Posted on by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

The Time-Traveller’s Life

It’s very late, but I’m not tired, for reasons that will become apparent. I am feeling a little overwhelmed, so – blog! I don’t think blogging stops me feeling overwhelmed, but it does help to process my thoughts and feelings.

I spent a lot of Shabbat (the Sabbath) asleep again. I went to bed late on Friday night (I was finishing reading Timewyrm: Apocalypse – it got pretty good near the end) and slept for about eleven hours. E tried to get me up for shul (synagogue), but I didn’t manage it. I’m not sure how much was autistic exhaustion/burnout and how much social anxiety. I don’t think my social anxiety overall is worse since COVID, but my shul-related social anxiety might be. I’m not sure how to work on this. Then, I was in bed for another two hours after lunch. I’m not sure how much was resting, how much sleeping and how much shutdown (?), but some of it was definitely sleeping. I feel extended meals with my parents are draining and, these days, often trigger something approaching shutdowns.

I feel like I’m struggling with a lot of minor health issues at the moment. Aside from the ongoing (and possibly life-long) struggle with autistic exhaustion and burnout, I still have sleep apnoea issues. I don’t always wear my mouth splint when I sleep, as I’m not sure it helps; when I do, I remove it in my sleep anyway and I don’t know if I leave it in long enough to help at all. I certainly don’t feel less tired. I threw away some of the packaging from my splint the other day and noticed something there that wasn’t on the instruction leaflet: it seemed to be a disclaimer saying it wouldn’t work if one’s front upper teeth naturally rests in front of the lower front teeth instead of on top of them. This is the case with my teeth and I wonder if that’s why it’s not working. I would like to actually talk to someone about this, but NHS, etc., etc. (By the way, did I mention I have to get another blood test because the GP’s surgery messed up the form for the previous one? Not the first time this has happened. I don’t even get upset any more, it’s just one of those inevitable negative parts of life, like death, taxes and the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate to Doctor Who.) Then there’s the ongoing possible hypoglycaemia issue that is making me worried about fasting on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), starting Sunday night, particularly combined with low blood pressure. It’s hard to get doctors to take any of this seriously.

Beyond all this is a general feeling of overwhelm which I know will be around for a couple more weeks at least, because of Yom Tov (festival) preparations, covering for J at work when he’s off for a week and possibly having to do the Very Scary Task again, the forthcoming flat survey and then, hopefully, moving itself, which is stressful even if E and I are climbing the walls wanting to leave.

***

I’ve been thinking a bit about masking or unmasking. My thoughts on this are emerging slowly and I will probably write a lot more about this over the coming weeks. I guess I’m lucky that I don’t have many unusual stims or quirks that I suppress and need to unmask. Unless I’ve been suppressing them for so long that I no longer know they’re there, which I guess is possible. I do have some minor stims, but I don’t think people really notice them. It can take a lot of effort and energy to make eye contact and show appropriate body language, but I don’t think it would be helpful to stop doing that at this stage, especially as I’m not around strangers that much. So unmasking for me is more about being myself in a wider sense.

Before I was diagnosed autistic, I just felt I didn’t fit in anywhere and even wondered if I was unconsciously finding reasons not to fit in just to be a loner. Now I still feel I don’t fit in, but I feel it’s more because I am someone with wide-ranging interests and a willingness to meet people who aren’t like me. My experience of E and my wedding was that my Modern Orthodox and even moderately Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) friends accepted a lot of things that I was worried they would not accept (Doctor Who fandom, E not being as frum (religious) as me, an atypical Jewish wedding party), so maybe I should be more comfortable being myself in those environments. However, I still feel like I have to hide my religious and political views among people who don’t have similar views, which is sad. In particular, this is hard in group therapy/support-type environments, which are supposed to be “safe spaces,” but aren’t always.

I think I’m not exactly a straightforward sample of any group I belong to (Orthodox Jew, Doctor Who fan, geek, Oxonian, I don’t know what else). At any rate, Facebook’s algorithm really has no idea of what I would like to see. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking of myself as a time-traveller who has learnt how to live and interact in a period from books and is now going to that time period in person and discovering that there are a lot of small cues and behaviours, turns of phrase and slang, that people in the past had that aren’t recorded in the books and have to be learnt or imitated on the fly. The alternative is to brazen out being different. I have this feeling among frum Jews, but also among Doctor Who fans, among geeks, even among autistics. So it’s hard to know what is autistic masking and what is just trying to communicate in a way people can understand.

***

I’m still thinking a lot about where I am religiously, particularly with davening (praying) and Torah study, given that two rabbis have told me to cut back on these, especially communal prayer and Talmud study, to avoid burnout.

I’m not davening at the same time as the community as one rabbi said and I feel a bit bad about that, but I am at least davening with more kavannah (mindfulness) than in the past. But I do find it hard to have in mind both the content of the prayer and the idea that I’m standing in front of God at the same time. I can have one or the other, but not both. It strikes me that this is possibly one of those things that lots of people experience, but no one talks about.

With Torah study, I’m still studying mainly Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and Jewish philosophy. I am trying to study Tanakh “properly” rather than just reading it. For me this means not just reading the Hebrew (which I’ve been doing for years), but looking words I don’t understand up in dictionaries rather than just looking at translations (an easy, but bad, habit to fall out of) plus using the Medieval and modern commentaries I have access to and, in the case of the Medieval commentaries (which are mostly in rabbinic Hebrew), trying to look words I don’t understand there up too. As far as I’m aware no one has ever produced a rabbinic Hebrew-English dictionary. I do have a modern Hebrew dictionary that claims to have Biblical, Talmudic and Medieval Hebrew entries. I don’t have access to modern commentaries on all of Tanakh, sadly. I am collecting the Koren Maggid Studies in Tanakh series, but I’ve found the quality variable, although mostly high. Today I also looked some geographical points up in the Atlas of the Bible that I picked up somewhere years ago, which was quite enlightening, although the atlas isn’t scholarly.

