Being Seen at Volunteering, Flat-Hunting and Jewish Pride

Yesterday I went to volunteering for the first time in over a month. I missed a lot of sessions due to having to work on Tuesdays as a result of bank holidays falling on Mondays as well as a result of the wedding. After the volunteering session, there was a lunch for volunteers as a thank you from the organisation that runs the food bank. The paid staff we work with came, which I expected, but also the CEO of the whole organisation, which I did not expect. It’s a very big organisation and the food bank is just a part of it; indeed, even all the volunteering taken together is just a part of it, albeit a big part.

The CEO asked us all to say how we ended up volunteering. I was interested to see that so many people started because they were made unemployed during COVID. It was a bit of a relief to see it wasn’t just me! Of course, as most of these people are twenty or more years older than me, they saw unemployment as early retirement, which obviously wasn’t an option for me, but it’s interesting that I needn’t have been so ashamed of being unemployed when I started volunteering.

I did find the lunch a bit nerve-wracking, as there were a number of people there I didn’t know, and I didn’t actually say much, but I did feel accepted, even more so when I stayed afterwards for Minchah (Afternoon Prayers) on site and a couple of the rabbis present spoke to me. I think the paid staff said that the volunteers are a core part of the team even though we aren’t paid and one of the volunteers said the paid staff do spend a lot of time helping us in a hands-on way; they don’t treat us as menial workers that to whom they are superior by virtue of being paid.

It’s strange that we speak so much nowadays about wanting to “be seen” in the fiction we consume. I could probably write an ssay about that outlook and the problems with it, but I did feel seen here. Interestingly, I do not find feeling seen to be a wholly pleasurable or satisfactory experience. It is good to have one’s good work acknowledged and be thanked and praised, but, perhaps from social anxiety and low self-esteem, I feel discomfort whenever this happens, perhaps a feeling of not deserving praise, but perhaps just a feeling of awkwardness at being the centre of attention, of wanting to be invisible (the opposite of being seen).

At Minchah I ran into an old Oxford peer of mine who works for the organisation. I run into him every couple of years. He’s a nice person, but usually I feel awkward at not being “good enough” since leaving Oxford, but this time I made myself have a proper chat with him, and enjoyed it. E asked me if I would like to renew the friendship with him properly and I think I would, if I ever get the opportunity.

***

Flat-hunting news: E and I are edging closer to making an offer for the flat we liked. We saw a couple more flats today and really did not like them. It made us more certain that the first flat we saw really was excellent, not just better than everything else we’ve seen, but extremely good in its own right. I spoke a little bit about it in therapy today. I didn’t really come to any new conclusions there, but I realised that I was talking enthusiastically about it, not reluctantly as a “least worst” option, but somewhere where I think E and I could be happy despite the building work. The slight worry is, having found the planning documents online, we fear that further building work may follow one day, but as E and I both said, you could move anywhere and end up living with building work, either in that block of flats or even next-door, where you have no control whatsoever.

Estate agents annoy me, though. One who phoned me yesterday kept using the first person plural: “Where do we want to live?” I’m sorry, you aren’t going to be living with us! Then he asked why we were limiting our search to two specific areas. As I didn’t want to tell him everything about our religious and financial situation, I shut that down quickly, but I thought it was rude of him. Then, of course, there are those who try the hard sell, which is just annoying, but which sadly covers most of them. I guess it’s their job, but it’s still annoying.

***

While hanging around between flat viewings today, E and I had time for some charity shop browsing. E found me two of the three James Bond novels I don’t own! (The Ian Fleming ones, not the later books written by other writers.) She seems to be getting good at plugging gaps in my various collections. The books were Casino Royale and Diamonds are Forever, for those interested. The one I’m still looking for is The Man with the Golden Gun.

***

Pride Month always sparks a lot of thoughts in my head every June. I could probably write an essay about this too, but one thing I always think about is what would it take for society/businesses/media/etc. to spend even one day saying how much Jews have contributed to the world, how much Jews enrich society, how glad they are to welcome us and accept us and so on. I’m not into competitive victimhood, but I think it’s fair to say that Jews have been at least as persecuted in the Western and Middle Eastern worlds as LGBT people, yet we have contributed a huge amount, from the religious and moral structure that still underpins much of the world to a vastly disproportionate number of Nobel Prize winners and other scientific and cultural geniuses (the famous statistic is that Jews constitute about 0.2% of the world’s population, yet about 20% of all Nobel Prize winners. Even Richard Dawkins finds this weird).

It’s hard to imagine it happening, though. The reality is that most LGBT people are perfectly normal, from a secular Western point of view, and therefore “safe” to welcome, whereas welcoming Jews would raise hard questions about the counter-cultural nature of so much of Jewish life, religion, Israel and so on. But that does raise the question whether tolerance for people who are pretty much exactly like you is really tolerance? I think this about a lot of things in our society, but Pride Month makes it very obvious, at least in the UK, which is pretty tolerant of LGBT rights. I know it’s different in parts of the USA where people protest Pride Month and perhaps it is a more meaningful event there. Here it’s just an excuse for big business to portray itself as socially aware by putting some rainbow flags in the window without doing anything that might actually cost it money, like paying workers more or checking that supply chains are free from slavery.

Beating Myself Up

I feel exhausted today. I’m not sure if I’m going to shul (synagogue) tonight, especially as E would like me to go with her tomorrow morning. I’m not sure I have the energy to go twice in fifteen or so hours. I feel like I get exhausted too easily. I know I’m autistic, but I still have stuff to do. I’m worried about the peopling I have to do in the next week or so and might have to skip some of it. E says I can, which is good, but I don’t want to unless I have to. On the plus side, we are getting married in ten days!

We are mostly there with the preparation. E and I collected the wedding rings today and E took her wedding dress to be adjusted to make it less revealing. E has really struggled to find something that (a) she likes that and is in her style, that is (b) is suitable for an Orthodox Jewish wedding and (c) in her price range. She got very frustrated about the fact that even dresses that are very modest in most ways seem to always have one “sexy” feature inappropriate for an Orthodox wedding, like no back or low cleavage. She can’t see the point of it. Unfortunately, because we are moving quickly from E moving to the UK to the wedding, and because E didn’t want to get a dress in the US and bring it over, E has been doing this to a tight deadline and with little time for alterations and definitely no time for a tailor-made dress.

***

I said something stupid the other day and I can’t stop thinking about it. I also said some stupid things when collecting the wedding rings from the jeweller just now. (I was very anxious, but I’m not sure what was cause and what was effect there.) This is where autistic monotropic focus (intense focus on one thing) is awful. I just focus on mistakes and beat myself up for things that were not that serious. My therapist told me to be kind to self the other day, but I struggle to do that.

On the autism forum (which I seem to have gone back to, at least until there is more drama), someone asked what advice you would give your younger self. I said, “I’d say ‘Accept you’re not perfect and don’t beat yourself up about everything. Also, accept you’re autistic and be realistic in your personal goals.’ But I still need to make myself understand those things as my current self, so I’m not sure what my younger self would make of them.”

I was also thinking about feeling inadequate compared to other Orthodox Jews. I feel I don’t daven (pray) or study Torah enough, either quantatively, in terms of time spent, or qualitatively, in terms of things like praying at shul rather than at home or studying Talmud instead of Tanakh. But then I was thinking about a recent argument on the Orthodox Conundrum Facebook group about whether all Jews should live in Israel and it seemed very obvious to me that God doesn’t automatically think that I’m religiously inferior to another Jew just because I don’t fulfil the commandment to live in the land of Israel and they do. So it seems I don’t automatically feel inferior to other Jews, just about certain things. In fact, I even felt that God doesn’t really see people in terms of superior/inferior, but then I realised that I don’t always act like that is true, I think I’m meaningfully inferior.

Overwhelm and Incompetence

Today was a bad day really from before I actually woke up. I awoke from a bad dream. I can’t remember it now, but I was feeling quite disturbed for a while. I remember thinking that my unconscious seems to have a better imagination than my conscious mind and that I need to find a way to tap into it. Then again, most of the dreams I remember are completely incoherent, so maybe not. I did feel quite anxious, although I felt better after eating breakfast.

I had to do the Very Scary Task again at work. I realised that the difficulty with this is only partly social anxiety. A lot is struggling to process what is said to me on phone and to deal with questions on the spot, as well as the fact that I still struggle to remember all the procedure, for reasons that I am unsure of (possibly some kind of psychological block on something I find frightening).

I also had to deal with other phone calls, a LOT of noise (building works in our building and one nearby, plus a group of schoolchildren visiting the building – not our office, but we could hear them) and various other issues I won’t go into here. At one point, I lost Wi-Fi and it took me a while to realise it had spontaneously switched to flight mode (or I had accidentally switched it somehow). I went to the bank, but was too overwhelmed by the people on one of the busiest streets in London. By the afternoon, the phone ringing was making me jump and even the printer was too loud. I felt overwhelmed and wanted to hide in the toilet, although I didn’t.

I did manage to go to the opticians after work and try to get new lenses in my spare glasses (I’ll get my main pair done afterwards). There was noise and it was very busy. I felt didn’t cope, but I got through it, so I guess I did cope.

I did manage to spend a lot of time decompressing when I got home without screens and that really seemed to help me feel better.

***

I spent some time today thinking that J must think I’m incompetent. It’s not just the mistakes I make (although there are a lot), but the hesitations, uncertainty and checking. If he asks me something, I answer positively, but then I worry if that was right and start to sound uncertain, so I then go and double-check, which looks unprofessional, even if I had answered correctly first time.  Work today just felt impossible and I remembered my boss in my further education library job who more or less told me that I wasn’t good enough.

This then spilled into wondering how I can get married when I feel I won’t contribute enough to the household. I don’t mind that E earns more than me, but I wish I earned more than I do. I really need to get some more proofreading work (which reminds me that I need to check I’ve been paid for the work I did, and to try to get a review for it). I know E loves me and wants to marry me anyway, but I still wish we were more financially secure.

This all led on to wondering if I should tell J that I struggle at work or ask for adjustments. J knows I’m autistic. If you recall, I had an article about being autistic in the Orthodox Jewish community published on a Jewish website, under my own name and with photos of me. I wasn’t so keen on the photos bit, but it is standard on that site for those kind of personal story essays. I didn’t think anything more of it, but about a day later J texted me to say he’d seen it. I had stupidly forgotten something that I say a lot, which is that the Jewish community is very small and we all know each other (J wasn’t the only person I knew to see it, but I still think it was the right decision).

The problem is that I don’t know what reasonable adjustments I could ask for. I don’t think it would be reasonable to ask to be excused from speaking to people on the phone or doing the Very Scary Task. They are too important for me not to do and the Very Scary Task only comes around infrequently (and I am slowly getting more adjusted to it). I’m not sure what exactly my problem is, just that often everything feels very overwhelming. I am still thinking about asking to work later in exchange for a mid-afternoon break.

***

The other thing I kept thinking about today is that I want help people, but I’m not very good at it. I don’t really want to go into detail about this here, though. Years ago a psychiatrist told me that I want to help, but I can’t because I don’t understand people and I think she said I never will and I just need to accept it (I wasn’t even known to be autistic at that stage). That feels very true, sadly. I guess E is the right person for me because I can understand her enough to give her what she needs.

***

I listened again to Burt Bacharach’s upbeat theme tune to Casino Royale – not the Daniel Craig film, but the largely forgotten 1967 spoof. I did this because I saw that he had died, and this is the only song of his I really know. Casino Royale is mostly awful, but I really like the theme, corny 60s tune though it is. If I was the kind of person who knew how to edit video and had a flagrant disregard for copyright, I would set the grim violence of the Daniel Craig Casino Royale to the jaunty 1967 Casino Royale theme. “He’s gonna save the world at Casino Royale!”

Autistic Exhaustion in the Frum Community

I feel like I’m on the brink of autistic exhaustion today. I got up at about 10.40am even though I felt really tired, because I knew the Tesco order was about to come and I had to be ready. It’s supposed to come between 11am and 12pm, but it always comes fifteen or twenty minutes early. I don’ t know why. Perhaps there are a lot of other people around here who have an order between 10am and 11am every week. Bending down a lot to unpack the crates made me feel ill from low blood pressure. I had breakfast, but went back to bed for a ten or fifteen minutes afterwards as I still felt bad. I’m not sure if it was shifting into autistic exhaustion by this stage, as one of the weird symptoms I get of that is a ‘head rush’-type feeling like getting up too fast with low blood pressure. By lunchtime, I was still feeling very drained and struggling to do anything. Maybe I did more yesterday than I thought, or maybe it just took more out of me because so much of it was social (volunteering, wedding planning Zoom call). I had to go for an eye test (see below) and didn’t do much else. I had some wedding conversations with my parents and with E and did some Torah study and one or two small chores, but that was about it.

My eye test was OK. My eyes are healthy, but I need new lenses, which might make The Guide for the Perplexed easier to read (if not understand). In retrospect, my eyes probably have been strained a bit recently, but I put it down to not polishing my glasses efficiently, which is actually a really weird thing to think.

I feel like I’ve been a bit spendthrift recently. Over the last few days, aside from wedding Daleks, I’ve bought the CD The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (I’m getting into The Kinks at the moment. I don’t think they were better than The Beatles, but I think they did some things better than The Beatles), the DVD of the 1960s BBC science fiction thriller Undermind (as part of my apparent attempt to watch all surviving British TV science fiction of the 50s, 60s and 70s), the final Harry Potter book and a large-format Doctor Who coffee table-type book. I didn’t spend a lot of money; the most expensive were Harry Potter (£4) and Undermind (a few pence more), but I feel vaguely materialistic, and I probably shouldn’t be buying books when I have so many still to read.

When I got home, I discovered I had been under-charged for the Doctor Who book. Most hardbacks in the charity shop are £2.50, but this had a sticker saying it was £4. Neither I nor the woman serving me noticed this, as the sticker had been stuck, upside-down, on the back, instead of the front as is normal. I’m not sure what to do. It’s only £1.50, and usually I wouldn’t care, but it was a charity shop and it feels vaguely like robbing the poor. I feel I should make an extra donation, but I don’t know that I would have bought the book if I knew it was £4 and I don’t want to guilt myself into paying it.

***

I posted this on a Jewish autistic Facebook group:

This is really a sequel to [redacted] post about being hard on ourselves from a couple of days ago. I beat myself up a LOT. Today I am struggling with autistic exhaustion and don’t really want to do much. Yesterday wasn’t particularly busy, but did feature quite a lot of social interactions and that is probably what exhausted me. But I find it hard to give myself a break about it, just adding to the exhaustion by piling on self-blame. I often struggle with autistic exhaustion and it holds me back from a lot of things, as do social anxiety and difficulty ‘peopling.’

