personality

You can build an entire personality around rsd. I think many do, neurodivergent or not.

The insecurity in dealing with not just people but everything can make you… clingy. Determined to win. Obsessive and competitive and hyper vigilant. A fighter! It’s good for business!

But seriously my rsd was not ‘love me’ and more ‘respect me’ or ‘listen to me’. If people don’t listen… there is nothing more enraging. Irritating is the word for J2, but not for J1. J1 was more like that rsd-riddled tangerine in the oval office.

Rsd made for a personality based on competition, winning, excelling, self-improvement, perfection, respect, discipline, self-suppression. I would beat people at their games because I wanted them to love respect me. So yeah - insecurity made me one of the best.

I guess this became the crux of my personality. This is not unique to me. The world of business relies on this trait. It’s just a big fucking circlejerk with kids pretending they know what the fuck they’re talking about. Seriously; I’ve danced with the wolves and most are in fancy dress.

Fashion and beauty, sure, but self-help and self-improvement… even things like meditation and exercise can and do become about rsd and pleasing someone else.

And here’s the important thing: the someone else doesn’t have to exist.

They are usually just in your head. A long time ago I realised I was trying to please the internalised versions of my parents. This is inherently impossible since they are just a personification of your self-criticism. But even this knowledge didn’t do anything to help; I was still dancing.

And I think this was because of rsd. If only I could meditate harder, I would be able to control myself and be a more respectable son. If only I trained myself in discipline to the point where I’m running a business, raising a family, training 20 hours a week at ironman championship level, structured to the minute…

Only then, will these internalised versions of… what? Only then they will be happy and quiet. But ‘they’ do not exist. It was never an internalised version of your parents. There’s little distinction between ‘mum and dad’ here, really, is there. These are more like abstract concepts of kindness and strength.

So let’s run with that and say that these are important values for you. Now we are getting the lay of the land and this seems far more productive than just rsd blah blah.

So kindness and strength. That’s actually the name of your kid, James. In kanji. Do you not remember that?

There’s no need to change these internal concepts; you just re-label them. These are not your parents. They are your personality and your values. You just never had time to figure that out you fucking dunce.

Fuck me do normal people just have all these pieces connect-4 into place the lucky cunts?

Kindness and strength. That’ll do,

Ha!

20250622 0740

Tolerance

I’ve always had a really high tolerance for substances. All types. 

I guess that shrooms and MDMA get a pass but things like booze, weed, caffeine.. zero to a hundred in a matter of days. Cocaine I didn’t feel anything; big red flag and left it alone.

Then Abilify comes along and a low starter dose for children sends me totally loopy for a week.

I think it comes down to how these things work, and why I wanted to avoid stimulants. When I found out I had adhd I went straight to the host of a podcast who had just released a book; a researcher with the most current knowledge. I asked his take; leaky synapses.

So find a drug that can plug them. Easy. JD, candidate. I shortlisted 2 (Abilify, Wellbutrin) and went with top candidate first. When rejected I asked for secondary candidate but they couldn’t access so came full circle.

Anyway this med completely trashed me for a week. We are talking half-pill MDMA level if you were dropping mitsubishis back in the gatecrasher days. That’s where I’m sat now. Maybe quarter pill.

So yeah these substances I had a great tolerance for all threw more water at the sieve. Even MDMA.  But booze, weed, coke, meth, adhd medication… it’s all throwing water at a leaky receptacle. How I had to keep throwing that water. That booze. That exercise. That approval. That drug. Whatever. Until the Lagrange point rolls around or the defence mechanism kicks in.

So I guess that this is more evidence for both the hypothesis of leaky synapses and the clinical efficacy of the drug. 

And this might even be a way to chemically test for adhd. If someone doesn’t have leaky synapses, you wouldn’t expect the same response.

Good data.

20250622 1143

Mania

As someone misdiagnosed with bipolar 2 at the outset (like 90% of us) I am getting pretty tired of the word mania.

This is yet another poorly defined catch-all which causes more problems than it solves. ‘Caused mania in underlying bla bla’, with the bla bla being the point.

So despite bp2 having been all but dismissed, anger is still mania? Excitement is mania. Positivity? Energy? Dreams for the future? Definitely mania; this guy wasn’t exhibiting those before.

