So I cancelled my Etsy shop. So many scammers and it just feels demeaning, but more than that I want the knives to be about not-productivity. Everything for me always has to be about the result; some kind of purpose and quantifiable goal. It’s what my reward system loves and makes more sense through the lens of audhd; it’s not a personal failing.
But I’m tired. Every goal line just serves as the start for the next. Every 1RM becomes your new warm up. Your volume has been cranked for so long that your speakers are starting to crackle and still you crank it further.
The art last year was about detoxing from a career in recruitment where it was all grey grey grey and then 1 or 0 with the 1 being enough money for a new car. I never got into gambling… or did I? All I can say is that the job had big ups and downs and a number in a bank account is a very easy way to quantify success. It is almost harder not to get sucked in given how our brains are wired. I guess I was lucky to have the defence mechanism encode my job null when it did. I’m not wealthy but I have enough, and my problems weren’t outside anyway.
Maybe that’s what it is about the knives. They can’t be about the outside. They can’t be about someone else or productivity or judgement of what is good or bad. They are not an explosion. I may give or sell them away at a future point but I think I need to just focus on making them for now.
Looking at each piece of steel, seeing what it wants to be, trying it out on one of this growing collection of stones, deciding where to polish what and whether to crack out the dremel.
Being happy to make mistakes.
That’s something that goes out the window if you do it for someone else or, even more, for money. There is no greater way to crush your creativity than to dance to the tune of an imaginary critic. If nothing else, you’re using your creative energies to create the critic.
Anyway I think I need to go into export mode again. It’s this cycle always and I thought I might get a break this time. I was saying to my wife in the garden about an hour ago: ‘I feel like that was a good creative spurt and wonder how long I’ll be allowed to rest; the usual half-day?’
Well yes it’s a half-day. But I think my next project will not have a finish line. The knives cannot be rushed. If you rush, you ruin. Same as the art I chose. And maybe I don’t need as much recovery because I’ve not driven myself to death.
A knife will be ready when it is ready.
A thought will be ready when its ready.
They are both for me, but some will be shared.
0950
That pang of fear is just a habit and you have medicine now which will keep your dopamine levels higher.]Getting that pressure to output again.
So I think I am misattributing the wellbeing to cannabis after years of self-medication and the next step is to cut that out. Pretty much certain this is the therapeutic effect of aripiprazole.
So I don’t have rsd any more but I do have social anxiety. In fact it might have increased; at the very least it’s more noticeable. Probably previously the adhd would have loved the adrenaline, but now it’s just plan anxiety.
There’s no ‘love me’ in there though; it’s just the ‘is this person trying to fight me’ I always get with eye contact and weird stunted conversations.
Thinking a lot about family again now I have a basic framework for understanding myself. I can’t imagine how to fix relationships just yet; I imploded in a big way and there’s no way I’m ever going to apologise for being the domino that the chain smashed.
But I do hope we can fix things. Or rather, build things anew, I guess, because I’m not the same person. It’s too complex for me to think about now though. I still need to work on me.
1315
Trauma
All those years looking for childhood trauma and it was dopamine dysregulation all along.
I mean I had a few fights (I won) and an alcoholic father (he was loving and stopped drink), but there were no identifiable big-T trauma events. The body was keeping the score on something, but it wasn’t what was written on the tin.
A few ‘is this trauma’ things which were actually audhd, along with an explanation
Intrusive thoughts
Adhd endocrine randomness
Hyper vigilance
Adhd and asd heightened adrenal response
Numbness / detachment / dissociation
Asd shutdown
Missing childhood memories
Dopamine time signalling issues
Addictions
Dopamine
Difficulty concentrating
Adhd burnout
Isolation
Asd burnout
Sleep disturbances
Life
Loss of interest
Adhd burnout
Chronic tension
Asd masking exhaustion
Identity fragmentation / unstable self-image
Adhd time signalling and salience issues
Chronic dysregulation
Adhd
This is just off the top of my head, but asd combined with adhd can present as trauma, depression and bipolar disorder almost to a tee. I was misdiagnosed bipolar and half the psychiatrists out there would still think I am bipolar based on my active phases; but these active phases are my norm.
Anyway there was no big-T trauma. It was all just a lifetime of undiagnosed audhd.
202506291328
What is strange about this? Why does it feel unjustified to sit and think?
Why does it somehow feel like a more productive use of time to seek thrills with computer games or TV? This is the noble pursuit; this is philosophy.