I find I beat myself up most about religious stuff. I criticise myself for not doing enough Torah study, and not enough Talmud in particular. I criticise myself for mostly davening at home and davening a very cut down Shacharit, even though these have contributed to a significant improvement in my concentration while davening. I have a general sense of being a Bad Jew, which I guess comes partly from feeling I missed so many stereotypical frum life experiences and never having really fitted into a frum community as well as these autistic issues.

The other week I emailed the Maaglei Nefesh support email. (They’re an organisation that provides support about mental health-related halakhic issues from rabbis with mental health training.) I said that I know autism isn’t a mental illness, but I don’t know where to turn. I said more or less what I said here. I was told that if I feel exhausted or overwhelmed, then I shouldn’t feel obliged to go to shul or do other social-related mitzvot, and I shouldn’t feel pressured to do mitzvot generally that I feel my autism prevents me from doing. I found this helpful, but as the exemptions mostly depended on feeling exhausted or overwhelmed, I just know I’ll end up thinking “am I feeling exhausted/overwhelmed *enough* to consider myself exempt?” To be fair, the rabbi said I could email back with more specific questions, which I may do, but I’m struggling to formulate anything more specific than a near-constant feeling of exhaustion and overwhelm.

Does this resonate with anyone? Please tell me I’m not alone!

I got a couple of responses, which is good, although no one really has a solution. At least I know I’m not alone…

Ignorami

I wasn’t going to do a daily post today, as not a lot happened. I went to volunteering, then slumped a bit in the afternoon, as has happened recently after volunteering, not so much in mood as in energy. I think volunteering uses a lot of energy, particularly when we’re doing it in the cold in the garage. I had six layers on today (undershirt, tzitzit, polo shirt, jumper, fleece, coat, plus gloves and scarf) and didn’t feel hot until I came into the building for the coffee break.

I spoke to E about wedding stuff in the afternoon and then cooked dinner, badly. We had run out of turmeric. We didn’t have ordinary-sized onions either; I meant to use two small, but forgot about the second one. It was actually OK taste-wise, but was more liquid than it could have been.

The reason I’m writing is that while I was cooking, I listened to a recent Orthodox Conundrum podcast, about a rabbi who died a couple of weeks ago who was a pioneering teacher of women’s Talmud. Traditionally, women were not taught Talmud at all. The podcast was interesting, but it just reinforced my feelings that I am a bad Jew for not having gone to yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) and not knowing how to study Talmud properly, and also that I will never be accepted by the frum (religious Jewish) community for never having been to yeshivah and being unable to study Talmud properly. I appreciate that these are two different feelings (1) I am a bad Jew; (2) the community will not accept me.

I’m not sure how to deal with the first feeling. I think deep down I know that I’m not the worst possible Jew. I at least try to be a good Jew. But the second feeling is really bothering me. I guess at a certain point it starts reinforcing the first feeling, so the two are linked. Status for men in the frum community is linked so much to Talmudic study and I struggle with that. I find it ridiculous that in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, an honest person who isn’t a great scholar is low status, whereas someone who cheated on their rabbinical exams, committed massive fraud or is a prolific child abuser can be considered a great tzaddik (saint) (all examples taken from real life, sadly). I don’t really want to be a part of a community that has those warped priorities and the Modern Orthodox community does at least seem to be waking up to the reality of these kinds of abuses. But that just brings the alternative problem of still not feeling accepted.

I don’t know how much of this is my paranoia colouring my experiences. I’ve struggled to fit in, but maybe that’s because of autism as much as lack of yeshivah study and Talmud knowledge. I wrote at length here about some examples, but on re-reading, they don’t really prove my point and I deleted them. They were times I felt that I didn’t fit in to the frum community, but there was no evidence that the other people involved were judging me negatively (although I’m pretty sure one was), let alone why they might have been doing that. Maybe people don’t care that I didn’t go to yeshivah, they just struggle to understand who I am because my autism stops me participating in the community in the usual ways and I sometimes come across as weird in real life. Even so, I feel isolated. I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter if they don’t like me because I didn’t go to yeshivah or they don’t like me because my autism stops me communicating with them or connecting with them in the usual ways. The fact is, I can’t communicate with them and they don’t like me.

It did occur to me after writing the above that, when I lived in a not-so frum community, I was able to lead services and give Torah speeches and that did seem to raise my status in the community, although I don’t know if they were responding to my knowledge or to the fact that I was helping the community.

I guess I feel that I want someone to give me a medal and reassure me that I’m a good person/Jew. I shouldn’t rely on other people for my self-esteem, which is easy to write and hard to do. How do you even change something like that? E thinks I’m more than OK, and I think that does make me need external validation less than I used to, but the feeling is still there.

Anyway, I was supposed to write this quickly to off-load, and it took over an hour, and I feel like I’ve not done enough today… We did have a long Zoom meeting this evening between E, my parents, E’s mother and myself talking about wedding stuff. It lasted an hour and a half and E and I continued talking and texting about it for quite a while afterwards. I found it pretty draining. I also confirmed that I don’t have strong opinions about a lot of wedding-related decisions, but I do have strong opinions about one or two surprising things. So, I guess that was something else I did, but I didn’t have time to set up another freelance proofreader profile or to work on my novel, two things that are secondary to the wedding right now.

***

I don’t want to discuss politics, but the Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said, “The question the people of our country are now asking is: are me and my family better off after thirteen years of Conservative government?”

Surely it should be “are my family and I better off…”? Am I being pedantic? I don’t know about Labour’s economic policy, but I don’t trust their education policy.

***

Facebook is showing me adverts for a sofa company that offer “Free Staingard” (whatever that is), which my addled brain read as “Free Stalingrad”. As Monty Python said, “You wouldn’t have much fun in Stalingrad.”

Sainthood Is Not In Your Future

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper

Work was slow again today. I made mistakes again. I tell myself that it’s because of autistic executive function and sensory processing issues, which it sort of is, but I worry that it’s also due to laziness or carelessness, which it might also be. I’m not sure what I can really do about it at the moment. J doesn’t criticise me, I just feel stupid. One of the reasons I’m sticking with this job is having a boss who is pretty unflappable and points out my mistakes without anger or even agitation when he probably is entitled to some.

I learnt, from the YouTube lecture I watched about autistic burnout the other day, the different between self-esteem and self-efficacy. (I feel that Ashley wrote about this ages ago and I didn’t take it in.) Self-esteem is about feeling a worthwhile person, whereas self-efficacy is about feeling capable of doing things. For a long time, I didn’t have either. Lately, I feel some small rise in self-esteem. E has made me think that I might just possibly be a good person, both in the abstract and compared to most people. I feel like I do at least try to be a good person and a good Jew (as well as a good son, brother, husband, friend, etc.) even if I don’t always succeed. But I really struggle to believe that I can do anything well or even competently at the moment.

Just as a quick aside, today I more or less confirmed a little link between Doctor Who and the organisation I work for. It’s a very slight thing and doesn’t really connect with me, but it made me happy.

***

I had a silly thought the other day, thinking about things I’ve written about here lately. If you had asked me what my interests were when I was eight or nine years old, I would probably have said history, reading, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Batman, James Bond. If you ask me nowadays, the list would be similar. I am still interested in history, although I’m more interested in specifically Jewish history as well as Jewish religious thought, which I wasn’t so aware of age eight (I mean, I knew Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) stories and we kept various traditions, but I had a lot still to learn). I still read a lot (although less now I have less free time and energy). I am still interested in Doctor Who, Ghostbusters and James Bond, although I drifted out of Batman a while back (the recent stories became full of graphic, brutal, realistic violence, which is not what I read it for). Of course, I’m being slightly facetious, as I have other interests now too (e.g. many other science fiction TV programmes or the George Smiley novels), and Ghostbusters is a lot less of an interest; I just mentioned it because I watched it the other day and I’m hoping to watch the other films in the coming days. And many of these interests went out of my life for a number of years and then came back, which I find a little strange and which is what triggered me to write this. I don’t know why I keep returning to the same interests. Of course, repetitive and focused interests are a part of autism, but many autistics change interests over time, and I think my interests are somewhat wider than most.

***

As Lancelot did for Guinevere, Romeo for Juliet and Abelard for Heloise, I recently showed E my undying love for her by making her a playlist (OK, those Medieval lovers probably made mix tapes as Spotify wasn’t invented yet). It’s a mixture of songs that I think relate to the complicated story of how we got together, plus some mushy love songs that I love. It starts with Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon, which I think of as “our” song (because of the sentiments and not because it’s the theme tune to an excellent James Bond film). It finishes with I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper by Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip[1] as an ironic commentary on my geekiness and not because I think it’s a great song or anything (I secretly think it’s a great song, but don’t tell anyone). In between are songs from ELO, The Beatles, Slade, Elton John, The Beach Boys, Billy Joel, The Kinks, Madness, Roy Orbison, Fox, Sting, Lou Reed, The Hollies and Ace of Base. Also, the Doctor Who theme tune, because watching Doctor Who together is a big part of our relationship.

I think E was a bit shocked by my musical taste: eclectic, but dated (bear in mind I’m not quite forty yet, but most of this music is rather older), although the only thing she vocalised astonishment about was the inclusion of two Ace of Base songs. I’m not really into Ace of Base, but these two songs do make me think about things from our romantic history. But she liked the playlist overall, which was good. I really like it and have played it the whole way through several times already. It makes me think of E when I’m struggling with being long-distance.

[1] Possibly I should explain to non-British readers and anyone under the age of fifty (excluding me) that, in the late 1970s, the dominance of disco in music and Star Wars in the cinema led to the “space disco” sub-genre (as well as disco traits appearing in science fiction e.g. the dreadlocked Movellan robots in Doctor Who’s Destiny of the Daleks). Although seeming at first like a cheeky Star Wars cash-in I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper is actually a fairly clever song with references to a lot of different science fiction franchises in both lyrics and music, and a very catchy beat.

More Shoulds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survival of the Normalest

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

Grief and Autistic Halakhah

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

Overthinking Character Traits and Novel Research

This is another post salvaged from being eaten by WordPress by copying and pasting into a Word document and then back into WP. This sometimes ruins the formatting; I’m sorry if it does that, but I don’t have the time/energy to sort it. I got up early for volunteering. I really wanted to stay in bed, but I needed to go to health and safety training for volunteering. I struggled to work out if I was feeling well enough after yesterday, but decided I did. When I got to the bus stop, I received a text from the person who coordinates volunteering (I’ll call her N) saying that we should bring photo ID to get into the building for the health and safety talk (usually we’re in the garage and don’t need to go past security). In addition, it quickly became apparent that there were bus delays. Other people at volunteering who get the same bus think that they quietly run fewer buses during half-term week; I don’t know if that’s true, but we had the same trouble last time it was half-term too. I phoned my Mum to ask what she thought I should do and she suggested I walk back home and she would give me a lift (I was already going to be late at this stage). As I walked back, I felt lightheaded again. It did seem to be linked strongly to the ID/bus stress. In the end, I got to the training half an hour late, but once I was there, the lightheadedness stopped. Training and volunteering itself were fine (although I did wonder a bit if we really needed a whole hour to tell us how to pick boxes up from the floor safely), but I left before coffee. I thought there would be no coffee this week because people had had it during the health and safety training and decided I would just go home after finishing my usual tasks. The coordinator said there was going to be coffee, but autistic rigidity took over and I “couldn’t compute” the change of plan and went home without really understanding why. This behaviour is frustrating. Even when I do it, I can see myself doing it and know why I’m doing it, and still can’t change it. I felt lightheaded again on the way home, but on this occasion it may have been travel sickness from reading on the bus. *** I sorted the business with the fine for the late submission of my tax return. It turns out that my tax return was late. I feel stupid about this, although I know it’s not exactly my fault; people I thought I could trust told me the deadline was different to what it was. I do still feel like I’m The Autistic Person Who Can’t Cope With Life though. I guess the lesson is: don’t trust people, look everything up yourself. To be fair to myself, there was a whole complicated question about whether I even needed to submit a tax return for that tax year, owing to a complicated work situation, so I should forgive myself a bit. *** Afterwards, I worked on my novel for an hour or so for the first time in a couple of months. I didn’t write anything, just worked on my plan, as since I last worked on it, I’ve decided I need to make some big changes to parts of it (the plan). This took longer than expected and I haven’t finished it yet. This was partly due to procrastination, but also due to lightheadedness, possibly triggered by the stress of feeling that changing the plan is a bigger task than I anticipated. *** Lately I’ve been catching myself with a lot of negative self-talk and inner criticism. I can’t work out if I’m criticising myself more or if I am just more aware of it. Is it good or bad? Bad that I’m doing it more or good that I’m catching it and trying to stop the thoughts. I think I’ve been avoiding getting stuck in those thoughts, even with things like the tax return today. *** I’ve said that I feel I have disadvantages and problems from being autistic, but that I don’t have the positive traits that other autistics say they have. I still think this is mostly true, but I’m not sure if it’s completely true. I certainly do blame autism for some of my shortcomings. But I wonder if I’m reluctant to attribute my positive traits to autism for fear that that would mean they are no longer my achievements, but just flukes. My character trait that I value most strongly is my integrity. During years of burnout/depression where I didn’t have a job or a relationship or many friends, I did at least value my integrity and think that God would value it too. Some would say that that kind of integrity comes from an autistic rigidity and unwillingness to break rules. That may be true. Does that mean that my integrity is not my own achievement, or that God will not value it? There is a Jewish idea that God determines everything about a person except whether they will be good or bad. That would seem to indicate that my integrity is my own achievement, yet it does seem influenced (at least) by my autism. Is this just another element of the problem of free will? After all, everyone’s morality is influenced by their environment to some extent. How guilty is a kleptomaniac? Conversely, it’s much easier not to steal if you are not homeless and hungry. Does being autistic mean I’m a less good person because integrity comes more naturally to me or not? It’s tricky. *** One thing I’m dealing with, in the context of my novel about a pornography addict, is wondering whether, or how much, I need to engage with the academic discussion around whether pornography addiction is real, or if behavioural addictions in general are really addictions in the sense that substance addictions like alcoholism are. I feel like if I don’t do some research and put something into the novel that shows I’m aware of the controversy for and against, I will get called out, but I’m not sure how relevant it really is to the narrative. From my point of view, the fact that I’m writing about a pornography addict pretty much shows that I’m at least open to the idea that it’s an addiction. I also don’t know how much research is “enough.” I don’t want to do a psychology PhD just to write my story! But I also don’t want to be accused of pushing particular views or treatment modalities when that isn’t really my intention. This has come to my attention again since seeing a post on Facebook a while back shared by someone I respect, a couples therapist. The post she shared was written by different couples therapist and argued that pornography addiction isn’t a true addiction. Unfortunately, the author seemed to have his own axe to grind, essentially blaming wives of addicts for not being sexy enough for their husbands or nagging too much and so on. That’s not quite what they said, but they did basically say that sex addiction is rooted in relationship problems, which are usually two-way. This does not really fit with the blogs I’ve read from addicts and their partners, where root causes in childhood trauma and other negative experiences of the addict are taken for granted by both addicts and partners. It did seem a bit like the author is a couples therapist, so argued for a couples therapy intervention, whereas an addiction therapist would argue for an addiction intervention. I’m just scared that if I send my protagonist down the route of treatment modality X (probably an addiction/Sexaholics Anonymous modality, as from my research so far that seems to be where the recovering addicts I’ve encountered have come from), then I’ll be told that this is wrong and I should have opted for modality Y (e.g. couples therapy). But if I combine them (e.g. the protagonist wants one modality, his wife another), that could just seem incoherent. In a world where everything is politicised and books are judged for the negative emotions they “trigger” as much as their artistic content (“By writing about treatment X, I felt erased for following treatment Y”), it is hard to know what to do. Possibly I’m over-thinking this.

