Pre-Wedding Angst

E has gone to spend time with her best friend (the one I saw, but couldn’t hear, in the noisy restaurant earlier in the week) and then to stay with her parents in a rented flat in Fulham until the wedding, not so that we don’t see each other as per Jewish custom (we’re doing photos before the ceremony,  so we will see each other before the wedding anyway) and more to get away from my extended family, who are going to be here for Shabbat, although thankfully not actually staying in the house, just eating here.

***

E is really stressed and not happy about how much is going on, which makes me feel very guilty. I know I’ve been over this a lot, here and elsewhere, but it’s only through going through the wedding experience that I’ve realised how like me E is in terms of dealing (or not dealing) with stress and peopling. I’m so used to being the one who struggles with these things that it didn’t really occur to me that my spouse would be the same, particularly as E is a lot better at masking and peopling than I am. This is further complicated by her having suspected ADHD as well as suspected autism (AuDHD), as that adds a load of character traits that are very unlike me (like very changeable emotions and need for regular diversion) so it’s really hard for me to understand her sometimes. So I do feel guilty for having this celebration, but then again, I’ve done stuff for her that was out of my comfort zone (like our civil wedding celebration), so maybe it balances out. I hope so.

I probably spent too much of my single life reading marriage tips on frum websites. I thought it would help me prepare for marriage, but I’m not sure it did. Those sites talk a lot about compromise as the foundation for marriage, but frame it that compromise is always possible. They don’t talk about what happens if something is really important to one spouse, but really difficult for the other, with no obvious middle ground.

I also do need to read about ADHD and, if I can find anything on it, AuDHD (there doesn’t seem to be much information out there, and until recently the fact that you can have both disorders at once was not recognised by the medical profession) as I need to learn more.

 ***

I feel quite stressed and a bit anxious too, which is unsurprising, about the wedding and about Shabbat with my large and boisterous family, worrying about how much sleep I’ll get tonight and whether I’ll get up in time for shul tomorrow and so on. I was persuaded not to go to shul (synagogue) tonight, even though I wanted to do so, so we could eat earlier, which will benefit me (assuming we actually eat quickly and not just early, which remains to be seen), but was done to help Sister and Nephew rather than me. I have said I don’t want a three-course meal (no soup), as we would usually have on Friday night to finish eating earlier, which Mum initially didn’t agree with. These are both probably the right thing to do, but is just another case of the wedding highlighting my inability to determine when to compromise and what are my legitimate boundaries to enforce.

I feel down and vaguely depressed too, which I know is also normal on reaching a rite of passage, and when I know E is stressed and down, but it’s still hard to deal with and triggers guilt for feeling down when I “should” be happy.

***

My parents’ shul (synagogue), which is now E and my shul, forgot to wish us mazal tov in the weekly newsletter. This is similar to my bar mitzvah, when the newsletter of my shul (a different shul) said I was leining (reading from the Torah) much less than I actually was doing (I leined the whole sedra and haftarah). This kind of thing happens to me a lot. I just hope they remember to call me up tomorrow for my auf ruf and that everything else connected with the wedding goes OK. So far things have mostly gone well. Still, it does reinforce my feelings that I’m mostly forgettable and don’t really belong in the frum world, a world that I’m struggling to get back into post-COVID and post-diagnosis.

Five Days

There’s a lot going on, as you can guess. I don’t really have time to write, but I need to process some things.

E and I went to Golders Green on Sunday and she bought me a new tallit (prayer shawl). There is a custom for a woman to buy her groom a new tallit before the wedding. This is because in most Ashkenazi (Northern/Eastern European) communities, men don’t wear a tallit until they’re married. As it happens, I’ve worn one for years, partly because I sort of identify as a Yekke (German Jew) (I’m only one-eighth Yekkish, but I identify with the stereotypical Yekkish traits of decorum, precision, punctuality and scrupulous honesty), partly because I thought I was never going to get married, but mostly because the book To Pray as a Jew said it was a rather silly and ungrounded custom and the mitzvah (commandment) of wearing a tallit during prayer was too important to pass up. But E and I both thought a new tallit will look better in the wedding photographs (I will wear it during the wedding ceremony), so we got one. We got a nice one. Afterwards we went for lunch in a new Israeli-style cafe. It was rather noisy, but the food and atmosphere were good. We tried to get me a new tie for the wedding, but couldn’t find anything we liked, so I’m going to wear a tie I already own that will go well. We made tacos in the evening.

Monday was a work day, and a dull one at that. In the evening, E and I watched Vincent and the Doctor, one of the better episodes from Matt Smith’s first season of Doctor Who. It features Vincent Van Gogh and deals sensitively with depression. Not the easiest watch, but an important episode

Today E, her parents and I went to Tate Modern art gallery, which I’d never been to before. We went to see the Klimt and Mondrian exhibition. It took me a while to warm to it. I wasn’t conscious of feeling stressed about the wedding, but I found it hard to get into the right headspace for the exhibition. I did find some paintings I liked, though. After a while, I started getting a weird synaesthesia, where I didn’t hear the colours, but I heard the shapes, weird sounds (like 1960s science fiction) and then music (mostly theme music from TV or films probably triggered by association of shapes). Afterwards we browsed some of the other galleries, although I didn’t see a lot that really spoke to me. I’m not opposed to abstract art or even conceptual art, but I do wonder if some artists are just seeing what they can get away with. I can imagine some of them privately laughing at how much money they can get for a found object or a pile of sand.

In the evening the four of us met with my parents for dinner at a kosher Chinese restaurant. We had a good time, although I didn’t say much. I’m glad my parents get along so well with E’s parents; I feel that it shows that at least some people in this family are normal. That said, E’s father is a lot like me, except that I’m religious and he’s very much not religious.

The wedding preparation is mostly going OK, except that the cake, which should be the easiest thing, has turned into a nightmare. I’m too tired to go into the details.

There’s a lot happening that I haven’t written, because I don’t have time or I can’t remember (I have poor autobiographical memory) or it’s too private. But I feel mostly OK. Anyway, we get married in FIVE DAYS. Which is ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY HOURS (less now).

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Baby Snuggles, Headaches and Low Blood Sugar

I’ve been too busy to write for a few days again.

I didn’t go to shul (synagogue) again on Friday night. I probably had the energy, but I was just running late, trying to cram in a lot the day after Pesach (Passover) when I was already exhausted from Yom Tov (the festival). We had a quiet Shabbat (Sabbath): E and I went for a walk and got rained on a little, but not much and we read a bit and I dozed for forty minutes or so. E and I are both looking forward to an ordinary week without extra religious events and in a weird way, I was glad to be back at work, just to be back in a routine again.

I did listen to music briefly on Friday afternoon, just before Shabbat, despite it being the part of the omer (period between Pesach and Shavuot) when frum (religious) Jews observe an element of national mourning, including not listening to music. I did this because I felt I needed to do so to regulate my emotions, which were becoming depressed. I’ve decided I will continue to listen to music if I need to calm myself, even though I’m not sure if it’s technically allowed. (It is permitted to listen to music if suffering from clinical depression or autistic exhaustion, so it might be allowed anyway, I’m not sure.)

I had headache on Saturday night and again on Sunday night, but I did realise that I haven’t woken up with a headache since E has been here, which seems to indicate that she’s good for my stress levels. Despite the headache, I drew up a schedule for the next five weeks, until the wedding (FIVE WEEKS!!!!!!!), which made me a little less stressed, as we’ve mostly got it under control. The big things still to organise are the ring (we’re seeing a jeweller Dad knows through shul on Wednesday to discuss this) and E’s dress (which may not be a traditional wedding dress, for various reasons).

Yesterday afternoon E and I went out with Sister, Brother-in-law and Nephew on Hampstead Heath and then on for coffee at a cafe that was nice, but ridiculously expensive (it was in Hampstead, so what do you expect?). The walk on the Heath was good, but there were a ridiculous number of dogs, including many not on leads. We are all at least mildly dog-phobic (technically Nephew isn’t, but with this family it’s basically only a matter of time). Nephew seems a lot more interested in his surroundings than he was in the past, particularly lights and the abstract painting on the wall of the cafe. E and I both had some baby snuggles, which was good. I caught up a bit with Sister, although any conversation with her or BIL is likely to be interrupted after a minute or two by Nephew. E and I also checked out some charity shops that were surprisingly open on a Sunday, but we weren’t willing to pay Hampstead prices for anything.

When we got home, we opened the wedding presents that had arrived before Pesach. We had been so busy with Pesach stuff that we hadn’t opened them yet. They were what we wanted (obviously, because they were from our wedding list), but I guess crockery and a kettle are never going to seem that fun to me.

Late in the evening, I started feeling faint again. I don’t know if this is low blood sugar or low salt or something else. When I feel faint, I don’t really want to slowly do scientific tests to work it out, I just want to eat and feel better. I felt faint at work today too and again when I got home. I am worrying that I’m hypoglycaemic, but don’t really know what that would entail or have time to research right now. I want to mention it to the doctor, but I have other things to talk to him about and I can’t get an appointment anyway.

Work was incredibly noisy again this morning with workmen outside and inside the building, the former with a loud radio blaring TalkSport again (is there really so much to say about sport 24/7?). The carpet under my desk has now worn away to the underlay. I told J and asked if we could get a new carpet, but he made uncommitted noises and muttered something about needing to replace the whole carpet, not just under my desk, and some of the furniture not being easily movable, so I shelved my radical plan to suggest that the walls could do with a coat of paint too. I guess before COVID I’d have had a stronger argument, but now we get about two visitors a year who don’t work in the building, so the economic argument for not doing anything is strong. I do keep catching my foot on the rim of the circular hole in the carpet, though, so I might see if some health and safety rationale develops.

