raw6

loops

Looped thoughts are one of the more painful features of my brain. They’re not a bug, but a result of my processing style, I think.

Since I can only run a single thread I have to run it to extremes, then backtrack, before finding the Legrange point for the next thread, and so on until I get to the answer. So this is single threads run to completion, rather than multiple threads running simultaneously.

The difference might seem subtle but it’s huge. Where someone else might be able to batch tasks and complete them like AAABBBCCC, I batch them and then just bomb through them sequentially: ABCABCABC. It’s why I can only have one computer game going at a time. So if there’s a red flag in the second B data I’m gonna spot it way later than you.

Anyway because of this thought process, I need to go to extremes, and I need that Legrange point. Absolutely need it. The inception point, maybe. Otherwise I get stuck in that thread and the wool spins and I start to get flustered and it’s all downhill from there for everyone involved. So yeah; gimme that Legrange point!

Anyway.

A simple loop is purpose:

- I need meaning

- Life has no meaning

This is a low-level loop which will never be resolved, and apart from my recent breakdown I have made peace with this. But I will never escape the loop. I have searched and searched for a way out; what if life doesn’t need meaning? But we do; we notice patterns. This is God. The unfathomable.

So around we go. And some people are given their Legrange point in the form of gospel or scriptures, some kind of totem, a deity or a belief system.

For me… nothing fits, so I find my own way. And that’s good, if hard. That’s my 道 which is what I’ve always wanted, I guess, what I wrote my dissertation on. Nobody can show you the way; your brain is a unique topographical representation of your world, complete with its own weather systems and communication satellites.

And carrying the analogy, maybe the Buddha found the Legrange point from his entire world; his self. I don’t want that. I just want to be a good dad, happy, slightly less hungry. Maybe help some people.

Life’s good right now. Time for the school run.

20250616 0650 

rebirth

Second only to karma in terms of misunderstanding. The momentary rebirth of Buddhism. To be clear: I’m not going to touch on any kind of rebirth after death. This is all within a single lifetime.

So I’ve had multiple rebirths. 

There’s the big ones. Alcoholic to Ironman.

The small ones. Looking up every split second.

Feeling like I was born to do art and knives; maybe practiced in your sleep.

sleep

So I don’t think I never had normal sleep and now I’m getting it for the first time ever. And it’s unreliable but great.

Today I’ve.. woken up 3 times in as many hours thinking it’s morning, and am now up at 0025 for a bit because it just makes more sense.

Yesterday I slept like a baby. Short but rejuvenating. But not manic I don’t think; not speaking in tongues or being weird, and feeling tiredness. Might need some chemical assistance here too. I think melatonin is pretty common since ‘us types’ have all kinds of fucked up hormones.

The thing is I have ‘dopamine’ sat there for the first time ever, so I am kind of permanently motivated and permanently de-motivated. And I’m not quite sure what tiredness feels like. Where previously I had to furiously ride a wave of demotivation and hope it crashes into sleep instead of corals, now I can kind of… melt into unconsciousness.

Bed is nice now, even if I’m awake. Previously it was a torturer. The amount of things that needed to converge for me to flip into sleep, and then to stay there. It doesn’t feel like they’re an issue any more.

Tonight I was lying there feeling the habits of thought lurch around and.. get stopped. By drugs. So a surge comes, I brace myself unconsciously, and then nothing. It’s toothless.

On the sofa I feel the surge to motion driving me to get up and… this is toothless too. I still get up and do something but it’s a habit. A volitional action. I can choose, even if I’m only just starting to realise.

I realised yesterday that I have a choice with regards to aripirprazole. I will do this and try to get it to people, but I will not kill myself to do it. I already did that many times. This I will do one day per week and try to pass the ball to a research team.

Anyway.

Maybe this is something the buddha talked about. The extinguishment of desire is the root of everything. Dopamine regulation, to the nth degree. 

But the escape from volitional action (karma) and suffering (dukkha) was the reason. By doing something to his dopamine system, I think the Buddha was able to reprogram his habits of behaviour and thought, and escape karma. I think this makes sense when you remember that dopamine encodes everything.

20250617 0030

rebirth

So I am sat here, 0030, rain out the window. This feels special and unique, mine. This is a situation that would have killed me previously; what about energy levels and blah blah. Now… I’m happy? Light?

Let’s go back, I think I’ve been reborn. In fact I know I have, according to how the Buddha described it. So let’s forget all the mumbo-jumbo after-death junk and just focus on what he talked about: the momentary rebirth within the confines of a single life.

