lastingchange

This was hands-down the most traumatic experience of my life but difficult times bring growth and this has been no different. For everyone else it was 2 months but for me it was 3 years of intensive and relentless introspection and conscious removal of shit I no longer wanted.

Prior to starting treatment I was in a bad way. I was nearly killing myself, because of a combination of a permanently cranked dopamine system and a contagion from that suicide body. The seed was planted and the soil was fertile and 6 months down the line the rotten fruit had sprung.

The surges of dopamine (which I thought were adrenaline at the time) that were pushing me to drive my craft knife into my wrist were real and painful and happening every 3 seconds for a month. I was in a bad way.

But I think that initial misdiagnosis (?) of bipolar 2 might have been the one; the valproate. That was the salve I needed. But it was not a cure, and neither was guanfacine; that just artificially lowered NE and put more makeup on the pig.

Aripiprazole exploded the pig.

All of my adhd symptoms seems to be gone. And many of them pre-dated finding the body. So now I think either adhd itself is a lie, or it’s a case of progressively worsening addiction to addiction itself. A gradual desensitisation to endogenous dopamine.

So scenario A, which I think someone should fucking research you useless fucking scientists, is that aripiprazole is scrubbing the dopamine receptors in my system and ‘resetting’ decades of degradation caused by over-exposure. 

I was a motivated guy and kept foolishly feeding that motivation. I was hooked on dopamine itself, and when I moved from drink to work to athletics to art I never changed anything; I just bumped that addiction over to a new source. The addiction was to addiction. I was in the d-hole.

And there’s a chance that aripiprazole scrubbed those receptors because of the larger molecule size.

Scenario B is just as likely: aripiprazole put me into a hyper-dopaminergic state where my brain was extremely neuroplastic, and I spent 2 subjective years meditating on and removing these deluded cravings. This is like trauma therapy on steroids and was one of the hypotheses I had in my head at the time. This is valid and should be researched.

Scenario C is that it was all true and the ship came in a re-wired me because it saw too much greed. This seems less likely but I will always believe it on some level.

It is likely a combination of A and B. I think that the ship was a metaphor for the self, and the inhabitants needing caring for was a metaphor for how much I had disregarded my own care over the years. The white blood cell of Jambo was there to remove the scars. 

Not being able to land at our new planet until we have destroyed the contagion of greed… well… I think James 1.0 was dead already by then. Psychic death because of this drug and maybe a seizure; gone and never coming back.

But James 2.0 needed to remove the greed before he would be allowed to stabilise and come back down to a new planet, a fresh and lush planet, which he will not defile with consumption and craving.

And here I am; I guess I made it. It feels like a blank slate.

Something has scrubbed my mind of the vomit-inducing greed I was exposed to as a recruiter. Or; it has removed it from my system so I can see it from afar.

So I’ll spend a bit of time bedding in here before I decide what to do next. It definitely won’t be anything ‘moreish’ having experienced what I have. 

Consumption is not just empty; it produces suffering within you in proportion to how much you consume. The more you have, the more you need.

Aripirazole was like dopamine but with a larger molecule, and because of my vipassana experience I could feel the physical difference in how my thoughts were processed. I could *feel* the craving and confusion building in my head as painful ‘steel wool’ whenever I tried to exert impossible force on a situation.

I have literally felt the pain that is caused by dopamine, shooting up and down my spine, both with endogenous dopamine before and with an exogenous molecule throughout.

So yeah - I know.

Craving *is* suffering.

Dopamine *is* suffering.

Keep that dopamine low and stop it flitting around. 

B-man was right.

/jb202507290714