The afternoon was largely devoted to sticking erratum stickers in prayer books and sorting papers again. When I got home I did a few necessary chores and read a few pages of Children of Dune. It’s still heavy-going and I’m struggling to remember all the plot points, but I’m determined to see what happens and finish it before my wedding. I ate a lot because of low blood sugar/salt/whatever. E is away for work, so I had dinner with my parents, which was probably a mistake, as I was feeling very depleted and peopled out, but I couldn’t find a polite way to say no (and now I’ve just annoyed my Mum by saying this to her when trying to explain why I couldn’t help her with something). I am too exhausted to do anything, so will probably just watch TV. I’m too tired to read, even The Sandman graphic novel that I started recently.

***

There has been Drama on the autism forum again. It’s happening a lot lately. It’s probably not surprising that a community of people who are pretty much defined by having poor social skills, no tact, obsessive focus and logical minds would spend so much time pointing out the (real or perceived) flaws in each others’ religious and political beliefs and opinions, but it is frustrating to watch given that I can mostly stay out of that sort of behaviour. Of course, this sort of thing happens all over the internet every day without neurodivergence. It’s just a shame as there are some people there I like a lot, but it’s getting harder to focus on the signal, not the noise, and it seems that some people I like are around less. This is probably not due to the Drama, as looking at old posts, most people only seem to stay on the forum for a year or two as they get a sense of their autistic identity, then move on.

Number Crunching

I woke up feeling drained today and not sure why except Pesach (Passover) stress and maybe wedding stress, although it hasn’t been on my radar much lately. I love having E here, but I guess we’re going through the “first year of marriage learning to live together and compromise” stuff, even though we aren’t fully married yet. Having worked out our position on the “big” topics, we’re having to find compromises on topics that we didn’t even know existed a few weeks ago, with the added complication that this isn’t actually our home, so we have to organise a whole other set of compromises with my parents too. I wish we were living in our own place, but it won’t happen for a while. E was very homesick this morning too. Married life is hard, and we aren’t even allowed to sleep in the same bed or share very intimate touch yet.

Related to feeling drained, I would like to have more energy, but I’m not sure how feasible it is. Other autistics seem to think there is no real way of boosting energy levels, aside from relaxation and sleep and sleep is not always refreshing to me due to my suspected sleep disorder. You can only manage your environment better to lose energy slower and leave more rest time to allow energy levels to naturally restore. I’m not sure how much I can do that right now, given that I have to go out to work and do a lot of non-negotiable (to me) religious stuff, although I’m trying to find ways to make the religious stuff more negotiable and hope to move completely to work from home one day, although it’s a distant dream right now.

Speaking of sleep, the respiratory department (which weirdly was responsible for my sleep study) finally got back to me today regarding my email about my sleep study results. They asked for my date of birth and post code to try to find my results. I don’t know why it took them over two weeks to write one line. Small steps…

Other than that, I feel like I took advantage of one of the Jewish Facebook groups I’m on to post about how I’m feeling rather than asking a specific question, so now I feel bad about that, and also feeling that no one likes me on the autism forum (I haven’t looked at that much for the last week and don’t feel I’ve missed much).

I’m also struggling to feel the meaning and joy of Pesach, but I feel like that about much of Judaism. I can’t tell if it doesn’t really engage me and I only do it out of abstract belief or if it’s just the alexithymia (difficulty recognising and understanding my own emotions) screwing up my life again. I think Judaism engages me, but that means I can’t reach the positive emotions I have about it and maybe never will, which amounts to the same thing in practice as not having them in the first place. It makes it hard to share the joy and meaning of Judaism with E when so much of my own presumed joy and meaning goes unnoticed by me.

E and I did some cooking together just now and that felt positive, but on the whole I feel slightly down and alexithymically unaware of what my problem is and what I could/should do to fix it, if that’s even how I should be looking at it. I think that some sadness is just part of the human condition and needs to be ridden out rather than changed.

***

I’m still thinking about the statistic I saw yesterday that there are about 1,380 autistic Jews in the UK. I suspect it must be an underestimate either of the number of autistics or Jews. Looking online, it seems that a little over 1% of the UK population is diagnosed autistic. Assuming that’s the same in the Anglo-Jewish population, the equivalent figure would be just over 4,000 Jewish autistics.

I did a back of an envelope calculation, admittedly with some questionable assumptions, and even with this higher figure, it’s likely that there are just forty or so autistics in this country who are broadly in the observant Modern Orthodox community, and many of them are probably severely autistic (I can’t find statistics on the percentage of autistics who are described as “high-functioning”). This means that the number of people who experience the interaction of autism and Jewish life the way I do in this country is almost non-existent. Even if I widen that to include the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, I think it would still be hard to actually find people like me, as I’ve encountered almost no Haredi non-severe autistics online or in person and suspect that anyone even vaguely functional in that community is encouraged to keep quiet about any neurological differences as it would be “bad for shidduchim” (finding a partner for yourself and your siblings).

No wonder there’s so little support for non-severe autism in the Jewish or frum community. No wonder I’ve struggled to so hard to find people on my wavelength in the frum community over the years. And no wonder my wife came from overseas!

Pandora’s Box

Today was difficult and I feel rather down. I suppose the background is a week of stress of various kinds and disrupted sleep (too little, too much), as well as meals at different times, and different foods as well as too much peopling. Pesach (Passover), basically.

E and I went to the science fiction exhibition at the Science Museum this morning. Unfortunately, a number of things went wrong for us. They were mostly minor things, so I won’t list them all, but the major ones were that the exhibition didn’t have enough exhibits, many of the exhibits it did have were replica props or costumes rather than originals, and the exhibition as a whole seemed pitched more at children rather than adults, although not quite at either, which was not clear from the advertising. The intellectual level of the signage seemed aimed at children, but the exhibits themselves were probably more recognisable to adults; I’m not sure how many children have seen Forbidden Planet or The Day the Earth Stood Still, let alone Alien (actually, more likely Alien than the 1950s films). We came away feeling we had neither seen anything unusual nor learnt very much and felt a bit ripped off as it was an exhibition we had to pay for, unlike the regular exhibits at the Science Museum. There was a lot of ambient noise in the exhibition too (it was supposed to be set in a spaceship), which, to be fair, they warned us about, but the noise and the people probably contributed to my feeling bad. It wasn’t terrible, but I felt short changed. I would have liked to have learnt more about some exhibits, especially the robot doll with highly realistic facial expressions that teaches young autistic children about emotions.

Afterwards, we found the museum as a whole too busy and noisy and went outside to eat lunch. We found a bench by a memorial to victims of the Soviet Union and ate our lunch until someone sat next to me and started smoking. The smell and fear of secondary smoke put me off finishing my matzahs. We decided we didn’t really feel like going back in the museum and wandered around for a bit, but there wasn’t much to see except a so-so bookshop, so we came home. I did a few odd chores, but lacked concentration and motivation for anything more significant. Anyway, there isn’t much that can be done at the moment for the wedding, which is my main focus. I do feel that I wasted the afternoon, though, aside from a short walk with E to the two local free bookshelves.

***

I struggled with interactions with Dad again. I feel I should be able to cope with his repetitions and intrusive small talk, but I can’t, certainly not when I’m already feeling down. E struggles with them too, but is more polite than me, or more inhibited. I get sarcastic or just short.

I think part of the problem is that I have an autistic “script” on how to live with my parents, albeit a sometimes dysfunctional one that involves being sarcastic and then apologising, then doing it again. I have no script on how to live with my fiancée/wife, but I am more able to be myself with her and we’re slowly learning how to live together, although it is very early days and we probably won’t really make progress until we’re living in our own space, away from my parents. The problem is that I have no script at all for living with parents AND my fiancée/wife at the same time, even though this is a much more difficult thing to do than living with either parents OR fiancée/wife separately. It feels like being in two plays at once. Added to this is that the family dynamic is changing because of my marriage, so even old scripts don’t apply.

It’s probably noteworthy that E thinks that I’m a very different person, a happier and more functional person, when I’m alone with her than when I’m around my parents. I suspect I’m also happier and more functional with her than at work, but I’m not sure how social situations and volunteering fit in. My Mum texted something today about me being happier with E too.

While E and I are still PG-rated in our behaviour, we are relating to each other more in a sexual way, unsurprising given that we will be married in six weeks. This is probably the first time I’ve really interacted with a woman in such a sexual way, certainly the first time for over a decade (depending on what you think of my behaviour with my first girlfriend, who did not respect my boundaries, unlike E). I think this is bringing up some difficult feelings for me that I can’t articulate to E or in writing and which I wouldn’t share here anyway, but I feel I need to access them in some way before our wedding. It’s fun, absolutely, but I think there’s also guilt, shame and fear in there from decades of sexual repression, as well as the fear that sex is a big Pandora’s box and if I (or we) open it, there’s no telling what might come out, even though I know I’m pretty vanilla.

I feel like I really need a therapy session to help process the last week or so (wedding, Pesach, having E here with my family, sexual maturing), particularly as I haven’t blogged much here lately. Unfortunately, I don’t have another session until next week because of Pesach and my therapist being away.

***

E picked up a book on Jewish marriage years ago that she didn’t like. She offered it to me, but I looked at it and thought it would upset me and trigger religious OCD, so we left it in a free book box. It takes an attitude to dating that makes me wonder how any frum (religious Jewish) people get married. Dating should be through a matchmaker (professional or amateur), it should consist of serious conversation (interrogation) to see that the couple have identical life aims and key values (if people in their early twenties or even late teens even have clear life aims and values). The conversation should be used to determine whether the other person has good character traits, particularly kindness, charity, patience (in the sense of no anger) and, for women, an indefinable “charm.” They should be on comparable religious levels from “good” (i.e. conventionally religious) families and ideally the man should be a good Talmudic scholar too. It’s acknowledged that no one has all these characteristics, but no guidance is given about how to prioritise those they do have. It feels like every normal person would  have at least one serious mark against them, so I don’t know how anyone gets married in the frum world, particularly as it’s increasingly common to do advance checks of a person through their “shidduch resume” (dating CV) and character references so you can ditch potential dates who you deem inadequate without even bothering to go on a date with them. The boys apparently just judge by the attached photo. I bet some of the girls do too. I guess people just lie and regret it later.

