depression – Vision of the Night

I wanted to go to shul (synagogue) on Friday night, but as we got closer to the time of the service, I started feeling lightheaded again. This made me wonder if there is a psychosomatic/social anxiety component to my lightheadedness. We ate dinner in the sukkah (temporary dwelling, in this case canvas walls on a cuboid metal frame with bamboo covering, to remind us of the temporary dwellings of the Israelites in the wilderness). I had some mild OCD thoughts, but brought myself out of it after a couple of minutes. E was very supportive. Afterwards, E and I stayed up late reading. Consequently, we overslept the next day and missed shul. We intended to get up about 8.15am. I actually got up about 9.30am to (ahem) answer a call of nature and thought about staying up and going to shul late, but went back to bed, again making me wonder how strong my social anxiety is about shul going. This aspect (hiding in bed, essentially) has been going on for years, far longer than the faintness.

We ate lunch in the sukkah, which E enjoyed more than the previous night, as it was warmer. In fact, it was so warm that E and I spent most of the afternoon out there reading. I finished reading this year’s Torah cycle, making I think nineteen consecutive years that I’ve read the weekly Torah cycle in Hebrew. It would be twenty-one years, but I missed half or more of the 2003-2004 cycle due to depression and burnout. Aside from that one year, I’ve persisted through many serious bouts of depression and burnout.

I stayed up late reading again that night, but got up earlier on Sunday morning than on Saturday as family friends that I’ve known for years were coming for Kiddush (refreshments) and I wanted to see them. The parents are friends with my parents; the daughter was originally friends with my sister, then became friends with me after she found my blog (not this one, a previous, non-anonymous one). I hadn’t seen her, her husband and oldest children since before COVID and I hadn’t seen her baby at all. After they left, we ate lunch in the sukkah again, but went indoors afterwards as it was colder. E and I napped and read indoors.

After Yom Tov, E and I watched the first episode of The Trial of Time Lord. E liked it. I already have thoughts about this most frustrating of stories, alternately daring and clumsy, clever and stupid, but will probably wait until later to avoid spoilering E. She did wonder why the sixth Doctor is “dressed like a clown” (in multicoloured patchwork clothes) and I had to explain that the producer had the idea that this made the character look bold, iconoclastic and unafraid of popular opinion, and no one, including the actor and the costume designer, could convince him that it actually made him look like an idiot, or at least like a totally unreal TV character and not a rounded person.

Today I had to work, but was able to work from home. I didn’t do a full day, as the work (sticking erratum stickers and copying dates from a spreadsheet to a database) is tedious and makes me feel ill after a while (staring at numbers on a screen), so I left an hour for later in the week. Also, if I’m called upon to do the Very Scary Task before Thursday, that will probably take about an hour, so I simply won’t need to do the extra hour.

***

As I mentioned above, I’m still struggling with periods of lightheadedness and faintness (admittedly I struggle to clearly differentiate the two). I initially thought it was stress or autistic burnout, then hypoglycaemia or low blood sugar. Now someone on a Facebook group for Jews with disabilities suggested PoTS to me. I’m torn between wanting to research this and potentially advocate for it to the GP and worrying that I’m becoming a hypochondriac.

After PoTS was suggested, I started noticing heart issues. I woke up a couple of times one night a week or so ago with indigestion-type pain over the centre of my chest. It went once I woke up properly. I felt similar pain when reading Saturday evening (possibly on sitting up after lying down). When I woke up from a nap on Sunday afternoon, I could feel my heart beating very fast for couple of seconds. Then I recalled occasional indigestion-type pain walking up stairs at times for quite a while now which I have been vaguely troubled by and guiltily put down to being out of shape (because of the pressures around E’s immigration, the wedding and flat-hunting, I haven’t done any serious exercise for over a year). Now wonder I wonder if there is more going on than I thought. I also see that PoTS could explain/influence some things I’ve struggled with for years: headaches, brain fog, poor sleep, tiredness, bowel issues, difficulty coping with heat, even my often red hands, although most of these things have other potential causes already identified e.g. I definitely have sleep apnoea. I guess it’s tempting to want a single, Occam’s Razor-satisfying, solution for all my issues. Autism plus medication side-effects plus sleep apnoea plus stress plus, at times, various mental health issues seems too much – too much to deal with and over-causation generally.

But, as I said, I worry about becoming a hypochondriac. I have told E about the PoTS suggestion and potential heart symptoms, but not my parents. I don’t want to worry them, although I’m open to a charge of hypocrisy here, as I’ve criticised them for not being open with my sister and me about their health before. Part of my reason is simply that, living with them and E, I find myself needing to consciously separate from my parents and do things just with E, even if it’s discussing this.

***

I’m currently thinking a lot about my relationship to mitzvot (religious commandments) and how to make that healthier without becoming antinomian (rejecting religious law). There’s a lot I’ve been thinking about, but I don’t have much time, so I’ll be brief. I think a lot of non-Orthodox Jews see mitzvot as “traditions,” things that are fun and meaningful to do, but also on a fundamental level optional (I know this is not necessarily how non-Orthodox rabbis view them, but I’m talking about the laity. And, to be fair, much of the Orthodox United Synagogue laity would view them the same way). If you can’t do one or miss it for some reason, it’s not the end of the world. You can exercise some latitude with it too, do it differently or at a different time. And that seems how non-Jews view them too. Whereas Orthodox Jews see them as something commanded by God, not just in general terms, but in great detail and not doing them in that way is a serious sin, damaging your relationship to God and risking punishment.

The latter approach seems to get me into unhealthy OCD-type areas, but the former just seems wrong to me. I’m left trying to find a way to navigate between the two.

I’m currently reading I Am for My Beloved: A Guide to Enhanced Intimacy for Married Couples by David Ribner and Talli Rosenbaum, two Orthodox Jews and qualified sex therapists who write about sexuality and relationships for an Orthodox Jewish audience. They write in there that sex should be about “intimacy two people experience together” rather than something goal-driven (e.g. it should last for X minutes and result in orgasms for both parties).