I’ve been the autistic avenger, an exchange student, a very heavy drinker (don’t get me wrong it was drink not parties), world class ironman, company founder, artist, potato. I’ve been many things. And they all felt unique.

I think now that these were ‘programs’ in a way. A set of rules that my autistic side created in order to optimise whatever identity I had targeted with that note-in-the-drawer approach. The entire thought processes were different.

If you want to be an athlete, live like an athlete.

It’s that simple. You just do it, and then your body and mind catch up. Your body gets more efficient at the physical movements, and your mind gets more efficient at the mental. Then one day you get too good, it hurts because there’s no more reward to be had through improvement, and you flip to find another fresh start so you can get your fix.

Anyway each of these personalities was near-totally disparate. In fact some (ironman/alcoholic) were intentional decisions precisely because they were so disparate.

Anyway I digress.

The rebirth is also part of the cycle of dukkha / suffering, because it entails the death of the old and the anticipated loss of the new. It is caused, again, by attachment. Dopamine. And to become enlightened is to escape the cycle altogether.

I feel like - as said - I’ve gone from hungry ghost to human. And I have a family that I love, so I plan to stay here. Enlightenment can come in the next life, if there happens to be one.

For now I feel like this export is me getting rid of the past life of adhd. I still have it, of course, but now it feels managed. I understand it. Maybe I can put it to rest.

Now… to sleep? Not to sleep? It almost seems academic now where previously it felt like the end of the world.

20250617 0050

Reprogramming

There’s the programming of a persona, sure, but I also intentionally reprogrammed my narrative around events so I could keep going.

There’s positive change to be instigated through most painful situations. Easy examples would be finding this dead body and looking into mental health, or getting ‘kicked out’ of England then turning it into our decision and owning it. The narrative is everything.

Seligman’s learned optimism and William James’ ownership of life

Anyway you can take most things and over the course of a few weeks or months you can reprogram them into something more agreeable to your psyche. Touch and go, fast and sharp, when you’re motivated. If you don’t do this intentionally then your mind will do it for you.

Dopamine is responsible for encoding preferences; positive or negative. It’s also used for encoding memories and emotions. When I took aripiprazole and was ‘high’ for a week I was telling my family that my psyche was very receptive and to try to put good stuff in there. I was also pretty obnoxious about it - oops - but the dopamine was high so I was right.

The fluctuation in dopamine in the adhd brain likely results in differences on this front; I know I can reprogram myself a lot easier than anybody else I know. But that’s probably because of a lifetime of practice.

CBT does not work for me. Not the same way, anyway. And talk therapy is/was pretty useless because of the decoupling of emotions. But I think that this is a kind of macro-CBT. Looking back, I riding my bike or something and just be like ‘yeah let’s do this’ while firing myself up for… nothing. 

Apart from a reprogramming. And that reprogramming is everything. And the firing up is how you get the code really deep into your mind. Dopamine is CRISPR for your memories.

—

Good morning!

My sleep is strange as the body adapts to higher dopamine but I feel rested and am enjoying these early mornings so will roll with it. They give me a chance to output without the kids. They’re mine. Almost went and asked for melatonin but I think ‘8 hours a night’ might be another construct I was trying to force. All these little self improvements that actually just become stressors.

Like clockwork, once I had exported all the audhd stuff, there were the suicidal images. So annoying. But I know what they are now. They’re sometimes mistaken for suicidal ideation but there’s no drive or desire; they are ptsd and now that the audhd foundation has been addressed to my satisfaction it seems I have a little more delayed processing to do. One thread at a time.

So this guy. I need to process this now I guess. I’ve raged about him before but when I tried to art therapise the event it held very little charge; there were bigger fish to fry. Well it’s breakfast, I’m back, and the kipper is fried.

Anger is the main thing I feel. And an ickiness in the collarbones. But mostly anger. My kids weren’t with me; that’s good. The local 600kg fauna didn’t eat parts of him; that’s good. He should have done it in his bathroom like my friend, who shouldn’t have done it at all.

Don’t get me wrong. I would feel bad for him, he was obviously in pain. But when you kill yourself you just pass that pain on to other people; it does not end. Usually it’s contained to loved ones but this guy decided to just… smash his dead body against a random stranger out on a bike ride. One final act of cuntery. So sorry, mate, but no sympathy. I have taken photos with my children where you chose to hang your corpse, and once you put something in your head you can never take it out, to quote The Road.