***

There is an article in the latest Jewish News about autism and youth movements in the Jewish community. Inexplicably, I can’t find it on the website, only in the hardcopy newspaper. It says there are an estimated 1,380 Jewish autistics (in the UK, I assume from context, although this is unclear). However, it is not clear if this includes high functioning autistics. Certainly the article seems to be based on the idea that autistics are excluded from Jewish youth movements because they have learning disabilities as much as, or more than, social impairments. The idea that children of average or above average intelligence can be autistic and still be excluded by other children and struggle to fit in and join in at youth movements is not mentioned. High intelligence in children can be just as isolating as learning disabilities, entitled though that sounds, especially when combined with poor social skills and sensory sensitivities. I stopped going to anything resembling a youth movement when I was twelve, because I couldn’t make friends and was untrusting of children my age from my history of being bullied at school.  As I’ve said before, I think this had a big long-term effect on my socialisation into the Jewish community, from which I’m still suffering today. I’m wondering whether to write in about this.

***

From a comment I left on a previous post: Yes, I also love the meaning of Pesach, but struggle with the practice. I’m struggling to find where I am with stringencies. I feel that I want to obey “basic” halakhah [Jewish law], not stringency, but that basic halakhah can be hard to find. And I have an ascetic side that tends unconsciously to self-denial and stringency which I don’t always notice until E or my parents points it out to me, by which time I can have upset them. Even without stringencies, it can be hard to negotiate a way through Pesach when there are four of us in this house each with their own take on what the “basic” practice (not the same as halakhah) is for us, or should be, even without taking into account the evolving family dynamic.

Also, with alexithymia (difficulty recognising and understanding my own emotions) it can be hard to tune in to even the spiritual meaning.

***

It is six weeks, or forty-two days, or less than a thousand hours until the wedding! This still seems far off at times, but too close when I think of all the things that need to be done.

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Choices

I mentioned in my previous post that I woke up in the early hours with a headache and couldn’t get back to sleep. I did eventually dose for a couple of hours during the late morning, so I’m not too sleep-deprived, but it wasn’t a great night.

I woke up the second time in time to go to my second-cousin’s house for lunch. As I said yesterday, I have lots of second-cousins, but only two I see regularly. We had a big family gathering of eleven adults, three children and one baby. I only intended to go for a while, as I thought I would be overwhelmed and I had wedding stuff to do at home. I didn’t say much and I did feel overwhelmed at times and struggled to join in conversations, but on the whole I had a good time and stayed for the whole afternoon. I had a cuddle with Nephew too, who drooled all over my jumper, but I didn’t care. When it was time to go, he did a weird sticking-out-tongue thing at me, which Dad thinks is his attempt at a kiss.

Afterwards, I intended to do wedding stuff, and I did, but not as much as I intended. I was probably too distracted after peopling to focus properly.

I had a slightly heavy Skype call with E dealing with our wedding, family and autism. I feel I still don’t know who I am now that I know I’m autistic, but I’m suddenly required to make decisions about the wedding, our marriage, relations with family, friends and community, decisions about work and career… It all feels overwhelming, but maybe it’s only by making those decisions that I can actually work out who I am.

I feel that I’ve gone through life on auto-pilot thinking things “had to be this way” from autistic rigidity, not noticing how bad I felt at times due to alexithymia (to be fair, years of depression and burnout felt very bad, but I couldn’t work out why exactly). I’m actually mostly OK with my religious decisions, even if I am trying to find ways to make it easier for those around me, and even if I’m now trying to acknowledge that my mental health, autism, and having less religious family and friends give me unique challenges here and that I need to adjust my expectations accordingly. However, other decisions possibly need to be challenged e.g. assuming that I need to aim towards one day working 9am-5pm in an office. I don’t believe this now, but it’s a recent change.

It’s kind of sad that so many of my life decisions are determined, at least in part, by my neurology and my tendency to certain mental illnesses, but I guess that’s life. We get to choose the decisions we make, but not the conditions under which we make them.

***

I’ve got a phone appointment with the doctor on Tuesday morning to discuss my missing sleep study results and a few other things. I find phone appointments very hard and would like to challenge them on inclusion grounds, but don’t currently have the time or energy. I’ll be skipping volunteering that day to take the call as I didn’t fancy taking it with other people around and, anyway, I need to have energy in the afternoon for wedding stuff and lately volunteering exhausts me.

Autistic Purim

I couldn’t sleep last night. I think it was a weird mixture of still “buzzing,” in a good way, from the Facebook group call (for people with health issues that impact observing Jewish fast days or celebrating Jewish festivals – we have one of both this week) and anxiety about Purim (Jewish festival this week). I did finally fall asleep about 1.30am, only to wake up at 5.30am and be unable to get back to sleep.

Work was boring and went slowly. I always feel awkward eating in a shul (synagogue) on a fast day (it was the Fast of Esther) even though I’m medically supposed to eat on the minor fast days. My boss J knows I don’t fast, but I worried about the rabbi walking in, even though I know I shouldn’t (and he hardly ever does either as we’re not really a part of his shul, we just have an office in the building). I went to Minchah (the Afternoon Service) purely because I was in the building. I thought I was going to be asked to do something and have to say I’m not allowed to as I’m not fasting, but it didn’t happen. I felt more positive about Purim as the day went on, but once work ended, the anxiety came back. I’m also anxious about having to make a bunch of calls to strangers asking them to pay their bills over the next week or two. That never gets easier. Definitely the second-least favourite part of my job, after the Very Scary Task.

I got home in time to go to my local shul for the reading of Megillat Esther (The Book of Esther). It occurred to me that this is my thirty-ninth Purim, but only my second knowing that I’m autistic. I was diagnosed shortly after Purim 2021. Last year’s Purim was still a bit COVID-ey and restrained, so this felt in some ways like my first “real” autistic Purim.

When I was growing up, I didn’t like Purim much, but I didn’t know why. I felt guilty about it. I assumed it was just because I was a non-rowdy, serious, vaguely melancholic person who has trouble letting his hair down and also that I didn’t like the noise during the Megillah reading that stopped me hearing every word (you are supposed to hear every word of the Megillah, both morning and evening, but this is made harder by the fact that everyone boos the villainous Haman (Haman = Hitler, basically)). Then when I was sixteen, I was mildly ill during the morning Megillah reading in school. I didn’t know it, but this was part of my first autistic burnout.

Then across my twenties and thirties there were years when I was too depressed and/or autistically burnt out and anxious (although, again, I didn’t know that) to go to a reading at all, plus the years when I had religious OCD and I came home distraught because I wasn’t sure I’d heard every word and my religious OCD was in overdrive telling me I was a bad Jew and should go to another reading to be sure.

Now I know that I’m autistic and there are a whole load of difficult things at Purim including the noise (just in itself, without the hearing the Megillah question, but also the fact that I can’t “tune out” background noise and focus on the reading; I am aware of every cough and grunt in the room), the number of people, the removal of social boundaries (I struggle with social conventions at the best of times and now even the ones I know about are gone) and the expectation (religious expectation and social expectation) that I should have fun (is there anything more likely to stop someone enjoying something than being told that they MUST or WILL enjoy it?). In theory alcohol could also play into this, but I mostly avoid boozy places; in all my Purim struggles, I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone trying to get me to drink, which is good. Then there is the fear of autistic exhaustion or even burnout as a result of all this (lately I’ve been feeling about as exhausted as I’ve been without hitting burnout because of wedding planning even without Purim). Then on top of all these autistic issues, there are fears that the minutiae of the laws, particularly the “hearing every word” one, will send me spiralling back into OCD. And all of this together sets up a lot of anxiety: social anxiety and religious anxiety. I could feel as we started the Megillah that I was “wound up” and tense.

I might have understood all this years earlier if it hadn’t been for my alexithymia (difficulty recognising and understanding my own emotions).

(An aside: I find the Megillah reading nerve-wracking even without the “hear every word” law. I always get a weird feeling that everything hangs in the balance every year, that if we’re not careful, somehow Haman could still win and wipe out the Jews this year. We’re supposed to have this level of imaginative involvement at the Pesach seder, but not here. I have no idea why I’m like this. Maybe after the Holocaust, the idea of someone wiping out the Jews doesn’t seem like something academic that happened “in those days”. Like I said, Haman = Hitler.)

Looking at this year’s reading, as I mentioned, I was very tense the whole time. It was a noisy reading; even aside from the “Haman” noise, there were a lot of people with coughs. As it went on, I began to worry about having missed words, repeating them to myself. Then I thought the reader made a mistake. I don’t know if he did or not. I often thought this when the OCD was bad. On balance, he probably didn’t, but I worry. I actually instituted a “one reading rule” a few years back, that I can only go to one reading in the evening and one in the morning, so that I’m not tempted to repeat readings. I’ve never actually gone to a remedial reading, but I’ve come close a few times. (Another aside: I have probably missed the morning Shema prayer thousands of times over the years I’ve been struggling with sleep issues (depression, medication side-effects, burnout, suspected sleep disorder), but it doesn’t bother me as much as missing the Megillah, even though the Shema is more important (biblical vs. rabbinic commandment). Somehow, the fact that we only read it on one day in the year makes the Megillah seem more important, even though Jewish law actually rules that the more frequent something is, the more important it is.)

I tried to focus on the idea I’ve had lately that the minutiae of the laws are less important than whether I’m moving towards God. I told myself that I tried my best, and I struggle a lot more than most people, and I hope God will accept my effort. I tried not to get caught up in the obsessive thinking that characterises OCD, to keep these thoughts as passing thoughts and not obsessive ruminations that could lead to full-blown OCD again. It’s hard, but, until I can find (or start?) a sensory Megillah reading in North-West London, I don’t really have a choice.

I had dinner with my parents afterward and felt better. We had Purim bread, which E tells me doesn’t exist in the US. It’s sweet challah bread, like Ashkenazi Jews have on Shabbat (Sabbaths) and festivals, but with raisins, sprinkles (we call them “hundreds and thousands” in the UK, which E thinks is quaint) and icing, although this one didn’t have icing for some reason. I had a hamantashen (Purim pastry) too. I wore my jester’s hat for some of it, my nod to dressing up for Purim. I heard somewhere that you should dress up as something you want to be, so obviously I want to have licence to tell people painful truths by couching them in humour (my satirical novel is still in the planning stage, though).

