Posted on by Luftmentsch · 7 Comments

Some Stuff About The Mystery Health Condition, But Mostly Doctor Who

I’m not sure how much I will write tonight. I have a lot to say (although most of it not so germane to this blog’s focus), but am very tired and need to go to bed soon as I have to be up extra-early tomorrow morning for longer davening (prayers) before work.

I feel like I’ve spent more than half my life looking for an explanation for why I’m not functioning properly. When I was a teenager and slowly realising my “difference” without knowing why, I had a weird fantasy of having some physical illness, like a brain tumour that could be removed, and then I would be a better person, in all senses of the word.

A few years ago, autism seemed to explain most of what had happened from childhood onwards, but the hypersomnia (sleeping too much) and energy issues persisted, apparently explained by autistic exhaustion/burnout and medication side-effects and later by sleep apnoea. But now low energy is married to bouts of lightheadedness, occasional chest pains and weird feelings I can’t quite describe, like the blood draining from my face, and I wonder what is going on there. Sometimes it seems like a blood sugar level issue, like hypoglycaemia; other times like something else, such as heart disorder PoTS (or POTS, depending on what you think the acronym stands for).

I do need to see a doctor soon; I wish it wasn’t so hard to do so. I don’t know how much research to do. I’ve mentioned being afraid of hypochondria, but there is also the consideration that overworked NHS doctors will sometimes not listen well and assign the most obvious diagnosis without really paying attention. Having some idea of what you might have and advocating for it can be an advantage. At the same time, I suspect lots of doctors are resentful of their often irresponsible rival, Dr Google, who tends to over-diagnose rare and bizarre conditions, so I don’t want to walk in and say, “The internet says I have hypoglycaemia/PoTS.” It’s hard to know what to say when you need to manage your GP. My therapist suggested I lead with the chest pains and not the lightheadedness when I see the GP as they are more likely to take that seriously, even if it is the less regular symptom, which is probably true.

***

I feel like I haven’t done much yesterday or today, but the reality is that I probably did. I went to volunteering yesterday, albeit I got there late, partly because of the long davening, partly because I had another moment of lightheadedness on getting off the bus and had to stand at the bus stop for a minute to feel better. Nephew was around in the afternoon, in a better mood than when I last saw him, despite his cold. I spent a long time playing with him/looking after him, which was fun, although he wasn’t interested when I tried to feed him. He’s still wary of me (Mum is his favourite person around here), but he warmed to me over time and even asked me to pick him up again at one point after I put him down (when I write “asked”, I mean he put his arms in the air and cried until I picked him up again).

Today I wrote my first devar Torah (Torah thought) in over a year, for the next Torah cycle, starting Saturday week. I’m not that happy with it, but E liked it, so I’ll send it to my old devar Torah mailing list. It was painful to write. My mind wouldn’t focus and kept going to internet procrastination.

I also had therapy today. I wanted to speak about a bunch of different things that came up in the month since the last session (my therapist has been on holiday), but at the end, my therapist discerned a running theme about leaving other people’s opinions and expectations behind and focusing on my own experience/ life/marriage/relationship with God. I pointed out the obvious literal parallel with leaving my parents’ house (hopefully soon).

***

Facebook is now trying to get me to follow a group called “Farmers who are tired of defending their work to Vegans” (capitalisation as on the group, apparently Vegans are a nationality now. Or possibly an alien race). Their algorithm really doesn’t know what to do with me.

***

The rest of this post is Doctor Who:

E and I finished the early parts of The Trial of a Time Lord yesterday, AKA The Mysterious Planet. E liked it, which was a pleasant surprise for me, as it doesn’t have a great reputation. I think it’s a reasonable script that could have done with some polish. Writer Robert Holmes has a deserved reputation among fans as the greatest Doctor Who script writer of all time (he is also the most prolific writer of the original series, only beaten by Steven Moffat on the new series), but I think he was ill when he wrote this, with the liver disease that would kill him before he could complete work on the two-part finale to the season, and that probably explains the unfinished feel. There is a mini-theme in there about logic without either external evidence or compassion being useless, but it isn’t fully evoked, and Humker and Tandrell, who are supposed to epitomise this attitude, being played like characters from a much more immature children’s programme doesn’t help. The Tribe of the Free don’t feel fully integrated into proceedings either.