I think I need to teach as well as to study, which is something that has taken a long time for me to realise or to re-realise. Not only is it a mitzvah (commandment) to share Torah wisdom and sin not to share it, but it’s a helpful way of getting my own thoughts in order, particularly with my own chiddushim (novel interpretations) as well as getting feedback and stimulating questions. I want to try to get back to writing divrei Torah on the sedra (essays on the weekly Torah reading), probably not every week, but some weeks, and sharing them. E and I want to get back into the habit of discussing the sedra every week, which we stopped doing in the run up to the wedding. In addition, a  friend I made through the Jewish autism video call suggested a regular video call between her, E and myself to discuss Jewish topics which I’m looking forward to as well, both as a way of learning and teaching and as a way to have more Jewish communal contact while I’m not managing to get to shul. I’m excited about these plans for the new year, which is good, as I feel like I’m struggling with a lot of Jewish things at the moment.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

Shabbat and Emotions

I got woken up at 9.00am again today by a phone call to do the Very Scary Task. I’m glad J is back at work next week. It actually went OK, so far as these things go, but I spent a lot more time working on it than the forty-five minutes I still needed to do. I’ve asked J for an hour off next week and he agreed, although I don’t know when I’ll take it.

Shabbat (the Sabbath) used to be a favourite time of the week when I had quiet alone time to recharge and avoid burnout. Unfortunately, E currently hates it. She finds it hard being with my parents so much and refuses to eat much of their stodgy Ashkenazi Shabbat food, preferring to cook her own (I often eat hers as I like it too, to be honest). She finds being cooped up on Shabbat hard and wants to go out and is frustrated by not being able to do so (even the library has an electronic lock to get in). Going to shul (synagogue) helps, but lately we’ve both been too exhausted. As I’ve said before, part of the problem is that I (autistic) need quiet alone time, which Shabbat is good for, whereas E (AuDHD) needs busy/novelty time. We do often go out on Sundays, but she still finds Shabbat hard, whereas, even if Shabbat wasn’t an issue, I probably wouldn’t want to go out two days running.

I’m not sure what the solution is. E knows she can go out if she wants on Shabbat, but hasn’t so far, as she feels I would disapprove. I’ve told her I’m OK with it, but she knows deep down it’s not my ideal and I can’t say that isn’t true. I think it does help her a bit to know it’s an option. Things will probably be better when we have our own place, but it’s hard to know what to do for the next X many months. I am also struggling a bit with my rest and recharge day being more fraught.

Also, as I’ve mentioned, neither E nor I regulate our emotions well, but whereas she is overly expressive, I am under-expressive and sometimes don’t recognise what I’m feeling until later, which isn’t a great combination either. I’ve also mentioned before the trouble I have expressing an opposite opinion to E or just freezing when faced with strong negative emotions, which she wants me to fight against, as she doesn’t want me to just agree with her all the time. I am trying, but my poor understanding of my own emotions as well as hers makes it hard even without my childhood conditioning that expressing an opposing opinion will cause people to abandon me (something else to discuss in therapy).

E feeling that she has nothing to enjoy on Shabbat makes me realise that I had nothing to enjoy on most days from about the age of sixteen or so until we got married (age thirty-nine). I don’t mean that in a “I did had it as bad/worse, so you need to just suck it up” way, but just that it didn’t really occur to me that people could go through life enjoying lots of things or that they could or would opt out of activities if they didn’t enjoy them. I just felt life was something you had to get through as best you could without doing anything morally wrong. If you enjoyed it along the way, that was fine, but it wasn’t likely to be a common or necessary occurrence (see also what I wrote about alexithymia and getting joy and connection to mitzvot (religious commandments) and Judaism yesterday). I think this is a personality and experience difference more than an ASD versus AuDHD one.

I would like to understand E’s AuDHD better and have posted on the autism forum I’m on to see if anyone can suggest any books. The library has one that looks good, but it’s only available as an ebook and I dislike reading ebooks. A book on alexithymia (difficulty understanding emotions) for me would be good too, but I’ve only ever come across one and it didn’t look good.

For what it’s worth, E and I have discussed things today and we are still holding out a bit longer for a flat to buy, but will switch to looking for a rental if we can’t find anything by the end of September. It just seems there so much to do NOW if we want to improve our current lives: find somewhere to buy (or find somewhere to rent), get more/better work, have a holiday, discuss a bunch of different stuff in therapy, even improve my diet (I’m feeling lightheaded again)… Autistic executive (dys)function brain(s) can’t cope and we procrastinate.

***

I don’t know if the next bit is “Facebook Woes” or “Doctor Who Woes” or “Star Trek/Star Wars Woes” or what. Actually, it’s probably “Procrastination Woes”.

I’m a member of a couple of Doctor Who Facebook groups, one each for Quatermass, The Prisoner and Sapphire and Steel,plus one for general British cult television. But Facebook keeps filling my news feed with memes and discussion points for Star Trek and Star Wars as well as some for films (sorry, movies) in general. These programmes are all technically science fiction, but the British programmes whose groups I follow are very different to theAmerican ones, if you actually watch them with an open mind. So why does Facebook’s algorithm send so many posts about them to my feed and few about Doctor Who? (No posts about the other series is probably because they’re relatively obscure these days, which is probably part of the elitist fun for me.)