Now I’m going to watch Doctor Who to try to relax a bit, then sleep and get up early enough to do it all over again before going to volunteer…

Purim, Being Pathetic, and the Autistic Talking Service Parrot

It was a rather stressful day again. Volunteering went wrong from the start. It wasn’t set up in advance, so we would have been delayed fifteen minutes just catching up. Then a table collapsed. I was worried I had not put it up correctly, but it turned out that a leg had just snapped off (I assume from corrosion). Unfortunately, when it collapsed, it squashed a large carton of mango juice, spraying juice everywhere, so we had to tidy that up before we could really start. Then it turned out that we had all misread the number of bags of food needed this week and we were sixteen short when the volunteer drivers came to deliver them. They ended up being added to tomorrow’s workload as it was late (the food bank operates on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, but I only volunteer on Tuesdays). I had to get home as I was talking to my rabbi mentor at 3pm, so I missed coffee even though I could have done with the sugar boost of a biscuit or two and even though I like the social interaction of sitting with the others even if I don’t say much.

Other stuff: there was some family drama that I inadvertently started. Not going into it here, but I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I cooked dinner after talking to my rabbi mentor (the call was helpful), but didn’t do much else this afternoon. I feel like I’m struggling to hold everything together at the moment and even minor stresses like those today can feel like massive, intractable issues.

***

Other issues: I’m going to volunteer next Tuesday even though it’s the minor festival of Purim. There is a Megillat Esther (Book of Esther, read Purim night and day) reading where I volunteer, as it’s a Jewish institution, so I can listen there and volunteer afterwards. Unfortunately, I’ll have to get up very early, despite being likely to be drained the previous day with work and the evening Megillah reading (crowded, noisy). J wanted me to cover for him in the afternoon in case we have to do the Very Scary Task (he’ll be getting drunk at his Purim seudah (festive meal) as per custom), but now I’ll be out of communication for a bit in the early afternoon. I did check with him and he said it was OK, but I feel a bit guilty. I felt I should volunteer nonetheless as we’ll be several people short next week. I vaguely feel like I’m ruining J’s seudah deliberately because my seudah will probably be alone and I don’t approve of Purim drunkenness (or other drunkenness), even though that’s not really what’s happening.

The other Purim issue is struggling to do mishloach manot (gifts of food to friends). I can’t give to my parents (which I mistakenly did for many years) because we’re in the same household. I only really have two friends in the area; one I haven’t seen for the better part of a year (although I will be inviting him to the wedding) and he’ll probably be either at work or at a seudah somewhere else when I get back from volunteering (the gifts have to be given after hearing the Megillah, but before sunset). The other person is J, but I don’t know exactly where he lives and it seems vaguely inappropriate to give gifts to my boss. The timing issue might also be relevant there too.

I can’t find any charity doing a system where you can give money to them to buy food to send to someone, only for giving money directly (which is also a Purim commandment, but a separate one). I’m not sure what to do. E wondered if I can give money to be included in my parents’ mishloach manot gifts to their friends, but I need to check with a rabbi if that “counts.” This is the type of thing that makes me feel a pathetic Jonny No Mates, something that will be reinforced by the four or five sets of mishloach manot my parents will probably receive from their local friends. This is just a part of the reason that Purim is not fun for me. Actually, I do have friends, just not necessarily Jewish, local or in the real world rather than the virtual one (you can’t send virtual gifts of food).

***

I wrote to the rabbinic mental health email helpline again a while back about my struggles with spiritual growth and Torah study when dealing with autistic exhaustion. The rabbi sent back a long email that I need to re-read and process, but summarised in the quote that “personal and spiritual growth is welcome only where it enhances your wellbeing, and if you find it causes you anxiety or exhaustion- it is “off limits” for you!”

I am not sure what to make of this at the moment. I don’t think stopping growth or Torah completely would be good for me, but I keep thinking of my first burnout/depression when I was sixteen and the doctor told me to stop working for a couple of weeks. I stopped for a bit, but then went back to it. Realistically, a week or two off wouldn’t have stopped my slide towards major burnout a couple of years later, which was driven by undiagnosed autism, but I feel it shows I should take this kind of thing more seriously.

Incidentally, that first burnout/depression started on Purim, which may be another reason it’s not my favourite festival.

***

Someone on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group opined again that for non-married adults, the choice is between transgressive sex or “pathetic celibacy.” I suggested that Moshe (Moses) and Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) were celibate and not pathetic. I was told by the first person and one other that they were great people and we can’t compare ourselves to them, which wasn’t really my point. (Also, this is a classic frum (religious Jewish) debating/pedagogical tactic: when famous biblical or Talmudic figures do something the speaker wants others to do, they’re examples; when they don’t, they’re exemptions who we can’t copy due to their special status. Frum girls are brought up on the Talmudic story of the woman who covered her hair even when home alone despite this being unnecessary according to Jewish law; if anyone suggested she was too holy to copy, they would get short shrift.)  I said that fulfilling the will of God isn’t pathetic and was also told that “pathetic” was being used in the sense of “inspiring pathos” which seemed pedantic and unlikely, and that something can be admirable and pathetic at the same time.

At this point I gave up on the argument, but it touched a nerve as for years I did feel pathetic for failing to attract a spouse and did want people to pity me, on some level, but I also feel, particularly in retrospect, that it was, at least on some level, difficult and admirable for me to stay a virgin for so long (by the time I get to my wedding, I will be just two months short of my fortieth birthday). I am reluctant to describe myself as “pathetic” in either sense.

***

E and I were talking about service animals and I decided I need a talking service parrot that will sit on my shoulder and make small talk to people for me when I can’t do so.

***

I just read an old Dilbert comic strip the joke of which was that Windows 95 was new and exciting and I felt ridiculously old, although not as much as when E and I went to the Museum of the Home last year and I heard a small girl look at a landline phone and say, “I’ve seen one of these before, but I don’t know how to use it.” It was possibly a rotary dial phone, but even so.

Thief of Joy

It’s been a tough twenty-four hours. Last week I felt I was getting my life on track, but I worry that I’m too prone to autistic exhaustion to earn more or to cope with children. Last night I was looking at the last twenty years, dominated by depression and/or autistic burnout. Sometimes it feels that I have nothing to show for that period until E arrived (OK, two degrees that have not got me far). I have to believe that there is meaning in those years or that I can give them meaning. That I met E in the end and before then I grew resilience and empathy, but it’s hard to feel that sometimes, particularly as I feel I’ve suffered “autistic regression,” essentially losing skills as a result of burnout.

These thoughts were inspired by seeing the blog of someone autistic who I felt was doing a lot better than me at life. Looking at the post again today, that’s not necessarily the case, but either way I failed at not comparing myself to other people, even though I’m trying to work on that right now.  And, yes, there are autistic people worse off than me and not just severe autistic ones.  On the autism forum it seems that, of relationship, children and career, people rarely have two let alone all three and some don’t have any. I have a relationship and while I don’t have a career I at least have a part-time job. I still hope to have children (and maybe a career). Of course, many people join the forum because they’re struggling, so that probably creates a bias in favour of less successful people.

I do feel I struggle with Orthodox Judaism placing a lot of emphasis on doing things, learning, growing as a person. There is a whole concept of bittul zman (wasting time) or bittul Torah (wasting time that could specifically be dedicated to Torah study) to show that we should constantly be thinking about using our time productively.  It’s hard to feel that I can or maybe should take things slower. Maybe this is a question to ask the rabbi I emailed a while back (from the helpline of rabbis trained in mental health).

***

Today was stressful: train problems on the way in, a lot of noise at work, boring work (although I could at least listen to a podcast today) and an unexpected visit by our treasurer, which put me on edge at having someone else in the office, especially as he had no real reason to be there and was just killing time. I was still exhausted and stressed from yesterday and the noise, boredom and unexpected peopling made things worse and really put me on edge. I didn’t stay for Minchah (Afternoon Prayers), but felt bad leaving as people were coming in (fifteen minutes early!).

I also worry that, if I was wearing noise-cancelling headphones, as I would like, I would have missed an important announcement about the train problems this morning and could have ended up halfway to Bank before I realised I was on the wrong branch of the Northern Line (the train switched lines).

Emotionally, I have had some Purim anxiety today. Purim is the Jewish festival in two weeks’ time and it is not autism-friendly at all (as well as also being an OCD trigger risk for me). Maybe that’s something to ask the mental health rabbi too.

I do frequently feel stressed and overwhelmed at the moment from wedding planning. I feel like I’m struggling with alexithymia regarding it. I have depression from work and anxiety from the wedding as negative emotions always make themselves felt, but it’s hard to tune in to the excitement especially as it’s so hard being away from E. I need to try to push the anxiety and impatience to excitement, not depression, but I don’t really know how.

Overwhelm (Again)

It’s been a quiet few days, so I haven’t posted. I had a headache on and off on Friday, not a bad one, but a persistent one despite medication. That contributed to my not going to shul (synagogue) in the evening, combined with the usual end of week exhaustion.

Shabbat (the Sabbath) was quiet. I did some difficult religious study: a bit more of The Guide for the Perplexed, focusing on an argument for the existence of God (largely irrelevant now, as based on an Aristotlean worldview that is no longer held); a complex Talmudic section that I will have to go over again to have any kind of chance of understanding it; and an interesting, if depressing, article I had printed out from Rabbi Jonny Solomon about the lack of interiority and spirituality in the Modern Orthodox community.

