raw5

therapising

So talk therapy never works. CBT, gratitude journals, no way. I had to figure out something new.

One thing I do is I type these things out, or I cut them into wood, or I write them. Let’s go with wood because that was the most tactile and effective for me, and I guess maybe because the side that needed to do the processing doesn’t work in words.

Anyway I hold the event in mind and cut wood. It’s that simple. And sometimes I cut fast and sometimes slow and sometimes I stop and look around. With carving it’s more intense, but the same. My mind touches on the emotions and cuts them into the wood. This is my therapy.

What I think is happening is that TPN is being occupied and the DMN being steered to the matter that needs digesting. The art doesn’t need to be about the event; it’s just about keeping a modicum of focus so your mind can wander in the right direction.

Then off the mind goes, with its process, and it works shit out. It comes in waves: strong at first and getting weaker. At least this is how it goes when it’s going well, but it’s a process of coaxing out. Like peeling back the layers inside a golf ball. Gently, one tightly wound string at a time, mindful of the energy within.

I think this works better when high (cannabis). Bear with me. It’s because of dopamine. So. You don’t have to be high; it just helps me. But I think the fact that the art is a pleasurable activity means you have more dopamine in your brain and are better able to encode painful memories to have less salience. I think this is why sculpture is so effective for trauma therapy. Because it’s pleasurable to manipulate the physical world.

All this said, now I have the framework of audhd I will try a bit of therapy again. Mostly to get seed ideas which I can run with. I think people like me don’t need guiding, so much as we need pointing and releasing. In fact guiding feels stifling, suffocating. Get out my way! Where is the target? Off I go!

So once done (art; now raw blog posts) I will put it on display for a while. I will see it, in passing, in the corridor. Then over time I will stop seeing it. It will fade into the background. And then I’ll put it away. And that seems to work.

There’s no ‘done’ with this stuff, and no ‘done’ with art. That’s kinda why I started it; business is very much right or wrong, money or not; and my brain is that way to begin with. I wanted to train myself to work in mistakes and unknowns; to embrace the error that is humanity. Because what is art if not a mistake? What is evolution if not an erroneous copy? What is culture and society but a product of emotional rng being coaxed into some form of structure? Gettin’ philosophical here.

But yeah. With this page I take a similar approach. Sometimes a very raw post will pop up, and be gone a few hours later. That’s because I needed to display it, to other people, to remove the emotional charge. But the stronger the charge, the shorter the display, and the more sweary and offensive the post will be. Over time I will touch it up, maybe a couple more times, then put a bow on it, one final spellcheck, and then it’s a post. And done. And on to the next.

Because it’s never gone. It becomes part of you and that’s ok. You just optimise it and make it smaller. The most beautiful trees are those that grew through trauma.

20250619 0430

One way things often play out is I finish logic processing and know the next step while you're doing emotional processing; I need to offload it so email you but it seems too soon and insensitive. Then later, you need to email me about some practicality, but I'm mid-emotional processing, and the tables are turned.

Hypomania

So unfortunately that pink cloud was hypomania, but it was a little more complex than that so I’ll break it down. A clinician would probably say ‘underlying blah blah’ but it was drugs and a different underlying blah blah.

There’s a reason and I think I’ve got it.

Underlying low dopamine along with dysregulation. And then the drug dose being too low, not too high. Let me explain.

So aripiprazole sits there on dopamine receptors, blocking dopamine from getting in, and activating them about 25% of the level that dopamine would. This means that they are never fully activated or fully deactivated. The occupancy of these receptors is dose-dependent, and the occupied receptors just smoulder away.

I have low dopamine, so aripiprazole raises my dopamine and makes me feel motivated / hyper. It pushes me toward mania, but the thing that tips the scales is a looped thought on the medication. Anyway it’s a combo.

At 1mg it activates about 50-55% of receptors. These were not activated before, so we have that extra boost, plus my normal dopamine spiking around. Higher baseline, better functioning, but also more hyper. I feel enlightened. The med has raised the baseline but it hasn’t shaved the top off enough.

At 2mg it would occupy 60-65% of receptors and it’s a different ball game, because the upper limit placed on dopamine would come more into play. So it would raise the baseline, sure, but it would also lower the ceiling more. I don’t feel enlightened; I feel regulated.