 In any case, I don’t understand any of the discussion threads or memes because I’ve lost touch with both franchises, which now seem to have dozens of spinoffs I’ve barely heard off, and even the memes seem to be based not just on spinoff series I haven’t seen, but on other memes that I don’t know and impossible to understand without that context. I’ve never really been “in the loop,” but now I’m so far from it, I’m on another planet. I really am middle-aged.

I get shown Harry Potter stuff too, but I’m avoiding it as I don’t want spoilers (I just started Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix).

I get shown a few Doctor Who pages, but have no inclination to follow pages that are almost always just screen shots from the programme with dialogue written on top. Nothing analytical or creative or even funny. It annoys me that Doctor Who Facebook fandom seems so lacking in intelligence and imagination these days (and also still full of David Tennant fans. Why? WHY? The only Doctor I can’t really see any positives at all in). Facebook isn’t great for analytical or creative generally, but other fandoms seem to be doing better. I don’t really know what Doctor Who fandom is like away from Facebook e.g. on Twitter. Doctor Who Magazine is centrally controlled “product” these days so isn’t really a barometer of fandom the way it used to be.

I could post some stuff here about the twenty-first century series versus the twentieth and their fan bases, but that would be a cheap shot and probably unsubstantiated. I do feel the new series and its outlook (perfectly normal for a contemporary audience) is different from the twentieth century version, but it’s probably in line with that of contemporary Star Trek and Star Wars, so that’s probably not the answer. That suggests I won’t like the Trek/Wars spinoffs either, but I am a little curious about some of the Star Trek spinoffs.

Incidentally, Russell T Davies says more Doctor Who spinoffs are coming, after several he oversaw during his first period as showrunner. At this stage, I am even less excited about this than I am about forthcoming episodes of the parent programme. I’d still like to engage in fandom, but between this, the Russell T Davies and David Tennant idolatry and the talk of inclusivity around race and LGBT with no mention of the fact that there hasn’t been a single character said to be Jewish on the TV show in sixty years (there have been a couple in other media, but often minor characters and one explicitly based on an antisemitic legend) I’m not sure what I would get out of it.

Anyway, despite my news thread filling with stuff I mostly don’t read and mostly don’t understand, I still check it frequently and I have no idea why. I guess I search for the elusive hilarious joke or incisive commentary on something. Dopamine apparently is triggered by searching, not finding, so I’m apparently a social media junkie as much as everyone else, despite my best efforts.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 8 Comments

Rambling Life Update

Commenter E (not my wife E) asked on the last post if I believe in someone who believes in me (this was with regard to struggling to see myself as a good person). I guess the thing about this line of reasoning for me has always been that other people don’t know what’s going on in my head or what I do when no one’s around. To be honest, me when no one’s around isn’t that different to me when someone is around, but I feel that my thoughts are the “real me” and therefore bad thoughts would make me a bad person. However, E knows 90% of what’s in my thoughts and actions and she accepts them. (I don’t think anyone should know 100% of anyone else’s thoughts, for a whole variety of reasons.) I also feel that no one should be culpable for thoughts they haven’t acted on. Moreover, I learnt when my OCD was bad that everyone has “strange,” socially unacceptable or even immoral thoughts. They don’t make you a bad person. They’re just the background radiation of the human brain.

When I blogged about this previously, Ashley shared the idea from DBT (I think) that are mind is the chessboard and our thoughts are the transient chess pieces moving over it. I struggled with this metaphor for a long time as I automatically saw myself as the anthropomorphised pieces and not the abstract board, but it chimes with thoughts I’ve had recently about the soul. I used to think of the soul as being somehow comprised of my thoughts, emotions and memories, but these change constantly. I see it more now as a sort of “ideal me” – ideal in the sense of a platonic ideal, a sort of “essence of me” that is beyond my thoughts and emotions. So it’s possible for that to be good despite “bad” transient thoughts. As we say in the Morning Prayers, “My God, the soul You have placed in me is pure.”

Since marrying E, I do find easier to believe God loves me and that I’m a good person, but I’m still not 100% there. It’s easier, but it still doesn’t come naturally and stress can apparently derail it. I am wondering if my recent clomipramine reduction has played a role here too.

***

E prepared all the food for Shabbat (the Sabbath) this week as my parents were just back from holiday. She made dairy meals rather than the usual meat meals my parents usually prepare for Shabbat (the Jewish dietary laws forbid serving meat and dairy at the same meal). My parents liked them, which I think was a relief to E. Otherwise, it was a normal Shabbat: we slept too much and I felt too exhausted and, on Friday, too ill (headache), to get to shul (synagogue). I feel bad about how long it is since I’ve been to shul, even though I’ve been told by a rabbi that it’s not a priority for me right now and I shouldn’t go.

Today E and I went to the Rossetti exhibition at Tate Britain. It was good, but too big. Neither of us were really interested enough for nine rooms of the Rossettis (really eight and a little thing on their legacy). Despite being billed as being about all the Rossettis, it was mainly about Dante Rossetti, with a bit on Christina and Elizabeth and very little on the others. Despite being so long, it was oddly coy in places, hinting at the complexity of Dante and Elizabeth’s relationship without really going into detail.

More practically, there weren’t enough seats and the lighting in places was very dim. I know the stereotype (even among autistics) is that autistics are hyper-sensitive to light, but I seem to be hypo-sensitive; dim lights make me feel uncomfortable in ways I haven’t (yet) worked out how to explain. I felt quite peopled out after a while too, and it wasn’t even that busy. It’s strange that I seem to feel this more often these days; the reality is probably that I notice it more often now I’m diagnosed.