The fire alarm went off on Saturday morning. Rather disturbingly, even though it’s right outside our rooms, neither Mum nor I woke up, although I had a weird dream about the fire alarm going off. Dad at least woke up. Still, even though I knew I’m a heavy sleeper, it’s disturbing that it failed to wake us. What if there had been a real fire? I’ve never been so worried about not being woke…

I didn’t get much response on the piece I posted on the autism forum about being Jewish and autistic, just two comments, plus the first commenter responded to the second one. There was one interesting comment where the commenter said they’re autistic, queer and blind and that while there are a lot of queer people in the autistic community, they feel their blindness separates them from everyone else in a fundamental way and suggested that’s similar to how I feel about being Jewish. It’s not a perfect analogy (I don’t see my Judaism as a disability), but I suspect there’s a lot of truth to it in terms of feeling fundamentally different and unknown, even unknowable, in a community that prides itself on its tolerance. I guess it feels that some things, while not intolerable, are inconceivable to outsiders.

On the plus side, a couple of people friended me on the autism site, including the person I tried to friend weeks ago.

I woke up at 9.45am today (Sunday) and got up rather than going back to sleep, mostly because I was too hungry to sleep. It was good to get up a bit earlier, even if I spent a long time online before getting dressed. I feel I wasted the day, although I did manage to do several things, and I was fighting against low mood/depressive and anxious feelings for much of the time.

I did some Torah study. Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult parsha (portion) this week, mostly legal, with complicated and unclear syntax in many places and, to make matters worse, lots of places where Jewish law rules completely differently to the apparent literal meaning of the text, while still basing itself on it. I also managed to quickly put together a “Save the date” note on Canva (I hope to send it out before bed) and went for a walk. I didn’t manage anything else, although I would have liked to have done so, but maybe that’s enough for a depressed and anxious day.

***

E set up an online countdown timer to our wedding.  I look at it quite a lot. I’m glad we’re down to double digits in terms of days now, but ninety-eight days is still nearly three months. I miss E a lot. She’s hoping to get some idea of when she’s coming to the UK soon. It will be good when we’re in the same house, even if we aren’t sharing a bedroom/bed.

***

I’ve managed to fix the wedding Dalek, at least for now, but I worry it’s going to be too fragile to take to the wedding. Sigh.

***

I posted the following on the autism forum.

I struggle to advocate for myself in the workplace. I have to deal with things like using multiple documents at once or doing things with multiple steps which is hard with executive functioning issues. I have lists of what to do, but I still make mistakes sometimes, not least because I don’t always remember to look at the lists. I also have to make and take phone calls occasionally. Periodically, there are days when I have to make a lot of important and very difficult phone calls, which means dealing with social anxiety, spoken word processing issues, telephone issues and problems talking to people and remembering the correct responses or even problem solving on the spot. That doesn’t happen too often, thankfully, but it did last week.

I feel uncomfortable with this aspect of the job, but I’ve had long periods of unemployment and don’t want to risk losing this job, which in other ways is good (relatively high pay considering the hours and workload; a very understanding and laid-back boss). When I try to think of possible adjustments, autistic rigidity kicks in and I feel like there are no adjustments I can ask for that would be both reasonable and useful. I don’t feel that asking not to use the phone is not [1] reasonable, given my contract. I actually don’t know what reasonable adjustments I would like, I just know that I feel a certain level of depression and anxiety in the workplace, not to mention feelings of inadequacy and overwhelm. I just feel I have to deal with it somehow or lose the job.

I would be grateful for any possible suggestions.

[1] I actually missed out the crucial word “not” in the forum post and couldn’t work out how to edit it! I had to add a comment to clarify.

Wedding and Marriage Thoughts (Part 1?)

After some awkward back and forth between E and the rabbi we want to marry us, we managed to confirm a date/time for our chuppah (religious wedding)! It’s the 21 May (please God). I’m suddenly superstitious about saying things like “Please God!” which I don’t normally say. I’ve had some anxiety this afternoon that somehow the wedding won’t happen or we will have to move the date and all the friends and family from overseas that we want to invite (a big proportion of the small guest list) will lose money on their plane tickets and be angry with me.

There are probably some subsidiary anxieties, like learning to balance E and my parents. It still feels strange adjusting to having E rather than my parents as my primary emotional support after having lived with my parents for so long. I wasn’t that close to my parents as a teenager, but when I had my big breakdown/burnout/depression/whatever at university, they were shocked that I hadn’t told them what was happening to me, particularly that I was suicidal. After that I tried to keep them in the loop more, and I also realised it was safer to rely on them than friends who are more likely to get overload with my issues (as happened at university). I did also find professional support in therapists, psychiatrists and my rabbi mentor that I didn’t have in the big breakdown/burnout, which helped spread the load, but I still spoke to my parents about a lot of stuff.

I think E’s understanding of the world is closer to my own, so I’m pleased to be able to talk to her, but I guess it feels weird trying to work out exactly how close, emotionally and practically, I’ll be to my parents after I move out, especially as E’s parents will be on another continent, so not local for help, but I don’t want E to feel that my parents get more input to our lives than hers simply because they live closer. It’s particularly hard to confide more in E than my parents now, given that the time and distance gap makes it hard to contact her sometimes, whereas my parents are usually around in the house with me.

The wedding planning stuff probably took quite a bit of time. I went for a walk, which helped the anxiety a bit. It is hard still being long-distance, especially doing wedding planning. I did some Torah study, but not much else; wedding planning and anxiety took up a lot of time and emotional energy.

Letters to No One

On Thursday night, I stayed up late on the autism forum, responding to posts. Some people were in an extreme emotional state and I wanted to try to help.

I woke up late on Friday and felt extremely drained. I doubt it was just the autism forum’s fault, as I often feel this way by the end of the work week, but the forum probably didn’t help. Whatever the cause, the result was that I felt too drained for shul (synagogue) on Friday evening. I did manage to do some Torah study after dinner and a bit of Dune Messiah reading.

I felt a bit better today, but did go back to bed for a while after lunch. I managed to do some Torah study again, but not much else. I’ve been lurking in my room as my parents are doing a “supper quiz at home” downstairs with eighteen friends (E was amazed they have so many and I told her these are just their local friends. E thinks they are super-allistic). This is a charity quiz where people form tables in different houses to participate. The questions are sent in advance, opened at a particular time, then have to be entered online before a deadline. The answers, and the winning table/house, is released a while later. Obviously, there is a lot of trust here about not cheating.

This is an annual event, although usually fewer than eighteen people (plus Mum and Dad) are able to attend. I used to participate, despite social anxiety/overwhelm, but after a couple of years, the quiz setters stopped asking trivia questions as it was too easy to google the answers and switched to lateral thinking questions, which I’m not good at. So, I’ve been lurking upstairs. When I went down earlier, most of the friends were engaged in the quiz, but two men were talking politics in the kitchen alongside someone who was quizzing another friend, a GP, on her health issues.

***

Last night I dreamt about a friend who stopped talking to me when my depression/burnout/suicidality was very bad, back when I was an undergraduate. It was a complicated situation that I won’t go into in detail here and I was largely at fault, even though this snapshot presentation might suggest otherwise (I was totally overwhelming her with my emotional needs and refused to seek professional help early enough, instead overloading my friend). I think she tends to surface in my dreams at times of change and emotional stress, so I guess this was probably triggered by moving forward with the wedding.

I do occasionally remember her and wish that I could let her know that I am autistic and that this was at least partially responsible for my handling the situation so badly, but I’m not sure why I want to do this. To explain myself so that she won’t hate me? Or so that she won’t beat herself up? Probably both. We did have a brief correspondence about nine months after she stopped talking to me, when I naively thought I was over my depression and was preparing to go back to university, where we both said that we blamed ourselves. I had no idea I was autistic at the time.

I started writing a letter tonight. Not an “actually going to post it” letter (I have no idea what her address is, beyond that she lives in Israel now), but a “I need psychological closure, so I’m writing this for myself and will throw it away afterwards” letter, which I’ve done once or twice before. However, I felt that I was just making excuses for myself and disowning my bad behaviour, so I stopped writing.

I had also thought about writing another “psychological closure” letter, to various Jewish Studies teachers I had at secondary school, who were disappointed that I didn’t go to yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) for a year or more after school and before university. Again, I wanted to tell them about my autism and about the way I intuited what a bad environment yeshivah would be for an undiagnosed autistic. To tell them that despite not going there, despite years of depression/burnout and emotional distress and perhaps years of feeling marginalised in the frum (religious Jewish) community, I am still frum. But this seemed to be more about me justifying my life to myself again, and probably in a passive aggressive way, so I didn’t even start to write that one.

I do occasionally wonder sometimes if these rabbis remember me, and whether they really thought they had failed to make me become frum. Unlike the university friend, who I haven’t seen since for twenty years, I did actually see one of these rabbis in a kosher restaurant a number of years ago, and another one used to daven (pray) in my old shul occasionally. I never said anything to them and they either didn’t see me or didn’t remember me.

***

There was Drama on the autism forum again. It’s identity politics stuff that I won’t go into. I think many people online thinks that they are being “silenced” by “those in power” and that places aren’t a “safe space” for them. This is true of people on both sides of the political divide. I guess because there are just so many thoughts on the internet (many of them totally incoherent) that it’s easy to assume that Everyone disagrees with you, even that you are being silenced by Everyone/Authority. You overlook the people who agree with you and only notice the negatives. I fall into this trap myself sometimes. (That said, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you sometimes.)

There is enough good on the forum, threads I benefit from and threads where I hope I’m able to help others, that I want to stick with it, but there do seem to be more (a) silly and (b) political posts lately and I feel they get in the way and provoke Drama. I just want to discuss living with autism on the autism forum!

***

I’m watching episode one of Undermind, from 1965. It’s a science fiction serial, written by a bunch of different writers, several of whom worked on the original run of Doctor Who (Robert Banks Stewart, David Whitaker, Bill Strutton and Robert Holmes – Whitaker and Holmes are two of my all-time favourite Doctor Who writers). So far, I find it intriguing, although dated in places. The initial episode concerns a drunken cabinet minister who hits an off-duty policeman, who brings charges. Within a day or two, the minister has resigned and committed suicide out of shame. Nowadays the scandal would drag on for weeks, he might not even resign (cf. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott punching someone who through an egg at him during the 2001 general election campaign and getting away scot free) and if he did, he’d be back in office in months. Or go on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. There’s also a gollywog in shot in a children’s playroom in a couple of scenes, which certainly wouldn’t happen now. But overall, it’s interesting me, and like a lot of vintage TV, it seems faster off the blocks than modern TV. Today, episode one of almost any drama seems to be an hour of slllloooowwwwlllllyyyyyy introducing the characters, and not much plot.