Why does it somehow feel like philosophy is something reserved for the dead? I have been philosophising since I was born but audhd prevented me from sharing it apart from with a select few.
What’s wrong with sitting and thinking about life for a bit when you get to the halfway point?
1446
I get so incredibly angry when I see injustice. It’s always been this way; this is why I had so many fights in school. I would dive in to protect strangers. Part of me probably loved the fights, but we can get into how I internalised audhd personal failings another day.
I just can’t stand it though. I get so genuinely angry about the injustice in the world; my body feels like it is facing down an assailant but there is nobody to destroy apart from the self. Shaking with rage, and always because of some scam or lie or duplicity, and the sheer inability to do anything about it on the internet. The pile-on culture of social justice warriors. It’s all revolting.
This sense of justice is one of the reasons my wife married me, but also one of the major causes of trouble throughout my life. I would walk up to teachers in school and say ‘this is not right and here is why’ in front of other kids. I made at least one cry, which I still feel bad for, but she was failing in her charge of providing an education and I guess that fell into the ‘injustice’ category for autistic James?
Thankfully my mother - and my father in a different way - gave me solid moral standpoints to fight from. I think it’s important to remember that if I didn’t have the fighter mask from my dad I wouldn’t have had the ‘stop when they go down’ rule and might well have killed someone. I hate the fighter and I wish he would sleep, but he won his fight and the program was effective. I guess the he might escape the loop of rebirth?
But looking at my social anxiety, probably not.
Rsd is gone, and that was the real killer. It’s back a little but I think this is more normal level not-wanting-to-be-hated than pathological love-me-mother-rat level. But I meet eyes and there’s the shoulder girdle tensing ready for violence. But again - is this learned? Or is this a biological thing? Both, but probably more biological than realised.
I maybe fed on this social anxiety before; this is why I was such an animated conversationalist, always with the dancing, gurning facial expressions. Maybe that’s why our family is so good at silly faces; because we have to practice our expressions in the mirror. I know I did, and then I relegated the memory to some half-remembered haze.
There’s been studies showing that autistic folks vs normal folks experience the comfort of eye contact in opposite manners. But honestly I don’t know how you can make a generalisation about autism since it seems to be ‘anything not generalised’.
Oh and fuck off with your pink and blue butterfly enablist shit. I know everyone has been told ‘this is a lifelong disorder and you have to accept it’ but that doesn’t mean Seligman’s learned helplessness it mean’s buddha’s road to enlightenment. It’s up to you which route you take. I’ll try to get this med to the world but I’m thinking more and more that it’s about the internal work too.
But the meds. I can’t overstate. I don’t think I would function like this without them. You can see my anger and how things changed with time in my art. Capitalism was pre-medication, trussed was post-guanfacine, and post-abilify I don’t want to look at that orange cunt and just want to be with my family instead.
Like a normal person. That’s what I feel like. In the juices at least. The wires will always be weird and that’s fine. But I didn’t eat my cannabis edible yesterday and I felt better than when I do usually. So this is exactly what I wanted in a med: sensory issues and cravings down, dopamine up to replace cannabis, once daily dosing and pharmacological ability. And adhd as a bonus.
Anyway fuck that ‘we are all broken so let’s pretend it’s a superpower’ shite. It’s not. But with abilify it sure felt that way for a while.
I do hope I can fix my relationships with my family. But I can’t focus on that yet. That’s the hardest can of worms. They have to meet me, then grieve the old me. Whoever he was, they loved him, and his death is going to hurt them. It will hurt them in proportion to how much they loved the dancer. But I still think that what they loved really was the stuff underneath. Maybe I should suggest they have a funeral of sorts. I had a burning ceremony for my old stuff last year, before everything imploded.
I guess I saw this coming a long way off and stacked the odds. ‘Get to the art James’ something said, with urgency. So I did. For a year. And it saved my life, I think. I cut wood, instead of my wrists. Somehow I tempered the relationship with my wife so she could (just about) survive the implosion. I got this website. I don’t know; it just feels like I knew this was coming and knew I had to prepare. When it all got bad and I just spent 3 weeks making pictures of my loved ones, before I had the serious breakdown. I wonder; if I’d paid just a little less attention to child #2’s hair, would I have killed myself?
All of this was an unconscious reminder of why I should stick around. What it was that J1 had built which could be a foundation for J2. Because J1 had done. He finished the program of being human. His fight was over, and he was terminating, and he needed to start the process for the next task or the system was going to shut down.