No Man’s Land

The last two days were the end of the Jewish autumn festival season. I went to shul (synagogue) for Shmini Atzeret evening, but not subsequently. I felt stuck in No Man’s Land. I wasn’t doing weekday things, but I wasn’t going to shul, so it didn’t feel fully like Yom Tov (festival). I didn’t feel great, emotionally. I had some anxiety and guilt, not to a huge extent, but some. I missed E a lot and had a lot of thoughts and feelings that I guess are related to loneliness, about wanting to be part of a friendship group and not really knowing how to do it. I had a headache last night which didn’t help; I went to bed late, but then the headache started and got worse lying down, so I stayed up even later reading until the paracetamol I took kicked in.

Since Yom Tov finished a couple of hours ago my mood has got worse. There may be some anxiety about work tomorrow. I helped Dad started to take down the sukkah (although there’s still a lot to do). I had a lot of self-critical thoughts doing that and I’m not really sure where they came from, although I have a few ideas.

Because I wasn’t doing much else, I read a lot over the last two days, both religious and secular. I started The Guide for the Perplexed by Rambam (Maimonides), but haven’t finished the translator’s introduction yet. The translation is by Michael Friedländer and was made in 1881. The introduction is more critical of Rambam than a contemporary Orthodox translation would be, which is interesting (Friedländer was the Principal of Jews’ College, the Orthodox rabbinical college in the UK that eventually became the London School of Jewish Studies), but the print is tiny! I don’t think I could read it for long periods without a break. I also started the new annual Torah cycle, which always seems more exciting than when we’re stuck in the middle of Vayikra (Leviticus). Reading Bereshit (the first reading of the Torah, from the start of Genesis), I had an idea that is potentially worth expanding into a devar Torah (Torah thought), but I doubt I’ll get the time or energy this week. In terms of secular reading, I finished You Only Live Twice and read a lot of the latest Doctor Who Magazine.

Going back to religious reading, I also read more of the book of thoughts from the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) on Pirkei Avot (the volume of Talmud dealing with ethics). This book and its companion volume on the festivals are very “fire and brimstone,” which surprised me a bit. The Chofetz Chaim died less than a hundred years ago and it seems a little strange for his writing to seem so dated. To be fair he was very old when he died and was born in the 1838, which must have influenced his worldview. Even so, it feels like somewhere in the last generation or two there’s been a big change in the focus of “inspirational” religious material in the Orthodox world from, “You’re going to die and be punished, or even be punished before you die, so make sure you do what God wants” to “God loves you and just wants to do good things for you, so just make an effort to build a connection with Him so He can reward you.” It’s strange.

E and I have discussed it a lot. Is it the effect of the Holocaust, of the ba’al teshuvah (return to Orthodoxy) movement, of pop psychology and self-help culture, of the mainstreaming of 60s counter-culture? I don’t know. But when we do our parashah (weekly Torah reading) discussion each week, we often feel that the Torah is a “hard sell” to modern audiences. Obviously the Torah is 3,000 years old and we probably shouldn’t expect a text originally understood by Bronze Age tribes to resonate in a straightforward way with Millennials (not that either E or I are Millenials…), but for someone who lived just about within living memory to seem so dated is more surprising. For comparison, other authors who published in the year the Chofetz Chaim died include George Orwell, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis, W. B. Yeats, James Thurber, P. G. Wodehouse and H.P. Lovecraft. To be fair, the Chofetz Chaim lived in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe, which was a world which doesn’t really exist any more, and which was not directly comparable to the Western Europe or American East Coast of the same era, but it’s a mistake to think that that world was so different to ours. There were plenty of non-religious Jews there too.

Fred Karno’s Army (Super-Long Autism Post)

The last two days were pretty tough. We’re currently in Chol HaMoed, the intermediate days of the Sukkot festival, where work is permitted if necessary, but advised against. J is taking the days off, but I went in to work yesterday and today because I want to save my holiday days so that I can go to New York to visit E in a few weeks. As with the first days of Sukkot, we are still eating meals in the sukkah, a booth representing the booths the Israelites dwelt in in the wilderness, and, by extension, trust in God.

On Wednesday, I got up extra early, said extra Shacharit (Morning Service) prayers (although still skipped a lot), ate breakfast in the sukkah, went to work, ate lunch in the work sukkah, felt lonely, down and exhausted (I think it was just myself and the security guard in the building; I might have heard one more person around, but I’m not sure) and came home not feeling well. I had dinner with my parents in our sukkah, felt overwhelmed by Dad’s attempts to get me to join in the conversation (I don’t have selective mutism, but I do go quiet and communicate mostly in monosyllables, grunts and nods sometimes…), eventually watched Doctor Who, Skyped E and went to bed.

Today was worse. I woke up feeling exhausted. I’m not used to working two days running, pathetic though that sounds (especially as I don’t quite work full days either). I got dressed, but decided I was too exhausted to daven (pray) before eating breakfast and struggled with the removable roof over the sukkah, realising too late that I wasn’t opening it properly. I had breakfast, davened, left for work a bit late, somehow did a little Torah study on the train and got to work not-too-late, but glad that J wasn’t in today to see it. I worked slowly, feeling numb and sluggish. The security guard wouldn’t take off the roof of the sukkah, as he thought it was going to rain again (it didn’t), so I ate part of my lunch (raw vegetables and an apple), but not my sandwich, thus at least observing the letter of the law of not eating bread outside a sukkah during Sukkot, but becoming very hungry (and somewhat sick from drinking tea on an emptyish stomach).

I had a boring afternoon enlivened by self-loathing after someone phoned to pay membership fees. Phone calls automatically come in on the phone extension on J’s desk. First I couldn’t transfer the call to my own desk as I was using the wrong extension number, so I ended up taking the call at J’s desk. Then I panicked and couldn’t find the account of the person who phoned on J’s computer to tell him how much he owed or work out where anything was on there, even though it should have been easy. I just went into autistic-and-socially-anxious brain freeze. He said he’d phone back next week, so J is bound to hear about it.

The incident left me feeling useless. If I wanted to forgive myself, there were reasons I struggled, but I should really have been able to cope by now (nearly two years in the job, albeit at only two days a week). A few minutes later, I did successfully transfer a call to my desk and take a credit card payment, but I still felt that I took too long and sounded like an idiot.

The plus side was not having had to do the Very Scary Task this week when it seemed likely that I would.

I ate my sandwich in our sukkah after I got home, read James Bond and felt better. I thought I would blog and wrote most of this post, hoping I could relax afterwards, but it was a mistake. Dinner was late, and I had to eat with my parents and their friends if I wanted to sit in the sukkah. I knew this and still made the bad decision to blog instead of watching Doctor Who. Honestly, it’s like I have some kind of neurological issue that makes me make bad decisions…

So then I had to “people” and mask and generally act like a neurotypical human being with four other people (that’s a lot!), three of whom don’t understand me at all and one who sort of gets it, but not always and only from the outside. I don’t mean that in a critical way, but it’s true. Anyway, my pizza was good, but I ate too fast, partly from hunger (it was half an hour later than the agreed start time, which I thought was late already), partly from autistic exhaustion and partly just because I didn’t want to be there. I think I was communicating with “Leave me alone” autistic body language and speech as they didn’t really try to talk to me. But it was OK. I ate quickly and went in, watched Doctor Who and Skyped E.

 ***

Sometimes I doubt whether I have autism. I thought my diagnosis would at least mean the end of those doubts, but apparently not, as so many people on the autism forum sound “more” autistic, whatever that means, even the ones who seem to be doing better than me. I wonder if there was some mistake, if I’m just a useless person, not a neurodivergent one. Today should have refuted these doubts, but didn’t, or not entirely, not the phone issues or the sound of the cleaner hoovering being painful to me. Normally I would cope with the hoover, but if I’m already struggling with autistic exhaustion, my tolerance level is much lower. I know you can’t become “more autistic,” but that’s how I feel when suffering autistic exhaustion. That’s what they don’t tell you about autism, how changeable, even arbitrary, it can be.

The other day I saw something on the National Autistic Society website about autistic exhaustion being caused partly by having to meet other people’s expectations. I can believe it. That’s why work is so stressful for me. There are specific tasks I struggle with, like phone calls and the Very Scary Task, but most of the work is routine, if boring, paperwork and spreadsheet work. But it’s having to be masked all the time, trying to ‘pass’ as ‘normal,’ even though I’m probably not even that weird a lot of the time (I don’t know. Ask E) and even though the number of people in the building is small. On the plus side, maybe this is a positive sign regarding E and I having children. I was worried about the extra exhaustion, but I don’t think I bother masking with young children (why bother? They don’t), so maybe it would be OK. I mean, the childcare would be exhausting, I know, but I wouldn’t have to factor in extra masking issues (I don’t mask with E, that’s why she’s so special).

***

I mentioned recently about so many people on the autism forum, myself included, wanting help, and no one actually saying what help would be useful. I feel that my ideal form of help would be for someone to follow me around for a few weeks and suggest workarounds for things I struggle with. (After I realised this, someone suggested I apply to Access for Work for a work coach. I’m not sure if that would be exactly this thing I want, or something enormously different and probably useless and annoying.)

I have spoken to some autism workplace advisors in the past. I can’t really remember much of what they said, although I have notes somewhere, but I struggled to apply what they said to my specific work environment (classic autistic issue) and often they didn’t know my own training and skills (how many people have suggested to me that I move from librarianship into archival work when they have totally different methodologies and rules? They just both happen to involve preserving bits of paper).

Suzanne recently differentiated between “people who can get things done” and “people who can make things happen.” In her words:

I think I can best explain the difference by considering various tasks in the operation of a warehouse that distributes donated food to food banks.

List A. Things I would be very good at:

• Checking in a delivery against the pack list and noting shortages, overages, incorrect items, and damages
• Updating inventory in the database and running reports
• Picking and packing orders

List B. What I would be hopeless at:

• Finding sources of funding
• Negotiating deals and agreements
• Recruiting and managing staff and volunteers

List A is about getting things done. List B is about making things happen.

Although she didn’t say it explicitly, List A/getting things done is autism-friendly. List B/making things happen, isn’t. I thought librarianship would be mostly List A/getting things done and maybe it was and maybe some of it still is (cataloguing), but I struggled to keep the job that was more List A, ended up in a super-autism-unfriendly job (albeit mainly for sensory/social reasons) that was still broadly List A and in the end felt out of my depth when they tried to change it to a List A/B hybrid and I left it. I hoped I would find something similar, but quieter, but it seems like so much library work is List B/making things happen.

This feeling was reinforced by the magazine I used to get from CILIP (The Chartered Institute of Librarians and Information Professionals), which, aside from going super-woke, seemed to be all about library management and soft skills stuff for dealing with other librarians and library users, not for maintaining collections of books. Not that it shouldn’t be like that, necessarily, just that it doesn’t fit my skill-set. It was only reading Suzanne’s list that this really clicked with me. Also, I had hoped librarianship would offer lots of opportunities for part-time work or job shares, but, sadly, I was wrong about that too, and as this week has shown, I simply can’t work full-time, or anything approaching it.

I’ve had some job interviews, but rarely got further. Job interviews are terrible ordeals for autistics anyway, and irrelevant to my skill-set, like making a blind man go over an obstacle course just to get a job that involves sitting at a desk, answering the phone. Then I stopped getting interviews. Now my library career is on hold, but I think it’s basically over. My skills must be pretty atrophied, which is probably why the interviews dried up. My CV looks awful anyway, massive gaps between jobs and almost as many jobs out of my sector as in it.

(Incidentally, my voluntary work at the food bank is very List A.)

***

The other thing I would really like help with is energy accounting. This is supposed to involve working out what gives you energy and what drains your energy, then making sure that the latter does not exceed the former. All well and good, but it’s hard to quantify energy gain and use, particularly as so many factors can affect them. I have more energy in the summer than the winter. I come home from work with energy in the summer; I just want to drop in the winter, even though it’s the same time of day and I’ve done the same work. If I’m dealing with tiredness, hunger or strong emotions (the latter of which I often can’t interpret or even notice properly), energy is lost faster, which means that energy loss can be exponential: the more tired I am, the faster I get tired. Some things drain and energise in different ways: writing drains mental energy, but energises through allowing creativity. Being around people usually drains (except E), but how much it drains depends on who it is and how the conversation goes. Sometimes it can energise a bit too. Shul can provide spiritual invigoration and social energy drain. And so on. It just seems so complicated, and arbitrary.

Surroundings can drain energy too. The world is increasingly busy and full of moving images and noise. There are video screens everywhere: shop windows, bus stops, phone screens out of the corner of my eye on the Tube. And so much noise, admittedly worse in town. And everything is so fast. I know people have been complaining about life being too loud, too bright and too fast for two hundred years, but it feels worse even than when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties (just pre-computers/internet – we eventually got both, but were late adopters).

I spend too much time on my own phone and laptop. I say it’s because the internet is my social pipeline, and it is, but much of it is procrastination with no meaningful social connection. I know I can’t stop it, but I want to at least try to be more mindful of what I’m doing. Even so, it probably contributes to my energy drain and discomfort. Shabbat and Yom Tov (Sabbath and festivals), when I don’t use my phone or computer, feels so much better and more natural. I wish I had the will-power to bring some of that into the week.

***

It’s not just autistic self-doubt: lately I’ve been having writerly self-doubt too. I wonder how I will write characters when I have autism and alexithymia (inability to recognise or understand my own emotions). Until now I’ve been working on a mixture of my own experiences, things I’ve read about (real people or fictional characters), and sort of “reasoning out” what someone might logically feel in a situation (as if feelings are logical!), but this seems inadequate.

Further, while, unlike some autistics, I can understand metaphor and idiom, I struggle to deploy them in my writing. I have also read (on Wikipedia, so it must be true) that people with alexithymia lack imagination (and have boring dreams). Both of these things (imagination and dreams) seem to be true for me. I read science fiction and fantasy, but struggle to imagine my own non-realistic scenarios, instead turning to stories from the newspapers and blogosphere and wondering what I or people I know would do in such a situation. This seems ‘wrong,’ although logically there is no such thing (logic again – as the Doctor said (The Wheel in Space), “Logic… merely enables one to be wrong with authority”).