The sound quality is appalling, but it’s a vintage programme. I’ve found vintage programmes that were broadcast on the ITV networks aren’t restored as carefully as BBC programmes. The BBC has an unofficial “restoration team” of fans of Doctor Who (initially) and other vintage television who ensure these programmes are often broadcast-standard despite being sixty or seventy years old as a labour of love. That doesn’t seem to happen with ITV series like Undermind or The Avengers.

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.

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.

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!”

Masking and Code-Switching

Warning: this is another long post. The short version is I miss E a lot and feel miserable without her, and (unrelated point) I also feel miserable trying to ‘pass’ in societies or sub-cultures I don’t feel I belong in. The long version…

I woke up feeling bad. I’m not exactly sure what “bad” means here, which I guess is the interoception issue again (difficulty understanding my body’s signals). Exhausted, maybe a bit achey and just generally wanting to withdraw from the world. I thought I was just tired, but it stayed after breakfast and coffee. I actually went back to bed for a few minutes after breakfast, but forced myself to get up again, even though I didn’t really want to, so I could daven Shacharit (say Morning Prayers) before halakhic midday (which is almost the same as secular midday at the moment). I felt awful when davening, again, it’s hard to say how, but both physically and emotionally uncomfortable. The emotional side is easier to describe: it was one of those times when my memory decides to show me a blooper reel of all my worst mistakes, which are generally bad social interactions. I try to be kind to myself and tell myself that I have autism and social anxiety, and that for most of my life the autism was undiagnosed, so it’s not surprising I messed up a lot of social interactions over the years, but I still end up feeling useless and pathetic (I guess the pathetic is as much because of the autism as despite it).

I miss E a lot. Really A LOT. Mum thinks that my mysterious illness feelings are just missing E and worrying about when she will get her visa, which may be true. After lunch, the physical discomfort subsided, but I felt really depressed, and lonely (when my parents went out). I had the feeling of agitated (anxious?) depression that feels like desperation. I’m not really sure what to call it.

I tried to finish my proofreading profile on the freelance site. This involved looking at other proofreaders’ pages and trying to work out was a reasonable price/word count/speed combination to offer. This led to monumental procrastination to avoid both anxiety and decision-making (autistic executive function issues? Possibly). Also a lot of agitated pacing. People seem to be charging relatively large sums of money for small-seeming amounts of work, which makes me wonder if this is going to be more difficult than I’m expecting it to be. I worry about screwing this up and getting thrown off the platform (or worse), which I can see is catastrophising, but that doesn’t make it seem better.

I got the profile mostly sorted, but there was a FORTY MINUTE English test (US English) that I needed to pass to be allowed to call myself a proofreader on the site! I went for a twenty-five minute walk in the cold, dark and rain, which helped me calm down a bit, then I did the test, even though my computer was playing up a bit. I did in about fifteen minutes and got 95%. I was annoyed not to get 100% as it was very easy and repetitive. I don’t know which questions I got wrong. I think a couple were awkwardly phrased and I wonder if it was one of those. They were all multiple choice questions, usually involving picking the correct word to go in a sentence or the correctly punctuated sentence out of four options, but I felt some answers had two correct answers, although sometimes one was arguably more obscure than the other. I can’t remember all the problematic questions, but one was about whether a film won “awards” or “the awards” and I felt both answers could be right depending on context.

I wonder if I’ll get any clients. I feel like my profile was less engaging than other ones I saw on the site, but I wasn’t sure what to say, especially as I don’t have much experience yet. I feel that my writing style is overly formal and feels dated to most people. I don’t know if that’s autism; it may be.

There was a thread on the autism forum about whether it’s better for autistic people to work a nine to five job or be self-employed, given that the later requires a lot of extra stuff (networking, admin, taxes). Both ended up seeming pretty awful. At the moment, it looks like the best-case scenario is that I end up doing both. Hmm.

***

I had little time, energy or brainpower after that for Torah study. I tried to do a few minutes, but struggled to concentrate. It doesn’t help all my Torah study at the moment is from fairly heavy-going books or in Hebrew. I was still agitated and pacing.

***

Mum said I’ve been down a lot lately and I have been. I am going to go back to keeping a daily mood record for a bit to check how many days I’m depressed. I feel I haven’t been depressed for many consecutive days, but depression just needs to be over a majority of days in two weeks. That said, I feel I’m never going to get off my meds if I keep getting depressed again, even if it is SAD that should rectify in a few months. Three months is a long time, though…

***

My procrastination while trying to finish the profile involved messing around on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group, reading old posts and feeling that I’m never going to fit in to the Orthodox community, even the Modern Orthodox community, although also thinking that the Anglo-Jewish Modern Orthodox community is very different to the American and Israeli Modern Orthodox communities (or equivalent) and so direct comparison of what would be acceptable or successful between them is not helpful.

***

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about masking. In the autistic community, masking involves suppressing autistic behaviour that is not considered “normal” in the allistic (non-autistic) world. This can include stimming (repetitive motions intended to soothe and aid concentration), inappropriate eye contact (too much, too little) and body language, excessive conversation about special interests as well as behaviour or reactions that show the anxiety and confusion many autistics feel in social interactions. Masking can also involve using pre-planned “social scripts” to navigate social situations in “acceptable” ways. Too much masking is thought to lead to autistic exhaustion and autistic burnout, as well as hiding a person’s identity from others.

I felt that I don’t mask much, but on reflection I think I do. I don’t stim much, but I try not to do it in public. I avoid talking about my interests for fear of the response it will get. I don’t show my social anxiety, I try to consciously control my eye contact and body language, and I use social scripts a lot to manage conversations with people (I was going to say with “strangers,” but actually I do it with my family too).

It occurred to me that I deal with another layer on top of this because of my intersecting identities. Code-switching is the linguistic term from changing from one language or dialect to another. It’s a fairly neutral term for a phenomenon that anyone who is bilingual or belongs to some kind of minority experiences, although if you google it, you would get the impression that it only happens when ethnic minorities in white majority Anglophone countries are made to change their language to standard English by the white majority. To be clear, it can happen in an oppressive way (between classes and with regional dialects as well as between races, which isn’t really recognised by the articles I saw), but it can also be a fairly inevitable product of cross-cultural contact.

As a Jew, even more so as an Orthodox Jew, I code-switch all the time (typically, the internet doesn’t acknowledge this). What you get on the blog is roughly the amount of Hebrew or Yiddish in my internal monologue (more likely a bit less than I would use). In situations with lots of non-Jews, I would use no Hebrew or Yiddish, even if that meant using weird (to me) English translations (“Tabernacles” “Ecclesiastes”). With my family and friends, I would probably use language similar to the blog, but with very frum (religious) Jews, I would use more Hebrew and Yiddish. It’s a balancing act and one that I feel quite conscious of.

What is really hard for me is constantly masking or code-switching in other ways too, if not literally in the sense of words used, then in terms of identities and ways of looking at the world. There is literal code-switching between British English and American English because I know so many Americans online. I hide my autistic and mentally ill traits from most people. And I hide my Doctor Who fandom from lots of people too: I hide it in the frum world because I fear it’s too secular (even in the Modern Orthodox world, which is open to TV, I fear my interest is too intense[1]) and also because I grew up as a fan when Doctor Who was incredibly unpopular and I would be regularly mocked for liking it, so I don’t like talking to outsiders about it. On the other hand, with other fans I would talk in much more detailed ways about particular stories, plot points, writers, script editors and so on.

I feel like I’m masking and code-switching all the time and it feels really hard to cope at the moment. It’s hard at work, because it’s uncomfortable and probably contributes to my feelings of exhaustion and some of my stupid errors. It’s hard in the frum world, because that feels like a much more conformist and judgmental community generally and the consequences of making even a small mistake feel potentially much greater than a comparable mistake in another community, although this could be my paranoia.

That said, I don’t know how much I want to unmask. The assumption in the autism world is that masking is bad, but I feel that everyone masks to some extent (we don’t go around telling everyone our deepest feelings or talking/singing to ourselves in public even if we might in private). But I do feel that I need to mask less even if I still mask a bit.

I would like to share this somewhere, but I don’t know where. The autism community would know about autistic masking and probably not care that much about the Jewish stuff. I think it should be more known in the frum community, but I don’t really have a suitable place to share it. As an aside, lately I do feel that I have some kind of message, but I don’t know who it’s for or what it is and I won’t know until I’ve said it. I watched a YouTube lecture about autism recently where the researcher giving the lecture said she used autistic blogs in her research. I did email her to ask if she wanted to use mine, or could suggest someone who might, but she hasn’t got back to me yet (it was right before Christmas).

***

While researching the above, I came across this book and wonder if it could help? (I know it says it’s aimed at autistic women and girls. The assumption is that women are better at masking than men, which is a generalisation at best.) I am wary, as I do tend to buy self-help books and then struggle to implement them unguided. And I’m wary that it uses CBT, as CBT tends not to work on autistics, although it could be autism-adjusted CBT (in which case they should say so).

 [1] I’m actually not sure how intense my interest in Doctor Who is any more. I’ve largely lost interest in the new series and contemporary fandom, but I probably am still obsessive about the original series, if I can find anywhere to indulge that very specific obsession.

Bumper Last Night of Chanukah Post!!!!

My mood slumped last night and didn’t really rise all day, at least not until I Skyped E. I went to bed late last night as I was reading Quantum of Solace, a James Bond short story that isn’t really about James Bond. It’s a story told to him by someone else, a story that has nothing to do with spies or anything usually associated with James Bond. I thought it was still quite engaging; I think Ian Fleming is under-rated as a write, like many successful authors of “pulp” fiction.