Or maybe it’s a treatment. Maybe he’s better?

Maybe he was always like this and somehow you forgot. Jetting all over the world, setting up companies, doing ironman. That’s some pretty manic stuff.

But yeah. This was drugs. So… mania? That would imply ‘triggered a manic episode in underlying yadda yadda’. But in this case, what happened was ‘drugs made him high for 4 days’ and the reason was ‘the drugs treated his underlying adhd’, which was the whole point.

A doctor would have been like ‘mania stop the drugs’. But the mania was a clinical effect because of my fucked up synapses. And this is why we need clinical trials!

Anyway how about at the start or finish of a race? Mania? On your wedding day or when about to propose? During a killer sales pitch. The all-blacks getting fired up for a game. Having a fucking baby?

My point is that ‘mania’ is a brain state which I have utilised effectively throughout my life. It has defined my life. Mania and depression. Sounds bipolar, but I think It was adhd pulling me out, asd latching on, and then major periods of burnout. My point is it’s nothing new.

And at the outset it was me on drugs. How do I know this? Lots of experience. Aripiprazole was like coming up from a speedy pill, spread out over 4 days, and that makes sense when you look at how it interacts with the brain.

So can we stop with the mania bullshit? I have legitimate emotions and if you start dismissing them as mania then I have to fight for them, and get exasperated, and you see more mania, and it goes nowhere good. It’s also disrespectful.

I was on drugs, guys. Go try some ecstasy. You’ll understand.

20250622 1413

Anger

They say that all anger comes from fear and I think that is true, but I always struggled to identify the fear that caused the low-level pervasive anger I felt toward the world.

The anger makes sense, with the lens of dopamine dysregulation and irregular, unprompted redlining. It makes sense that someone would feel - at a level before cognition - afraid. The emotional volatility alone, never mind the lack of a framework when undiagnosed.

Anyway; I was angry. Mostly at myself. At everything really. Not sure. That’s dopamine dysregulation for you! 

And now… just like that… I don’t need to beat myself up about it. 

There’s nothing morally wrong with me; in fact my moral compass must be very strong to stay the course all these years.

I was just born with a little more human condition than most. A little more rng in the juices, and a little more rigidity in the wires.

There are so many things which used to be issues and just become non-issues with the frame of diagnosis. The anger would still be there without meds, but I could at least say this is because of a) rng emotions, b) processing overload or c) something normal like hunger and tiredness.

So much of that anger… 99% of it was directed inward.

20250622 1713

Autism and adhd are the human condition turned up to 11. Here’s my simplification of these poorly-defined blanket terms.

Autism is neuronal and adhd is hormonal.

Autism is intent and adhd is impulse.

Autism is order and adhd is chaos.

Adhd is the better defined of the two: ‘dopamine dysregulation and all that follows’. Autism is… well… They’re both poorly defined and not getting much clearer. The diagnoses will be changing very soon as AI comes into play, so don’t sweat it too much.

Both of these conditions are a feature of the human condition and not a bug. 

That’s important. They are part of how we evolved. 

We need the divergence of random emotions casting a net, and the convergence of logical thinking reeling it back in.

These are not things to be ‘cured’, though the extreme versions of the symptoms are - in my mind - to be medicated.

Autistic families mastered our artisanal crafts. Adhd folks went off and discovered America. 

Autistic folks saw patterns and created our science and religion. Adhd folks shouted the news from the rooftops.

Autism and adhd are humanity. We could not exist without either.

20250622 1733

Baton

I think there’s a kind of baton pass which happens between neurones and hormones and has been… refined by these meds. Where one athlete would previously do a pirouette and throw the baton in the air, now they’re passing it over with just a little skip. It’s weird.

So I used to feel inappropriate* emotions. All my efforts were to try to shut the loud one up. Control him. Now the loud one is playing ball and the quiet one is like ‘wut’. For a while there I kind of found myself having emotional resets as well as mental resets, but they’re fading.

The mental resets are because of physical memory limitations, and can often be handled through offloading to an external receptacle; like this website at 2am. Dead serious there; I think my brain gets full while I’m asleep and I wake up with ideas forcing their way out. I’m different. Getting the ideas out is a higher priority than sleep, usually.