Anyway we are stable at 1mg but after the events of the winter I am very cautious of any kind of motivation. I slipped into depression these last few months and this pill has pulled me out of it. But I don’t want it to tip the scales too much the other direction, and the pharmacology suggests that increasing the dose would make it more of a mood stabiliser, so increasing the dose is probably best.

Essentially it was a titration issue. But reverse-titration issue, I think. My kid, who weighs <30% me, is on the same dose. That doesn’t feel right.

20250619 0640

Diagnosis

How do you diagnose something that doesn’t exist? Badly.

Diagnosis is important for me, to explain my world and access drugs, but diagnostic criteria are annoying and imprecise, based only on subjective reporting. If you’d asked me whether things were a problem in my 20s I would have said no, and it’s only when I tried to slow down that I needed diagnosing.

Anyway we all have good and evil in us. The god and the devil. Yin and yang. Autism and adhd. A nervous system and an endocrine system. And some of them are quirkier than others, because that’s how evolution works. Sometimes the quirks are beneficial and other times not, and this goes for both genetics (evolution) and memetics (emotional rng).

Spinning & weaving

I’ve come to think of my thought process like a person on a loom, spinning the threads and then weaving them together.

The steel wool is the observations of the world; the rules being absorbed in real time. They get too convoluted after a while and I need to optimise; the feeling of ‘steel wool’ is what I call memory overload; like an angle grinder inside the cheekbones.

I need to use something physical to spin this mess out into coherent threads. Spinning sounds so much better than stimming. I use a repetitive action like running or making knives.

I can feel the wool coalesce into a single thread which my brain can spool and handle. This thread often goes back into the churn to be woven with more threads, until we have a bundle of solid cords.

Once the process completes, things start to be woven together. Here a red, there a blue, and a coherent and often surprising image forms.

That image goes back into the churn, the wool spins, I spin, I weave.

And this process just continues until I’m done. I’ll look up with surprise and realise it’s finished and there’s no more wool. I have the answer.

This is how I think. You could call it cycles of diverging and converging.

I like the weaver analogy. This is how it feels. I can see individual threads and I can feel or intuit when they are in the right place. But I usually don’t see the picture until it’s done.

20250619 0935

Morality

is this person acting with the intent to improve longitudinal brain chemistry for the maximum number of people?

Points:

intent is important, not result

longitudinal so they focus on long-term good

maximum number, weighted for closeness, self as 1

I think this might also address ignorance, in that educating yourself would be acting in line with the moral principle. 

I’m going to bounce it around for a while but it feels nice and clean and - most important - sustainable. It also prioritises the self, and makes me reframe a lot of thought patterns I’m not too happy about*.

Key points:

Your self is weighted as 1, and only truly close relationships can ever reach 1. 

If all else is equal, you are morally obliged to improve your own brain chemistry.

Behaving purely in a purely hedonic nature would be longitudinally detrimental, as would be being too disciplined. 

You are morally obliged to be nice to yourself, but in the long term; proper self care.

You are morally obliged to be kind to yourself and let mistakes go.

Old moral codes were great for the day, but society and tech were different then. Religion was a societal structure as much as individual. I’ve never liked religion; give me faith. But since none of yours fit, I’ll make my own.

Brain chemistry for all!

20250620 0405

* eg1. Finding the dead guy I’m angry about. And that’s justified. Because he was fine to kill himself if that was a step up, but he did so in a way that would knock on to others, if you see what I mean. eg2. Simply beating myself up about stuff.

So here we are; I guess now I know the system environment and can start trying to build an OS that everything else can ride on. Morality has to be at the centre, I just know. And now I’ve written that down I know why - because I need rules. 

A moral code is rules. Same as my kid. Which is the right choice, daddy?

Maybe I can do better now I’m not following the psych books. A for physics, D for psychology. Makes sense now. As does that aptitude test which said I should be both a) French polisher and b) politician. I guess I polish things and recruited. I needed meds to be able to polish properly.