I wonder again if I want to write for the wrong reason? I enjoy the process of writing, of nurturing ideas and finding words, or at least sometimes I do (I don’t think any writer enjoys it all the time). But I feel I want – not fame, exactly, but to be taken seriously. I know I’ve written about this before. I want to prove myself to people in my past who have probably forgotten all about me. And I want to prove myself to myself. Relatedly, I also want to somehow use my writing as a magic vehicle to ask for forgiveness from various people I’ve hurt (hurt mostly through being autistic, so if I write about autism, they might read it and intuit that I’m writing about myself, and about them, and that I’m apologising. There’s a lot of maybes here).

Beyond this, I think the “being taken seriously” thing is partly because not only did I vaguely think I would be an academic, but I spent the happier parts of my adult life among clever people, probably not that much cleverer than me, but who were allowed to develop themselves intellectually in a healthy way without breakdown or burnout. They were in academia or other intellectual roles that were interesting and meaningful to them.

Is intelligence or wisdom any more praiseworthy or less arbitrary than physical attractiveness? Yirmiyah (Jeremiah) says otherwise (9.22-23). I don’t feel the need to prove my attractiveness, so why my intelligence, knowledge or wisdom? It’s mostly a product of genes, upbringing and schooling and while I played a part in that, a lot of it was out of my control. Yet somehow I feel the need to prove myself, and that it would somehow be good for me if I did prove my worth to my satisfaction.

***

I’m watching Doctor Who to de-stress. The Androids of Tara is one of those late seventies stories so hated by fandom on original transmission for largely spurious reasons. I really like it. It’s not deep, but it’s a lot of fun. Meanwhile, one of my few remaining fan friends posted a lengthy analysis today of the trailer for the next episode of contemporary Doctor Who, the final episode for Jodie Whittaker and a part of the BBC centenary celebrations.

I watched the trailer. It seemed like most twenty-first century Doctor Who: fast, flashy and over-stuffed, but it was twenty-three seconds long, I’m not going to voice an opinion of the ninety minute special it was taken from based on it. I’m not particularly excited about contemporary Doctor Who, or, indeed 100 years of the BBC. I prefer twentieth century Doctor Who, even if I know what’s coming next. Or maybe that’s the point. Maybe, with autism encouraging a love of routine and a fear of uncertainty, knowing in advance what all the bad bits are is reassuring (“bad bits” as in upsetting plot developments and “bad bits” as in badly written/made). I know what to expect and can prepare. That would explain why twenty-first century Doctor Who seems to improve with age for me. I hated the 2007 season (David Tennant’s second) at the time, but now I see it as a high point of the new series, if not of all time (even though I still dislike certain elements. Especially The Lazarus Experiment).

***

I was going to explain about Fred Karno’s Army, but this is nearly 3,000 words and I’m too tired. I just mean that I feel like a ramshackle amateur under fire. Google it for the historical context.

Yom Tov Burnout

The last two days were the first two days of Sukkot, the Jewish festival where we live in temporary huts in the garden to experience the transient nature of life and the security of trust in God. In theory, anyway; in the UK it can be a struggle with the elements to stay out there. I find it hilarious when I see Israelis, and some Americans, complaining that their sukkot are too hot to stay in. Cold and wet is more normal here.

On the plus side, we ate dinner and lunch out in the sukkah every day and this afternoon it was warm enough that I sat out there for a while studying Torah (although it was getting a bit on the cold side). I also got to shul (synagogue) for two sets of Minchah and Ma’ariv (Afternoon and Evening Prayers).

Unfortunately, there were some downsides too. The biggest is Yom Tov (festival) burnout, about two thirds of the way through the autumn festival season. The next few days are semi-festival (although I have to work) and then next Monday and Tuesday are full festivals again, although I will be deliberately avoiding shul during Simchat Torah on Monday night and Tuesday (only Purim rivals it as the most autism-unfriendly festival). I feel exhausted, and spending so much time with my parents hasn’t helped (no offence intended to them, but I need more downtime alone). Not only do I have to do this again next week (plus Shabbat (the Sabbath) in between, when my parents have invited people for Kiddush after the morning service), but I have to work for the next two days (and risk doing the Very Scary Task without J being around to hand-hold), and get up extra-early for extra prayers and to eat breakfast in the sukkah, and I will probably have to eat dinner with my parents and their friends on Thursday. This is not going to be a fun, stress-free few days.

I also have been eating very unhealthily, from the point of view of sugar as well as cholesterol. So far, so Yom Tov. I have chapped hands again from sitting out in the cold, I think I struggled breathing while asleep again, and I’ve had a lot of, probably irrational, guilt feelings the last few days over all sorts of things, particularly not going to shul in the mornings and not going to a Kiddush in my parents’ friends’ sukkah even though I knew a friend I haven’t seen for years (pre-COVID) would be there. Also irrational things like guilt over the content of dreams I’ve been having (no, not sexual, but weird and upsetting). I can’t work out if the guilt is religious OCD, low self-esteem, both or neither. It’s hard to tell.

I do think I need to work on my social anxiety, which has got worse because of the COVID lockdowns, as a matter of urgency, but I’m not sure how. CBT, the main treatment for social anxiety, tends not to work for autistics. I’m technically on the waiting list for autism-adjusted CBT on the NHS, but who knows if that will ever materialise? I think it’s pretty much impossible to get autism-adjusted CBT privately, although I haven’t looked. CBT did work for me for OCD, where it was mostly exposure therapy and it didn’t matter whether I believed the cognitions, so maybe it would work again. I did have CBT for social anxiety a few months before COVID, and it didn’t help much, but I think that was partly due to the short number of sessions and my failure to really push myself hard enough and keep pushing myself with the exposures to social situations. But it just joins the huge amount of things going on in my life right now or soon: the wedding and flat-hunting, trying to write one novel and sell another or possibly re-write it, setting myself up in business as a proof-reader, learning to drive… I feel overwhelmed just writing the list!

***

I feel pretty anxious about tomorrow. I’m likely to be somewhat sleep-deprived, as I don’t know if I’ll sleep well tonight (I often don’t after Shabbat or Yom Tov) and, as I said, I have to be up extra early for extra prayers tomorrow, then off to the office where I need to speak to the security guard (who I worry doesn’t like me) about using the shul sukkah for my lunch and where I may have to do the Very Scary Task without J being around and where I certainly will be in the office by myself , which gets lonely. The office also has little in the way of natural light and that alone sets me in a bad mood for six months of the year. And then I have to do it all over again the next day. J has already told me what my first task tomorrow is and mentioned I should do it straight away, so now I’m worried about messing that up, forgetting to do it or getting in late and not doing it in time…

***

On top of all this, I miss E a lot. I thought that it would be easier being celibate in a relationship than being single, and just as easy being engaged as in a relationship, especially long-distance, which shows what I know. Even regardless of sex, I just want to spend time with her. Pretty much everything I’ve written about in this post, good and bad, would be better in a context of us living together.

***

A weird thought I had in a shiur (religious class) yesterday: being autistic, I can’t understand other people easily, what they’re thinking and feeling, especially about me (cf. the security who worry doesn’t like me). How can I even hope to understand what God thinks or feels about me? Where “thinks” and “feels” are metaphors at best for something beyond my comprehension.

Quotidian Piety

I struggled today at work again. There was actually a reasonable amount of work for me to do; I didn’t have to do the paper-sorting (which isn’t make-work, but also isn’t a priority if there are other things going on). However, I felt like I was struggling and making mistakes again. I was going to go to the bank as it’s the end of the month. In the afternoon, J gave me a new task to do. I spent a while on it, then realised I needed to go to the bank if I wanted to be back by the end of the day. That in turn meant I needed to close off the banking. So I rushed through the new task and then didn’t finish it when I realised I was making mistakes, and I rushed to close off the banking. I had made a mistake on the banking spreadsheet too which took a while to find. I just hope I didn’t make a mistake paying in the cheques. I’ve done that before. I’ve put the wrong number on the paying-in slip and the bank queried it.

I found the bank trip difficult too. The crowds in London, the noise, the omnipresent video screens… it was just autistic overload for me. When I got back, J said I could finish for the day (not because of the overload, but because it was the end of the day), but I felt overwhelmed and sat in the Beit Midrash upstairs for a bit (it was quiet, and I turned off most of the lights, but the security guard turned them back on and told me to leave them on. I didn’t realise they were supposed to be on), then davened Minchah (said Afternoon Prayers) before coming home. The journey was stressful, with too many people and someone next to me invading my personal space. I would say ‘manspreading,’ but it was a teenage girl! Someone in the carriage had noisy music on their phone too. I felt pretty much physically attacked by all of it.

Then my sister and brother-in-law came over for dinner. It was fun, but I was feeling really burnt out and overloaded. Then I spoke to E (we Skype every day that isn’t Shabbat or Yom Tov), which at least didn’t exhaust me further. I should really go to bed, but I wanted to get some of my thoughts down.

Some autistic people see autism as a “super-power,” like the homo superior of the David Bowie song Oh! You Pretty Things. I don’t really experience it that way. On days like today, it feels like a real disability.

***

Someone on the autism forum said she was a failure because she hasn’t achieved anything except getting married and having children. Unthinkingly, I said that I didn’t think she was a failure, mostly because I would say that to anyone. I do think that getting married is an achievement for someone on the spectrum, and having children is an achievement for anyone (strictly speaking, it should be that raising children well is an achievement). I realised, of course, that I view myself as a failure despite being married (sort of) and having a part-time job. I feel that I do my job badly, and that it’s not full-time, and I don’t know if I’ll ever have children or how I would cope with them. It made me think a bit about what I mean by ‘achievement.’

Everyone says that Western society prioritises wealth, fame, status, looks, power – lots of things I think are not worthwhile. Realistically, most people are probably the same. Apparently research shows that most people really care about more spiritual or caring goals, but that they think that no one else does. Even so, it’s true that the media promotes wealth, fame, status etc. But I’m not interested.

I should say that my religion provides meaningful achievements for me, but too often it turns into a list of things I don’t do, or don’t do “enough”: (communal)(meaningful) prayer, Torah (Talmud) study, mitzvah (commandment) performance, charity and so on. At work I sometimes come into contact (albeit usually through looking at old minutes and letters) with extremely rich people who are able to devote significant amounts of money and time to charity and community work. I can’t do this. I feel that my ‘issues’ (autism, social anxiety, disordered sleep etc.) interferes too much with my religious life.

Today I came across the term, ‘quotidian piety,’ coined by historian Elisheva Baumgarten to describe the daily religious practices of Medieval Jews and how they were intertwined to their lives. I wonder if I have ‘quotidian piety.’ I do religious things every day. I wonder if they are ‘achievements’ in this sphere. I wrote the other day about trying to move towards God instead of more concrete, but often unachievable, goals. I guess that is a similar idea in terms of seeing small steps as an achievement.

Lately I have been thinking less about wanting/needing to write and be published as an achievement. This is probably because I’ve been too busy with E’s visa application and Yom Tov to think about it, but I’d like to try to keep it up. I don’t think it’s sensible to think of writing as an achievement or peg to hang my self-esteem on at the moment.

“…an almost Proustian display of modern Existentialist football…”

(Title quote from one of the Monty Python sketches I think about periodically, which happened to be in the episode I watched earlier, about a pretentious football commentator interviewing a monosyllabic footballer. It’s not really relevant, I just think it’s funny.)

There’s a lot I want to say, but I am totally exhausted, and overwhelmed with things to do. However, as I’m too exhausted to do much now, I’ll try to blog at least some of the things on my mind.

I flippantly remarked on Angela’s blog the other day that I’ve been tired for decades. I felt somewhat bad about it afterwards, as that was a post about tiredness through serious physical illness, but I’m not sure that tiredness from depression, autistic exhaustion and a sleep disorder is really less “real” or worthy of note. At any rate, I struggled to sleep again last night, although not so badly as some nights, and then struggled to get going in the morning, only to discover that while I was asleep, E had asked me to send her a particular document needed for the visa again, as I had forgotten to sign it. To be honest, I hadn’t forgotten, so much as not realised I need to do it (yes, classic autistic, “If you don’t explicitly ask for it, he won’t realise he needs to do it”). This delayed me a little, but I cut my usual truncated Shacharit (Morning Prayers) even shorter and got to work on time.

Work was exceedingly dull and I found some mistakes I had made weeks ago that at least went unnoticed by my boss. I listened to podcasts while sorting through papers then felt guilty that I had decreased my efficiency, although I’m not at all sure that that was the case, as the task is dull, but also difficult, as most of the papers I’m dealing with at the moment are legal or financial, but also twenty years or more old. They should be ripe for throwing away, but I worry that my legal and financial ignorance will lead me to throw away something we need. At the moment, I’m just trying to produce a general list of what everything is.

***

I have a tendency to take the world’s troubles on my shoulders, at least sometimes. Lately I’ve been feeling concern for lonely people on the autism forum, abuse survivors and current victims in the Jewish community, as well as continuing sadness and perhaps anger at God for my parents’ friends’ late son. I do worry sometimes that abusers and gett refusers (men who refuse to give their wives the religious divorce they want) in the frum (religious Jewish) community will find a loophole to the Next World via their Torah study and communal involvement and somehow evade punishment. This is irrational, as I don’t believe God is as easily deceived, or has His values as warped, as the frum community sometimes is and, in any case, I believe spiritual punishment is inherent in the action in ways that are too complicated for me to explain now; you can’t avoid Divine punishment any more than you can avoid being in your own body. But I do think about it a lot.

***

I came across the idea a number of years ago that lots of frum people want to fast-forward through this time of year, the Jewish autumn festival season. For them it’s a time of painful self-examination and guilt. It is that for me too, with added autistic exhaustion and peopling, social anxiety, low self-esteem and disordered sleep issues, not to mention autistic issues with work routine changes and overload from working more intensively. I could also say that their guilt over sins is excessive and misplaced, whereas mine is logical and deserved, but I’m not going to go there (which is probably a good sign in and of itself). I feel like that now, with all the extra overwhelm of my life at the moment too, but today for the first time I felt frustrated that I haven’t worked on my novel for weeks because I’ve been focused on my wedding and E’s visa application. I’m glad, as I wondered if I had given up on writing. However, I still doubt I will have time to put pen to paper (or word processor) for another month.

One extra thing that is hard at this time of year is having alexithymia, difficulty noticing and understanding my own emotions. It’s hard to be sure I love and am in awe of God and that I love Torah, or that I have joy in the festivals and in being Jewish when I struggle to notice love for my family, let alone a being I can’t see and Who is the source of everything bad that ever happened to me as well as everything good. Mostly I try to “deduce” my emotions by my actions, which I guess must mean I feel something positive about God if I do all this religious stuff.