Now the next task is running. I think the first version is ready and it will need a rewrite to grow much from here so I’ll just add nuggets occasionally but focus on simple old blogging and living for now. Philosophical musings. I’ve always loved these and the adhd/asd lens is great to be honest; it means I can revisit the big problems and approach satisfactory solutions; agency and meaning for example just fell out the other day. This was the missing piece in my life, and it probably sounds a bit crazy to be here at 2:34 am writing this, but I was in bed at 0830 and this is a big change so… maybe this is how I was supposed to be. Maybe the ‘regular routine’ I tried to keep had become yet another personal failing and reason to beat myself up. Missing piece is not an understatement. Even better: this is the backing on which the puzzle is built.
Anyway - life is good. That’s what I’m saying. And I go to bed looking forward to waking up. Previously I would go to bed looking forward to getting up. The difference is huge.
202506300236
I’m a scientific guy who sees fate everywhere. Turns out it was autism.
I guess the difference between Einstein’s fate and that of a shaman is replicability. It’s what the buddha talked about; reflecting the world. Einstein saw relativity; he saw the weave and he gave it form. That was his fate; his dhamma.
Other people have seen God; they had a different framework for understanding their world. I see fate, patterns, science, planning.
I see everything going back like the roots of a tree from now, converging, and ready to grow, on a steady path with a degree of randomness. I see that it could never have been any other way and will never be any other way.
For some reason I thought this contradicted science.
Fate doesn’t contradict science.
Fate *is* science.
Fate is autism spotting patterns. Some patterns are real, and some are not. Causality or coincidence? That’s the key. Science isn’t always correct or good. Fate is your brain testing a hypothesis.
20250630
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’m less verbose. Yes. Really. I have cut off a lot of the niceties at the end of the sentence. I just don’t know how to use them any more, and they were ineffectual to begin with. If everyone already thinks I lack empathy then I might as well stop trying so hard.
-
I’m still kicking myself a bit about the final LinkedIn debacle. If only I could have gone out in style. But who cares, really? That place is a mess.
I did however spend 10 years building a strong reputation in a niche market and then.. well.. I didn’t need it any more and put it on pause. I tried to ask the network for help when I found aripiprazole; unfortunately I probably worded it a bit like Kanye.
Anyway; no great loss but I wish I could have just quit like a normal person. We have an explanation for that now. There’s a couple of people I respect who I probably upset during a tumultuous time with brain chemistry meds; I’ve sent an apology but been ignored so I guess that’s just another knot in the stomach for the next few months.
Anyway that was a different tool for a different job. It’s a shame that the network itself wasn’t of help, but the skills I used to build that network could be just what the doctor ordered if I decide to get serious about clinical trials.
That said there’s a growing part of me that just wants to enjoy the second half of life. But I think this is the trap; the people get happiness and forget to share it. This is why I had to move so quickly and embarrass myself; because otherwise I would not move at all.
And I knew this, from a lifetime of adhd. The only way is to act. Then and there, in the moment, while the fire is burning. If you wait, you lose. And this is the neurotypical approach: to wait. Not fond of that word but if we are talking 50%, then 50%+ would wait. Their fires don’t burn so hard and fast.
Well I can’t wait and I had a changing brain and some things were messy but they always have been.
0500
It’s amazing, you know. Watching these kids grow.
We start out as a blank slate. Nothing but hunger and pain. I’m not sure that ever changes really; we just put constructs on top.
Let’s work on the assumption that life is hunger and pain. That seems to be what the babies are telling us? And joy, and wonder, of course, but those things get managed away along with the pain. A drink will kill your pain but take the joy with it.
So here we are in pain and hungry and we need the food from the mother and we get it how; by screaming. Expression of pain is rewarded.
But if you express it too rawly, like a baby, you will hurt the people around you. We develop rules of behaviour to limit this harm. Suppression of pain is rewarded.
This very much feels like adhd expressing pain; the endocrine system being in charge as a baby. As we get older our neurones grow more and we develop self-control. This is where I think my version of asd came into play, since I think it’s just a compensatory measure for the adhd.
So when we are babies and children we are encouraged to express emotion and play and be creative and have adhd. And then as we grow we are taught how to behave, restrain ourselves, have good table manners, be more asd.