I wonder if there is a way to apply this to mitzvot, to see them as about experiencing connection with God rather than saying either it’s up to me what I do (which would imply that it is voluntary or that God has no strong views on the matter) or saying that I have to obsess over the last detail, which triggers my OCD. I am already doing this to some extent with davening (praying), where I sometimes less important skip passages (I almost never do a full Shacharit (Morning Prayers) now) and try to concentrate on key passages, but not beat myself up if my concentration slips.

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 8 Comments

Elevating Futility to a High Art

I feel down and lethargic today. I felt close to tears much of the day without knowing why (although I’ll make a few suggestions below). The type of mood that would be clinical depression if it continued for two weeks (which realistically/hopefully it will not do). I don’t really feel like doing anything.

There are things I feel down about, but they mostly happened after I felt down, or significantly earlier and I put them out of my mind until I felt down. People trolling online. A fun-looking Doctor Who community that turned out very quickly to be full of the worst politics (does everything have to be about race and gender?). The fact that Facebook’s algorithm seems to think I’m a socialist [1]. Not that I’d want any other politics on there. I’d like a politics-free zone to talk about fun things. Politics is the bane of our age. I do kind of like the idea that I’m broad-minded enough in my tastes and friends to beat the algorithm and avoid pigeon-holing, although it probably just means I’m vaguely interested in some very left-wing-leaning fandoms.

I tried to listen to a religious podcast as Torah study (couldn’t face reading), so I started listening to the latest Orthodox Conundrum, on Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), with Dr Erica Brown. I did stick with it, but the enormous list of her achievements at the start just made me feel more pathetic. I know I’m trying not to feel like that. I know she’s probably neurotypical, mentally healthy, and secure in her personal identity and community. But it’s hard.

All that said, realistically, a lot of the stress is about all the Yom Tovim (festivals) at the moment. We’re only about halfway through the autumn festival season. There’s a lot of preparation, stress, peopling and potential religious OCD-triggering moments to come. Then there’s our flat-purchase in limbo. The survey is tomorrow. If it’s good, then we can go ahead with the purchase, but E and I are scared after our last experience. We are both desperate to leave my parents’ house though. My parents accept our neurological and mental health issues, but the environment isn’t the best for flourishing with those issues.

I also feel that I need to be emotionally and spiritually involved in all the Yom Tovim, not easy for anyone, let alone someone with alexithymia (difficulty recognising and understanding my own emotions).

Anyway, I did a few things today: helped my Dad with the sukkah again, did a few minutes of novel research before becoming overwhelmed, listened to some of that podcast while walking and doing a little dusting. I guess that is quite a bit. I didn’t feel any better, though and I felt bad for not doing much research, not finishing the podcast and so on. I need to focus more on my achievements… but then that just becomes another “Should” and another reason to beat myself up.

[1] For some reason, a lot of the socialist memes FB shows me seem to involve cats. Because if there’s one animal that suggest cooperation, sharing and mutual support, it’s the domestic cat.

***

It feels hard to establish an identity, for me as an individual and for E and myself as a couple, and to be accepted, or not to care if I’m not accepted. Part of me feels I should not care what other people think of me, but another part feels that people who don’t care what other people think of them are often horrible, selfish people. I feel there should be a Maimonidean middle path, but it’s hard to see it in an age focused on hyper-individualism.

***

I’ve written here before about my feeling that halakhah (Jewish law) is a kind of beautiful, delicate crystal cathedral that I dare not damage. Recently I’ve felt that that metaphor is inadequate because halakhah is both impossible for me to really damage and also my relationship to it and thereby to God is organic. E said maybe it’s a tree, where I can damage my relationship with God, but it will grow back unless I deliberately completely root it out. I’m not sure if this is quite the right metaphor either, but I’ll think about it more.

***

OK, now I’m going to ramble about The Prisoner and Doctor Who, because that’s what I do when I’m miserable.

The Prisoner first: E and I just watched The Chimes of Big Ben, the second episode (in original transmission order) of The Prisoner. It doesn’t stand up to repeated viewing well, as the plot holes and contrivances become too obvious. I think the twist still works well although that may be because since childhood I’ve been intrigued with juxtapositions of rooms where they’re not supposed to be, in this case a room in London actually being in the Village. Interesting that Number 6 already thinks the Village might be run by British Intelligence.

As I’m doing this Prisoner re-watch partly to spot moments that resonate with contemporary society, I have to point out the art competition where people can choose any topic and they all pick the same subject (Number 2) and present him as heroic.

***

I saw an online article that described the tenth Doctor and Donna as “Doctor Who’s greatest power couple” when it should clearly be the fourth Doctor and Romana. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were even married in real life (very briefly) and so actually a power couple.

One day someone will have to sit me down and explain to me why David Tennant’s acting in Doctor Who is supposedly so good, because I really don’t get it. It just seems like a lot of SHOUTY EMOTING to me, combined with a bit of whining and occasional bullying. At least Sylvester McCoy was quirky, fun and Doctorish when he did SHOUTY EMOTING. Tennant just seems to want to be Mr Cool.

Looking at Eccleston and Tennant, combined with the photos we’ve seen so far of Ncuti Gatwa, I would say Russell T Davies has the weird idea that the Doctor is, or should be, cool and I don’t know why he thinks this. He is supposedly a fan since nappies, but he frequently seems to massively miss the point of the programme. Even Chris Chibnall realised the Doctor isn’t cool. Cool is the opposite of what he’s about, because it’s about detachment, scorn for the intellect and being popular as opposed to be being ethical.

Then those fans can explain to me why, when Doctor Who fans say the great strength of the programme is “Its infinitely flexible format” do they not generally like experimental stories, but familiar ones with familiar characters (the tenth/fourteenth Doctor, Donna, the Toymaker, Kate Stewart and UNIT). Jodie Whittaker’s first season was highly variable, but there were four episodes out of ten that made me think, “Oh, I didn’t know Doctor Who could do that” and genuinely not know what would happen next. I forgive it a lot for that. Most fans prefer the continuity-clogged (and semi-incoherent) seasons that followed. Go figure.