Despite that, I got up early this morning (about 9.30am – early for me, anyway), mostly because I woke up early and felt hungry. I even stayed awake, although I went back to bed for a few minutes after breakfast. It was a struggle to daven even an abbreviated Shacharit and Musaf (say Morning Prayers), as I felt so tired.

That said, I think I woke early because I woke struggling to breathe again. I’m still waiting for the results of my sleep study to see if I have sleep apnoea. I might have to wait another two months for the results! I believe the results can be downloaded as soon as the sensors are returned to the hospital; the huge delay is in getting the personnel to interpret said results. All E and I seem to be doing these days is waiting…

I went for a longish walk for an hour. This helped my mood a little, but not totally.

I didn’t do much else. I spent far too long messing about on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook page (see below). I’m enjoying being on there, slightly more than my annoyance at how awful FB is nowadays, but I’m not sure that I’ll achieve any of my aims for joining the group, such as making frum (religious Jewish) friends, becoming more integrated to the frum community or starting a conversation about the place of the mentally ill and neurodivergent in the frum community (again, see below).

I did spend a little time working on my novel plan, even though I said I wouldn’t, because apparently I really can’t keep away from it (see below). It looked better than I thought it would, although there’s still a lot to do.

***

It’s really hard being away from E, especially not knowing when we’ll be together, let alone when we’ll get married. I read an article on a Jewish site (that will go unlinked, as I’m going to criticise it) about the laws of taharat mishpachah in Judaism (essentially, not having sex when the woman is having her period and for a while afterwards). The author repeated the standard frum line about this preventing divorce. Which it may do, as I think the divorce rate in the frum community is still lower than in the secular world, but it’s clearly not a panacea, as divorce is still a very real thing in the frum world. The type of married people (not just Jewish ones) who write essays about relationship breakdown seem to think that there’s one simple mistake that all divorced couples make that dooms their relationship and other people can easily avoid it, and I really don’t think there is. That’s what makes it scary.

That said, the thing that really annoyed me was where the article stated that newlyweds are “young and carefree, with no grey hairs or wrinkles.” Although aimed at less frum people, the article seemed to be based on the idea that everyone marries young and no one has any life problems until they have children. Um, maybe you were, but E and I are in our late thirties and come with suitcase loads of “baggage”! But we love each other despite this (actually, E doesn’t have wrinkles, although I do).

In the wake of this, I did think of posting something about conformity in the Jewish community on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group, perhaps based on the thing I wrote here a few days ago about the difficulty of being frum if you’re mentally ill, neurodivergent, poor, etc., but I held back because it was too long, unfocused and ranty and because I didn’t know what response I even wanted (cf. my discussion with JYP in the comments to that post). The OC group does show care about some marginalised groups in the Orthodox world, such as abuse survivors, LGBT Jews and agunot, as well as about women’s rights in the Orthodox world in general, but I haven’t really found a way of starting a conversation about mental illness or neurodivergence there. I searched for older threads about mental illness and they tended to be focused on issues like rabbis answering mental illness-related questions badly rather than integrating the mentally ill or neurodivergent into the community.

***

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing at the moment instead of actually writing, as I’m on a break to try to calm down about it. I felt a kind of urgency about writing as I wanted to get something published and try to build a career as a writer to help support E and our potential children. This is clearly not happening, as we will be married long before I get anything published, particularly as I’ve stopped sending out my first novel to agents, as I’m not sure whether I want to rewrite it. I do want to get set up as a freelance proofreader in the next few weeks, as that seems a more practical way to earn money.

I am slightly ashamed to admit that I do still feel the need to prove myself with writing, to show I’m as good as all my school and university peers who went on to good jobs (or any jobs, really), not to mention the other writers and newspaper columnists who I read and think, “I could do better than that,” although I probably can’t. Spite and envy probably isn’t a good reason to do anything, let alone to make art.

I probably will keep writing as a hobby/psychological need. It’s hard to work out how to balance it with religious obligations and family obligations. E supports my writing more than I do and wants me to keep writing despite family obligations, but the frum world doesn’t really see writing or creativity generally as an important activity. I don’t think I can justify my writing on the grounds of supplying an important need to the frum/Jewish community or increasing Jewish visibility in the wider world, as I really don’t think I’ll get published. It’s just something I need to do.

I used to get annoyed with the Hevria people for prioritising writing and creativity over religious obligations, but maybe they were right. Maybe you need to be ruthless about family and community to get published. Then again, I think Mattue Roth was the only Hevrian who actually got any fiction published professionally.

 I’ve mentioned before that David Bowie said the worst thing God can do to you is make you an artist, but a mediocre artist. I feel that’s true of me. I have basic writing skills, but I lack imagination, unsurprisingly, as that seems to be common with alexithymia (difficulty understanding my own emotions).

As I said above, I did do some work on the novel plan today, which was good, and I do feel very drawn to writing it, but I am struggling a bit with where the novel is going and what to write, while feeling that I need very much to write.

***

Books: if I’m not writing them, I’m reading them (which is not a bad thing).

I finished re-reading Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide. It was a good 90s fandom nostalgia trip, but other books came out later and went further than it did. I also tried to put my pile of new Doctor Who novelisations away. These were the books I felt a little guilty about, as I was pleased to add them to my collection for free, but wasn’t likely to read/re-read them in the near future, and wasn’t sure if I should have accepted them.

My bedroom is hardly minimalist. It’s got four bookcases (three big and one not so big), one packed full with DVDs, most lying on their side, warehouse-style, so I can fit more on the shelves. The other three are full of books (and some CDs), many of them also lying on their side. (I also have books in a couple of cupboards and a bookcase full downstairs too.) There are also several piles of books on top of one of the bookcases, containing over 150 Doctor Who books (fiction, as the non-fiction is on another shelf) along with a couple of other TV/film tie-in books. I have about 1,300 books in total. Yes, E is right that I should get rid of some. It’s hard! I might donate some non-fiction books I’m never likely to read to the charity shop in a week or so, although I don’t know who will buy books on Medieval Scotland.

I went to add the new books to the pile on top of the bookcase. I hadn’t realised how far the case has come forward from the wall with the weight of all the books on it and one of the books fell down the back. It was Doctor Who – The Daleks, the novelisation of the first Dalek story, which I disliked as a child because it departed from the TV series in its depiction of the events of the first ever TV episode (which isn’t even part of the Dalek story on screen), but which now, in the age of DVD, seems significant for precisely that reason, for being an entirely new take on the events of the TV story.

I’m not sure how to get the book back from the black hole behind the bookcase. I quickly decided that I wasn’t going to take the hundreds of books off the bookcase (not to mention wargaming models) to move it out, especially as it’s the middle bookcase and I might have to move one or two others too to get to it! So the book will sit there in the black hole for now.

I noticed a while back the bookcases wobble a bit, and I am vaguely worried about them falling on me one day. I guess I just have to hope that when E and I move somewhere of our own, we have enough space that taking a reasonable chunk of my books is a good idea and that I can move the bookcase then. I think we’re unlikely to be able to afford a place big enough to hold all my books along with those E brings over from the US.

***

My parents bought me an extra Chanukah present, even though I said they didn’t need to: A Fire Burns in Kotsk: A Tale of Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland by Menashe Unger. Even though I own every English language book I can find about the Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk), I’ve put off buying this for years because (a) it’s expensive (about £30) and (b) it’s a weird book, sitting on the boundary between history and historical fiction, presenting itself as the true story of the Kotzker Rebbe and his Hasidim, but also written in novelistic style with (presumably) invented dialogue. I’m not quite sure what to make of it and probably won’t be until I’ve read it (if then). At least it’s something to read on the way home from work while I’m reading The Great Dune Trilogy, which is too big and heavy to take to work.

***

Contemplating all this stuff (low mood, not fitting into society, struggling to sell my writing, lack of imagination), I’m having one of my “I hate being autistic” days. I think I get fewer of these than I did a couple of months ago, but I’m still not at peace with myself, and I still see ASD as a bad hand I’ve been dealt, albeit one I want to play as well as I can, and admitting that it’s better than some other people’s cards. It frustrates me enormously that so-called “high functioning” autism means I can write literary fiction, read in a dead language, read and understand (at least partially) twelfth century Jewish rationalist philosophy… and still screw up basic stuff like editing  an invoice template at work (why? This is like proofreading; I should be good at it, unless it’s the pressure of masking in the office), speaking on the phone (or at all), doing tasks in the right order, promoting my writing, networking, etc., etc., etc.

It doesn’t help that I have a lack of mentors or guides to help me integrate into the frum world or for raising the profile of my writing. It’s sad, because I do feel I have stuff to say to the frum world and the wider world, but I don’t know how to say it because of my autism, while people who might know how to help me say it don’t know that I have anything to say.

I did just dig out an email from my parents’ friends’ son-in-law from an earlier attempt to set myself up as a proofreader. He is a freelance proofreader and said to persevere as work is out there. He also said YOU HAVE TO NETWORK!!!!!!!! (I put it in capitals because that’s how scary it is.) That email was pre-COVID, though, so I don’t know if it is still true.

***

I saw the Doctor Who trailer. I wasn’t impressed, but I didn’t expect to be. David Tennant + Catherine Tate + Russell T Davies = pretty much my least favourite Doctor/companion/showrunner combination.

Monotropic Learning, Being Frum and More

It’s been hard to do anything today. I guess the weather being awful doesn’t help. It’s been raining here. The snow is melting a bit, but the rain water is probably going to freeze over tonight making the pavements even more icy and dangerous tomorrow. And, of course, it gets dark at about 3.30pm.

I feel like I miss E more every day, and it feels wrong to be doing Chanukah without her tonight. It’s also hard to do it without my sister and brother-in-law, who are still too overwhelmed with their new baby to come out. We might go there later in the week. It’s so easy to get stuck thinking this is how it will always be. When I was in New York with E, it felt like we would get married and be together soon, but living with my parents makes it feel like the next forty years will be like the last forty (almost). It’s hard to believe things can change sometimes, especially when it feels like I’ve been dealing with the same issues all my adult life. This is not entirely true, as I am not really dealing with depression now, but I have been dealing with autism the whole time, even if I didn’t know it.