The production is sometimes at odds with the script, with the corridors of Marb Station and looking too clean and new (and also like cheap kids sci-fi). Possibly they wanted to contrast with the tunnels in the next segment of the season/story? Much the same could be said about clean and new-looking clothes worn by the Station’s inhabitants. Drathro is impressive, but doesn’t do much. The Tribe of the Free should be tied to the Marb Station inhabitants visually somehow, perhaps with vestiges of clothing, to visually reinforce the plot point that some of the Tribe have come from the Station.

Even so, it mostly hangs together as a traditional story with a twist and after a season that had seen the production team apparently forget how to make Doctor Who in favour of Doctor-companion bickering and ultra-violence, it’s good to get something that actually feels like competent Doctor Who back. Glitz and Dibber are traditional Robert Holmes semi-comic crooks, but with a level of casual violence (mostly off-screen, unlike the previous season) unseen in Vorg or Garron. They get a lot of the good lines and it’s no wonder Glitz would make two return appearances, one before the end of the season.

The big improvement is Colin Baker’s Doctor. People who say he only became a great Doctor with the Big Finish audio dramas are forgetting this season. He’s pompous, even arrogant at times, and does occasionally clash with Peri, but he actually comes across as a likeable person you would want to spend time with (which wasn’t always the case with his earlier stories), someone loud, yes, but loudly passionate in his enthusiasm about life, the world, knowledge, everything. Everything including that awful costume, apparently. I don’t know why they didn’t use the eighteen month hiatus as an excuse to ditch it. People criticise the coat, but it’s the Rupert the Bear yellow-with-black-stripes trousers that have always appalled me. The Valeyard is an appropriate foe for him, a dry as dust pen pusher, played memorably by Michael Jayston, but I’ll refrain from saying more about him now in case I review the series finale, where there is much more to say.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 2 Comments

Occam’s Razor

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 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 by Luftmentsch · 2 Comments

Rosh Hashanah and the Timewyrm

Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) was OK. I’ve had better, I’ve had worse. I hadn’t had one with E before, so that was good. I won’t do a detailed account as it’s late and, anyway, there’s not much to say. E and I were burnt out on the first day and spent most of it sleeping, eating or reading. I did daven (pray) a little, but I didn’t make it to shul (synagogue). I was too burnt out. Today was similar, except that E and I got to shul for the second half of the service this morning and heard the shofar (ram’s horn trumpet) which is the primary mitzvah (commandment) of the festival. I went to bed after lunch, but couldn’t sleep, instead lying there exhausted for an hour and a half. I do wonder if this is a kind of autistic shutdown.

There is a custom to eat various symbolic foods on the first night of Rosh Hashanah. My family has gradually increased the amount of types of symbolic foods we eat and we ate a lot this year. E read some historical notes on where the different customs come from (she’s really into food history, particularly Jewish food history) which my parents and I appreciated. It was fun, although it made the meal quite long and may have contributed to burnout the next day.

***

I’ve paused Harry Potter reading to read the rare Doctor Who – The New Adventures novels E bought me for my birthday. These were spin-off novels from the early nineties, when the TV programme had just been cancelled (or “indefinitely suspended,” whatever that meant). E bought me the first four books in the series, which form a sequence. I had heard that only books two and four were good, but it seemed silly to just get those, especially as one and three were much cheaper.

So far, the novels show the range finding its feet. The editorial line from the start was that the range would be aimed at an older audience than the TV series, late teens and twenties rather than a family audience, presumably because adults have more disposable income, but perhaps also because the TV audience was aging in the eighties and because the main editor, Peter Darvill-Evans, hoped to create a “serious” science fiction series rather than just a cheap tie-in range. To be fair, he eventually succeeded, but it took some time.