Related to this is my feelings about the frum community. On an Orthodox Conundrum podcast I listened to today, they spoke about the importance of being part of a community for spiritual growth. I’ve never really had this, at least not in the way they meant. Someone on the autism forum the other day suggested that while I say I want to be part of a community, I also seem to have negative feelings about it (I said making friends in the community seemed “terrifying and impossible”). I don’t really have an answer this.

***

I suspect the answer to all of the above is to “Let go and let God,” as the 12 Step movement says, but I’ve never been very good at that. It’s hard to “Let go and let God” when you can’t work out how much you trust God.

***

Good things that happened today:

E sent the visa application off, despite consistent issues with the third-party website.

I was told I can keep paying reduced shul (synagogue) membership fees because I’m on a low salary. I feel vaguely guilty about this and don’t know why, although as I have been paying money to a shul I haven’t been attending, and as I will continue doing this for some months more, I feel the shul is still getting a good deal.

My birthday present from E, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus by Aviva Gottleib Zornberg finally arrived. The delay, I should say, was on the part of Foyles Bookshop, not E. Zornberg has written several deep books on Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), mixing traditional commentary with ideas from Western philosophy and literature and psychology. She’s very good, but no one expected her to write about the almost entirely legal and purity-focused Vayikra (Leviticus). So I am curious to read it, but will wait until it comes around on the annual Torah cycle next spring.

Also arriving today was the latest Jewish Review of Books (finally) and Doctor Who: The Dis-Continuity Guide. Actually, the latter came yesterday, but it seemed inappropriate to write about it on such a sad day. Then today I went into the charity shop and found a load of interesting-looking books. I already owned a couple of them, perhaps fortunately, but I did buy a copy of Yehudah HaLevi’s Medieval Jewish anti-philosophical philosophical work, The Kuzari for £2, which goes nicely with the Guide for the Perplexed I got for free a few months ago.

Yes, my plan to avoid getting new books until I work my way down the To Read pile is going well. Wait a minute…

Autism and Becoming Myself

I had the usual I’ve slept too much during the day sleep problems last night, plus when I finally did fall asleep, I woke up after an hour or two with a headache (migraine? It was localised intensely over one eye, but I’ve had more general headaches that have felt worse). Inevitably, I slept late this morning.

The main thing I did was go to two of the six online shiurim (religious classes) run today by the London School of Jewish Studies in advance of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement) starting next year. One was Rabbi Sam Lebens talking about God changing history so that penitents never sinned. This is interesting, but I was familiar with his argument from his book The Principles of Judaism and I’m not convinced that it’s really a necessary or credible hypothesis, either from Jewish religious texts or from logic. I’m more convinced by the argument he rejected, that repentance changes the meaning and consequences of our misdeeds, but that we still did those misdeeds.

The other shiur was more helpful for me. This was Rabbi Joseph Dweck talking about teshuvah (repentance) as a process of self-discovery. This is the type of existential/personal growth-focused shiur I like.

He quoted Rav Kook on teshuvah (translated as response or return) being a return to the self, leading to the return to God. Rabbi Dweck spoke about God’s first word in Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) being “Yehi” “Be” (a literal translation of what is usually rendered “Let there be [light]”). God in Tanakh does not mechanically create the world out of parts (he didn’t say this, but this is essentially what happens in a lot of pagan creation myths), He wills it into being as itself. God’s fundamental charge to us and to the universe is simply to be ourselves. Similarly, Avraham (Abraham) is commanded to “Go for yourself” i.e.  become an individual for yourself.

He said we should spend our life working on becoming our ideal self or fullest potential and that to call ourselves stupid, ugly, useless (etc.) is to blaspheme against God Who created us. Becoming ourselves is thus the first step to returning to God through the integration of our parts.

This was good to hear in terms of my continuing struggle to come to terms with my autism and how that impacts on my religious life, particularly regarding shul (synagogue) attendance (admittedly due to the intersection of autism with social anxiety and disordered sleep) and my general feelings of being a failure at work, Judaism and life in general. Quite how I will assimilate the ideas and what I will do with them remains to be seen. I’ve heard similar messages before without shifting my low self-esteem, even before autism diagnosis. I hope that one day I will hear a critical mass of such teachings and something will shift inside me. Beyond that, I think I really need some practical way of internalising this message. Any ideas would be welcome (affirmations tend not to work well for me).

Other than that, I went for a walk and finished scanning documents to go to the Home Office for E’s visa application. E put together a cute PowerPoint presentation of photos of us and screenshots of our emails and texts to prove the legitimacy of our relationship to the immigration bureaucrats.  I briefly checked out a couple more autism forums to see if there’s one that suits me more than the one I’m currently on, but I don’t think there is, although it doesn’t help that I can’t really articulate what I’m looking for, just that I haven’t seen it yet. I did come across a Jewish autistic Facebook group, which I will check out when I rejoin Facebook, although it looks like it only has twenty-nine members. It has a sibling group for people with “‘lived experience’ of autism”, which I guess means family of autistic people as well, which is somewhat larger with over two hundred members, but still fairly small. They were both created this year, so may grow over time.

Immigration Woes, Religious Growth on the Autism Spectrum and Performative Judaism

Most of today was spent scanning documents for E’s visa application and sending them to her. I didn’t have much time for anything else, although I cleaned the kitchen a bit as we haven’t got a cleaner coming this week.

I phoned the building society to try to get a printout of my savings account statement for the last year. I couldn’t get it to show as a pdf through online banking and a screen shot wasn’t good enough for the Home Office (for E’s visa). The woman I spoke to said that my account was for a book, not individual statements. This sent me into autistic/socially anxious panic, as I was pretty sure I didn’t have an account book, and I hung up.  I decided it would be easier to sort out in person, so I walked to the building society, wearing my invisible disability lanyard (just in case), which may have helped.  They said they would print my statement, but first one cashier and then the other had printer problems.  I thought I would have to come back another day or go to another branch (which would also have to be another day), but at the last moment they managed to print what I wanted.

I later discovered the printout only has the last four digits of my account number, which I suppose is for security reasons. I hope the Home Office still accept it. E and I are both terrified concerning every little detail that is not 100% the way they want or which we just had to work out on our own initiative. We are sure they will use this to refuse the visa application. E says what if the Home Office website is like Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and we need the Immigration Talmud to understand it properly because its literal meaning is deceptive? It’s a frightening thought. Likewise concerning the problems I had with the benefits I was mistakenly paid, which the Home Office will see from the bank statements they are making me submit. I wrote a whole piece for them explaining what happened and that it was not my fault, but we’re still terrified that the Home Office will think I’m some kind of benefits fraudster and assume that E is the same and refuse her visa. I hate bureaucracy.

Then I came home and tried to phone to confirm the psychiatrist appointment I’ve been sent. Once again, the call went to the answerphone even though the office was supposed to be open. I got annoyed about this, particularly as I wasn’t sure that it’s the right number to call, although the only other phone numbers on the letter were the crisis team and the “smoking cessation” line (?!), and it certainly isn’t either of those. I worried they would cancel my appointment because I haven’t confirmed on a number they haven’t given me. The answerphone gave another number, so I called that, only to be told that I should have phoned the first number! I said I left a message on the answerphone and the receptionist said that would be fine, but who knows with the NHS? I would say I need the NHS Talmud too, but I suspect it exists as an oral tradition only.

There was a Mussar (Jewish ethical development movement) yeshivah (rabbinical seminary) in the early twentieth century where students were sent to do stupid tasks, such as going into a hardware shop and asking for milk, so that people would get annoyed with them, in the process teaching them that self-esteem comes from within, not from other people.  I feel that, with autism and social anxiety, most of my social interactions that aren’t with a small, select group of people feel like that. It hasn’t done much for my self-esteem, though.

I feel I haven’t really adapted to post-depression/burnout life or to ‘normal’ life with autism, a suspected sleep disorder and social anxiety. In particular, I ignored my social anxiety in the past as it seemed insignificant compared to my depression and OCD, but now they’re under control, it feels like a real impediment. I did CBT for it on the NHS, but I only had ten sessions and didn’t push myself hard enough or sustain the effort afterwards. Then COVID came along and knocked back what progress I had made.

I wonder what I should be doing right now in terms of growth i.e. dealing with autism and social anxiety and also growing as a person and growing religiously (this being the time of year when we think about these things in the Jewish world). I just got married and usually someone who just got married would be told to focus on that relationship for the first year, but it looks like half or more of our first year will be spent on different continents. More generally, I don’t know enough autistic or socially anxious adults in the Orthodox community (with or without significant sleep and energy issues) to try to gauge what is typical or even possible behaviour from someone in my situation.

In particular, trying to assess my relationship with God, as one Jewish site suggested, is hard. Being on the spectrum, I find it hard to assess my relationships with people who are actually communicating with me, let alone those who aren’t. I know I have a good relationship with E, but that’s partly because I can judge interactions, like how we resolve disagreements, and partly because she explicitly tells me that she thinks we have a good relationship. I’m sorry, I’m autistic, I find it hard to read these things without being told. With God, I have to intuit how He feels about me with really no evidence at all, and it’s all too easy for that to be distorted by low self-esteem. I’m not really a person who has a “sense” of God’s presence in their life and I find it hard to really know what that would feel like, although I perhaps have felt it at very specific points in my life.

***

On a somewhat related note, I’ve read/listened to some things about Judaism and feminism in the last few days. I don’t want to get into that debate, but I find it interesting that they present Judaism as primarily performative, not contemplative. In other words, Judaism is something you do (study, lead religious services, lein), rather than something you think about or contemplate. Women’s exclusion from Orthodox Judaism is seen as stemming from exclusion from doing certain things and can be rectified by letting them do those things.

Judaism is primarily a performative/action-based religion rather than a contemplative/faith-based religion like Christianity or Buddhism. That has certain advantages (setting aside the issue of gender segregation for the moment), but it arguably does lead to the marginalisation of those in the community who, for whatever reason, can’t do Jewish things (whereas fundamentalist Christianity leads to the marginalisation of those who, for whatever reason, can’t believe Christian things, which is a whole other set of issues). When it comes to feminism, we frame the argument around what women are allowed to do and who is allowing, or not allowing, them to do it, but I’m interested in people who aren’t able to do for pragmatic rather than societal/halakhic reasons and what happens to them. Do they just leave? Or get excluded, or at least demoted to second-class status? I want to start my Facebook group to find out!

There is an idea of meditation in Judaism (Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan z”tzl wrote three books on it, one of which I have), but it’s not very prominent except in the Breslov Hasidic community. (I’ve tried meditating, but struggle with it currently.)

The thing that I keep thinking about in this context is a story I haven’t seen in the original (I saw it paraphrased in Rabbi Dr Avraham Twerksi’s book Let Us Make Man). I think it comes originally from the Jerusalem Talmud. The story is that Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, who was one of the leading sages of the Talmudic era, was severely ill and all his students came to visit him. They tried to cheer him up by saying what a great Torah teacher he was and he just got more depressed because he knew he was not going to recover enough to teach again. Then Rabbi Akiva said, “Suffering can be precious” (as a way of developing character and earning spiritual reward), which caught his attention because accepting suffering was something he could do in his passive state. I feel that kind of intellectual/contemplative, even passive, approach of “Suffering can be precious,” is generally not discussed in contemporary Orthodox Judaism. Rather, people in crisis are pushed to do more, even if that’s not really feasible for them.

How to Destupidify myself?

I didn’t have work today, J having switched my days this week.  This was probably for the best, as I slept a long time after all the stuff I was doing yesterday (tax return, visa form).  The house was almost empty when I woke up, just me and Dad.  I know that’s the usual number of people on a weekday, but after so many being around for the last few days, it felt empty.  Dad made some enquiries on my behalf about changing shul (synagogue) membership to get married by my parents’ rabbi. We don’t have to change it for a while.  When we do change, I think we get a year of free membership in any shul in the United Synagogue, so it’s worth not changing that until nearer the time, although Dad feels I should continue with membership of my current shul until then “just in case” (this is him being morbid, meaning so that I’m not left without burial membership anywhere for a number of months, just in case I drop dead suddenly). I’ll go to my parents’ shul for the Yom Tovim (festivals) as my shul will be in its new premises, twice as far away. If I wasn’t getting married, or was getting married there, I might have still gone there, but it seems silly when I won’t be going there much longer anyway.

Today was mostly spent on the tax return (which was a real headache, but which I still need to spend some time on, despite having spent about three hours on it already) and scanning documents for E’s visa application.  I didn’t manage much of the latter, as the tax return left me exhausted. I did get a walk in, which I didn’t manage yesterday, but I only did a few minutes of Torah study, compared with more yesterday.

I miss E a lot and I know she misses me.  It’s hard being apart for so long when we already feel married.

I did manage to phone about pre-marriage classes for E and myself, which is positive, especially as I had a lot of social anxiety about the call beforehand.

***

As I mentioned, I’ve been filling in my tax return.  It seems really difficult.  I feel like, “I’m autistic, I’m supposed to be good with numbers and methodical; I am (or at least I was) a librarian, which is also supposed to make me methodical; so why do I always struggle to find the documents I need, and to find the right figures on the documents once I’ve got them?”  The papers aren’t even in that much of a mess, they’re actually organised reasonably well, but somehow the piece of paper I need isn’t ever where it should be.  And I’m not that good with numbers.  Even at school, where I got good grades in maths and even did A-level physics, I wasn’t intuitively good with numbers the way some of my geeky friends were.  Maths was always a second language I could translate into in my head, but not intuitively think in.

Doing things like this just leaves me confused as I go from document to document.  I have to keep reminding myself which tax year I’m doing this for, otherwise I’ll forget and enter the wrong data.  Just to confuse myself further, midway through the last tax year, I switched from being a freelance contractor to a permanent staff member, although still doing the same job in the same institution.

I just feel incompetent these days.  At school, I was a high achiever, academically (socially was another story), but I think I survived by putting myself in a protective bubble for fourteen years, memorising vast amounts of data and filtering out the real world (noise, smells, social interactions, bullies, eventually even out-of-school-activities and almost everything other than work in the end).  My good memory for trivia stood me in good stead in exams, but after that, I had to go into university and then into the world, and suddenly critical thinking skills, analytical skills, problem-solving skills, flexibility and creativity were all more important than just being able to remember lots of facts or even remembering other people’s arguments.

I have two degrees, but I work two days a week in a low-skill job which I am over-qualified for, but in which I still regularly make big mistakes.  The mistakes are probably partly out of boredom, but also from having to work on multiple documents at once or just my inability to remember things nowadays.  My mistakes fuel my low self-esteem, which in turn probably causes more mistakes as I assume I will fail.  I feel like somewhere along the line, after years of autistic burnout and mental illness, I just got stupid and I don’t know how to destupidify myself.  Sadly, I think anecdotal evidence indicates that prolonged autistic burnout, and prolonged bouts of mental illness, can both lead to a decline in cognitive ability.  It now looks like I have a sleep disorder too, so I can throw sleep deprivation into the mix too.