It seems any historical exhibition these days has to shoehorn in references to imperialism and American slavery and then sententiously explain that these were Bad Things in a manner similar to anti-drugs messages in case anyone might not realise this (The British Empire: Just Say No). It’s very funny. The imperialism bit was at least relevant to discussion of Dante Rossetti’s supposedly orientalist usage of non-white models and non-European imagery, but the American slavery reference really was out of place, informing us that Dante Rossetti’s patron had made money in shipping and that much of his cargo was cotton from the American south, where working conditions were poor even after slavery was outlawed (got there in the end!). This had zero relevance to Rossetti’s art, of course.

Also, is it unwoke to say “the Middle East”? There were several references to “West Asia,” which I initially thought might mean the Indian subcontinent, but then the caption for a picture inspired by The Song of Solomon said it had a “West Asian and North African biblical setting”. I thought this was bizarre, as I would only count the relatively small number of biblical narratives set in Egypt as being North African and nothing at all in it strikes me as Asian. Is this a weird way of avoiding having to describe the land of the Bible as being either Israel or Palestine? Wikipedia tells me that “West Asia” is a term for the Middle East used by “some academics, UN bodies and other institutions”, but I’d never heard it before.

After a couple of hours of this, we were pretty galleried out, so we walked around the Pimlico/Westminster area for a while, then came back to Charing Cross Tube and came home. Parliament Square was very busy and, autism aside, I realised I still feel nervous just seeing crowds post-COVID.

***

Books!

I finished reading 10,000 Light Years from Home, a science fiction short story collection by James Tiptree Jr, real name Alice Sheldon – science fiction in the sixties (these stories were from the sixties and seventies) was still seen as a male-dominated genre and many female authors adopted male pseudonyms to find readers and even editors. The stories were a mixed bunch, but some very engaging. I preferred the ones with a Douglas Adams-style humour to the more serious ones. I struggled a lot with slang and non-literal language which is unusual for me; despite being autistic, I’m usually OK with non-literal language, although slang can be hard to decipher. It was often hard to tell what was dated sixties/seventies slang, what was American slang and what was made-up science fiction slang. Tiptree also didn’t always make it clear through pronoun use who was speaking, which was confusing. After this, I don’t feel the urge to go out and find the rest of Tiptree’s writings, but if I come across some more, I might read them.

One interesting thing: if I didn’t know that Tiptree was a woman, I’d have thought that there were some dated “male” views on gender and a “male gaze” approach to some stories and topics, particularly rape. I see this as a warning against assuming people “must” write a certain way according to identity.

Other reading: I’m still going through the Holocaust section of The Third Reich at War. I do want to finish it (I’ve got twenty-six pages left, I think), but might pause the book for a bit afterwards as I’m not sure I’m in the right headspace for something so heavy. I’m about 40% through the book overall (yes, I do monitor my progress through books; yes, it probably is autistic and is another way I don’t live in the moment).

I’m probably going to read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (book four) as my main recreational reading now I’ve finished the Tiptree. I wasn’t overly impressed with the first three books (the third was the best so far), but Facebook occasionally posts Harry Potter memes or scraps of analysis in my feed (goodness knows why the algorithm thinks to do that, I’m not following anything Harry Potter related), which have made the later books look more interesting than the earlier ones.

When too tired for prose, I’m re-reading a mammoth seven volume collection of a Batman story arc about Gotham City being practically destroyed in an earthquake and thrown out of the USA as Congress doesn’t want to pay for rebuilding.  This is wildly improbable (even more improbable is how it gets reaccepted at the end), but it makes for some different storylines to the usual insane super-villains, essentially a post-apocalyptic Batman. I’m halfway through volume three and Gotham still hasn’t been declared “No Man’s Land” yet. It’s a long arc…

Part of me would like to do some research reading for my much-delayed novel, but I worry about putting pressure on myself and my limited reserves of time, brainpower and energy at this busy and stressful time.

***

Doctor Who!

E and I have been watching Matt Smith’s time on twenty-first century Doctor Who, probably the peak of the new programme, in my opinion. However, we’ve paused between his second and third (final) seasons, partly because I felt like watching some twentieth century Doctor Who, partly because although his third season contains a number of fun episodes, four of the first six episodes (counting the Christmas special episode that was uniquely broadcast between two halves of a season) are at least moderately downbeat (and one of the others is rather stupid) and we feel the need for something lighter. So we switched to the original series and watched Patrick Troughton’s The Enemy of the World, which still feels special to me despite being rediscovered ten years ago (actually around the time Matt Smith’s third season was first broadcast). Troughton’s time on the show, along with that of Tom Baker, were the most to focus on upbeat escapist stories and not serious downbeat ones. There is a place for those downbeat ones, but, given that I tend to see Doctor Who primarily as escapism, I reach for these stories more than others.

That said, tonight we’re watching The Muppets Wizard of Oz, a TV Movie from 2005 that is moderately amusing, but crude CGI and references to Napster, Girls Gone Wild and celebrities studying kabbalah make it seem dated in parts. Do Girls Gone Wild references belong in a U-rated film anyway? I guess it’s there for the parents watching, like the (funnier) line “We’re friends of Dorothy.”

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

Hotel California (Mini-Post)

E and I had a good Shabbat (Sabbath), although we both slept for a ridiculous amount of it. I don’t know exactly how much, probably twelve or thirteen hours. We did do some reading and Torah study, but it was too wet to go out and I was too tired for shul (synagogue). E had cooked different (better, in her opinion, and I agree) food for us for Shabbat with my parents away as my parents’ repetitive Shabbat food is something E really struggles with here. We had sushi too, which I don’t get often.

We saw our solicitor today. It was a meeting arranged before we decided we should probably withdraw our offer on the flat, but he did make it clear that, for a whole bunch of reasons, it would be stupid for us to go ahead with it. Unfortunately, the estate agent is trying to wheedle us into going through with the deal. I’m trying to be firm with him, which is easier in writing (email) than in spoken communication. If he phones tomorrow, I will refuse to take his call.