Lately (OK, for nearly a year), I find myself wanting to watch The Trial of a Time Lord again, the fourteen part portmanteau tale from the 1980s that seemed to pre-empt most of the beats of recent Doctor Who. I wonder if I can put E through it. It would probably be unfair of me to do so. It has a poor reputation and is a lot less polished than contemporary Doctor Who, certainly in production and perhaps also in script, but it’s mostly fun. It doesn’t feel like a chore to watch or something you would only watch because you want to feel miserable. I haven’t seen it for years, though, so maybe this is me glamorising it in retrospect.

***

One thing I did do today was finish Timewyrm: Revelation and with it the sequence of novels that started the Doctor Who – The New Adventures books. In summary, book one was unbearably awful, book two was really good (even if it ducked the moral question of the Doctor and Ace essentially supporting and even benefitting from the Nazi regime in order to keep time on track), book three was not great, but still better than fan reputation suggested and had a good twist at the end that justified reading it, and book four was amazing (as per fan reputation). Paul Cornell’s best New Adventure. Definitely a good fortieth birthday present from E to me.

Posted on September 4, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 10 Comments

Poacher Turned Gamekeeper

Work was not good, so let’s ignore that. I came home and felt I sniped at everyone, without meaning too. Yes, I was exhausted, hungry, faint (despite eating lentils and quinoa for lunch as the doctor said) and stressed, but I still shouldn’t do it. Despite the fact that I never swear, I said to E that “Aside from eating and booking a flat viewing, I’ve done nothing since I got home except argue with everyone. I’m pissed at myself and probably pissed at everyone else too.” I actually felt better after that; maybe there’s something to be said for swearing after all. Just don’t tell my parents. They swear a lot more than I do, but have quite bourgeois attitudes about bad language, particularly in film and TV. This comes on the day the Education Secretary, Gillian Keegan, was caught by a “hot camera” after an interview asking “does anyone ever say you’ve done a fucking good job because everyone else has sat on their arse and done nothing?” No, they don’t. In life as well as in politics.

Speaking of life, I’m thinking of going over to the opposition – actually, the Establishment. I thought that “sensitivity readers” were a bit of a racket, blackmailing nervous writers to change their artistic vision to avoid upsetting someone with a grievance and a desire to make trouble (probably the sensitivity reader themselves). And they probably are.

Of course, good writers should do their research, which can involve passing the manuscript to someone more knowledgeable of a character or setting than they are, particularly if they have first-hand experience. But the idea that it should be enforced as a matter of course, and that the sensitivity reader should effectively be a second editor, or even a second writer, seems very wrong to me.

Nevertheless, they are here and I am thinking of becoming one, for autism, Judaism (particularly Orthodox Judaism) and perhaps depression (I’m not sure if anyone looks for readers for that or if it’s too common and well-known). Part of my reason is simply that it strikes me as an easy way to make money. I don’t deny it. We live in a knowledge economy where those who have knowledge and expertise can charge a premium to deploy it on other people’s behalf. I don’t see that as immoral. I have some specialist knowledge that I might as well impart and if society is organised a particular way at the moment, I don’t see why I shouldn’t make the best of it even if I don’t really see our society as an ideal one.

More pertinently (and here I risk an accusation of hypocrisy with my earlier paragraphs), I think that autistics, Jews and especially Orthodox Jews are often presented very badly in fiction. (So are conservatives, but I doubt anyone would pay for a conservative sensitivity reader.) I would like to correct this, but do it in a sensitive (ha!) way that allows the author’s vision to still come through. I would not say, “This has to go!” but “This is an unfortunate stereotype, are there more original ways of presenting this character or plot thread?” Cliché is bad because it leads to mindlessness and groupthink, including prejudiced groupthink; meeting cliché with cliché or censorship is no better; opening up original and thought-provoking alternative ideas is what literature is about. Maybe I can even reform the system from within, just a little.

Of course, there are difficulties. I don’t think I can speak for all autistics, all Jews or even all Orthodox Jews. They are too wide and varied as groups. I personally think Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory is a terrible negative stereotype of autistic people (although he is not explicitly said to be autistic): smug, supercilious, sarcastic, unempathetic. Yet many autistics love him and embrace him as a positive representation of autism.

My knowledge of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world is limited, although I know much more about it than the average person and actual Haredi Jews are unlikely to work on a non-religious book. More worryingly, Jews are seen by the type of people who believe in sensitivity readers as white, even super-white, in fact Persil: “whiter than white.” No one cares about offending us, and lots of nice, left-leaning people go out of their way to actively do so. So no one may want to pay for my services. But I think it’s worth a try and might be a way of standing out and getting some work more easily than as one of ten thousand other proofreaders or copy editors out there. (I do still intend to try to get proofreading and editing work; this will be a supplement.)

After coming to this conclusion, I later read a review of the new James Bond novel, which is apparently super-woke. The original prose Bond wasn’t terribly political. He killed Russian spies for a living, but I think voicing vague support for John F. Kennedy was as far as he got into day-to-day politics (and that was possibly an in-joke or hat tip: Kennedy had named From Russia with Love as one of his favourite novels in an interview, boosting Ian Fleming’s sales). He certainly didn’t go on rants about the evils of populism, eat healthily or prefer the metric system to imperial measurements as he apparently does in the latest novel. And he probably would have defected to the KGB before taking an immigration lawyer as a lover. If we do have to go down this route, I’d rather have a completely new character, like the black, female 007 who replaces him for a time in the film No Time to Die, who I liked as a character in her own right.

I don’t know why we have the idea that our heroes have to be like us. I’m not talking about inclusivity in terms of race, gender and so on, which I don’t have a problem with, but the idea that heroes have to have the type of opinions that could get printed in The Guardian or The New York Times to be purchased by an audience that publishers and producers seem to feel reads, or should be made to read, those newspapers.