Is one right and the other wrong? I think not, but I think that the extra oomph the endocrine system has in those early days is what makes us all have unique personalities. There is randomness built into the system:
the sperm and egg create genetic mutations
the endocrine system’s unpredictability creates the neuronal mutation of personality
Randomness is higher in endocrine so it yanks around the neurones into a weird shape and the personality is formed.
This interplay between pain+hunger and restraint+suppression has defined my life. With the above perspective, it might define everyone’s life. Just the volume is a little high in some of us.
202506300535
presentation
My presentation of audhd was so good that it fooled even me. That razor’s edge I walked my entire life was so clean and clear and crisp that I came across as one of the sharpest, most high-functioning, optimistic and motivated people you’d ever meet.
I am an outgoing introvert who needs alone time but can’t pull himself away from other people. I research and plan everything to a tee and then throw in an exaggeration the last minute. I come out of interviews and sales pitches having aced them but with no memory of what has happened.
I always need to have one large project at a time, and probably 2-3 small ones. Maybe 20. But if it ever nears zero then I start to get anxious. Because zero projects means the mind can play.
I act fast; slap bang done dusted. Because if I don’t, it all gets clogged up in my brain and nothing happens. Even trying to hold 3 tasks in mind makes me incapable of doing the thing at hand, so I need to either address things instantly or put them in external memory.
I am very clever but also pretty dumb. I can spot solutions in a heartbeat but am incapable of navigating some simple banter. This is not because I am unaware of my social faux pas; I am more aware of them than anyone else. But I have adhd. So I can feel myself digging, digging, stop digging James, still digging.
My sleep is abysmal. I toss and turn for 1-2 hours then have a restless night of sweaty dreams.. This has changed completely with medication. I can’t tell you how happy I am.
I use a lot of substances. I fell into alcohol for a bit but my preference is cannabis; it’s harmless compared to my endogenous chemicals. I always explore the mind. Always. It’s mine; you do what you want with yours. I see no point in a life where you only interact with the external world.
I am highly sensitive. External stimuli, sure, but internal. Not only physical discomfort but the emotional discomfort of insults and rejection. I think it hurts everyone but I have read that it can hurt people like me even more.
I have phases where I will just 100% do one thing, obsessively, for months, and then I’ll never touch it again. Or if lucky I’ll do it again in a few years. Usually I end up with one project that shapes my lifestyle (ironman, art) and then loads of sub-projects that fit in the framework.
My weight fluctuates wildly; 10% up or down is not unusual. 2 weeks chocolate and 2 weeks spinach-smoothie is normal for me.
I will generally have 2-4 week periods of ‘adhd activity’ followed by ‘asd cleanup’. This is so effective I shake my head in disbelief. This site was a couple of these cycles: output a mess, tidy it up.
I hate the things I used to love. I hate them so much it has gone beyond hate and apathy and into just a simple magnetic repulsion. There is almost no emotion there; just a physical incapability to even consider enjoying them again.
I am terrible with girls. And boys, and I’m not even gay. But if anyone fancies me, I am awful. I pick up on their anxiety and I devour it and amplify it and within seconds, I am the anxious one in an interaction with someone I don’t even find attractive. It’s really annoying.
I am quick to anger. I don’t want to be but I have autism and adhd. It means I am pretty much always in a state of overload and unrest.
I achieve incredible things.
I am very empathetic, just not in the way you want. I will help to solve your problem and I will look at your emotions logically and say ‘this is why you feel this way’ and you will hate it. But a few days down the line it might help.
I view emotions through a logical lens. I have always needed to identify an evolutionary reason for all of our emotions. This is - apparently - not normal.
The world is so slow and boring and load and chaotic. It’s pretty confusing; you want to be together but alone, you want music but quiet.
I am painfully motivated or an actual potato.
The reality is that my presentation of audhd is inner conflict. It’s the good and the evil, the yang and the yin.
My adhd kept me outgoing and my asd kept me organised. Both required immense effort. I had no idea.
202506300648
crises
So one way I deal with difficult things is by not dealing with them.
Logical crises I find easy. That’s one benefit of being single-threaded and fast: you just get it done.
My crises are emotional ones.
Strong emotion can be challenging and leaves my body tied in knots; it’s very uncomfortable thinking about some recent events, for example. This needs a big ‘everyone feels this’ caveat.
Brain needs its +1 so it seeks out another problem instead; one that it can do. Logic. This is a valid coping strategy; it gets you out of the feelings and allows you to hopefully process them later.