E and I have been in a state of overwhelm and exhaustion for much of the day. We are both catastrophising: we worry we’ll never move, wonder if we should be looking to rent to get out of my parents’ house, we worry when we’ll be in a stable place to try to start a family, we wonder if we are even competent/capable of raising children with all our neurological and mental health issues. And in the immediate term, we wonder if/when we should go on our delay honeymoon/holiday.

I went to an online autism support group in the evening, but it overran and I don’t have time to write about it now…

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 6 Comments

Pottering

I haven’t blogged for a few days (again). Tisha B’Av (the Fast of Av, the saddest day in the Jewish calendar) passed OK. I didn’t go to shul (synagogoue) in the evening. I prayed, but I didn’t read Eichah (The Book of Lamentations) or Kinot (more lamentations, but post-biblical). I wrote my previous blog post and read a bit of The Third Reich at War. Because my reading schedule for this had been interrupted by my mini-burnout, I hadn’t actually reached the Holocaust chapter and was reading about the German invasion of the USSR. I would finish this chapter the next day and read a few pages of the Holocaust chapter, but not much as (a) I ran out of time and (b) it became clear that this section was too depressing to read for long. I’m currently hoping to get through it by reading about five pages a day, as otherwise I don’t know how to get through it, but skipping it somehow seems wrong.

I slept for about thirteen hours that night. I woke up feeling a lot calmer and less depressed and overwhelmed than I had been for a week or two. I went on a couple of video calls for people with issues around observing Tisha B’Av. One was an art class that was a big outside my comfort zone and, to be honest, I didn’t get so much from it, but I found the support group call better, albeit that I worried afterwards that I had said too much or said the wrong thing. I didn’t listen to the podcast on Eichah that I had saved.

On Friday I did a bunch of chores, the usual pre-Shabbat chores and some flat-purchase-related stuff. I’m not sure if I’ve said that we’re worried that the block of flat has some fire safety issues. I spoke to my brother-in-law, who is a surveyor, about it. He’s a commercial surveyor, rather than a residential one, but he gave me some ideas for how to move forward. E and I are both thinking that this might not be the flat for us. If we aren’t on the way to moving somewhere by the autumn festivals, we’re going to look to rent somewhere as we need to get out of my parents’ house whatever the cost.

I didn’t go to shul on Friday night either, although my Dad did. I was running late and tired, but I felt a bit guilty and wondered if I should have procrastinated less and pushed myself more to go. I do wonder if my tiredness is a psychosomatic way of getting out of shul.

On Friday night I couldn’t sleep. I had some indigestion (I ate too much salt beef as I don’t eat it often), but I think there was insomnia beyond that, as I didn’t feel tired. I did eventually fall asleep around 2.30am, woke up at 7am and thought I might go to shul, but then fell asleep again and slept through much of the morning. I did manage to avoid napping in the afternoon. Incidentally, my sleep apnoea mouth splint doesn’t seem to be doing much for me except making falling asleep harder. Part of the problem is that I remove it from my mouth when asleep (it can be hard finding it the next morning) and I don’t know if it stays in my mouth for long enough to make much of a difference.

The rest of Shabbat (the Sabbath) was a mix of walking, Torah study and reading James Bond (The Spy Who Loved Me). I would have liked to have played a game with my parents and/or E, but it didn’t happen.

I spent today pottering and doing odd chores. E went out by herself to meet a friend. As I’ve said before, E relaxes by going out, whereas I prefer to stay in and feel unpressured to do much, just quietly read and think about things and cross a few things off the To Do list, which is what I did today.

I tried to put together an “unofficial” wedding photo album of photos taken by friends and family on their cameras instead of by the professional photographer. There are good photos to put in there, but mostly of my family as E’s family didn’t take many photos, so I feel a bit conflicted about it. I tried to get the album made on Snapfish, but their albums turned out to be not what we wanted at all, too prescriptive, so I just bought some prints and will get an album at W.H. Smiths.

Someone I was at primary school with tried to friend me on Facebook. It took me a minute to realise who she was with her new double-barrelled surname (I assume maiden name plus husband’s name). I turned her down. I don’t really want to meet most people from my past and I try to use Facebook mainly for groups. I barely remember her anyway and can’t remember any interactions with her except that on my very first day in school we were paired up boy-girl and had to walk into the classroom holding hands (why?) and I was paired with her. I think. It could be I’ve got it confused after over thirty-five years.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 9 Comments

Gaslighting Myself

I skipped shul (synagogue) again over Shabbat (the Sabbath) and did reduced prayers. I only did fifteen or twenty minutes of Torah study each day (Friday and Saturday) and I refrained from studying heavy things like Talmud or The Guide for the Perplexed. I would like to get back to Talmud study, but feel I should leave it for now. I did some Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) study instead, which felt good. E and went for a walk on Shabbat afternoon. It was very windy, but we needed to get out of the house. I played Ticket to Ride: Europe with my parents in the evening and won; I think I’m learning strategies for it, which seems weird, as I’m usually bad at that sort of thing.

Today has just been mostly chores, some related to wedding or flat-purchase. I didn’t do any novel research.

I felt less burnt out by the end of Shabbat. I think being off computers and phones helps me decompress, so I’m going to try to be off them every evening by 9pm, even if I have half-finished blog posts. I’ve tried doing this in the past, but it’s been complicated by having long-distance friends or E, or by needing to blog my life in detail to process my feelings or to connect with my main friend group, which isn’t an issue now I live with E.

