Purim is coming next week. Purim is the most carnivalesque Jewish festival, a rare Jewish festival that is actually what non-Jews would think of as a festival. Since my autism diagnosis, I’ve wondered how I ever coped with it. Then I realised that I didn’t. For the past few years, my anxieties have focused, via my religious OCD, on the problems of hearing every word of the reading of the Megillah (Book of Esther) as Jewish law dictates, when custom also dictates the making of a lot of noise whenever the villainous Haman is mentioned. But even before this, I struggled with it. Obviously the years when my depression was at its worse, I largely avoided the festival entirely, staying at home and not hearing the Megillah at all. But I think even as a child I felt uncomfortable with the noise, costumes and general atmosphere. I do still spend Purim in a state of nervousness, worried that something unpredictable will happen (unpredictability is a major source of anxiety to those on the spectrum), some prank or noise that will upset or scare me.
I can remember one year I was ill on the Fast of Esther (day before Purim) and although it was from fasting, my parents told the rabbi that “Purim made [me] ill,” that they thought I was sick with anxiety about it. Even then, before I was depressed or diagnosed autistic, my parents intuited that I struggled with Purim. My first depressive episode, which I increasingly feel was more like autistic burnout than depression, started on Purim when I had what I now recognise as an anxiety attack in a Megillah reading; it feels like Purim is completely entangled in my struggles with mental illness and autism. I have fantasised what an autistically-comfortable Purim might look like, but I can’t see anyone doing it, certainly not when high-functioning autism isn’t really spoken about in the frum (religious Jewish) world, and the community in the UK is really too small to make room for minorities of minorities.
Beyond that, Purim is the start of a month of intensive preparation leading up Pesach, which is hard in itself, for everyone, but also leads to the fear that my Pesach religious OCD will flare up again, particularly worrying this year as E will be here. I just have to face it, but it’s scary.
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Last summer, when the Jewish internet was full of people complaining about negative representation of Orthodox life in the mainstream media, E pointed out an Instagram post to me, from the journalist (and rebbetzin) Avital Chizik-Goldschmidt, which I saved to re-read at when I feel despondent about my writing. The text reads:
There’s so much frustration right now in the frum community; I get it. But the problem lies not only with corporations seeking sensationalism – it is also with our inability to foster a creative class that tells honest American frum stories that aren’t PR.
How about we be the change we want to see? How about we invest in real Orthodox art? What if instead of investing in askanim [activists] & bloggers to whine about misrepresentation – we empower frum independent-minded artists to do creative work, tell stories of our communities, bravely, *candidly*? The beautiful & challenging, the inspiring but also the systemic issues that emerge in communities in which there is the inevitable tug-of-war between individualism & conformity, tradition & modernity. Being both a frum journalist & a rabbi’s wife, I see up close how much pain there is, how much work there is to do.
All the energy poured into posts about how amazing our lives are, the shine of Shabbos & the impeccable wigs & sparkling family portraits, all the stories we tell ourselves – what if we would channel that energy & time into telling actually compelling stories, *for a wider audience*? No, not “my Orthodox life is fun & perfect” tales, but stories of faith, conflicts, struggles? Not sanitized hagiography, but flesh & blood. Not “content,” but art. Stories that show we are human & nothing more.
Why is it only people who leave who tell stories? Yes, it sells, but perhaps also— because we don’t create spaces to tell our most raw stories.
If you want to compete in the global stories market – publicity & hashtags don’t work.
Find real storytellers: the impassioned frum screenwriters, novelists, poets, filmmakers, artists, thirsty for platforms. Educate them. Cultivate their talent. Give them tools they need to succeed. Support their work & their honesty. Don’t censor them, don’t tell them to pursue other professions because parnasa [livelihoo], & — this is important — don’t shut them down when their work offers true critiques of communities they love & live in.
It’s on us to create community where honest storytellers can thrive – where stories are told from within, unflinching.
Reading this, I felt “At last, someone else gets it! This is exactly why I write!” But also, it’s worrying, because there’s the implication of the penultimate paragraph that communities do censor, they do discourage artistic careers and they do shut people down if they present an non-idealised picture. It makes me feel that there could be an audience for the stories I want to tell, but I have to get through two sets of gatekeepers, each with very different priorities: first the publishing world gatekeepers of agents and publishers, who are indifferent at best to stories about Judaism and religion (except Holocaust and “off the derekh” (stopping being religious) stories), then a community that often seems concerned more with making itself look good on the page or screen than listening to the marginalised.
I would feel happier if there were places I could share my Jewish writing, like Jewish writing groups. Hevria.com was good when it existed, even though I never felt like I really fitted in there. I would have liked to have written for them regularly. When they started doing in-person creative events, I obviously couldn’t go as I live on another continent.
Lately though it has been a struggle to write at all, because I feel exhausted all the time. I feel that I don’t know where to look for help as I don’t know if the problem is physical health, psychological health or medication side-effect. I feel I should wait to see if the vitamin D the doctor prescribed helps, but my parents think I should try to see my preferred doctor (if the receptionists will let me) and ask what he thinks.
I feel I do need to change something, as I can’t carry on only managing to work two days a week and needing to sleep ten or twelve hours on non-work nights and I certainly can’t get married in this state. I wake up, and I want to get up, but somehow the signals don’t go from my brain to my legs. Then I fall asleep again. This happened several times across the morning today, with increasing frustration. It was almost physically painful to fight the exhaustion to get dressed this morning. The whole situation just makes me feel down.
Between exhaustion, worries about being physically able to write, writing anything that has a chance of getting published, worries about Purim and Pesach, worries about how E and I will earn enough to get married… I feel I talked myself into a depression today. I feel as bad as I did when I had depression; I hope it will just last a day or two, and then go, without becoming another full-blown depressive episode. I do feel a bit better for having spoken to (variously) my rabbi mentor, my parents and E, and brainstormed ideas for what to do next.
I did have other surprising news as well, late in the day. Unexpected cliff-hangers are not only features of improbable TV series. But I’ve written enough for today, so it will have to wait for now…
Vision of the Night 