So anyway I think it goes something like this, and there will be many shorter and longer versions, like micro and aero training cycles, segments on a snail shell, etc.

Loud one feels, shouts

Quiet one processes, calms

Loud one remembers, shouts

Quiet one processes, calms

This process, again and again until the emotional charge is gone. 

I think this is how normal human emotions are processed and released and is something that I was never able to do because of adhd. I don’t think this is ‘because of autism’ as many say, but because of dopamine signalling issues meaning that the records are out of sync, and those same dopamine issues cause some autism.

Since starting aripiprazole I feel like emotions can flow and be processed. I feel lighter. There was a movie with George Clooney flying around the world firing people. He talks in about your life being a rucksack you carry around, and how liberating it is to take things out and leave them behind. I love that analogy. Aripiprazole feels like it freed up 80% of the bag overnight.

And waking up at 2am? Deal with it. I’ve always done it. Just I’d usually lie in bed for 45 minutes trying to get back to sleep instead of getting up and writing shite like this.

20250623 0225

*the more I write about them the less I think they’re inappropriate and more I feel they’re an evolutionary necessity

External

So I think one of the reasons I’m waking at 2:30 is because my memory is full. The other is a weak bladder. Both can be emptied for relief.

The 2am thing is new, but external memory is not. ‘Hey Siri’ became indispensable the second it became functional. Hey Siri remind me of bla bla on the 20th of January in 5 years.

I need to do this on various levels to function. I never even realised! I tend to think aloud a lot during conversation; not because I am trying to communicate but because I need to export that data in order to process it.

Something about exporting the data makes it bypass the logjam and get into deep processing, so it can be wrangled properly.

Memory overload is a sensation I have ignored all my life because I was never given the language for it. I choose ‘steel wool’ because that’s how it feels, spinning inward and pressing out. Like a hum, or a buzz, or a pressure, or that feeling when you tense your jaw.

I also have an ongoing WhatsApp chat with myself. I have tried notes, hand written or otherwise, but it has to be text messages. The reason? Adhd. I can close the task. Fast in, fast out, done. Send. No loose threads. That is literally the whole point.

Offload so you can process. Offload all the time.

So with the weaver analogy I’ve just finished warping a thread and I need to store this thread somewhere without it unravelling while I warp the next. The external memory (thinking aloud) is how I do this. It prevents the previous process from unravelling while I lay the grounds for the weave.

So what you’re getting when I’m thinking aloud is just part of the process; a single thread. If you interrupt to say the pattern looks wrong, that’s maybe because I’ve only done the reds.

20250623 0310

Planet 

The planet of the self starts out smooth, barren. It’s only through the interplay of the weather and the land that the individual is formed.

The land of the brain can form any number of channels and valleys according to the weather it is exposed to. Slow-moving all-destroying glaciers, transient squalls; all of these things go into shaping the land that will remain.

And the land is unique and solid. Shaped not only by predictable meteorological events, but also by seemingly random happening like eruptions; the unpredictability necessary for progress.

As the planet cools the tempest abates and leaves the land visible. In theory.

But the weather was still too wild in me and I needed chemical assistance to see the land. 

Now I can see, I’m surprised at how much I know my way around after a lifetime of flying blind.

20250623 0351

Purpose

Autism and adhd are an integral part of humanity. We could not exist without evolution. We could not exist without adhd and autism either.

Progress is always two steps forward one step back. Or 5 and 2. But it has to happen that way; someone has to eat the poison mushroom.

On an individual level we wouldn’t want to, of course. So what evolution does is give us these wacky emotions, which make us do stupid shit that benefits the species. Like eating mushrooms.

All humans function like this.

Adhd is where this random risk-taking behaviour is cranked up. And autism is where the meaning-and-order side is on high volume.

So adhd makes you go out and do crazy shit like procreation. Then autism makes you reel it in, go whoah we need a house for this baby, get your shit together.

Adhd is evolution for the mind. Evolution for society. And then autism is like synaptic pruning, coming in to clean up the mess.

It’s the creative process. Cast a net. Reel it in. Some nets are cast wider and reeled in harder, is all.

Inappropriate thoughts and emotions? No. 

Evolution. The errors are a feature.