***

Liz Truss is the new Prime Minister.  I don’t really have any thoughts about this, except that it cements my feeling that I can’t vote for any current political party.  I think I dreamt about Gladstone last night, although I don’t remember the details.   I do feel the world in general has a terrible crisis of leadership at the moment, although realistically great leaders only come around every quarter-century or so.

Existential Spirituality

I wonder sometimes about my spiritual life. I feel I have more of a religious life than a spiritual one. I would like to have a more spiritual life, but it’s hard to know where to start, especially from inside a major religion — where do you go when you’re already where you’re supposed to be, and don’t want to leave, but aren’t fully fulfilled? I want more spirituality, not less Judaism. Further, I find ‘spirituality’ a vague and unhelpful term, and Hebrew words like ruchniut aren’t any better.

I used to read a lot of Jewish religious existentialists (not all Orthodox). I found Jewish existentialism an approach that resonated with me more than many approaches in the Orthodox world, so out of curiosity, I searched online for stuff on existentialist spirituality, despite knowing that secular existentialism is very different to religious existentialism.

I found an article on existential spirituality in psychotherapy the other day that says the following:

There are four primary existential ways of being-in-the-world. They include:

1. Umwelt: Being-with-nature or the physical world.
2. Mitwelt: Being-with-others or the social world.
3. Eigenwelt: Being-with-oneself or the world of the self.
4. Uberwelt: Being-with-the-spiritual or over world.

Boss (1963), Binswanger (1963), and May et al. (1958) described the first three of these existential ways of being. van Deurzen (1988) added the fourth.

I do struggle with several of these areas. I’m able to experience nature well when I’m in a natural setting, but I struggle to find one in the suburbs. It might be good for me to walk more often in a little area of land left wild at the edge of the nearby park (although it only takes five or ten minutes to walk the length of it).

Skipping number two for the moment, I am a lot more OK at being with myself than before. I still have low self-esteem, something worsened by autism-induced mishaps, and some social anxiety and catastrophising, but I’m mostly comfortable being inside my head. I feel positive about my sense of integrity, which ties into my Jewish practice as I practise Judaism less to feel “positive” or “spiritual” in the moment and more because overall I have a feeling of integrity and rightness from acting in accordance with my religious beliefs and as part of a three thousand year old community.

The really hard areas are two and four. I think being with others is very important (this is perhaps the biggest thing I take from Jewish existentialism), and it does help me when I find a way I can interact with others well, but finding that way can be hard. I definitely missed volunteering the last couple of weeks when it was on a break and I felt depressed until it restarted yesterday. The downside is that I feel depressed and burnt out today, which may be cause and effect or may be coincidence.

The fact that I go to shul (synagogue) a lot less than I did seven or eight years ago is probably a negative here too, from a social point of view as much as anything. Communal prayer does create social bonds. In recent years I have gone to shul a lot less, as a result of sleep disruption, social anxiety, changing communities and then COVID. I’m now totally out of the habit of regular shul attendance and struggling to get back into it.

I think my marriage to E might be the biggest positive change I can make here. Following the Talmud, I see marriage as the primary model of a loving relationship (the Talmud sees “Love your neighbour as yourself” applying particularly to marriage) and I think the intimacy (emotional as well as physical) there will help me feel more spiritually-fulfilled. I think already our emotional intimacy has led me to feel better in this way. It is hard at the moment, though, when we are so far apart and know it will be so long until we get married. E said it feels like we should be married now and our current status is a weird aberration, and I agree with her. E also thinks that God wants us to marry so I can help her be more religious and so she can help me to have more fun, which may be true too.

Connecting with God directly is harder. I struggle to connect with God through Torah study, except on occasions when I suddenly gain some new insight. That doesn’t happen often, but maybe I have to do a lot of study to provide “scaffolding” for those moments of connection. But often it’s easy to forget God while studying Torah and just focus on the text as a text. Possibly I should try to get back to reading something inspirational or about personal growth every day.

I have improved my kavannah (mindfulness) in prayer lately, but even then it can be hard to concentrate on God. I can focus on God or on the words of the prayer, but it’s hard to focus on both at once.

I guess a lot of the problem is the subjectivity of what constitutes a spiritual experience or a connection with an invisible God. Maybe I’m trying to over-analyse.

***

I got a phone call from A, the person who seems to be a middleman between me and the psychiatrist. He turned out to be a psychiatric nurse. He said that before my medication was reviewed by the psychiatrist with a view to reducing it, could I tell him what happened about the autism assessment I was referred for in 2019, as they had no further information. I was pretty shocked he didn’t know about my diagnosis. In fact, I don’t think he even knew I was referred for an autism assessment, as he thought it might have been for ADHD (the hospital assesses for both). I offered to scan the report and send it to them, which was fortunate as he said he could write to the GP, but that would take weeks (!). You would think that an advantage of a single, national healthcare provider would be some kind of shared data base, at least within the locality. Honestly, this service is just so useless.

***

I was going to go for a pre-wedding haircut after this, but it started raining really heavily and I decided to go after work tomorrow instead. It’s still quite hot and I think the rain and heat/humidity combination along with the disruption to my plans brought my mood down. I am nervous of having my hair cut by a stranger again. I’ve always found haircuts intrusive, probably for autistic reasons about personal space and sensory stimuli, but for many years now I’ve had tremor in some social situations and haircuts are a major trigger, indeed, they were the first trigger when it started. I hope it doesn’t happen tomorrow.

I forgot to go to shul (I want to go on Wednesday evenings), although I wouldn’t really have had much time to spare. Instead, I submitted my first novel to two more agents, both UK-based. I’m trying to focus on UK agents at the moment. One is Jewish, but is super-influential and well-connected, so I probably won’t be accepted by him. To be honest, I suspect all the agencies on the list I’m using are too big for me and that I need some small boutique agency. E disagrees with me here; I hope she’s right.

***

I got sent £3.34 from Lulu.com, which means someone bought my non-fiction Doctor Who book!

“What’s so interesting about an ox?”

I really struggled to get up today, feeling utterly drained and self-critical (it goes without saying I got up really late, as it was a non-work/volunteering day — no volunteering this week for the summer holiday). The fact that another heatwave seems to have started probably didn’t help. Even if I can sleep when it’s hot, I tend not to sleep well (or, even less well than usual). Dad was watching the news when I went down for breakfast, so I got to see the latest on the Conservative Party leadership contest (“Tax cuts will fix everything in our broken society”) and Donald Trump being raided by the FBI, which is the least surprising “unexpected” story ever (I would not be surprised if he eventually goes out in a hail of bullets). None of this helped my mood much. I did manage to get dressed in about ten minutes to just about say some of Shacharit (Morning Prayers) while it was still time, which was good, and unexpected.

I waited over an hour at the dentist, as there was a child (I think) who needed emergency treatment. I was OK with that, although I had nothing to read, and the waiting room would probably have been too noisy for me to read anyway (radio, child playing videos on a phone without headphones). I think the dentist said I shouldn’t have gone to the dentist until I had two separate instances of pain, but possibly she was just saying that she wouldn’t extract the tooth for just one instance of pain. She said the gum was inflamed and cleaned it out, and suggested I rinse after meals with salt water to keep it clean, but that was about it.

Because of the long wait, I lost a lot of time. I tried to do some Torah study while cooking to save some time, but I struggled to find an appropriate shiur (class) to listen to. I ended up listening to a short ten minute thing and then some more Orthodox Judaism, which was interesting, but more pedagogy than actual Torah study. There was more discussion about teaching Talmud to schoolchildren, which made me think maybe I know some more things than I thought, not so much in terms of facts, but concepts, like knowing some of the history of the Talmud and the way it uses particular topics to discuss general concepts.

Rabbi Yakov Horowitz spoke about speaking to a meeting of three hundred (I think) Haredi single mothers who wanted to understand their sons’ schoolwork (Haredi women are generally not taught Talmud). One woman asked why her son is always talking about oxen. I was already aware that the Talmud uses four different types of dangerous items (foot, ox, pit and fire) as shorthand for various ways of causing damage, so I felt somewhat ahead of the game here. It was also good to hear a Haredi rabbi admit that one hundred years ago, only the top one per cent of Jewish schoolboys would have even gone to yeshivah and studied Talmud. Again, I knew that already, but it’s not really admitted to in the Haredi world. I recently saw someone arguing that while most Jewish men in pre-war Eastern Europe did have to work, they dreamt of spending all their time studying Tosfos (Tosfos, or Tosafot in the Modern Hebrew pronunciation I use, is a collective Medieval commentary on the Talmud, even more complicated and difficult than the Talmud itself). I can’t prove that this is untrue (I don’t have access to the dreams and fantasies of every Jewish man in pre-war Eastern Europe), but it seems unlikely given the social and economic situation of the time. Study was important to people even quite low down the social scale, but of much less challenging texts, and it seems unlikely that all Jewish men wanted to spend as long as possible in religious study.

I tried to phone the United Synagogue Marriage Authorisation Department to get the paperwork to move on the religious marriage. I got the answerphone, as I did when I phoned last week, which worried me a bit. I will try again…

The other thing I did was spend an hour or so working on my novel. I feel a bit bad about writing instead of studying Torah, but I tell myself writing is my livelihood, even though it actually isn’t, I’m just hoping it will contribute to it one day. I did make myself do a few minutes of Torah study on this week’s sedra (Torah reading), which happens to be my bar mitzvah portion (although I no longer remember how to lein it — I got so much praise for my bar mitzvah leining that I freaked out with social anxiety and refused to lein again, except when my parents forced me to lein haftorah for my sister’s bat mitzvah).

There are other things I would like to write about, but I am tired and between struggling to get up and get going this morning and the wait at the dentist, I am out of time.

I Come from Barcelona

Work is very slow at the moment, which possibly gives me too much time to think, or to overthink things. I thought more about trying to find my religious place and about trying to find some kind of purpose in life beyond doing boring work, badly, for inadequate pay (my pay is very generous compared to what I do, but inadequate to live on unsupplemented).

I woke up feeling a failure, I’m not sure why. The exception, the non-failure, is my relationship with E, which is a big exception, but still, I feel that I’m not achieving enough (what is “enough”? Enough to help support a family or enough to stroke my ego?). I sometimes feel like I interpret any error on my part or anyone with difference of opinion to me as a sign of failure on my part, that I should have spotted the error or predicted the difference of opinion and accounted for it in advance.

On the way to work, I listened to an Orthodox Conundrum discussing whether Modern Orthodox schools [1] teach too much Talmud. This was interesting, but also (for want of a better word) triggering. The argument in favour of as much, or more, Talmud included the need for immersion in the language (Aramaic and rabbinical Hebrew) and thought-system of the Talmud and Medieval commentators to really make progress in understanding, which I probably agree with, in a way, but I was left with the feeling that, having not gone to yeshivah and not studied/studying Talmud in depth or at length, my Torah study is at best “dilettante” (as the “pro-more-Talmud“ opinion said) or even that I am a “second class Jew.” I’m not sure what the context for this remark was, and I’m pretty sure it was being said along the lines of, “We mustn’t let people who don’t study/understand Talmud feel like second-class Jews…” but I still felt uncomfortable. On the other hand, Rabbi Kahn did argue that some students are simply not going to understand or enjoy Talmud study, particularly at age fourteen, and that they should study other Jewish topics (like Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) or philosophy) and more creative ways of studying and engaging with Jewish tradition. I agree with this, and it is part of why I didn’t go to yeshivah, but it did prime me to spend the day introspecting about where I fit in the Jewish world (again).

If Torah study is the most important mitzvah (at least for men), and Talmud study is the most important form of Torah study (again, for men), then where does that leave me? Again, reading When Rabbis Abuse, it sometimes seems like being learned is more important than being good in the frum (religious Jewish) community. Certainly being able to study Talmud and lead prayer services seems to lead to status in the frum world in a way that just being a good person does not, or not necessarily. I am still haunted by the image of serial child abuser Todros Grynhaus leading Yamim Noraim (High Holy Day) services even after serious allegations of abuse had been made against him. This was in a Federation shul (synagogue), so moderate Haredi rather than extreme Haredi.

Less melodramatically, I worry that the people I admire would find little to admire in me (except E). I do have a need for approval.

I began to wonder if I need a clearer purpose in life than other people. I need to do more than work to earn money to buy food and pay rent/mortgage so I can live to work to earn money to buy food… I feel this should be important to everyone, but apparently it is not. For many people, work, family and conventional religious behaviour seems to be enough for them[2] and I wonder why it doesn’t seem to be the case for me. Is it just because my family is still hypothetical and my religious behaviour is fraught with difficulty because of autism, social anxiety and disrupted sleep? Or is it because I feel myself to have a weak sense of self and my own opinions, bouncing off other people’s ideas, so I look for a clear mission or guiding principle in life to manifest my life around? I feel that, even without all my “issues,” I would want more from my religious life than going to shul three times a day and studying Talmud (or even something else) for an hour or so a day. I need something more, but I don’t know what.

To some extent, I probably want something conventional Orthodox Judaism just isn’t offering. I went to the little shul (really a Beit Midrash) upstairs to daven Minchah (say Afternoon Prayers) after work this afternoon. There wasn’t a service, I just wanted to pray in a shul and I knew I wouldn’t go this evening. Before I davened, I just sat in the quiet and calm of the empty room and it was very peaceful and comfortable, but that’s not really a Jewish way to respond to sacred spaces. There are kabbalists and Hasidim who meditate (I’ve done it in the past), hitbodedut, mantra meditation, other types of meditation, but it’s not considered mainstream. It’s not something most frum people would associate with Judaism.

Then again, maybe once I get married, I really won’t need anything else, particularly if we have children. Maybe being with someone I love and who loves me, in a genuinely reciprocal relationship (unlike previous relationships, which were always one-sided, despite my efforts) will be enough for me, and I won’t care any more about where I fit in the religious world beyond where we happen to be, or about getting published or being taken seriously or anything else (OK, I would probably still worry about money and boredom if I was in the same job). I hope so, because sometimes hoping for more than that seems foolish.

[1] I’m not sure how the American school system works and what grades correspond to what ages, but I think this was mostly about secondary schools.

[2] Admittedly not the scores of people who are all over the internet describing themselves as “activists,” but, then again, I’m not sure what these people do other than repost stuff on social media.

***

I tried to submit my first novel to another agent. The first agency I looked at didn’t want religious fiction. I’m not sure that my novel is “religious fiction,” exactly, but it’s probably near enough to make it not worth my time submitting. The second agency said something along the lines of, “Fiction doesn’t need to be Christian, but it should not conflict with a Christian worldview.” Talk about betwixt and between. The next agent is apparently autistic, and wants the usual standard marginalised voices, but doesn’t want “inspirational works including religious overtones.” What does that mean? (Please don’t tell me that religious people can’t be marginalised, or aren’t marginalised if they’re Jewish or Christian rather than Muslim or Hindu.) They only wanted the first five pages, which I don’t think is really enough to sell the story (what next, the first five words?), but I was just desperate to submit to someone so I hadn’t wasted the evening. In the end I sent to a different agent at the same agency. The agency wanted me to follow them on Twitter, which did lead me wonder just how desperate they think I am. I am desperate to get published, but not that desperate. I wanted to submit to another agency, but it was hard finding one that was suitable and I ran out of time.