Without even looking at my bookshelves or Goodreads, I came up with the following list of fictional protagonists or important supporters of the protagonist in stories I love whose worldviews and traits I don’t share, partly or fully (mostly literature, but some graphic novels, film or TV): James Bond, Richard Hannay, Asterix (all that boar! All that bashing!), Batman and his Bat Family, Basil Fawlty, Homer Simpson (actually, my favourite Simpsons characters are Mr Burns and Sideshow Bob, both thoroughly evil), anyone who practices magic (Gandalf, Merlin, everyone in Harry Potter), pretty much anyone in Terry Pratchett, arguably anyone in Narnia (an overtly Christian narrative), everyone in Brideshead Revisited, The Good Soldier Svjek, Yossarian in Catch-22, the narrator of The Third Policeman, most of the characters in The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, Hamlet and King Lear. Also, I started reading Jorge Luis Borges for his mind-blowing low fantasy short stories, but came to admire his realistic stories of the cowboys, bandits and low-lifes of nineteenth century Argentina. His short story Deutsches Requiem is a chilling autobiographical account by an unrepentant Nazi war criminal on the night before his execution. It’s a brilliant piece of writing. And this is before we get into a discussion of how much I identify with the worldviews of characters in Dostoyevski.

Sadly, the twenty-first century Doctors (Doctor Who) are probably in there too, with their arrogance, pompous tendency to hog the limelight and give bombastic speeches (“I’m the Doctor! I’m a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey! I’m going to save all the goodies! And I’ve defeated all the baddies a million times already!” OK, why not show rather than tell?) and to talk about inclusivity, acceptance and cultural relativism while berating anyone who doesn’t show the aforementioned Guardian mores, even if they are literally living in the Middle Ages as well as talking all the time about being a pacifist while still killing lots of aliens (OK, Pertwee and McCoy in the original run did this too, but they weren’t so smug about it).

Of course, pretty much every contemporary hero or heroine is secular and views religion with puzzlement at best, so I’m different there.

I admit I’m open to a charge of hypocrisy as there are some things I won’t read because they are too far out of my comfort range e.g. His Dark Materials (although that’s because I know about the sad fate for the protagonist as well as because of Philip Pullman’s militantly expressed atheism). I’m not saying we should read things we’re certain to hate, but to be open to different characters and different stories.

(I should also say that on the commute home I came up with a whole skit from Woke Hamlet, but I’m too tired and it’s too late for me to post it now. Maybe tomorrow if enough people vote for it. (Yes, E, I know you’re voting for it!))

***

E and I watched the second part of the Inside My Autistic Mind documentary with my parents. I’m still digesting it. I always come away from these things thinking, “Well, I don’t do that, or not to the same extent, so maybe I’m not really autistic.” I think it helped my parents understand me a bit better. There was more I wanted to say to them, but I felt a bit “blocked,” which I guess is partly the trouble I have describing my experience in detail as well as describing things verbally (as opposed to in writing) and perhaps partly also because I don’t feel close enough to my parents to open up about everything I feel.

***

I posted part of yesterday’s post, about the Orthodox Jewish world not recognising the effort put in by disabled, chronically ill or neurodivergent Jews to be religious, on a Jews with disabilities Facebook group and it got a lot of likes and favourable comments, so I feel pleased.

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 13 Comments

Disappointment and Mourning (Tisha B’Av)

It’s nearly 9pm (actually about 10pm at time of posting). I’m sitting on the floor of my room, typing. The fast of Tisha B’Av is about to start. On it, we mourn for the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem (first by the Babylonians, probably in 586 BCE, then by the Romans in 70 CE), the revelation of God’s presence that we believe was there and the Jewish and global unity it was supposed to create. We also mourn many, many other terrible events that happened in Jewish history on this date (e.g. the expulsion of the Jews of England in 1290, the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, the first train to Auschwitz in 1941 (I’ve always been a bit suspicious of this one and meant to go and check it, but never have)). Mourning customs include not eating or drinking for twenty-five hours (I can’t do this due to being on lithium tablets, but try to fast until halakhic (Jewish law) midday, which is just after 1pm BST), not washing for pleasure (as opposed to hygiene), not wearing leather shoes, not having sex, as well as sitting on the floor or low chairs instead of normal chairs and various other things designed to make us uncomfortable and sad. Some of these restrictions only last until halakhic midday (e.g. sitting on the floor), but most last until nightfall tomorrow.

This has historically been a difficult day for me, struggling for so much of my adult life with depression and autistic burnout. It’s hard to gauge what is a “safe” level of misery for me. Many poskim (halakhic authorities) forbid people with eating disorders, even in recovery, to fast ever again, even on Yom Kippur (which is a more important fast than Tisha B’Av) because of the risk of disordered eating creeping back into their thought patterns. I sometimes wonder if I should something analogous should apply here. Sadness, and maybe, on some level, depression, are parts of the human condition, but provoking it might be dangerous in some people, particularly at the moment, when I seem to have fallen back into something approaching a depression/burnout, albeit not diagnosable at the moment as it hasn’t reached the two week threshold.

Because of this, and because my brain feels squished after a day of work (not even a full day and some of it working from home), I am not going to shul (synagogue) this evening for Ma’ariv (Evening Prayers) and the dirge-like chanting of Megillat Eichah (The Book of Lamentations, the most depressing book of the Hebrew Bible) [1] as well as Kinot (laments). I will daven Ma’ariv (say Evening Prayers) at home, but I probably won’t read Eichah or Kinot. I just don’t have the stamina this year.

I feel a bit disappointed in myself. I feel I want to be sure that I absolutely can’t do more than I’m doing. I told E this earlier and also that I think God is probably not disappointed in me. I think God is generally less disappointed in me than I am in myself. She agreed. It’s hard, though. I’ve spent all my life pushing myself hard and feeling I have to push myself harder, partly from low self-esteem, but also because it feels like my wheels are just spinning. I try to do stuff, but autism and mental illness just stop me getting the outcome I might expect from the effort given, so I push myself harder until something blows and I burn out. And that’s the temptation in religious things too, even though caring for one’s health is a religious value too. They say that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is insanity. “They” are probably right, but that would mean confronting the fact that I won’t be able to achieve many of my goals, religiously and otherwise, because of my neurology and mental fragility (if that’s the right word).

There is also the fear that if I say, “I’m good enough” I’m going to end up as some terrible narcissist/serial killer/dictator type person. I assume these people have boundless self-belief and never engage in self-criticism. I had this discussion with E too and she didn’t think you can suddenly become a narcissist. You’re born with narcissism, like autism. What little research I’ve done on serial killers suggests that they actually have low self-esteem. I haven’t done any research on dictators, but I’m unlikely to be put in any position of power and indeed have historically run away from most positions of authority, however minor, out of fear I am too incompetent and inadequate for them.