The new problem needs to be challenging in proportion to the old problem. Playing computer games will not entertain if you’re going through a divorce, but base jumping might.
So the recent events, and maybe life in general, currently have me thinking that I want to build a company that makes tailored brain chemistry solutions for ND folks using AI. I have the connections from my old industry, I’m retired, I have some first-hand knowle….
But that’s me distracting from something else. The question is whether the distraction is full-on avoidance or a way to initiate processing. And right now I’m not sure. It’s not something I’ve ever been aware of until this morning so will keep you posted.
202506300913
latch
So just focusing on emotional obsession here; like where you latch onto an event and can’t let go of the rage, embarrassment, whatever. That kind of thing happens a lot for me.
I think it’s because of - yes - dopamine dysregulation. The initial happening was probably stimulating so got a healthy all-of-your-dopamine attributed to it. It was either very pleasant or very unpleasant.
Whichever it was, you latched on with strong emotion. Emotion codes for salience of course, which means it hits hard and goes deep, but then we have issues regarding emotional processing in the autistic brain too.
Pure speculation: I think that the dopamine irregularity to time cells means emotions are not sequenced to events properly and do not fade with time like in an average brain.
Since starting aripiprazole (and guanfacine before that) I am so much better at letting go of things; they just get released where previously I would grit my teeth and fight.
So the idea of going for a walk to release emotions? It doesn’t work. It needs to be something more engrossing and less engaging, so that your mind is fully occupied in a reward-centre sense but mostly unoccupied in a processing sense. It needs to be fun and simple.
Because of dopamine dysregulation we latch onto an event hard, and then because of memory salience and sequencing issues we are unable to process and release the emotion. It remains and festers.
Guanfacine enabled me to detach from things in about 3 minutes. Abilify it’s more like 1. Before this… I rode my bike. A lot.
202506301748
Credit where credit is due: I’m a hard bastard. I had a lot of fist fights in my early life and won the vast majority. This is what I was trained to do by my mask, and also why I pushed away the parent who trained me so forcefully when I had my breakdown.
But fuck me was I tough. I came to Japan alone. Lost a job in a week. Got another job, lost that, alcohol, scammed and jail, built a company for someone, quit it all to travel the world with my wife. Fucking so many moves around Asia, italy, england. So many personal challenges there which I won’t go into out of respect for people, but it was hard for many, and not in a trivial way; a life that should have been never was.
We moved back to Japan on short notice after getting kicked out of the UK and I had a breakdown while I was back there. Like two lives, with my wife kicked out of the UK and me, here, with a dog I don’t want, a life I don’t want, wondering if it was all a dream. Acute dissociative episode with my mum stroking my head to bring me back to reality, age 33.
3 days later I’m on a plane. Lose my wallet in Amsterdam and somehow the airport angel this middle aged guy gets it to me right as the plans is leaving. Land in Japan in a town we don’t know and my wife immediately gets preganent. We have little money and no house or furniture. I get serious.
I completely disregard all personal care. All I do is work, snowboard and drink. Heavily. I help build Japan’s first autonomous driving company. I melt down. First child arrives. I promise I’ll stop drinking. I was right the next time.
Back on the bike James; need a house now. Buy a house in a year? I love a challenge. And earning money means nothing; I always need a tangible goal. Money is just a tool that lazy thinkers use as a proxy for success.
Anyway get that, and another child, and covid and both kids were premature and because I set up my own company I don’t get parental leave despite paying double health insurance.
Wow this is getting fucking whiney eh. Late night. I’ll put this in private fuck this shit
Creativity is a coping mechanism for limitations. Limitations on verse structure, materials used, composition, etc. The limitations give birth to the creativity. I think audhd types can be extra creative merely because of how many limitations they have faced in life.
0615
… and now I know my limitations I feel like I could better function ‘in a team’. Or rather, now I have medicated my rsd away I could better act as a general, giving orders, instead of a sergeant, leading the charge.
0616
I think low dopamine feels like buzzy head bees and high dopamine feels like silk. The brain noise is a great barometer, and it’s the low-dopamine phases where I do dumb shit. And the high phases. Wait.
0617
Today's verse has me thinking of Elon Musk pottering around in the K-hole while putting his backdoors into the electoral system.
2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
Maybe the reason stims have to be things like rocking and knives is that there’s no optimisation to be had. Your brain just goes into autopilot and the part that would otherwise be planning and optimising can go and do important stuff instead.
1059