20250623 0435

I wonder how many of these hobbies were actually my own. The guitar; ‘you were so good on the guitar James’. But when I look at it all I feel is apathy. The same old A minor, played to eternity, is there anybody out there? Maybe the problem was middleware. Maybe the messages weren’t getting through.

Anyway these hobbies that have fallen to the wayside - I don’t know if they were mine. The guitar was my dad’s thing. Ironman was something impossible, and a great challenge, but again, not mine. I surrogated it from somewhere, and there were so many (so many) places to optimise with three sports and nutrition and recovery and logistics, I loved it and it became my everything for a long time.

But even that broke in the end. These were never mine. I took someone else’s dream and I dismembered it, then Frankensteined that fucker and made some kind of soulless replica, thinking it would fill the void inside. Just made it bigger. Needed drugs!

All of these things must have been to try to please some internalised caricature of whoever’s dream it was, if it was even their dream in the first place. They don’t know or care what you are doing, and they would already have said ‘good enough’ if they did.

But your dopamine system had latched onto this new target, this new goal, this new carrot on a stick, a new distraction from the spikes in your asshole. And then you proceeded to kill the joy, and look around and wonder what the fuck that was all about.

I wonder how this plays into the relationship with that person going forward? Say I achieved the dreams of my father but they did not satisfy me; would that make me angry with my father for giving me the wrong dreams? I worked and retired and it did not satisfy and I was angry at capitalism. I trained and qualified and it did not satisfy and now all athletic pursuits look comical.

But yeah. My real hobbies. They were killed at school.

C. That’s all it took, I think. C, for a sculpture I loved, about the convergence of AI and humanity, made in 1996. Then A for utter utter shite just because it was a painting or textile or whatever so easily compared. As an adult, easy to see. As a child… that was soul crushing. Hey; I enjoyed watching ballet too! That got beaten out of me fast.

But I guess what is happening now is I’m coming back to who I really am. It seems that my ‘real me’ whatever the fuck that shit means (I get it now!) - it seems this real me might be just… emerging. Somehow he’s already into the art and knives and played a hell of a catchup game and now he’s got his philosophy and religion back too.

Fucking hell man these ‘scientists’ sometimes. Fuck me. One loser ranting about neuroplasticity while getting the definition wrong. So closed minded at times. Just like the proletariat in any day, I guess. Always using language to play games.

It’s all coming full circle. Intelligent machines. Philosophy and emotion and the science of the mind. You need scientific words for the science and subjective words for the subject, and your science now is to make a subject. A lot of these guys know how to build a house and think that means they could build a car too. Wrong mate. You can build the factory that builds the car, and you’d better have some other skills lined up for when you’re done.

20250623 0606

I guess I don’t really need to sweat this ‘building a personality’ thing, do I? I already have a personality. Like Jambo. Somehow all the parts came together.

What I did previously though, I guess that was frantically trying to get to some kind of ‘completion’ or finish line. Maybe to complete the task of the mask so I could be genuine; maybe just because every task needs finishing. I don’t know.

But my point is that now the tempest has calmed, the answers are almost all there to see. It’s just a case of coaxing them out.

So I have a couple of blades. Old blades. Likely 800 years or so. They came from a bunch of 5. Family. Bandits. Who knows. One is sharpened down to a nubbin, no signature, but awesome steel. This is my ‘self’ blade. The other is nicked and dented from combat. Bigger, more flamboyant, looks better but not as good.

These are going to be my meditations and I’ll just sit there and … coalesce. I think it’s just a case of keeping the mind busy so the brain can wander, or vice versa. Since the DMN and TPN are active I don’t know why but hey - autistic people need to stim to process emotions. Adhd means I kinda struggle to process anything unless I’m occupied. 

So just maybe the autistic necessity for stimming is actually an adhd trait that occupies part of the mind so the other part can process the juicy stuff, even unconsciously.

Anyway the idea is I just sit there and rub steel. Maybe go for a walk. Play some games. Get my kid. Rub more steel. All the while just popping on here and adding if anything seems worth adding.

No structure, as usual, and one day it’ll just be done so I will come back, wipe the whole thing clean, and type it out with the weave in mind.

But right now I’m in the warping phase. I am warping my personality out of my unconscious mind. Sounds cooler that way.