Anyway, I have applied to twenty-five agencies in a year, which is NOT good going. Admittedly, there have been times when I stopped submitting for months on end, for various reasons (applying for jobs, waiting for the emerging writers’ programme to get back to me, E here or me going to the US, Pesach preparation…), but it’s still disappointing. I’m up to ‘J’ in the alphabetical agency list I’m using. Also, some of these agents sound really annoying, super-privileged middle class people super-proud of themselves for being on the side of a carefully-curated and approved set of Little People.

***

E read, and told me about, the recently-published novel Shmutz, about a Haredi woman who is addicted to pornography. I was worried about it stealing the thunder from the novel I’m working on about a pornography-addicted Haredi rabbi. She doesn’t know where my novel is going, but she has seen the first draft of the first couple of chapters. She says it didn’t seem like there was a huge overlap. Shmutz has apparently some very graphic descriptions of violent pornography, which there definitely won’t be in my novel.

After we spoke, I took the plunge and skimmed the first few pages on Amazon look inside, although I don’t want to read the whole thing until I’ve finished my first draft. It left me somewhat despondent. Shmutz gets off to a much quicker start than my novel, opening with the main character telling her doctor she doesn’t want to marry as that would involve giving up pornography on the first page. My first chapter tries to build up slowly to the reveal of the apparently too-good-to-be-true protagonist’s secret, but I worry it will bore people, and agents only seem to want to look at the first ten or even five pages, not the first twenty-five. Shmutz seems much more open about its subject matter than I’m able to be, much more fitting with the contemporary idiom. I struggle with things like slang and think my prose is probably ponderous (in general, including here, not just in the novel). In terms of explicitness, I want to balance between writing something vaguely suitable for religious Jews, pornography addicts and partners of pornography addicts to read without being triggered, while still trying not to be as coy as most Orthodox writing about sex.

I suspect Shmutz doesn’t have my pretentions to Serious Literature either; I want my novel to be deeply about things like the Jewish idea of repentance and redemption as much as about sex. I probably want to be taken seriously too much (again, in life as well as in writing). E thinks I’m wasting my talents writing serious fiction when she thinks I’m better at writing science fiction satire (based on a squib I showed her a while back), but I have to really be in the right mindset to write that, and I worry I can’t put myself in that zone, I just occasionally get pushed into it by things around me. Plus writing satire would involve being more aware of current events and the idiocies of the age (Big Tech, Trump, woke, etc.) than I want to be right now.

***

I’ve been re-watching some Fawlty Towers lately. Sometimes, at work or volunteering or occasionally in other places, someone says something to me and I just have no idea what they’re saying, whether through executive dysfunction, sensory overload, difficulty processing spoken instructions or something else. Whoever I’m talking to has to say the same thing multiple times and I stare blankly until it eventually sinks in on the fifth attempt. The reasons are different, but I think from the outside it looks exactly like Basil Fawlty trying to communicate with Manuel, only without the casual sadism. “Please try to understand before one of us dies!”

Difficult Thoughts, and Staying Frum

I slept until 11am, which I probably needed.  Then I spent a while in bed, which was a mistake, as I fell asleep until 12.30pm, which I did not need and was not good.  I felt self-recriminatory after that, and about the over-excited post I wrote yesterday.  Sometimes I get stuck in fantasy that things are suddenly going to improve and then it’s painful coming back down to earth.

I also noticed that I’ve had a lot of difficult thoughts lately, not self-criticism so much as pure O OCD-type thoughts (e.g. thoughts about saying hurtful things to strangers).  Apparently everyone has these thoughts, or thoughts like them, all the time, but people with OCD can’t dismiss them as ‘just thoughts.’  I do wonder why people don’t discuss them more if this is true.  They do lead on to self-criticism, because I think, “How can I have thoughts like that in my head, even subconsciously?  I don’t want to say these things, so why is my brain suggesting that I should?”  I’m not obsessing over them and I don’t really think I’m a bad person, so it’s not reached OCD-level, but I just wish it would shut up.

To be honest, I would probably be a lot happier generally if my brain would just shut up sometimes.  I know someone who seems to wander around broadcasting their entire inner monologue constantly to avoid the silence.  If that really is what they’re doing, their inner monologue is a lot quieter and more banal than my inner monologue.  I do wish I could turn things down sometimes.

***

I felt down today, I’m not sure why.  The day has been a bit of a struggle.  I don’t have anything insightful to say about this.

I did phone the GP surgery this afternoon and managed to get an appointment with the doctor I spoke to last time.  This was regarding wanting to reduce my medication and being told by the psychiatrist not to do so.  The GP seemed a bit annoyed that I hadn’t been able to speak to the psychiatrist directly to explain my situation, but had to speak through a “link worker.”  This was the person I spoke to on the phone, who I thought was a psychiatrist, but apparently was not.  The GP is going to write again to request a direct phone call between me and the psychiatrist.

I spent a while psyching myself up to phone the United Synagogue about moving forward with E and my marriage application paperwork, but got the answer phone.

So many things at the moment can’t be done in one go.  A lot of this relates to going to the US and getting married, but also to other things like filling in my tax return (which I’ve never had to do before).  I just keep pushing things off or only managing to do the next step and I find it frustrating that nothing is ever finished.  Maybe that’s contributed to feeling down.

***

Sometimes I wonder how I’ve stayed frum (religious Jewish).  It’s hard to stay frum if you don’t feel connected to the community, or aren’t getting positive feelings from Jewish practice, or are just struggling to do all the stuff that being Jewish entails, and I’ve struggled with all three things at different times.  I guess I’m struggling with most or all of them now, if not necessarily to the same extent as in the past.  And autism/Asperger’s and mental health issues just makes everything even harder.  My main mental health issue at the moment is social anxiety, which isn’t as bad for me as depression and OCD were, but it’s particularly good at sabotaging anything I try to do related to being in a community, and a lot about Orthodox Judaism is ideally done in a community.  Alexithymia (difficulty sensing and understanding my feelings) probably also means that I miss some positive feelings from Judaism and community, strange though that may seem.

Does that make me a good Jew for persisting despite all this or a bad one for not being so enthusiastic, committed or involved?  I don’t know.  I feel like a good Jew wouldn’t be struggling with these things in the first place, but I also feel that I didn’t choose to be in this situation.   I once saw one rabbi write that “A good Jew is trying to be a better Jew,” but I worry that in the last few years, rather than improving, I’ve even cut back on things to try to consolidate what I’m still doing.

I am aware that people on the fringes of the Orthodox Jewish community, for whatever reason, tend to drop out.  I’ve known a number of people who became frum as a young adult, but dropped out of observance later due to mental health issues (sometimes becoming observant is a symptom of mental illness, although I don’t think that was the case with me).  So I know I should feel that I’m doing OK.  It would just be nice to have some certainty that I’m a good Jew and a good human being.  Although, as I realised a while back, but still haven’t internalised, there isn’t going to be a day when someone gives me a medal to officially recognise that I’m a good person or a good Jew, and I should really stop wanting it to happen.  At least E thinks I’m a good person and a good Jew; it probably is too much to hope for other people to say the same.

Tangentially-related to this, on one of the Orthodox Conundrum podcasts I listened to, Elisheva Rishon (fashion designer and Jew of colour) spoke about connecting with other Orthodox Jews online, but struggling to overcome stigma in real-world Orthodox settings.  I don’t think I experience stigma per se (although it’s easier for me to mask), but it nudges me towards going back on social media to try to find people I can connect with.  But then I remember how awful being on Facebook was, and I scare myself off it.

***

I am currently reading The Third Reich in Power by Richard J Evans; When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture by Elana Sztokman; and Lamentations: Faith in a Turbulent World by Yael Ziegler[1].  These are all good books, but very heavy-going [2].  I tried to read the Third Reich book this evening and struggled with it.  I think I have to throw a novel in there or something lighter.  It’s frustrating, as the Third Reich book is very long and I don’t want to be reading it for months on end.  I don’t want to take any of those books to New York in a few weeks (not least because they’re too heavy in a literal sense), so I’ll have to start something soon anyway.  I do want to finish the spring Jewish Review of Books first (the summer issue is out, but it takes ages to get to the UK).

[1] I am also occasionally reading The Television Companion: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who by David J. Howe and Steven James Walker, which is annoying in another way entirely, but that’s not a topic for now.

[2] When Rabbis Abuse is also in desperate need of a proof-reader, as I’m not sure I’ve seen a professionally-published book with so many typos and errors, but, again, that’s not a problem for now.

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Pitch Imperfect

I stayed up late last night blogging, which was probably a mistake, although I thought I wouldn’t fall asleep easily as I slept so much during the day, finally getting to bed about 2.00am, just before the fast of Tammuz (see below) started. This was probably a mistake, as at 5.30am I woke up with a headache and even after it went, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I did eventually fall asleep midmorning and sleep for another three hours or so.

This week is set to be a disrupted week. Today is 17 Tammuz, a Jewish fast day and the start of the Three Weeks of mourning (no haircuts, shaving, music, weddings, parties, etc.). Fast days always feel strange and disrupted to me, even though I haven’t been able to fast on the minor fasts for fifteen years or more because being on lithium makes the risk of serious dehydration too great. This year, my family aren’t fasting either; both the United Synagogue and the Federation of Synagogues put out warnings that people in various categories of vulnerability should not fast because of the heatwave and dehydration risk. So it feels a strange day.

J said I could work at home tomorrow because of the heatwave that we currently have in the UK, but there isn’t really any work I can meaningfully do at home right now and I didn’t want to do pointless make-work, so I suggested going in on Wednesday instead, when it should be cooler, as I don’t have therapy this week. I’m probably going to see a friend sit shiva (mourn) for his mother tomorrow. And it’s my birthday on Wednesday and my sister and brother-in-law are coming round. I’ve moved some other parts of my routine around to accommodate these changes. I hope I cope OK with everything, as disruption to my routine can be difficult. And the heat makes everything extra-hard.

***

I thought I had an idea for an article that I could sell to a Jewish website. I spent an hour procrastinating and not starting it, which was a bad sign (admittedly I did about fifteen minutes of novel research in the procrastination). I spent half an hour or so writing it, but only managed 400 words and don’t think it’s going anywhere. I could try to expand and improve it, but it’s a news-related story (Jewish websites like to be topical for some reason) so it has a limited shelf-life and I’d need to finish it soon.

Admittedly it is very hot today and hard to work, and there was also a lot of noise from children playing outdoors and people playing music with the windows open. Still, I don’t feel confident in the idea any more. Possibly I am too much of a perfectionist to be able to write for websites, magazines and newspapers, which seem to need a lot of copy to be produced very quickly to generate enough income to live off. I was discussing monetising blogs, and writing in general, on Ashley’s blog today and I gloomily concluded that I’m not good enough at selling myself to make writing a really good career for me, but as I don’t seem to be good enough at anything else, I feel I have to try it anyway.

I feel I should be able to pitch articles to various Jewish sites, but somehow I don’t know how to generate ideas, and, as I said, Jewish kiruv (outreach) sites tend to like a ‘hook’ linking the topic to the news (which means writing very quickly) or to popular culture (which means writing quickly and also having more pop cultural awareness than I’ve ever had). They generally aren’t interested in a straightforward devar Torah or textual/philosophical insight, as they’re aiming at people who aren’t frum, trying to show the relevance of Judaism to their own world of politics and pop culture. Some people I knew from Hevria write for the Haredi press, but I don’t think I have the right understanding of frum culture for that, and I don’t want to work for papers that won’t print photos of women (which is all of the Haredi papers now, sadly — despite this, the people I know who write for them are women. I don’t think they like the situation, but they seem to have accepted it, on some level). I tried pitching to less religious Jewish newspapers in the UK a number of years ago, but didn’t get anywhere.

***

Other than that, I didn’t do a lot today. I Skyped E for a while and went for a walk at dusk, when it was cooler and did a tiny bit of Torah study, but I didn’t get to write more of my novel, which was a shame.

The fast is over now, and I should think about heading for bed, but it’s too hot to sleep and despite/because my disrupted sleep last night/this morning, I don’t feel at all tired.

All In My Head?

I don’t usually comment on the Rationalist Judaism blog (which is basically a critique of the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community, despite the misleading title), as people on both sides can be aggressive and unwilling to listen. But I left a comment on this post. It left me thinking about my position in the Orthodox world (Modern Orthodox as well as Haredi).

I always felt I didn’t fit in in the frum (religious Jewish) world, in the Haredi community, the Modern Orthodox community, the unusual world of the Oxford University Jewish Society. But I always feel I don’t fit in anywhere, and that may be just my own perception due to autism, low self-esteem, social anxiety or any number of things. It could be that I could fit in, IF I could find the right community (probably Modern Orthodox) and if I can overcome my social anxiety. I wonder how I can do this, given that CBT didn’t work so well here and autism-adjusted CBT is not likely to be forthcoming for me for a long time. It also makes my personal history more depressing, in a way, if I could have had friends and fitted in if only I had known how to do it. All those wasted, lonely years.

The alternative is that I really didn’t fit in, and then I really don’t know how I will fit in in future, particularly given low self-esteem, autism, social anxiety, etc. I guess being married will automatically help me fit into the Orthodox community a bit better, and E has superior social skills to me, although I’m not sure we would be trying to connect with the same people.

As an aside, I think the reason I still think of Hevria so much, and with such mixed feelings, is that that was the place where I should really have fitted in, and somehow I always felt I didn’t quite manage it. Again, that may have been all in my head (when I was suicidal, a bunch of Hevria writers emailed me to send moral support, which I did not expect, particularly as I’d barely connected with some of them), but then, I did feel upset that I was never asked to become a regular writer, even though the people running the site knew I wanted to be one, and they ran my pieces occasionally as guest posts, and that made me feel I wasn’t quite fully there.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, and I have to get ready for Shabbat anyway.

Wedding Plans

Work today wasn’t very good. I think I slept badly again because of the heat and yawned away like crazy on the Tube and struggled to stay awake. There was a fair amount of work to do in the morning, but in the afternoon I was sorting old papers again, mostly minutes of meetings from circa 2002-2006. There were minutes from a number of similarly-named committees mixed up together, which was confusing. I spent a lot of time feeling anxious about E and my wedding ceremony and got into a bad state. E and I were texting about it too, and that probably made things worse, as we both got into a negative mindset where each thought that the other deserved a better partner than we could be. I probably texted too much for a work day, but there wasn’t really much work to do.

