mental illness.

I’ve been on a cycle for a number of years of feeling that the frum world has let down me and other people with mental illness or neurodivergence. Then I’ll try to reach out and I’ll find a bit of support and feel better, but then I get isolated again and the cycle repeats. It’s hard not to look at my neurotypical, mentally healthy (or apparently so) peers who have found a way to succeed in the community and in general and not feel let down, frustrated, lonely, maybe angry, and probably other things too. I’ve felt for a while that the frum world in general, and the Haredi world in particular, has an amazing amount of chesed (kindness, support) for those inside the frum box, but those outside are often left to fend for themselves. And I know others have it much worse than I do; I at least have a supportive wife and family, my rabbi mentor and enough ability to “pass” for a time in the frum world, even if it’s stressful and draining. I certainly feel a lot better about the situation than I did when I was still looking to marry someone from within the frum world. Still, it’s painful to feel rejected (again).

(Someone also wanted to argue with me about whether autism was a disability or an eccentricity. I just walked away from that conversation as no good come from it, as I knew from other threads that this person just likes to argue.)

***

It rained much of the afternoon, so I didn’t get out for a walk and writing that short post for FB and responding to comments took longer than you might think, so I didn’t do much else. I did some Torah study, but not much else.

***

So, the baby blessing (again). I’ve discovered the baby blessing isn’t at the end of the service, but in the middle, during the leining (Torah reading). So I’m going to have to get there earlier and stick around even though I don’t feel comfortable davening there. I know I’m going to have to do it, but it feels like every time I try to make a compromise regarding this, I just get told to make another compromise. And it’s really not going to be fun being at a big family thing afterwards without E, as virtually the only adult there without a spouse (the only other one will be Brother-in-Law’s severely intellectually disabled sister).

We haven’t spoken to the hotel yet about electronic keys etc.

***

I’m still watching Ghostbusters: Answer the Call, the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot with an all-female Ghostbusters team. This was hugely controversial at the time, to the extent that the fandom website Den of Geek had to turn off commenting on all posts about the film because of the amount of anger and abuse the comment section filled up with, supposedly at the idea of rebooting the franchise, but, a lot of people suspected, about the female leads.

To be honest, the female cast is probably the film’s greatest asset. They’re charismatic and reasonably funny and it honestly is good to see women playing scientists/heroes rather than love interest/eye candy in a science fantasy adventure film like this. And the film remembered that the original Ghostbusters was a comedy, unlike Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which had a couple of good jokes, but weren’t primarily comedies. However, whereas the original film was very dry and ironic, this film is much cornier and over-reliant on people being stupid or getting slimed. It is fitfully funny, though, and better than its reputation.