20250623 0942

Good morning! 4am but I’ve had 7 hours and here we are. I booked a flight to Phuket last night; will go solo for 10 days. Phuket is where this last 10 year segment of ‘getting your shit together’ started so it seems fitting it should end there. Plus weed is legal so I’m just going to get high, visit the old haunts, and make knives. Yes. I have bought baggage allowance so I can carry my whetstones with me.

These knives are the missing link. And this blog; curling out profundities to a crowd of nothing every morning. At least it feels like someone is listening, and this is mostly a way for me to process anyway. External memory and all that.

But yeah the art is fantastic but it’s also exhausting. I used it as a great way to expunge things from my psyche but kind of hit the ‘this is where I should be’ line with Jambo and my brain pushed me elsewhere. But it was gentle this time, because medication. And I’ve managed to come back, which is a great relief, because I really did not want to kill it.

Anyway the art is exporting and adhd and great but it’s not something you want to do when you’re quietly nurturing. The art is about tearing down, opening up, cracking open, death. The knives are about feeding, polishing, nurturing, growth. It was… like clockwork my brain impulse-bought this meteor and within a day of rubbing it was like ‘I need to get serious here’ and found a way to make it compatible with my adhd and productivity addiction. Furiously rubbing a meteor just won’t keep me entertained for long enough, but restoring centuries-old steel? Yep.

And now I’m back at the art a little I feel like I will just use it when I have something I want to say. First year I just made and made but I was learning the skills and it was also my soothing at the time; I had nothing else. Prior to this it was exercise, and before that alcohol. Before that? Fighting and wanking probably I don’t know. Upgraded problems apart from booze which was a lie.

Anyway the knives are recovery and growth. And I’m going to take them with me. Just need to figure out the airports but if checked they should be fine.

Not much profundity to curl out this morning and that’s a-ok. I have an art piece incoming about the destruction to relationships caused by this internal struggle. I wonder if anyone’s reading this and realises that the entire website was made as a way to meet them in the middle? Plenty of effort, see. Just atypical effort.

Anyway off I go while the epoxy is in its malleable window and the kids are in bed.

202506240422

A coherent self depends on time. You cannot have a song without a beat, or a tree without a trunk. Prior to medication and understanding I had no coherent self; I had achieved all these things and worn all these masks but none of them were me, and they had all fallen away apart from the familial ones.

What aripiprazole gave me is a self, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. It’s worth noting that a lifetime of meditation likely helped.

So all these parts are floating around and they begin to coalesce. This is in-progress right now as I sleep. I am waking to memories I had forgotten, and they are imbued with colour where previously they were not.

Anyway I digress.

These asteroids have been pulled together and made coherent by the understanding and the processing freed up by treatment. I can now take parts of my past and try to build a ‘real self’ based on my intent, rather than impulse.

So we will flip analogy now. The tree is a planet. A newly born planet.

Early days - childhood - the land is easily malleable and the weather tumultuous. Your endocrine system shapes your nervous system. Then over time the land cools and becomes less malleable, the tempest calms, and you have a ‘normal’ brain where solid neuronal structures hold the bull share of control.

In my brain the weather never calmed down so I developed some pretty wild land as a result, to try to funnel it in productive manners. It worked until it didn’t; now I have medication and the storm has passed, I feel like I can see this underlying structures.

So I feel like I can see a coherent self and just need to warp him out of my unconscious. Which is what I’ll be doing here.

20250624 1100

Why

Why am I writing this?

I reckon it’s mostly just because. I’ve always been interested in my brain and now I have a chance to export it. It’s literally my entire universe and now it finally makes sense; I need to capture the inspiration before it’s gone.

Why else? To get aripiprazole to the world is what manic me would have said.

But the first reason was to write an instruction manual for my family. It is clear that my efforts to date were… ineffectual. So I’m going to drop the neurotypical approach and try something else.

Why else? My kid has the same brain as me. The thing I feel happiest about is being able to help him in terms of medication. Helping him in terms of advice… well… it seems like I have a lot in this brain which might be best catching as it comes out, lest it’s gone forever or I get hit by a bus.

Why else? I guess I hope that this will help some people.

I guess I also hope that this might spur some kind of new thought. My science will not be checked and things will be wrong but I’m typically good at identifying broad strokes so there’s a chance that something in here could help with AI research or adhd treatment or I don’t know. Just help someone to navigate a difficult time.