The first book, Timewyrm: Genesys (no idea what the mis-spelling is about) has a rather crude approach to an “adult” audience. It’s basically a straightforward, even clichéd, story set in ancient Mesopotamia, with cardboard characters and little to recommend it. Later historical New Adventures (as well as their sister range The Missing Adventures) would go all-out with research, with some authors even appending bibliographies at the back of their novels. Genesys author John Peel (not the DJ) seems to have started reading a book on ancient Mesopotamia, found out about sacred prostitution and then lost interest in everything else about the culture, just featuring a lot of smutty innuendo and nudity (although no actual sex). The book also made much of thirteen year old girls being considered old enough to consent to sex. Sometimes 1991 seems a very long time ago.

The Doctor Who TV stories of the late seventies (produced by Graham Williams) were attacked by much of fandom, including Peel, at the time of broadcast, as badly written, badly acted and generally stupid and silly, with too many bad jokes (none of these criticisms are valid, by the way. I really like these stories, which are clever, engaging and genuinely funny). Peel authored a lot of negative reviews of these stories for The Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s fanzine, TARDIS, which I suppose goes to show that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, or what goes around, comes around, or some other trite cliché about people getting what is coming to them when they criticise others.[1] I would watch any story from the late seventies, even Underworld (probably the worst, or at least most boring, story of the seventies), rather than read this book again. I basically ended up reading the book super-fast not because I was enjoying it, but because I wanted to get it over with.

So far the second book, Timewyrm: Exodus is a lot better. It’s yet another “What if the Nazis won World War II?” story and probably too light in tone for the subject matter, but at least it’s a fast read in a good way. I’m about a third of the way through after about two hours of reading and it doesn’t feel painful, clichéd and boring the way Genesys did, even if author Terence Dicks (who worked in one capacity or another on numerous TV Doctor Who stories, but never with the seventh Doctor before this) has a rather shaky grasp of the characters of the seventh Doctor and Ace. Actually, he still writes them better than Peel did.

[1] Yes, I know that if I ever succeed in publishing anything, my negative reviews of Russell T Davies stories, and David Tennant’s SHOUTY EMOTING will come back to haunt me, even if no one else notices.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 4 Comments

Disagreements

The last few days have been hard. We had two new volunteers at volunteering on Tuesday, which was difficult because not only did it trigger my autistic and social anxiety “New scenario! New people!” worries, it messed up our workflow. We’ve got the perishable food packing down to a fine art with three people; with five, it becomes too crowded in a small corner of the garage and we were tripping over each other. There was also another issue I won’t go into now.

I did get to see Nephew for a while on Tuesday afternoon as my parents were babysitting him here, as they will be on Tuesdays from now on. He still seems puzzled by who E and I are, but at least he didn’t burst into tears when he saw us and I did get a bit of a hug. I got a headache afterwards, which was probably largely from the heat as we’re having another heatwave. I got another headache today.

E and I have seen a few flats in the last few days, including one that we like. REALLY like. Even more than the death trap flat. Unfortunately (a) it’s right at the top of our budget range and (b) it’s leasehold and the lease has less than ninety years on it. To explain to non-UK residents, property in the UK is sold freehold or leasehold. Freehold property means you own the building and the land it stands on; leasehold means you own the building or flat, but not the land. The land is leased on a long lease, generally more than 100 years and sometimes as much as 999 years. However, anything under eighty years is considered a “short lease” and the property on it is hard to sell as banks won’t mortgage it. This means the flat will be hard to resell unless we extend the lease, which is expensive and time-consuming. Eighty years sounds long for a “short lease,” but it’s a problem because the landowner gets much more money if the lease is extended with fewer than eighty years left to run.

This may work in our favour, as we can try to use it to negotiate a lower price and see the lease extension as a deferred cost to when we have saved more. We are expecting to be in the flat for at least five years, so having to stay for three years to extend the lease shouldn’t be a problem (you need to live in a flat for two years before you can begin the extension process, then it can take up to a year to extend).