I am not sure what to do over the next day. I can read more of Richard J. Evans’ The Third Reich at War, although I haven’t got up to the Holocaust chapters yet as I intended (still on the invasion of the USSR). I might read parts of Josephus’ The Jewish War, about the suppression of the Great Revolt by the Romans culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70 (as I said above). But that’s really just because I have a copy and have never read it. I could, as I said, read Eichah and some Kinot, but I’m not sure that I will. I have booked for two online events tomorrow via a Facebook group, one a support group for people who need to eat on the fast and one a learning/art session related to the day. Plus, there was an Orthodox Conundrum podcast with Rabbi Joshua Berman on Eichah that I’ve been saving. So I guess I’ve got lots to do (even excluding some payments I need to make related to the home move), but it is a very long day (the fast doesn’t end until nearly 10pm tomorrow) and I’m likely to get bored at some point and I worry I will turn inward to self-criticism rather than actual mourning as I am supposed to do.

I guess mourning is hard with alexithymia (difficulty recognising and understanding my own emotions). I have mentioned in the past that negative emotions like depression, despair, anxiety and loneliness (and envy, I guess) are easier to recognise than positive ones like happiness, love and so on. I would think that this would make the sadness of mourning easy to spot, but somehow it isn’t. I don’t think that I really mourned for any of my grandparents when they died. I’m probably more emotionally literate (or auto-emotionally literate; I’m not sure I’m good at reading anyone else’s emotions) than I was then thanks to therapy, but I still struggle with mourning. Nine months or more on, I still feel like I’m processing Ashley’s death even though I never met her in person, I just knew her online for a couple of years. I’ve actually been meaning to write about this here, but haven’t yet. I think about her periodically and that can bring up very complex emotions, both from our friendship (I didn’t always agree with her) and the way she died. Mourning for a building that I never saw is even harder, particularly when it’s only a matter of faith that it led to unity and powerful religious experiences – the type of experiences, I might note bitterly, that my own religious life has never really included, no matter how hard I try (perhaps alexithymia again).

Anyway, as you can see, I am online after 9pm again as I have been several times this week, despite my attempts not to. Admittedly I wouldn’t be relaxing tonight, but whenever I’ve tried something like this in the past, I find I end up online as blogging is the only way I can process my emotions and I can’t (or won’t or don’t like to?) go to bed with unprocessed emotions swirling round my head.

[1] Some would say Iyov (Job) or Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), but I like both of those, plus Eichah has a much bigger death count.

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

Back in the Abyss

I’ve been feeling very depressed today. I’m not sure how coherent this is as a result. I’m feeling things that I associate with my periods of depression and burnout: lethargy, depression, maybe despair, overwhelmed, feeling physically “heavy” and drained. I know it’s the ongoing “perfect storm” of flat-purchasing issues, changing family dynamic issues, living with my parents, Tisha B’Av (Fast of Av), unsuccessful anti-depressant reduction and my continuing misery at work as well as more long-term worries about fitting in to the Jewish community and whether any late-diagnosed neurodivergent person can ever be happy or successful (for any given definition of “happy or successful”). I just feel that the world is not made for neurodivergents like E and me and the only people who even understand how bad (depressed, exhausted, misunderstood, confused) we feel are those like us who don’t have any answers either.

E made me wonder how much I enjoy aspects of Judaism, or much else, but it’s hard to tell with alexithymia (difficult recognising and understanding my own emotions). I feel something positive on Shabbat (the Sabbath), although E does not at all. I sometimes feel something positive when praying or doing Torah study, particularly when thinking of my own divrei Torah, but it’s hard to know what I feel or how often; certainly not all the time. I feel I should persist in things that don’t always make me happy if they sometimes make me feel something positive (not necessarily happy, but positive), but it’s not always easy, and some things I do just out of obligation. I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing either, but I think E struggles to understand it and maybe I do too, on some level. It’s been hard to be motivated to stay frum (religious Jewish) lately, but the thought of eating non-kosher food genuinely makes me want to retch.

E asked me if I knew of anyone with similar issues to myself (mental illness and/or neurodivergence) who left Orthodox Judaism and I said yes, several. Then she asked if I knew of anyone with similar issues to myself who stayed in the Orthodox Jewish world and I said no. On reflection, that’s not entirely true, as I’ve come across a couple of frum autistic people, including a couple of Orthodox rabbis (both sexes), only one I’ve had personal contact with. And I’ve seen things written by people who coped with mental illness and stayed frum, although I don’t know how long they were ill for. I think some people on the Facebook groups for Jews with disabilities (etc.) I’m on might have mental health issues; I don’t know. But I think most of the autistics were diagnosed as children and that seems to make a huge difference to wellbeing and functionality, although I’m not sure why. You would think that techniques that help children function would help adults, but there’s almost no help for adults late diagnosed with autism, either on the NHS or in the private sector and I don’t think there’s much in the USA either. What help does exist is mostly focused on getting into work (like good little drones…). I also think that people raised frum with these issues seem to do better than those of us who became frum later in life, maybe due to better social integration and family support networks.

Given all of this, it is hard to see how I can function (a) in the world and (b) in the frum world without role models and support, but I don’t know where to turn.

Other hard stuff today: I started listening to a podcast interview with Dara Horn, which may have been a mistake. I think we only envy people we want to be and feel we could realistically have been. I don’t envy successful athletes or Oscar-winning actors. I do find myself envying Dara Horn, who is an acclaimed award-winning author of serious fiction and non-fiction dealing with the type of Jewish themes I would like to write about, plus she’s very Jewishly engaged (she leins (chants from the Torah in synagogue), whichI was too socially anxious to keep up after my bar mitzvah) and has a family. And she has a PhD in Hebrew and Yiddish Literature, which she talks about as if it was the most trivial thing! She did her PhD and wrote a novel at the same time, and the interviewer just says he wrote a book while doing his PhD too as if neither of these things were big! Gah. I could go on, but I’ll just make myself feel more inadequate. I have to tell myself that we have different challenges, talents, roles, but it’s hard not to feel that God is going to judge me for not being like her, even though my brain is really not wired that way. I guess that’s just a way of saying that I feel that I should be like her and don’t acknowledge that I can’t be, mostly because I still don’t know what I can do (again, something I would like post-diagnosis help with). Nor do I have role models who can guide me to realistic goals and ambitions.