I believe that suicide is our final freedom, and the only reason it is frowned upon is societal. Don’t hurt your family and friends. Obviously it’s better not to reach the point of suicide, but if someone’s brain chemistry literally has them in hell every day, and they are unable to see an escape, then who are we to tell them to suck it and deal?

Anyway I should probably take it easy for a while on various fronts. I always work like this: make a mess, cast a wide net, reel it in. I think I’ve just reeled in the audhd net and it was… exhausting. I think I’ll play some Doom, now the meds have enabled me to again.

20250618 0400

drugs

So my family and probably every adhd family out there have an unusual relationship with substances. With the fact that about 20% of them have drunk themselves to death and another 20% died from likely-avoidable cancer, you can’t blame them.

But they were almost certainly medicating for an undiagnosed mental disorder, so it’s time to change the narrative.

First things first: alcohol is not a ‘drug’ in that it doesn’t bind to selected receptors in your body. Well GABA but… It is an emulsifying agent which seeps through all of the oil and water gaskets that are essential for life. It just permeates your entire system like a sickness. Alcohol is poison, straight and simple. It can render you unconscious but little more; the bluntest tool imaginable.

Drugs however; they’re great. They mimic chemicals your body naturally produces in order to regulate itself. Regulate. So I have issues with dopamine regulation, right? So will many of my family in one form or another.

So it makes sense to have a crutch which is fit for purpose. This word: crutch. Alcoholics use it like it’s a demonic thing. What is a crutch, but something to help you walk?

If you have low dopamine, you need a crutch to increase the dopamine. It can be behavioural, and I tried them all, but they weren’t sufficient. Putting aside hard drugs, I’ve always found cannabis (or legal minor cannabinoids) to be incredibly helpful. 

Cannabis increases dopaminergic response for pleasurable activities. That’s a big check for adhd symptoms. It helps with sensory issues, sleep and mood, and does so because it interacts with systems in my brain which are dysregulated by default. 

It means I can stay home and make art instead of being driven to the mountains to put myself in peril. As someone with two kids to support, which is the better option?

If we had normal brain chemistry, then sure, the normal narrative for drugs would fit. But we don’t. So it doesn’t.

Alcohol is not a drug. It is anaesthetic while your wound festers. Other substances can be salves or even antibiotics.

So for anyone struggling with this ‘drugs are bad’ narrative, just remember that the narrative is the wrong way round. The drugs were a solution for a real problem. People chose the wrong solution and caused a new problem. Ignorance, is all.

deadline

My brain seems to need deadlines to plan back from. This isn’t even conscious, though maybe it was at some point. 

It will target something - Xmas or a race or a holiday - and it will start to plan back, break things down into chunks. The year becomes the month becomes the week, the day, the hour, the minute.

Then I weave, and all the pieces feel so impossibly tangled I have no idea how it can ever work out… but somehow it does. The impulsive side throws in an extra project when it sees any slight opening, but the quiet one has been planning and things almost always work out.

Why is this? Why the deadlines? I just had a deadline thrown into question and it threw all these threads in the air; previously I’d have pretended it didn’t bother me and I would ‘roll with the punches’ but really… I’m autistic and it bothers me. I had planned back from that.

I guess this is to do with the dopamine response I get from a plan coming together. I enjoy processes and improvement, and there is no better evidence for a good process than everything just magically coalescing the night before the deadline.

It’s stressful though and I am happy the impulsive side is tamped down a bit now.

Decisions

So I view life as a Markov decision process. If you know the layout of the chessboard, and you know the rules of the game, you know the best move. How the board came to be is irrelevant.

With adhd it can be hard to weigh your options. Listing pros and cons? Yeah it doesn’t work. Because the loud one is in charge of language and the quiet one is in charge of planning.

So. You don’t know the past or future. You still know the best move. It’s a basic decision making principle in AI.

Previous moves have just served to teach you the rules of the game. This is important. You know the target. Also important. If you replay recent events you will just be back on the track, and not able to make a decision.

So you need to stop, and view the situation as a total blank slate. You are starting from zero every second. What is the optimal move? Adjust your rules based on the result. Blank slate, optimal move, adjust.

Then there’s risk. I can’t balance risk in my mind very well. I like to think I can, but I can’t. I have monotropic thinking and am impulsive.

So what I do is look at consequence, not likelihood. 

What is the consequence? Death? Less ice cream?

Is this decision reversible (buying a car) or irreversible (having a child).

This is the way I get my ‘true self’, my autistic side, logic, whatever, back in the driver’s seat.