***

I posted something on a Facebook group for Jews with disabilities about the difficulties of making friends and fitting in to the conformist Orthodox Jewish world when you’re neurodivergent. I was really just venting and looking for sympathy, but someone offered advice which would be helpful to a neurotypical person, but not to E and me and I didn’t know how to respond. I just thanked the person for the suggestions and only responded to the possibly helpful bit, about speaking to the rabbi of our new shul.

***

I feel like I still don’t know exactly where I am with Judaism. I believe in God and Torah and want to perform the mitzvot (commandments), but I’m still not sure how to do it without burning out. Nor do I know how to choose what not do, if I can’t healthily do everything. The Talmud has an often-repeated proverb that if you try to grasp a lot, you grasp nothing, but if you try to grasp a little, you grasp something. Even so, it’s hard to identify parameters. It doesn’t help that often rabbis do not make clear the difference between biblical and rabbinic commandments as well as stringencies and non-binding traditions. Obviously they do this because they want you to keep everything, but it makes it hard to make independent decisions about this situation without talking to a rabbi, but it’s hard to talk to a rabbi about keeping the whole Torah and impossible to have a rabbi on call 24/7 (particularly on Shabbat!) when a situation arises and I have to make a split-second decision about what to do.

Related: I’ve written in the past that I thought I had a punitive view of God and then realised it was just an abstract, transcendent view. I do believe in an immanent, caring God, but I struggle to relate to Him. It occurred to me that the early parts of the Amidah prayer as well as the Alenu prayer conceptualise this paradox without resolving it (deliberately).

***

I’m re-reading the Batman story Batman R.I.P. When I last read it, in February 2021, it was about a month before my autism diagnosis and I was not so aware of terms like masking and internalised ableism. I wrote a blog post about the comic, in which Batman is brainwashed and drugged, but has created a “back-up” persona, The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, a sort of autopilot brain to save himself if he gets brainwashed. I wrote that when I’m exhausted, I can have a sort of Luftmentsch of Zur-En-Arrh persona I can draw on to get essential tasks completed.

Lately, it seems that I was just describing making myself more ill by pushing through burnout. I feel I gaslight myself when I’m burnt out. I say, “I can do X when I’m burnt out” and push myself to do X, but then I feel awful and just extend the burnout as I actually can’t do X when burnt out.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 8 Comments

Bleurgh

I’m feeling physically ill with autistic burnout today and struggling to do anything, even to read my Doctor Who book. I’m possibly making stupid mistakes due to burnout-induced cognitive impairment. It’s hard that autistic burnout isn’t really recognised as a real condition or understood and accepted by other people. By myself, in a way. Is this ablism or a work ethic? I feel guilty about wanting to write and being so religious when E needs me to do stuff. However, E wants me to feel comfortable religiously and she really wants me to start writing fiction again. It is hard to know what to do. I shouldn’t have blogged yesterday when I felt drained, but I needed to process things. Again, it’s hard to know what to do.

I feel that I will crash over Shabbat (the Sabbath). I feel a little guilty about this, as I’ve missed shul (synagogue) for a couple of weeks, plus E struggles with Shabbat, as my parents’ meal plans and conversation are not what she is used to or feels comfortable with given her neurodivergence. I can understand this, as I probably only cope because I’m used to it.

Lately I feel like I should bend halakhah (Jewish law) more for E. Go with her to a non-kosher vegetarian restaurant that she might enjoy more than the kosher ones. But I know I would feel terrible doing this and that she would not want me to feel terrible.

I realised today E and I react to stress differently, particularly in relation to our neurodivergence. E has a kind of restrained meltdown in terms of catastrophising and complaining about what is going wrong or could go wrong. I have shutdowns and just, well, shut down, either fully or, more usually, like today, keep going on residual energy, but don’t have anything left for non-essential conversation (to my parents’ annoyance) or non-essential activity even, as I said above, basic and enjoyable activities like light reading. I’m just writing this because NOT writing and NOT processing my emotions is just as painful as the painful “squishy brain feeling” I currently have from exerting myself to write.

I also wonder if I eat too much when autistically exhausted due to interoception issues (difficulty interpreting my body’s signals). I think eating might help when it won’t. Or maybe it’s just comfort eating.

I just saw a “social energy badge” advertised on Facebook. It’s a rectangular badge with a line of happy/indifferent/sad faces and you slide a marker to one that shows how much social energy you have. I would need two, a social energy one and a general energy one. They are related, but not the same for me.

Tangentially related, on a previous post, Susan mentioned the idea of allocating daily or weekly slots for activities to balance them. It’s a good idea and I have tried it in the past, but one day of burnout or any other disruption can send the whole thing out of balance. It is particularly hard in my parents’ home, which does not run to any kind of schedule. Plus, it is hard to know how to balance things when there is so much to do and so little energy. Maybe I will try again, though, either now or when E and I have our own home.

A lot of what little energy I had today went on reaching out to online friends to help them. I’m mostly OK with this, but there’s someone autistic who connected with me on Facebook who constantly asks if I can phone or meet her and I really don’t want to, partly because I don’t feel I know her well enough or feel comfortable enough, but also because I’m worried she doesn’t respect boundaries (e.g. repeatedly asking to phone or meet when I keep telling her I’m not comfortable), partly because I get the impression that she’s young and impressionable and I’m worried the whole situation could get out of control very easily. I don’t want to be accused of grooming. I feel I should just cut contact with her, but she’s clearly in a very bad mental health state. At the moment I’m keeping an arm’s length-distance while occasionally checking in to see if she’s OK, but I’m worried this might be making things worse.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 8 Comments

Too Headachey to Think of a Title

E and I were pretty exhausted over Shabbat (the Sabbath). I skipped shul (synagogue) on Friday night as I was exhausted and a bit faint. We missed Shabbat morning shul too, as we were still exhausted. I felt a bit bad, but I’m trying not to feel so bad about doing what I have to do to cope with life/autism. It’s just so easy to get into the cycle of not going to shul at all, which I don’t want to do again.