Given how miserable E and I were today, we thought we would watch The Simpsons to cheer ourselves up. I was going to say to her that, given how our day was going, this would probably be miserable too, but I stopped myself. Surely The Simpsons could not fail us! But it was an atypically sad episode (Ned Flanders’ wife died in a weird t-shirt-related accident), albeit with an upbeat and atypically religious (not cynical) ending. I hope to watch something more fun before bed, but probably without E, who works late. But I may run out of time, given that I have to be up early for work tomorrow.

(Related: E has got annoyed that so many twenty-first century Doctor Who episodes are downbeat and depressing. To help plan future viewing, I’m planning to put together a story list colour coded with green for fun stories, orange for mostly fun stories with serious bits or themes and red for depressing stories. I think 1960s and 70s Doctor Who will be mostly green and orange. From the 1980s, the red grows as people think everything needs to be “serious” and that “serious” correlates with miserable endings. I could write a whole essay about how franchises originally aimed at child or family audiences (Doctor Who, Batman, Star Trek) become “serious” and “gritty” as children who grew up thinking the originals were “adult” become adults who realise that they weren’t serious by adult standards, but now want to remake them so they are, and are frequently in position to do so. Anyway, I still think fun Doctor Who stories often offer more genuine adult moments of character and theme than a lot of recent melodramatic emo-fests.)

I was doing well with my “Off internet/phone by 9pm” routine until this week, when it’s been affected by the general slide in mood, productivity, will-power and everything else.

The good news today is that my new noise-cancelling headphones seem to be working fine. I can’t figure out how well the noise cancellation works yet (not sure I’ve turned it on properly), but the sound quality is good even on busy streets and with the volume lower than I usually have it on those streets, which is good for my hearing. I did sync them with my laptop as well as my phone, but they seem to lose the laptop Bluetooth connection if I move. I suspect this is the fault of my “ancient” (nine or so year old) laptop and not the new headphones.

Posted on July 24, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

Standing On the Brink

Apologies, but blogging and especially responding to comments is probably going to be less regular than usual at the moment as I’m struggling with time and energy.

Yesterday E and I went to Golders Green as a “just the two of us” birthday celebration and had a really nice lunch at a kosher cafe. We went charity shop shopping afterwards and got several cheap books and DVDs; I also got a free Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novel (which I probably wouldn’t have paid for) from the cardboard box of somewhat battered second-hand books that The Book Warehouse has lately taken to putting outside the shop in the hope of enticing people in.

We got home in the late afternoon and I had to write various flat purchase-related emails while E cooked dinner. E and I have become very stressed over issues stemming from the flat survey and how to get clarification and/or resolve them. The biggest is a question over how good the fire safety of the communal areas of the block of flats is and whether we can get proof that it’s OK and/or going to be improved in the forthcoming building works. The scary thing is that this was easily the best flat within our budget. The only one close to it was in the same block, so it has the same problems about the communal areas. So if we decide we can’t live in this block, we would basically have to start the search from scratch, live with my parents for much longer (which is driving E crazy directly and driving me crazy indirectly as I try to keep everyone on good terms) and delay trying to start a family. This in term raises questions about whether we should be renting and whether that would worsen our financial situation irreparably. And so on, and so on. One problem triggers another. This dynamic played out today as we got some emails that just made the flat situation seem more hopeless. Both E and I ended up feeling very overwhelmed and I felt somewhat burnt out.

Weirdly, this morning on the Tube, a Haredi woman got her fourish year old child to give me a little card booklet. I thought it was plugging a kiruv (outreach) event or similar, but it was a prayer of gratitude for all that God has done for me, including the negative things. I sat reading and translating the prayer for a few minutes. I did eventually realise there was a translation on the back, but I think translating it unaided made it feel more personal to me. I suppose I would sometimes be cynical about things like this, but somehow it lodged in my head today and did make me feel grateful for what I have even though we are struggling with this issue. (This is the site for the booklet, with the prayer in Hebrew and English.)

Work was hard, though. There wasn’t much to do, just sorting through and disposing of old papers for much of the day. The result was more burnout feelings. I listened to music despite the Three Weeks to stay sane. I felt close to having a meltdown by mid-afternoon, partly triggered by the shredder repeatedly jamming, but also by the flat situation, my frustration at doing such unrewarding work and, paradoxically, my fear that I may lose my job once I’ve sorted all the papers (which might happen soon) or end up sticking stickers for months on end as there isn’t really enough work for me to do for two days a week. It’s not actually paradoxical that I fear this; as much as I dislike the job, we need the money and I am under no illusions about my employability, given my history of long periods of unemployment, mostly short-term job history, no career progression, poor interview performance and autistic issues in the workplace. (For all that I feel that my boss in further education was an unpleasant person, she probably could have got me formally in trouble for some things and did not. Or maybe that’s just me putting myself down again.)

***

Something that may be contributing to the negative ruminations is my clomipramine reduction. I remembered that as well as helping with depression, clomipramine helps with OCD and scrupulosity. It could be that this is why I’ve had a lot of “Am I am a good Jew?” questions in my head lately. It may also contribute to the racing thoughts I’ve had at times lately, although these are not always OCD or depressed. I have returned to a dose of 25mg of clomipramine in the morning and 50mg at night, but I worry I will have to increase some more to get back to the mental stability I previously had.

***

I posted this on a Jews with disabilities Facebook group last night:

I hope everyone is OK. I’m dreading Tisha B’Av (Fast of Av) on Thursday. When I was suffering depression and autistic burnout (undiagnosed at that stage), I was initially OK with Tisha B’Av. At least I was feeling the right religious emotions for once! But as my depression and burnout went on for years and years, I felt so bad that a day of extra depression was too much.