Stop. Blank slate. One step. Repeat.

A process. Kills decision paralysis too.

Day 25

Feels like we are stabilised at a clinical dose (1mg) now. Things I have noticed:

Mood and motivation significantly improved

Task initiation and switching easier

Taking breaks easier

Less exhaustion

Less tension in the entire body

Thoughts are smoother and more contained

Initial hypomania has passed (I still think it was an ascension phase)

Mood feels ‘buffered’ at either extreme and elevated

Slight restlessness, but it’s different to adhd restlessness; can choose to engage

Sleeping less, but sleep feels restorative

Waking with the sun and happy to do so

I feel like this is the medicine for me but I may want a slightly higher dose. The reason for this is how it interacts with dopamine receptors; I want more mood stabilisation and not ‘more motivation. Because of the binding affinity and relative strength, it seems that 2mg would have more anxiolytic and mood stabilising effects.

It feels good to be motivated again! But at the same time, the last time I was motivated Iwas terrified I would kill myself.

We are actually back in the same situation, with the ptsd popping up again now I’ve addressed my audhd a bit. But I now feel able to deal with it, and the images have an explanation so are more irritating than scary. 

[leaving this raw, typos and all]

I guess I should talk about that fucker in the park. Everyone thinks I’ve been avoiding it; I haven’t. Just my brain knew there were bigger fish that needed frying first. Now that’s done, it’s back to showing me what need expunging.

So the flashes of suicide are back but they are just images. No emotion. It’s ptsd through and trhough and I will likely seek out some therapy if I can’t work it out.

Anyway there I am; training for the ironman world championships. Again. After burning out the year before. Because I have no idea what to do with my life. I need to chase something but have nothing left to chase. All I know is that I can’t ever stop.

So I’m at the very end of the training block and fucking knackered. Absolutely wasted. I hate this and really don’t want to go but it’s the last session and I’ve spent the last 15 years training myself to be hooked on discipline so…

Off I go. Fucing heavy legs. Clammy. Ugh. Just get up the fucking hill. Hate every second but make it like 80% up and I’m like ‘fuck this I’m done’ go home.

Down I go coasting the same way as always with lovely trees and the greens and yellows and organes of this beautiful hokkaido natural forest flying by when theres a parking space on the left and there’s a mand and he’s standing and it;s not tnormal why is he hstanding like that are you fucking serious wait what what I what you said I woudl ws

I always knew I would find one. I didn’t think it would be today.

Pretty raw still… Getting it out,

That fucker. Fucking bastard. Ramming his fucking death mask into my brain for all eternity. That fucking shit.

Anyway there he is. Like fucking Michael Jackson with his fucking neck all off to the side. I run over like fuck maybe I can help him but not a chance; he’s gently swaying there in his black bench coat.

Nondescript 45 year old man. Legs gently folded underneath him. He could have stood up at any time. Quick release knot on a new rope, dopped from his hand as it went limp. No mess on the floor; he knew what he was doing. But why here?

I pace. Call the cops. Instinct. Pace some more. Look at him. Look more. His fingers are rigored and red, with the nails tuning purple. His shoelaces are untied. The faint rocking is unnerving, as is the way his feet are resting on the floor, like he’s just sitting into a cross legged pose.

So there I am, walking around, the sirens start, 6 cars. I call my wife; she’s not too surprised and gets in the car to come pick me up. Pacing. Looking at his face. Trying not to. Looks like he’s just going to… open his eyes. The drool and snot from his face just sliding toward the floor, maybe half a metre.

And behind.. his car. And his dog. In the car. The dog is the only thing people will ask me about going forward. Everything else must be too uncomfrotable. But the dog is fine. It has toilet sheets and water and food and has pooed a couple of times. He knew what he was doing. Probably did it last night.

The cops arrive, crack some jokes, buddies, used to this kind of thing. They were good; all I mean is that this was no big deal for them. They weren’t just out riding a route they’ve done 200 times, about to see their first ever corpse. No open casket where I’m from.

Anyway. An hour or so. He’s covered in blue tarp. I am cold. We finish and go home. The police offer no support. I call to try to find out a little about the man but obviously no dice. I also ask if they have any kind of counselling or support for this kind off thing; blank looks.

So yeah shit happens and it was about 2 weeks of nothing before my wife and I both exploded at each other. But I think that this opened the pandoras box of why I was out there on the bike in the first place, and got put on hold until the big stuff was out of the way.

But now it’s time to address it.

20250618 1237