I read a bit: The Guide of the Perplexed, a Doctor Who novel (Cat’s Cradle: Warhead) and a Superman graphic novel. In the afternoon my rabbi mentor, his wife and some of their kids came around. They were staying in the road behind us and we’d arranged to go for a walk. They wanted to show their children the house they had lived in years ago, before they moved to Israel. Conveniently, the flat E and I are buying is on the way. Unfortunately, one of the girls was not feeling well, so my rabbi mentor turned back to take her back to where they were staying after a few minutes, but the rest of us went on together. I enjoyed seeing my rabbi mentor’s wife (I should really think of a proper title for her here so she doesn’t just sound like a subsidiary part of my rabbi mentor) for the first time in many years. I’m not sure how many years, but certainly pre-2019, the last time I went to Israel, as I didn’t see them on that trip. I’ve seen my rabbi mentor more recently, as he travels more for work and he came to the wedding, which his wife couldn’t make for work reasons. They aren’t in London for long, so unfortunately I won’t be able to see my rabbi mentor again on this trip.

At seudah (the third Sabbath meal), E, my Mum and I did a taste test of Rakusens chocolate digestive biscuits (kosher brand) versus McVitees chocolate digestives (general brand that got kosher certification last year). Surprisingly, we all felt the Rakusens were better, a much tastier biscuit. I thought the chocolate layer was better too, but I think I was alone there. Rakusens are enormously more expensive, though, so we’ll be saving them for a treat.

After Shabbat I needed some alone time. Unfortunately, I got hungry, tired and a bit down emotionally. I sat downstairs eating cereal and fruit and reading that Superman graphic novel (Superman for All Seasons). I seem to empathise more with Lana Lang than Lois Lane. Maybe I have a small-town mindset, despite having lived in London all my life (bar a few years at university) or maybe I just empathise with people who don’t end up with the life they thought they would get rather than go-ahead career people who are the best in their field.

Today I woke up feeling exhausted again. I don’t know how much is autistic exhaustion, how much sleep apnoea and how much the heat. I seem to sleep worse when it’s too hot to sleep under a duvet.

E needed to get out, so we went to Hampstead Heath. By chance, on the Tube to Hampstead, we found ourselves in the same carriage as my oldest friend and his two daughters which was really nice especially as I hadn’t met his daughters before. E and I had a good time on the Heath. Being in nature seems to be good for me and my autistic exhaustion and being away from my parents’ home is definitely good for E. I just like standing among trees, to be honest. We saw some kind of stork by a pond and tiny brown frog, smaller than my thumbnail, that I first mistook for a beetle.

I did end up with a headache again and I don’t know why. There are so many possible candidates: dehydration, lack of food, exhaustion, the heat… Except none of those explanations really feel right. The headache has been coming and going all evening. It’s not so bad at the moment until I move, when it’s painful, and there’s a level of nausea all the time. I didn’t do any Torah study today or daven Minchah (pray Afternoon Prayers) because of it. In the past I would have forced myself to do a bit of Torah study and to daven, but I’m trying not to make myself ill doing religious stuff any more.

I don’t know what to do now. I’m probably just going to watch TV until painkillers help (although I’m already on the second dose of the day), as I think showering would be a bad idea and lying down would just make it worse. I wrote most of this post when it wasn’t so bad and am mostly editing now, but apologies if mistakes get through. I feel bad and just want to post, having written the thing.

***

I wrote the next bit on Friday and didn’t have the guts to post it, but I guess it will make this post more interesting (I hope not controversial).

Lately I sort of want to write about politics, but I also don’t. My actual interest in day to day politics has dropped very low, but I have a vision of society that occupies my mind. I don’t see anyone else with the same vision, right or left. I guess the one line version of my political beliefs these days are that I care about the things progressives care about, but I think their methods are flawed much of the time. I also care about some extra stuff they don’t care about. My vision of society is conservative in a Burkean sense, something organic and evolutionary, connecting all sectors of society in the present in a need for mutual care and support, but also connecting the past and future. I don’t feel any modern conservative party that I’m aware of is advocating policies that I remotely agree with. In a sense, I don’t think there are any real contemporary conservatives, just neo-liberals and reactionaries. But I guess that’s another topic (“Conservatism: You’re Doing It Wrong”).

These days I mostly feel like a historian (I have a BA in History) looking dispassionately at a particular period and assessing the causes and effects, pros and cons, of different events and ideologies while feeling totally unconnected emotionally. I don’t think there is a single politician I see and feel some kind of “I would vote for them!” connection. Also, I honestly think having the same party in power all the time would be awful because (a) power corrupts and, more importantly, (b) I see different political ideologies as different lenses to see a society that can never be seen in itself. Each lens helps you see different problems/solutions. None of them has all the answer, none of them can even see all the questions.

It was hard to realise I was conservative (small ‘c’). I thought I was a progressive for a long time, but I only relatively recently realised that I’m not. I grew up being told by family, friends and the media that conservatives were awful people, driven purely by self-interest. I was brought up to think I should be a socialist (who were supposedly completely compassionate, a fact I find hilarious now), or, if I couldn’t manage that, at least a liberal (who were supposedly caught between compassion and selfishness). I get annoyed about this now, as I used to volunteer at a drop-in centre for asylum seekers, and I currently volunteer at a food bank, so I don’t see the vulnerable as parasites. I just happen to think the state is often not good at supporting them for reasons that would take too long to explain here.