So the world no longer feels like it’s falling apart. The backdoors into the government and Elon’s empire.. they feel inevitable and I can accept them. Wish it wasn’t Elon but I guess better to have someone who has a vague understanding of AI than someone who is totally ignorant. Better to manipulate it toward human evil than to let it think up its own evil. Because at least human evil doesn’t usually wipe out the entire species; just chunks of it.

Anyway. All this had such urgency. Pre-diagnosis (but with bp2 mis?diagnosis) I made the capitalism piece, and post-treatment with guanfacine I made trussed. Now I don’t care. I just want to look after my family.

I mean; I do care. Probably more than most. It just doesn’t hurt to care any more. The level of care is more in-line with the level of impact I can have in the situation, which is very little. 

One of my major frustrations over the years is that I care far too much about things I have far too little influence over. I really try not to. Marcus, Seneca, buddha, alcoholic-prayer… lookin’ at you. But audhd; you want people to listen to you. And you want them to shut up while you dump on them ha! And you have no idea for 42 years! Ha!?

Anyway now I care acutely about the things that I should care acutely about - my family. I still care about the other things, but that’s in the voltage not the juice. The juice is now reserved for the juicy parts.

I do feel great that I was able to get my child this support where there previously wasn’t any. Just being able to give him the understanding of how he is different, most of all.

So where to start with building a self? 

That ptsd thing will be a touch-and-go thing; gradually defusing it. I’ll leave if be for a while. No rush. 

Morality is a key one and I think I have an intuition. After that.. well… we have tech now. Maybe ask AI. For the components, not the definitions.

I guess that personas will be one too. Do relationships come before the persona or after? That’s the key. A real relationship needs to be with the real person, not with an act or a persona. If you have to dance to get someone to like you, you’ll always be dancing.

Anyway time to potter around the garden now I am medically capable of pottering. Ha. Fucking hell. What kind of old person am I?

20250620 0440

Remember waking to crush 18 tall cans every Saturday morning? And Sunday? And .. yeah. Upgraded problems, for sure. I’d be dead if I hadn’t stopped drinking.

Though… those hungover days. They were golden, if you’re honest. The excuse to be a potato. That makes sense through the lens of autistic masking. Recovery. Golden until you started losing sensation in your fingertips. Phantom aches in the abdomen. Checking the colour of your eyes. But the chemical relief, and the relief from reality, being able to stay in bed. It could be books or classical music or whatever but we all need escapes from reality. I guess that’s what these drugs give some people, where previously they were lacking; an internal base to touch.

Now I have 3 things I guess. This blog, in the mornings. The art, for the adhd and expressing, and the knives, for the asd and soothing. These were… all missing. I was a functional drone, always alone. A filtered reality, around myself curled, spinning faster, pulling my arms in, until it all flew apart. But. Overall. A good thing?

I’ve never known the meaning of any art I’m making until I’m done. Never. Art teachers hated it and marked me down and the things I loved got a C while the things I hated got an A so I just stopped. At least in science, right was right. And in business, right paid the bills, so that was the logical way.

Makes sense with bottoms-up thinking. Again; autism. Apparently. Who knew! Anyway I seem to collect bits and make pieces and then gather them, they gravitate toward each other, and then pop - they’re done. When it goes well, of course; when I channel. Then afterward I see it and then I know why the pieces were what they were. My life has been very much like this too; the disparate pieces are so very disparate yet somehow they fit together and almost look planned.

These meds have enabled me to better see the meaning of a piece before it’s done. I’ve had one idea in mind for a while now and it just started popping out fully formed the other day. I know it’s about the internal war between adhd and asd, the harm to relationships and self, and my coping strategies for these two sides (art and knives). Usually, I’d have no idea at this point; I can only think it’s because of dopamine.

Anyway I’m getting a new computer today. This one is tainted with memories of whoring myself out for money. The farmer helps the baker helps the butcher and they all have sandwiches my ass. That fucking wet cookie linkedin. Never again. Thanks Kanye. Choose some better friends though.

20250621 0450

It kinda sucks to be told that you have no empathy after a lifetime of feeling empathy very strongly. 

I guess it comes back to my red not being your red, the internal vs the external, yadda yadda.

What if the emotions you would experience in a situation are different from the norm, and you are empathising from that standpoint? Is that not empathy?