I got quite down and self-critical, so E and I had a long conversation this evening when we looked at wedding plans systematically and said how we envisioned our wedding, as well as listing our top three wedding priorities. E let me count “religious stuff” as one thing, which was generous of her (I’ve already told her that having Minchah and Ma’ariv (Afternoon and Evening Prayers) is lower down my list and might get cut). I think we both felt better after that as we have a clearer idea of what we want, and I have a clearer idea of why she wants to keep the costs down.

It’s scary that tiredness + boredom and maybe + heat can quickly = extreme self-criticism and pessimism about the future, as well as cynicism about my ability to make good life choices. I should remember that I can get quite down at work, particularly when there isn’t much to do or I’ve made mistakes (both of which happened today). It is good that E and I have talked this through now.

Unfortunately, I am no closer to determining how many people I would feel comfortable with at the wedding, or how to narrow down my list if I decide thirty people (plus E’s guests) would be too many.

***

When I was self-critical and beating myself up about life decisions that weren’t entirely within my control, I had a thought about autism spectrum disorder, namely that it seems to be entirely random whether you get a version that turns you into someone severely disabled, a version that turns you into a super-successful Elon Musk-type visionary, or something in between. I’m not sure of any other condition that can be either disabling or enabling except perhaps ADHD (which has some links to autism). There isn’t really a clear way of causing one or the other outcome (that we know of currently).

Unfortunately, these days I feel that I’m moderately disabled. I have a reasonable degree of functionality compared with someone who is non-verbal or even compared with someone who essentially lives at home and does no paid work and has no friends (which is somewhere I’ve been in the past, or close to), but I’m clearly not functional enough to fully support myself financially at present or to have the kind of lifestyle many of my neurotypical peers have attained, and I don’t know how I go about changing that. My book learning has not really helped me in a work environment that values “soft skills” and networking ability so much more than academic skills, and my inability to function in noisy environments or under pressure do not make things easier for me.

Self-Recrimination

I was tired even by my standards this morning. I struggled to get up and I think I fell asleep on the bus to volunteering. I think the heat has made my usual sleep issues (whatever they are) worse. I was worried that I would struggle with volunteering because I was so tired, but I actually felt OK, perhaps because I was on my feet the whole time. It did come out that I’m on psychiatric medication, which was slightly uncomfortable, but I feel like I have a load of issues that I have to accept will come out periodically with people I’m not close enough to in order to feel completely comfortable with them hearing it. And I came away with loot! There were too many vegetables and they wouldn’t last until next week, so I took some potatoes and carrots.

More excitingly, there was a big pile of religious books to be buried if no longer wanted (holy books are buried in Judaism), or to be thrown away if they were less holy. I asked if I could take some, and no one minded if I took one or two. Or ten. I’m not joking, I really took ten, as they were free and just going to be buried or even thrown away if I didn’t take them. Admittedly some I only took because they were free, but I was pleased to get a one volume translation of Rambam/Maimonides The Guide for the Perplexed (I don’t know if I’ll read it from cover to cover, but it’s good to have for reference), the The Hafetz Hayyim on Pirkey Avoth (not how I would transliterate, but anyway…) and Challenge: Torah Views on Science and Its Problems (quite a well-known Modern Orthodox book from the seventies). One of the books I ordered for novel research was at home when I got there too, which was good.

(Unfortunately, once I got home I discovered that I now have about 1,275 books and no space to store them in, particularly the Jewish ones, which can’t be stacked horizontally like the novels, for various reasons.)

I seemed to spend half the afternoon dealing with odd chores (adding the books to Goodreads and finding space for them; dealing with and filing a bunch of tax and financial letters) just to get to the point where I could do things for my trip to New York for E and my civil wedding in August. I then discovered that the airline had not sent me a confirmation email for the flights I booked on Sunday. I did eventually manage to retrieve the information, but it shocks me a bit how naive/clueless I can be; it had registered that they hadn’t sent anything, but I vaguely thought they would given time. Yes, I know executive function issues in autistics can mean that problems register on an abstract level, but don’t lead to the “Do this to fix it” thought that neurotypicals get and that’s probably more the case for me than I realise. I’m still not sure what the problem was, but I did get an email in the end, and then managed to find a hotel at a reasonable price.

My mood did go down a bit when confronted with all this, but it’s comforting that one feared obstacle after another has been surmounted or just melted away.

I wanted to do some Torah study, but I had a headache and Skyped E. I hopefully will do a few minutes before bed, but not much. The heat just feels really oppressive and it’s hard to do anything, particularly after a busy day and poor sleep last night. E and I spoke about the wedding, and I had a longer-than-intended discussion with my parents afterwards. Discussing in the heat and tiredness was not easy. I think I need to write my delayed password-protected post to process and understand my thoughts about the wedding.

***

I’ve been feeling some self-recrimination lately. A lot of it is wanting to explain myself to people, to explain how my autism affected me when I was younger. I think there are people who tried to befriend me who I ran away from; certainly there are people who tried to get me more involved in adolescent/university Jewish social/religious groups who I ran away from. I think some of the kids who bullied me at school did so because they misread my social anxiety as intellectual snobbery or worse. And there was the horrible situation I got into at university with the female friend I had a crush on where I overloaded her with my troubles until she stopped talking to me; I basically destroyed the friendship, or at least I partially did it. Sometimes I wish I could have my time again and be the somewhat more socially-functional person I am now, but back when I was a teenager. Or just to tell people that I’m on the spectrum and that’s why my reactions are weird (not neurotypical).

I’m particularly struggling with talking to my Dad. It’s at least partly my fault. We don’t communicate very well any more. I would like to say more, but don’t want to do it on a public post. This has been going on for years and getting worse. I’ve spoken to my therapist, but I really don’t know what to do about it. I blame myself and tell myself to be more patient, but I can’t seem to train myself to behave differently.

How I Broke the Shidduch System

I’m still thinking about dealing with Impostor Syndrome and with other people’s success (two slightly different topics, but related)(also, I tried to link to Ashley’s Impostor Syndrome post when I wrote about it yesterday, but WordPress ate the link somehow — sorry Ashley!).

I want to think, “I’m trying to live according to my values: to support E and my family emotionally; to be kind and empathetic to others; to try to connect with God and Torah; to try to connect with the Jewish community across time and space; to be thoughtful and curious and honest; to be creative sometimes; and to focus on personal growth; and if I don’t always succeed, at least I succeed sometimes.”[1] Still, it is hard to think about that a lot of the time. I don’t really want to be super-rich, but I do worry about how E and I will make ends meet basically relying on one and a bit wages between the two of us, without relying on our parents. And, as I said the other day, part of me would like my opinion to be taken seriously in the Jewish community (or even more widely). I’m not proud of that thought and I don’t really think it’s a good character trait to have, but it’s there.

I hope this feeling might go away. I used to be very caught up in self-pity and that’s reduced (although not entirely vanished) since being diagnosed autistic, getting a permanent job and getting engaged. Maybe the desire to be taken seriously by others will subside at some point too if I can deal with whatever’s prompting it, probably a feeling of not being taken seriously, and even being ignored and bullied, as a child, as well as low self-esteem generally.

[1] Sadly, my biggest failure is probably being kind and empathetic to my parents. I know it’s hard to live with your parents when you’re pushing forty. And I know my parents have their own character traits and issues that make it hard to live with them sometimes, and that sometimes those things are a particularly bad fit with my autistic needs/disabilities. But I still I feel I should do better. I want to say more about this, but I’ve never worked out how to write about the situation without going into lashon hara (improper speech) and dishonouring parents territory. Maybe it will be easier once I move out.

***

I watched a YouTube video of family therapist Elisheva Liss being interviewed by Rabbi Efrem Goldberg and his wife Yocheved. From what Liss said on her weekly newsletter, I thought it would be about narrative therapy. However, I must have misunderstood, as they spoke mainly about shidduchim (the whole system of arranged dating in the Orthodox Jewish world) and marriage. I probably would not have listened to the whole thing if I realised that they would not be talking about narrative therapy.

I used to think I was too defective for the shidduch system to work for me, but maybe it’s more the case that the shidduch system is too defective to work for me. I’m not sure. It’s true that in the end I met E away from the system, and that E would never have been in the system in the first place. And I am aware that most shadchanim (matchmakers) and rabbis would throw their hands up in despair about E and me, with both of us having some ongoing psychological issues, neither of us earning very much money, and both of us on somewhat different religious levels. I do worry about those things a bit, although less so since we got engaged, but ultimately it’s just the two of us in this relationship/marriage and we arguably have skills that many twenty-somethings in the shidduch system don’t have in terms of self-knowledge and values-awareness; knowledge of each other from dating together so long; honest communication; willingness to compromise; and just general maturity. Not that I would say that I am particularly mature, but I have to believe that I can’t have got to (nearly) thirty-nine without picking up some maturity and life-skills I didn’t have at twenty-four. To be honest, E and I both need someone who understands and accepts us, with all our issues, more than we need someone on the same religious level. I know that thinking that probably would not be accepted in much of the frum world, but then it’s probably why I couldn’t find a partner in the frum shidduch-dating world.

***

I did a bit of novel writing today, but I struggled with procrastination. I’ve been writing quite a lot lately and maybe need a break for a day or two (more than just Shabbat). I’d like to finish reading over this chapter first. I thought I would do that today, but E asked me to help her with an important wedding thing that rightly took priority. That left me feeling a bit anxious. We are making progress with this wedding, but sometimes it feels that for every worry we knock on the head, another one emerges. I can’t go into details, but it did remind me of something Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl once said, that everyone thinks a moral dilemma is a choice between something right and something wrong, but it’s not; a moral dilemma is a choice between two things that are both right and you can only pick one, or two things that are wrong, but you have to pick one i.e. a situation in which there can be no perfect response. As a perfectionist, this sort of situation makes me anxious and stressed.

Materialism, Ego and Spirituality

I listened to an Orthodox Conundrum podcast about materialism today. I had mixed feelings about it. The guest, Rabbi Jeremy Wieder, spoke about contemporary America being defined by four ‘isms’: narcissism, hedonism, consumerism and exhibitionism (the UK is probably not so bad, but still affected by all four). This is probably true, on some level, but I felt Rabbi Wieder and host Rabbi Scott Kahn struggled to define their terms, particularly as they felt this is an area where something may be within the letter of the law, but not the spirit. As they said, it’s very subjective; person X may say that person Y is being hedonistic and consumerist, but person Z may say the same about person X.

Historically, there have been people in the Jewish community who have been very wealthy and lived extravagantly, and they were often great philanthropists and ambassadors for the community to the non-Jewish world e.g. Sir Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds. In modern days, maybe someone like Lord Levy. If they hadn’t been blessed with great wealth, and used some of it not just for philanthropy, but to enter high society and provide a Jewish voice there, the Jewish community as a whole would have suffered. Maybe this is less obvious in the less aristocratic USA. I feel someone lucky enough to be rich and influential needs to do some serious soul-searching about what their role in life and the Jewish community is and why God wants them to have that wealth and what the best thing for them to do with it is (I have never had this problem myself!).

Incidentally, I worry a bit about being exhibitionist myself on my blog, but I think I tend to talk most about my failures and gloss over my successes (like the Kotzker Hasidim who were said to sin publicly and perform mitzvot (commandments) in secret to avoid pride in their behaviour).

The podcast did at least make me realise how E and I would have struggled to raise a frum (religious Jewish) family in the USA, given the astronomical price of private Jewish school fees (in the UK there are Jewish state schools), on top of needing to find me a job with health insurance.

By coincidence (or not), while having these thoughts about materialism, part of my work today involved inventorying someone’s flat. (It’s a long story how this was relevant to my job.) If you want to test how much envy you have, try inventorying someone’s furniture, complete with price tags! And they weren’t even paying for it as it was being provided by their employer. It did make me worry how E and I will survive on about the equivalent of one salary between us, even without kids. And we’re limited to staying in Jewish communities, which tend not to be the cheapest. People we try to befriend will probably be earning a lot more than us too. It’s kind of depressing.

Also depressing was discovering that I didn’t get on the emerging writers’ programme. I tried not to get my hopes up, but part of me was hoping that this would be the big turning point in my life, or at least in my writing career. But it was not to be. Maybe it’s for the best, as it allows me to pause writing my novel when I need to, to focus on my wedding. I can also go back to submitting my first novel to agents, something I stopped doing because I thought the project I submitted for the emerging writers’ programme was supposed to end up as my first novel.

It does all make me wonder what my role in life is, whether writing is a part of that, and whether E and I will ever be living above subsistence level (or, more realistically, living without parental support). In this context, Rabbis Kahn and Wieder spoke about focusing on spirituality rather than materialism, which is a word I’ve always struggled with. It seems very nebulous and ill-defined. As I’ve said before, I see the quest for God and for meaning as more a part of my life than finding God or and meaning. I suspect some people would see this as spirituality, while others would wonder why I can’t just find God and then I would be spiritual. Likewise, I try to focus on spiritual growth, rather than attainment, but I am very bad at maintaining this perspective without slipping into self-criticism.

I saw an article recently that said that spirituality is about trying to adopt God’s perspective on the world. I did not like this, at least not in the way it was presented. I feel God’s perspective is decentred and plural (God can see things from literally everyone’s point of view). Hence, the Talmud is a pluralistic text, with multiple answers to any question, and it’s more concerned with presenting all those answers in the internally strongest way than with seeing which answer is better than the others (part of the reason Talmud study is so difficult is that it’s often unclear which side actually ‘wins’ the argument). And scholars like Rav Kook z”tzl, Rabbi Lord Sacks z”tzl and Rabbi Steinsaltz z”tzl saw many religions as being legitimate paths to God.

Perhaps related to all this I had another, “Oh, there’s someone I used to know; they’re a lot more successful than me” moment today. The fact that this person was the one who left me with a life-long feeling that I am inferior in the frum community for never having gone to yeshivah did not help, particularly as I feel that, on some level, that is precisely why I’ve never really fitted in (well, that and being a socially anxious autistic).

To be honest, a lot depends on how you define ‘successful’ here, but I hope — hope! — that one day I will earn enough money to help support E and hopefully some children or at least a child. And I would like to think that people are interested in my ideas, at least by publishing and reading my books and maybe by sharing them in other ways (I’ve always had a weird desire for a monthly column in the Jewish Chronicle, I’m not entirely sure why). This is ego, I admit. After a childhood of receiving no attention, or only negative attention (bullying etc.), I would like to be taken seriously as a writer for the sake of my own ego, but as I intimated with regard to the super-rich community machers (people who are very involved in the community), sometimes spirituality is about trying to harness your gifts to help others, not supress them or give them away.

Yes, I’m aware there are a dozen or so people who take my writing here seriously enough to regularly read. I’m grateful, although I’m a bit bemused as to why anyone would read these rambles, mostly about my autistic struggles, as I don’t consider them anything like my ‘real’ writing.

Speaking of which, when I got home from work, I managed to work on my novel for quite a while. I sat at the computer for an hour and a half. Not all of that time was spent writing, but quite a lot was, so that at least was positive.