Now I’m not depressed or burnt out, but for the last few weeks, I’ve felt balanced on the brink of burnout and trying not to fall down. I have a lot of difficult stuff in my life right now, not bad stuff, but difficult stuff that is pushing me close to burnout and I’m worried Tisha B’Av will push me over the brink. 25 hours of gruesome Medieval laments and reading about the Holocaust doesn’t seem the best thing for me right now, but I’m not sure what to do instead, especially as I can’t fast because of the medication I’m on (I usually fast until halakhic (Jewish law) midday, about 1pm). I’m not working that day either, which is a mixed blessing.

I don’t know if I will go to shul (synagogue) at all. I will probably do some Holocaust reading at some point, but I might try to stream some documentaries, not grim Holocaust (etc.) ones, but not fun ones either e.g. wildlife documentaries, just to pass the time without doing fun stuff.

Does anyone else have this problem?

I had a couple of helpful responses, although more people seem to have the question than the answer. It’s good to know that other people are struggling with Tisha B’Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, when we are supposed to avoid happy or fun things and focus on mourning the Temple and repenting from the hatreds that tear us apart. Possibly, as some people said on the FB group, I need to focus more on avoiding hatred and especially feeling fraternal love rather than feeling sorrow.

I did come across something from Rabbi Yoni Rosensweig the other day. I am wary of relying too much on his Facebook posts, as I can’t understand all the Hebrew and the automatic English translation is frequently wrong (sometimes comically so; it has a recurring problem mixing up the similar Hebrew words for ‘stringent’ and ‘donkey’). But he recently bemoaned rabbis who won’t allow leniencies for people with a history of mental illness who are not currently ill, but who are worried about relapse. He says no one would say not to allow leniencies for someone with cancer that hasn’t metastasised, so why not allow leniencies for mental illness in remission with serious risk of relapse. As I face Tisha B’Av, I’m trying to think of myself as someone in remission from burnout and depression and at serious risk of relapse and not as someone with a “blank slate.”

Posted on July 21, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 12 Comments

Birthday Burnout

Yesterday was my fortieth birthday. It was a mixed day. I felt awful at work, depressed, exhausted and burnt out. I feel like I get to this point with most jobs, then burnout and get fired. Actually, I’ve never been fired, but I feel a couple of jobs made it impossible for me to stay. I hope this doesn’t happen here as we really need the money and I doubt I could easily get a new job, bearing in mind my history (poor employment history and long history of unemployment, plus poor interview history). I just hope staying in the job doesn’t mean worse burnout.

We were meeting at my sister’s house for my birthday dinner, so I went there after work. I got some time with Nephew. He was pretty scared of me at first and burst into tears whenever he saw me. I thought it was because of my Three Weeks beard, but Sister says he’s like that a lot lately. He warmed to me after a while and, while I didn’t get many smiles, I did get to play with him for quite a long time and he seemed fairly happy, if obsessed with trying to get my fingers in his mouth. He’s learnt to turn over, but isn’t fully proficient at it yet, so sometimes he ends up lying on his back waving his limbs like a stranded beetle. He hasn’t worked out that he can’t grasp things with his toes either and sometimes tried to grab my hand with hands and feet.

My parents and E came over at dinner time and my brother-in-law was home by then too. We were having takeaway pizza. When dinner started, I was actually pretty furious at both Sister and BIL and Mum and Dad, albeit for different reasons. I just felt E and my needs were being considered secondary to everyone else’s needs and, while I’ve accepted this in the past, I want to be heard and set boundaries now for E’s sake. I did try to set some boundaries, although I’m not sure if I succeeded. I did calm down after a few minutes (I don’t get angry for long) and had a good time. I was a bit sad that E struggles with my family events. She doesn’t really connect with my family or have much in common with them. I got some good presents including wireless, noise-cancelling headphones (from E and my parents), rare out-of-print Doctor Who books (from E), a Jewish book (from my parents), and Doctor Who coasters and ice cube makers from Sister and BIL.

Today has also been hard. I woke up late feeling really burnt out. I had to get going, as I had a scheduled call with my rabbi mentor. I did my usual Shabbat chores, went shopping with E, filled in some flat-purchasing forms for the solicitor, phoned him and the surveyor (the latter an anxiety-inducing call to remind him we hadn’t got the survey yet), finally got the flat survey and read that and prepared a summary for E and my parents and discussed that… it was a lot. I probably won’t go to shul (synagogue) even though I don’t currently feel super-exhausted as I don’t want to make my energy levels worse.

My rabbi mentor was really helpful. I told him about the activity pie chart I posted here the other day. When I said religion and maintaining family relationships were only about 6% each, he suggested that I look at the emotional energy expended rather than time. I think this is what my therapist meant when she suggested this, although she didn’t put it in those words, but I found it hard to conceptualise and drifted into activity. If I look at emotional energy, I think maintaining family relationships is close to my original estimate of 30%, as I’m spending a lot of energy at the moment learning how to build a marriage with E, helping her with her anxieties and catastrophisation, dealing with my complicated relationships with my parents, smoothing over things between E and my parents, even worrying about my future relationship with E’s parents. (There is a lot more to say here, but I haven’t decided how much to share publicly, plus I’m running out of time before Shabbat). Religion might also be much higher, as I might be doing less religious activities, but I’m worrying about my religious life a lot and trying to focus energy on prayer where I can even if I can’t focus time on it, so that prayer can be quite tiring.

My rabbi mentor said that I need to focus on my relationship with E ahead of almost everything else (relationship with parents, religion). He suggested trying to get out more, even if just for a couple of hours, to get space and “us” time. I have also been trying to get more alone time, as I find I need that to function too. He said that I shouldn’t worry too much about dramatically cutting down formal religious time (prayer, Torah study) as I should focus on the “Living Torah” of relationships with E and my parents, ethics at work and in the street and so on. It was reassuring. As I’ve said before, though, it is hard to know what to prioritise, because so many things seem not just important, but absolutely important. Relationships with E and my parents are obviously absolutely important, but work seems like that (we need the money), religion (at least until my call today), then setting up proofreading work (to stop current work burnout), writing (as it gives me more energy in the long run). Writing and proofreading are drifting down the list now, though, and I’ve cut religion back.