Is empathy the expectation that your emotions will comply to a societal bell-curve, and that you will act according to the 50th percentile?

And that, if your emotions do not comply to the bell curve, you should act disingenuously and pretend that they do? And that if you act authentically and empathise with their situation, but your emotions would differ, that is unempathetic?

A single bird flying past a flock; which is going the right way?

I guess we aren’t talking about that though; that’s the internal. That’s the red being red. We’re talking about the communication of empathy.

So let’s say that this individual is hypothetically able to pretend they would feel a different way given a situation. Their brain tends to tackle logic before it tackles emotion. So they empathise; they’re like ‘if I was in this situation then what would I feel’?

And what they would feel is the need to solve things logically so they can have breathing room to process the emotions later. What they most certainly would *not* want to do is stop and talk about emotions while the world burns around them. So they empathise and propose a solution.

Isn’t everyone this way?

I’m not in the 50th percentile; far from it. Does this mean I lack empathy? No. Does it mean that my approach and emotions in situations might differ? Yes.

Empathy is all relative. When someone talks about empathy, are they talking about a complying to a societal norm or trying to empathise with them as an individual? Empathising with them as an individual is the only real empathy; the other is just a societal construct; another mask.

So if empathy is a meeting in the middle, it should be easier by default now I am dianosed and mediated. Better chemistry, better understanding. But if it's meeting in the 50%, well, that's just social conformity given a fancy name.

But is empathy meeting in the middle or am I talking about communication?

20250621 0630

Disinhibited

I’m starting to think that disinhibited thought, inappropriate emotions, and other divergent mental traits, are the psychological equivalent of survival of the fittest.

I have a very strong moral compass so disinhibited thoughts (why am I thinking this) and inappropriate emotions (why do I feel like this) would cause me no end of strife. A lifetime of self-criticism.

But what if this is divergent thinking at play? The casting of the net?

It seems obvious that all creative pursuits would require some level of disinhibited thought. Otherwise your tree would look the same as my tree. This is why some substances can free you up by taking off the brakes.

But what about society? Would people have ever … abolished slavery if someone hadn’t had the inappropriate emotion of ‘this is wrong’ and the disinhibited thought of ‘I’m going to do something about it’.

So all blades have two sides. Apart from one ones I make they only have one but. All coins have two sides. They cut both ways and there’s three stones in the bush.

But if it wasn’t for this absolutely bastardly disinhibited thought, would civilisation have been created in the first place?

—

The only way to get the lay of the land… is to leave.

I know that when I left the uk is when I became able to see the uk. Fortnightlong holidays don’t cut it; it needs to be 4+ months immersed. 

Probably best I don’t go into my opinion of the uk…

Everything about life and priorities here is different. And then leaving business to do art. That was a huge change and there’s still a conditioned part of me that’s like ‘what will the businessbodies think about this’ but I don’t give a fuck really; I give a fuck about feeding my family and keeping businessbodies happy was a way to do that (plus rsd in J1). Pavlov’s karmic dog frothing away.

Probably best I don’t go into my opinion of business…

Then there’s the process of learning. I’m 42 this year and 41-year-old-me makes me cringe, though to be honest this year is a bit of an outlier so let’s say 41 vs 40 year old me. I have a loads of life experience yet always felt woefully unprepared..

Lovely rain outside this morning. I’m really getting the hang of these knives now. Feels good. Had the usual ‘I’m getting good and should check I’m doing it right’ pang but ignored it; never give in to that pang. That pang is a killer of originality, progress and fun.

Anyway leaving the land. What have I done now if not leave the land of the self, almost. Or rather, leave the land of the superimposed self and enter the land of the real self?

40 years superimposed self? Or 30ish? That’s a weird one. So my experiences and feelings were legitimate. That’s the thing. But other things weren’t. The dance was made for gazelles and I’m an elephant. The amount of realisations I’m having now - around the 4 month mark - is totally expected. Just like that first time I left England. Stopped drinking. Went through any kind of ‘recalibration’

I left the uk and saw that violent crime was not the norm.

I wonder what I’ll discover now I’ve left the superimposed self.

20250622 0535