So it is all up in the air at the moment, which isn’t good for my anxiety or my autism. Brother-in-law, who is a surveyor, has been helpful and he sees this as an opportunity for us more than a problem. I have thrown myself into research about leases and extensions, which I guess is an advantage of autism – I am now the family “expert” (if that means anything).

There were a number of other difficulties in the last few days that I won’t mention, plus I had to do the Very Scary Task at work today (E thought it was unfair of J to throw this at me when I’ve just done it twice while he was on holiday). I felt pretty bad doing the VST today, both physically and emotionally. I felt faint before lunch and lightheaded straight afterwards. This might indicate that the faintness isn’t physical, or not just physical. I did feel awful this afternoon although it was hard to tell if I felt I was close to shutdown, burnout, meltdown or all three.

I have noticed my nervous eyelid twitch (always the lower left eyelid) has returned lately, a couple of weeks ago (before this flat appeared). It’s not a huge problem, although it’s slightly irritating, except that it can presage worse tremor and it seems to be happening all the time, even when I’m alone, whereas previously it was linked specifically social anxiety and only appeared in social situations.

***

I wish I was better at accepting that other people will not always agree with me. I just assume they’ll hate me and not want to have anything more to do with me. I know where this comes from, in terms of childhood events, but it’s really difficult that I’ve never found a way to deal with it, especially when I need reassurance from E that she won’t leave me when we disagree about something. It’s particularly a problem as I try to be a somewhat original thinker and I don’t quite fit religious and political moulds (or so I’d like to think, anyway).

It’s particularly hard disagreeing with my parents, as I’ve lived with them and had them as my main emotional support for so long, but really hearing anyone disagreeing with me, even if I know they have no expertise in the matter or don’t know me or the situation in question, upsets me and sends me into a doom spiral of self-questioning (not in a good, self-aware, way, just in a panicked, insecure, way).

This is connected with the idea of autistic unmasking and wanting to be more authentic in my relationships. “More authentic” (rather than “silent” or “mirroring what other people think”) means some people won’t like the thoughts I express and will probably leave me. That sounds OK on paper, but is very difficult in practice.

The Kotzker Rebbe said that just as you can accept that other people’s faces are different to yours, so you should accept that other people’s thoughts are different to yours, but somehow the latter seems harder. I always assumed that that quote was about accepting other people’s thoughts, but now I realise it’s just as much about accepting your own.

I feel like I need some kind of algorithm [1] to judge how much weight to accord to other people’s opinions, based on whether I actually asked for their advice, how well they know me and my situation and how relevant their expertise is. I also feel upset that in my family (excluding E), I feel that I’m the “idiot child” who people advise, but never seek advice from. The only exception is Jewish things, where I worry they assume I know more than I do.

[1] Yes, I’m autistic.

***

Facebook showed me a screenshot of a meme with someone (I don’t know who, I don’t know three-quarters of the “famous” people Facebook assumes I know) saying “Are you ready to rock… yourself back and forth in the shower while crying?” and underneath was a comment thread saying “The motto of the Supernatural fandom… and the Sherlock fandom… and the Doctor Who fandom. Don’t you mean Every. Fandom. Ever.” (I’ve altered punctuation slightly).

Aside from the fact that I don’t think Sherlock was that sad (and the original stories generally weren’t either)… doesn’t anyone else miss when Doctor Who, and popular culture in general, was supposed to be fun? In the original run of Doctor Who, a few stories were sad, and most had sad moments, but overall most stories were escapist entertainment. A while back I made that list I threatened to make fore ranking Doctor Who stories on how depressing they were. Aside from the brief producership of John Wiles for around 1965, almost all Doctor Who stories of the sixties and seventies were basically fun to watch and the programme’s decline in the mid-eighties probably correlates with the decision to make the programme more “serious” (read: miserable). But the modern series seems to think it’s failed if it hasn’t produced a couple of thoroughly miserable stories a year.  I don’t get it. Doctor Who is not Greek tragedy. It’s family entertainment. It can deal with big themes and sad events, but it shouldn’t feel like a chore to watch.

Posted on 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.