Because of all of this, I’m going back on the higher dose of clomipramine that I was on until Monday (25mg in the morning and 50mg at night), which will hopefully halt my recent emotional decline. If not, I may boost it back up a bit. It’s depressing to think that I may be on psych drugs forever, but the alternative is worse.

Related to all of this, E said after she read my blog the other day that she understood how bad I feel more from blog, than from what I said in person. I can understand this. I probably do understate things in person, whether from English understatement, the fact that I’ve been socialised not to tell everyone how bad I feel, shame or a desire not to worry people, but also because I express emotions better in writing than in conversation. It’s not really a problem, it’s just a strange dynamic, but I guess our relationship has strange dynamics already, they just work for us.

The flat survey was mostly OK, by the way. A few things to fix, but most of them we already knew about and some we know are already being dealt with. So that’s another step closer to having our own place.

Posted on July 6, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 10 Comments

Not Fasting, Worried About Hypoglycaemia

Today was hard and I’m not quite sure why. It was a Jewish fast day (17 Tammuz) and they always seem difficult, even though I don’t fast on rabbinic fast days (i.e. all of them other than Yom Kippur) because I’m on lithium tablets. That in itself is extra problematic now, as I’m on lithium to treat depression/prevent relapse of depression, but I’m no longer sure how much of my experience was depression and how much was autistic burn out. I’m so far on about a third of the dose of clomipramine that I was on a few months ago with no apparent mood issues, despite major life changes. On the other hand, I cut olanzapine dramatically some time ago with no problems, but when I cut it out completely, my mood plummeted and the psychiatrist put me on a low maintenance dose. I haven’t tried cutting lithium yet. If I come off clomipramine completely without problems, I will probably go back to the doctor to talk about that, if only to stop needing the quarterly blood tests. So I feel a bit as if I’m not fasting under false pretences because the lithium may not be doing anything. But then I look at how badly I fast on Yom Kippur and how badly I used to fast on other fasts, and my sudden apparent drops in blood sugar on random days and wonder if I’m hypoglycaemic and whether I should even be fasting on Yom Kippur (see below for more on hypoglycaemia).

Work was dull. There was actually quite a bit to do, but it was still dull. I went to one of our other sites, but got stuck in traffic on the bus on the way home and my blood sugar dropped. It was lunchtime and I have early breakfast on work days, so it was about six hours since I had eaten. I didn’t have any food with me or my glucose tablets, because I didn’t expect this. This was what brought hypoglycaemia back to my mind. I looked into it a few months ago, but then I got married and E and I started flat-hunting and I forgot about it.

I feel I should look into it, but I also feel like I struggled to get my autism diagnosis and then I struggled to get my sleep issues taken seriously and diagnosed, so do I really want to start that process all over again for something else that is hard/impossible to really treat?

I work in a shul (synagogue) and they had early Minchah (Afternoon Prayers) because it was a fast day. I felt obliged to go even though part of me didn’t want to as I was worried they would call me to do something around the Torah reading and I would have to decline because I’m not fasting. I went. They called me, I declined, I thought they guessed I’m not fasting, but I was mostly OK with it, then a few minutes later they called me to do something else and I had to say, “You can’t call me to do anything today” which I thought made it very blatant. To be fair, the reality wasn’t as bad as I built it up in my head, but it was a bit awkward.

There was enough work today, unlike some days, but I ended up feeling very fed up and not sure why. I did start reading The Third Reich at War on my lunch break, which probably didn’t help, but I am trying to time it so I get to the chapter on the Holocaust in three weeks time for Tisha B’Av (the next fast). To do this I need to read about twelve pages a day.

After I’d got home and recovered somewhat from the day, I went on a call for a Facebook group I’m on for people who can’t relate to Jewish special days and festivals in the “normal”/expected way due to medical or health issues. This was focused on the fast, although I spoke a bit about the Three Weeks of national mourning from now until Tisha B’Av and how I relate to that with my history of depression and fears of burnout. It was really good to speak to people who have similar issues, even if not identical ones to my autistic issues in the frum (religious Jewish) community and some people suggested some good things. In particular, someone spoke of trying to find an equilibrium in religious observance which may not be where it was before diagnosis or awareness of my issues. I think “equilibrium” is actually a really good way to describe this process and is something to keep in mind as I struggle a lot with this.

***

My sleep apnoea mouth splint thing is here. I haven’t opened it yet, as I’ve just had too much going on, but I’m glad it’s here.

***

I am still struggling with the situation with E and my parents. She likes them, but finds their super-allistic (non-autistic ) ways difficult, particularly their long conversations focused on small talk, especially over meals, which then drag on and differences in taste in food (the latter is probably not autism related). It makes me realise how much I struggle with them. I feel like I try to assert boundaries with them sometimes and fail or upset them and then stop asserting the boundary from guilt or pity. I feel like my desire to please everyone means I often don’t care for myself at all, not just with family.

***

I have a wonderful wife. She read my post yesterday about the rare Doctor Who: The New Adventures spin-off novels from the 1990s and said that as the noise cancelling headphones she wants to buy me for my birthday are a fraction of the price she expected to spend even before accounting for the fact that my parents are joining with her in buying them, plus they’re a bit of a dull present (hopefully useful in dealing with sensory overload on my commute and maybe in the office, but not that exciting), she would buy me some second-hand rare Doctor Who novels as a supplementary present. She is amazing.

I found some relatively cheap copies of the (mostly) expensive Timewyrm sequence of books. They are relatively cheap because not in mint condition, but sound as good as any books on my shelves. For a librarian, I’m not always great at taking care of books. I can’t read them without them looking, well, read. I guess carrying them in rucksacks with lots of other things doesn’t help.

She also wants to read some of the New Adventures and now I don’t know where to suggest to start…

Posted on May 19, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 14 Comments

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.

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 17 Comments

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).

Posted on April 25, 2023 by Luftmentsch

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Posted on April 17, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

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.

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

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!

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Luftmentsch · 8 Comments

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.

Posted on March 16, 2023March 16, 2023 by Luftmentsch

Protected: Family Drama

Posted on March 15, 2023March 15, 2023 by Luftmentsch

Vision of the Night

Tag: depression

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Occam’s Razor