Why else? Because I finally feel my experience is valid.

I’ve travelled the world, built businesses, won races, had a family, retired early… all while apparently disabled? I have lived in 5 different countries and speak 2 languages fluently with a few others not so fluently. I have adhd and asd, and I think the asd was sat in the background secretly crunching the numbers. I have this inkling that there might be some little nugget buried way down deep… something valuable and shiny that will help me and others. 

But only if I can get to it. And the way I process things is to output them, and to output them to an audience.

And I prolly wanna become an AI. Hiding your data is a losing game. I avoid social media and letting tech use me, but that won’t prevent me from trying to use the tech.

So here we are. Now I write. Whatever next?

20250624 1129

This reminds me of quitting beer. Waking up every morning with some nugget that my brain has cooked up; some little insight that bubbled it’s way through overnight. Or not, but usually something, and usually better accessed for not filling your head with noise before typing.

So I sit there and rub steel in the day and think but don’t really think, then the next day I tend to have insight into whatever topic it was. It’s kind of effortless; like a kind of divining. Like knitting! If your emotional mind - the juices - have always been louder than your coherent self, yet somehow you seemed coherent to everyone all these years, and you were able to do this already, oh the wonders you may see.

So I try to write about the usual stuff; frustration and how an abundance of motivation are my issues… but honestly I’m a bit bored of the audhd rubbish now and want to get into the self. The juicy stuff. Philosophy. The audhd is just a framework and a way of understanding my brain. Some people have Freud; I have neuroscience. It fits. I needed a baseline to work through the existential issues that have bothered me my whole life and thanks to audhd I now have that baseline.

Kinda worry this might come across as culty but it’s not and nobody’s reading it apart from the G-man anyway (not God, ha). I hate management! You can all fuck off. No contact details on the site. But I am so tired of these supposed intellectuals I used to work with blanket-rejecting millennia of wisdom of the soul because they don’t like the language used and the fact that we can’t measure it yet (see cartography).

Anyway what I want to do is create a holistic picture of humanity and if you think that’s ambitious or weird or whatever then go sit on your football. I’m human and so are most of the people I care about. Buddhism and Christianity and all the others (?) have common threads of (basically) a midlife crisis, mental breakdown, and awakening. These religions have helped millions over the years and maybe now we have the science to cherry-pick, and put 20 years of meditation practice into a pill. There’s a brain state that can be replicated with science.

Yes yes we might already be in the matrix but being in a game wouldn’t stop you trying for a high score. And in all seriousness the Matrix is the only way we survive as a species anyway.

I am starting to feel like the ‘symptoms’ page needs a brush up. It probably sounds a bit angry. But this is my ‘creative process’. Throw shit at the wall. Wait and see what doesn’t fall off. Scoop it up. Throw harder.

Lovely.

202506250322

How I used to puff my chest up, strut around. Walk into a shop and get those knuckles facing forward (figuratively) and alpha-monkey around until I could get home and tired-alpha around a bit before I could go and recover mentally by destroying myself physically on the bike.

Sustainable living.

Restless

That itch; the need to move. The need to do, always. Something. Anything. Not this; anything else. That itch that you’ve forgotten something, that the door is unlocked. The feeling that there’s one last appointment you’ve forgotten, one essential item, one thing that will just ruin all your efforts.

That itch is what characterises my adhd. Itch doesn’t suffice.

It’s fishhooks under the cheekbones.

That’s how I feel my motivation. A pull, in the gurning muscles, toward something; anything. Plan every second so you never have to sit and feel that pull.

Oh god the exhaustion but the inability to stop. You hate it but you have to move because the alternative is just…

The alternative is hard to describe since I spent 42 years thinking everyone felt like this all the time.

Can you imagine a hangover without the sickness? Or that pang to get another drink as the last one fades? 40 minutes after your cigarette and you want another.

It’s like that but significantly stronger. That’s why quitting alcohol and cigs and anything else was easy if I just decided to; they pale in comparison to my body’s natural juices.

That pang to move. It’s withdrawal. This type of dopamine dysfunction comes when you are withdrawing from chronic abuse of heavy drugs. And some of us were just born with it.

The motivated few.

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