I didn’t do much today other than Torah study and getting ready for Chanukah (which did not take long). As a child, I would wait excitedly for Chanukah. As an adult, it lost some of its sparkle, but when my religious OCD was bad, it was a still point, a festival where the religious obligations could be fulfilled at home (so no social anxiety), with little halakhic (Jewish legal) complexity that might trigger the OCD. This year it just feels like I want to get on with it so that E can get her visa and come to the UK. We’re hoping for a Chanukah miracle, but we’re running out of time for that.

I guess I feel kind of down today (actually, really quite down) and not sure what to do with my time today. Maybe I do need fiction writing in my life, if only as a focus for my energies. I feel kind of stuck with that, though. Part of my mind wants to solve plot problems and part wants to stay away for now. So far I’m staying away.

***

I’ve been thinking about this image (by Rit Rajarshi) for the last few days, from a Wikipedia article on monotropic learning, referring to the way monotropic autistic minds fixate on one topic intensely, while polytropic allistic (non-autistic) minds can focus on many things at once or quickly switch topics.

The picture is interesting, as it seems to show that the monotropic mind can focus on many aspects of one subject or many topics branching off from it. I have a wide general knowledge, but tend to link subjects to one another in my head. A lot of what I have learnt, I have learnt directly or indirectly from Doctor Who or Doctor Who fandom. Admittedly Doctor Who was (possibly still is, I find it hard to tell) an unusually literate programme, and certainly 1990s fandom was highly literate and intelligent, but beyond this, I can pick up information and access it faster if it somehow links to Doctor Who (although Judaism seems to be on a separate circuit, as there is very little overlap between the two).

I do not know how to turn this to financial advantage the way some autistic people can.

***

I feel that in order to really live a frum (Jewishly observant) life, you need to be: (1) reasonably well-off financially, (2) physically healthy, (3) mentally healthy, (4) neurotypical, (5) have a frum family and (6) be accepted into a frum community.

The frum community does help people who are poor and who have a short-term physical health issue. It is much, much worse at supporting people who have ongoing physical health issues, mental health issues or neurodiversity. It is not great at reaching out to people who do not have frum family or who do are not well-integrated into an Orthodox community. Sadly, many ba’alei teshuvah (non-religious people who become religious) end up cutting themselves off from their family for various reasons, sometimes because they find it easier than dealing with less religious relations.

I would like to post this on the Orthodox Conundrum group, but I’m scared of the reaction I’ll get. I really don’t mean it to be a “privilege-attacking” or victimhood post, just to signpost what I think is a real issue, but I’m not sure that’s how it will be taken.

***

I mentioned the other day that, when I went for a blood test, I got a stabbing pain in my forearm, a couple of inches below where the needle went in. Over the last few days, I have had some discomfort there at times, although it’s hard to work out when (I think it’s certain movements or positions, but I haven’t worked out which ones). I am getting vaguely worried about it (as my Mum said, it seems to be on the vein), but it seems silly to go to the doctor over slight and vague feelings.

***

I got some more books! For Chanukah, from E I got A Guide for the Jewish Undecided: A Philosopher Makes the Case for Orthodox Judaism by Rabbi Dr Samuel Lebens (who wrote The Principles of Judaism which I read a few months ago. A Guide for the Jewish Undecided is supposed to be a more accessible book to the lay reader, although from glancing inside it, I’m not sure how much that’s the case). From my parents, I got Isaiah: Prophet of Righteousness and Justice by Yoel Bin-Nun and Binyamin Lau, from the Koren Maggid Tanakh series. I also got some Doctor Who socks from my in-laws! (It’s still slightly weird to think that I have in-laws, especially considering how little time I’ve spent with them.)

Coincidentally, I also received some Doctor Who novelisations from my parents’ friends. These are more books that belonged to their son who died a few months ago. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about this, like I’m profiting from his death. Maybe it feels like that because these are books that I’m adding to my collection of Doctor Who novelisations, rather than books I’m in a hurry to read (I have read some of them before, years ago).

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More Shoulds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calling Into the Void

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

You Had One Job, Hamlet

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Demons

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

“The red-eyed scavengers are creeping”

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

Cause Without a Rebel

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

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

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

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

I really missed E a lot too.

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

  ***

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

***

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

***

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

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

Grief and Autistic Halakhah

Being away from E seems to be getting harder and harder. It feels just as bad as when my loneliness was at it’s worst, except focused on one person rather than an abstract desire for a relationship. Hopefully her visa will come soon…

***

I’m still thinking about Ashley, but not quite so much, although I don’t know how much of that was being distracted by other stressors. I’m reluctant to say much here, as it feels vaguely like I’m appropriating pain that should really belong to her family. I felt some other guilt too. I’m not sure I can remember all of it, but some of it was feeling guilty that I’ve been more affected by Ashley’s death than those of my grandparents. I feel that that’s wrong, that the death of my grandparents should have affected me more. The two aren’t exactly comparable, though. My grandparents were quite old, mostly in their eighties. It was sad when they died, but it didn’t have the tragic aspect of young death, or suicide.

Another factor is that, in a strange way, I feel I didn’t know all my grandparents in an adult way, in the way I knew Ashley, even though I was sixteen when the first of my grandparents to die passed away and had known them all my life. They were just there, like my parents.

My paternal grandmother died when I was sixteen and about the same time my maternal grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s (the symptoms had been there for quite a while, but from this point on it became very noticeable). I feel like I didn’t know them as an adult, only as a child. I remember my paternal grandmother as very anxious and I didn’t really understand why (or is that an adult interpretation? Did I just accept it at the time?). I think I would better understand her depression, anxiety and agoraphobia (all unspoken of at the time) now.

I felt that I was only beginning to get to know my maternal grandfather when he died when I was nineteen, a few months after my maternal grandmother. I felt like he had begun to talk to me more as an adult in the last few years and suddenly that stopped. I did know my paternal grandfather rather better as he died when I was nearly twenty-seven. But I think in retrospect it’s my maternal grandfather I think of more often. Since my autism diagnosis, my parents have speculated that he was on the spectrum too, so maybe that explains why he felt more comfortable talking to me than his children about his past.

Episodes of depression/burnout followed in the months after the deaths of my grandparents, but in retrospect, I’m not sure that there was a causal link, except perhaps the death of my maternal grandfather, as the depression really did follow in just a few weeks. The others were more spaced out.

Another factor is that, when most of my grandparents died, I was still very emotionally immature. I know I write about my feelings most days now, but in my teens and twenties, I really didn’t understand what I felt and couldn’t put it into words, even more so than nowadays. It’s taken years of therapy and, I suppose, blogging, to get to a point where I can begin to understand what’s going on in my head.

Anyway, I managed to get an appointment with my therapist for this week, so hopefully it will help to be able to talk about these feelings.

***

Away from this, further guilt came when J said that I asked for three days off later this year to go to New York to see E, but I only had two days of holiday left. I felt bad about this, although I think the confusion came because he’s rounded down my number of holiday days, given that my contract didn’t start until February whereas the holiday year started in January. Even so, I felt vaguely bad for not realising. I made loads of these terms of work mistakes at my job in further education and still feel embarrassed. I think HR must have hated me. Taking one day less holiday doesn’t affect my plans, I will just have to work the day before I fly instead of packing.

***

J sent me to Selfridges to try to get some duplicate keys cut. Selfridges seemed more crowded than I was comfortable with (although probably less crowded than it should have been, less than two months before Christmas; I guess people are not spending on luxuries). I had one of those moments when I think that everyone I see is a human being with their own thoughts and emotions and I freak out a bit. I don’t know why this happens. Aside from the crowd, the muzak drove me crazy. Different parts of the store were playing different music and I could hear bits of different songs at once in painful aural mush. I don’t think this is an autism thing so much as a ‘having taste’ thing. When I finally found the key-cutting stall, I struggled to hear the assistant over the shoe repair machinery, but they didn’t have the right size blank keys to cut the new ones. I will probably have to go elsewhere on Thursday

The whole experience left me feeling overwhelmed and near to tears. I feel like I used to be able to cope with experiences like this (I used to commute into town on the Tube and buses every school day at rush hour!), but no longer can. Some of it may be getting older (it is a recognised phenomenon that autistic people become less able to cope with sensory overload and less able to mask their autistic symptoms as they get older), but I wonder if COVID lockdown has eroded my tolerance for these things, along with boosting my social anxiety? Or if I recognise the overwhelm more since my diagnosis.

Similarly, when I stayed after work for Minchah and Ma’ariv at the shul (Afternoon and Evening Prayers at the synagogue), I felt overwhelmed even though there were only fifteen or so people in the Beit Midrash (not a huge room, but not tiny either). Is this social anxiety or autistic overwhelm?

I was still feeling overwhelmed when I got home, but not light-headed, perhaps because I ate an apple in the office mid-afternoon and a cereal bar after Ma’ariv. I used to eat on the way home from work, but COVID has scared me off eating on the Tube.

***

Between Minchah and Ma’ariv, the rabbi quickly taught a halakhah (Jewish law). What it was isn’t relevant, but he took the mundane nature of the halakhah in question as an example for halakhah (in the wider sense of the Jewish legal system) being all-encompassing and supportive no matter what happens, that it “has our back” in his words.

I did not feel 100% comfortable with this. I do not feel that halakhah always has my back. I feel that there’s a lot I should be doing, according to halakhah, that I can’t cope with right now or perhaps ever because of my social anxiety and autism. I feel I would need an “autistic halakkah” to help me.

A while back I heard that Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig has set up an institute to try to train more rabbis in mental health awareness so that they will be able to respond to people with mental illness more effectively. He has also published a book of answers to halakhic questions regarding mental illness. I feel that someone needs to do the same thing for neurodiversity.

***

The other day Suzanne said that my life is interesting. My immediate thought was that my life isn’t interesting, so it must just be the way I write about it. Then I realised that I was in a low self-esteem double bind: either my life is interesting or my writing is interesting! I’m not sure what I think about this (just kidding).