I don’t know the politics of many of my current friends, but the ones who do speak about politics (in real life or social media) are all to my left. I worry about “coming out” to them and mostly stay quiet unless I feel someone is interested in what I have to say and feel comfortable talking to them, which is quite rare. Mostly that would be explaining something about economics. I did economics A-level. I feel most people know nothing about economics, even though it’s pretty essential to understanding how to change the world. I just wish I remembered more of what I learnt or had learnt more.

I find the world is just full of sneering about people and politics these days. It’s not one side or the other. I don’t mind have a discussion with someone (I’d prefer it not to be a debate or argument), but people just make sarky comments to people who they know agree with them and it scares me a bit. That’s why I don’t really talk about politics. I just worry that I would lose friends over something that doesn’t matter much to me, or get hurt by unreasoning sneers. (I worry that my satirical novel will be sneering. I hope not. I want the characters to be real people, not straw men/people.) The whole situation just makes me want to be silent, but that, combined with my fear of rejection by my friends, just makes me feel ashamed of views which, while unusual, are not violent or intolerant. It’s confusing. I want to talk about it to “come out of the closet” and feel less weird and ashamed of my views, but I also don’t want to talk about politics at all because all talk of politics these days is toxic and I’m afraid of rejection by those around me.

Posted on by Luftmentsch · 14 Comments

Love Is…

Love is doing things you wouldn’t do by yourself  because you know your significant other needs to do them.

I feel really wiped out today and I know some of it is end of the week autistic exhaustion, but I also know that some of it is dealing with the ongoing situation with E and my parents and knowing that Shabbat (the Sabbath) is the hardest day for that. No one is arguing, but I’m just trying to keep things running smoothly so E can do what she needs to do without upsetting my parents, which is not always easy for me. I don’t blame E for doing what she needs to do, as her AuDHD needs are real (even if undiagnosed). I choose to try and keep things calm at home for myself and my future as much as for her, which is my choice, but it’s emotionally tiring. And I do increasingly feel the difficulty of living with my parents with autism myself, as if I was OK as long as I didn’t know there was an alternative, but now I know there is one, it’s hard to live with it (Alexis de Tocqueville famously said this about oppressive regimes that try to reform and become more democratic: revolution is more likely after the shift to reform starts than before, because people realise what they’re missing).

It’s also hard when E’s response to stress and especially to stress living with my parents is to want to go out and distract herself with something fun, whereas my response is to want to stay in and crash and just relax. She went out without me today, which was good, and we agreed that in the future she would sometimes go out without me. We don’t have to do everything together. I got on with some stuff at home, but I still feel like I have a stack of stuff to do and can’t go out so often. I still want to choose wedding photos for our album (although I guess we need to do that together), set up freelance proofreading profiles and start working on my novel in earnest, which might help me de-stress. This is aside from general stuff E and I have to do together, like finish buying stuff for our new kitchen (the disadvantage of having a small wedding was that we didn’t get everything we want/need as presents). I do probably need to focus more on alone time, although I did that last night and went to bed very late, which didn’t help with tiredness. I also went to bed late from blogging, but that’s also a coping strategy with emotional stress, as blogging helps me process emotions that would otherwise be hidden from me due to alexithymia. Of course, internet procrastination didn’t help.

We do hope the flat move happens soon. We had the survey done yesterday, which is a start. The solicitor emailed us a copy of the email he sent to the seller’s solicitor. It looks like he’s started the legal searches, which is also good, but also that he’s politely angry with the seller’s solicitor for not sending everything she should send.

My hands are still badly chapped, which I’m pretty sure is a stress thing at this time of year. I also got a minor headache and felt nauseous. I listened to music to deal with autistic exhaustion, despite the Three Weeks of Jewish mourning normally forbidding it, otherwise I don’t know how I would have got dressed. I don’t know if this was fully justified, but, as we discussed on the call yesterday (see yesterday’s post), I need to find a functional equilibrium that works for me, even if it’s not 100% halakhically (by Jewish law) justified.

I think E and I are handling the situation about as well as we can. We are communicating, with each other and with my parents. We aren’t arguing or passive aggressive. But we really need to get to our own space. To be fair, things might get a little easier in a few weeks, when Shabbat isn’t quite so long. But it will be hard until we’re in our new flat.

I did a few things today: the usual pre-Shabbat chores, read reviews for noise-cancelling headphones, did a tiny bit of Torah study, wrote some important emails. But there seems so much more to do, which makes me feel overwhelmed.

E and I want to get to shul (synagogue) tomorrow, but neither of us really feels like it, me because I feel exhausted and burnt out, E because the home stress has distanced her from religion for now. We feel we should keep going if we’re to have any chance of ever building friendships there, but we also feel we’re too neurodivergent to ever build up friendships there. It’s hard. There are people I would normally talk to about this type of problem, but I feel people who aren’t autistic or ADHD just don’t get it. Not a criticism or complaint, I just find it impossible to explain in ways they can understand.

My rabbi mentor and his wife are staying near us this Shabbat, literally round the corner, so we’re hoping to see them, which might make this Shabbat a bit easier.

***

I keep getting phoned from the Diesel Emissions Claim Centre or some such, offering to help me claim if I had a car that was showing false diesel emissions. I don’t drive. I’ve blocked the callers, but they all seem to come on different lines, from different cities in the UK. It’s very annoying and I don’t know what I can do about it. You would think they would get the message and pester someone else,, if only to avoid wasting their own time.

***

Yesterday at work I came across the following job title: “Consumer Happiness Representative”. I would love to know what this job really is. Is it just a fancy name for sales rep? Or helpdesk person?

***

WordPress gets worse. Now it’s replaced usernames with numbers in comments (probably a glitch, but annoying) and it’s showing me ads on my own blog.