So that was textbook mania but rooted in reality. I still think that this med has treated all my ADHD symptoms as well as anhedonia but my baseline has been thrown out.
Anyway I am going to compartmentalise the experience into two:
1 - the ‘this was mania’ approach (meds page)
2 - the ‘this was an awakening’ approach (thoughts page)
Because objectively it was mania but subjectively it was an awakening and aren’t they all?
Anyway the mania could have been dangerous. I’m not joking when I say that I think my drug history helped me. Want to be very cautious with dosing and I’ll be telling my psychiatrist so (remember nobody who can self-report has taken this on-record).
Anyway I was so convinced I was right. I still am! Ha! Extra risky! But.. The med treated everything that ailed me AND made me high for a week or two. So; understandable excitement.
But nobody told me the science didn’t work (because it does work) so I wound up offloading ideas like this, which probably created a feedback loop. It took someone removed from the situation to snap me out of it.
Need concrete prompts to avoid it in the future:
Lack of sleep
Overflowing with ideas
Not eating
Basically mania is being high, and the high person rarely knows they’re high. Speaking in tongues. Racing thoughts. It’s a religious experience for the person and a confusing mess for everyone else.
So…. Food, sleep, idea quantity. Those are the flags.
20250611 0700
Processing
So I have a short memory and slow processing*; most people have a longer memory and faster processing.
This means I tend to forget things faster than others. I blurt them out thinking they’re funny while other people are still processing things ‘normally’. Then I go away and process. And regret.
But now I have a bit more of a framework for understanding this.
In the short term it might mean that I blurt shit out and upset people (a way I process things due to low RAM) but in the long term… it’s probably me who suffers. Silently.
People have moved on. They’ve processed, while I’ve forgotten. But not totally; it just couldn’t be held in working memory long enough to ‘work it out’. It’s still raw and popping up occasionally, and when it does, polishing knives helps knead out the tension.
So people come to make up, thinking I’ve also processed, and open a wound which was still infected. The processing isn’t done.
And then there are two types of processing: personal and social. Or rather, two types of regulation. You have to process to regulate and…
Give me a sec. I’m 3 weeks autistic and was high as a kite for 2 of them. I’m also 4 months ADHD and.. you get the picture.
So anyway most people are social creatures and process emotions socially. They talk and they hug and they look in each others eyes and share the pain and gradually it diminishes and they move closer and then they have one last conversation to put it to rest and…
Imagine that the RAM is shit and the processor still working. RAM is full of this processing in the background. It’s overloaded. And then you see a crying face full of happy/sad/relief emotions because they’re over it but you’re not and the wound is prodded and…
This all sounds very far fetched as someone who lived their entire life a slave to RSD. It’s amazing really. I’m not ‘robot mode’ any more but I still don’t have RSD. And I’m pretty sure this is right.
I think the way I will regulate my emotions is using this new thing I’ve found - knives. I need to figure out how to regulate my own emotions properly before I can participate in the group-regulation everyone else relies on. I can probably never participate, and pretending to all these years is what caused me to become a hermit and burn out time and again.
So sometimes when I’m asked to have the make-up chat I’m just not ready to make up. And when I’m cracking my jokes you’re still letting it sink in.
There has to be a middle ground…
20250611 1000
* but super fast thinking when I’m on a thread; so slow processing for complex things like emotions and fast for simple things like rocket science.
encoding
So… and this one is coming straight from the arse..
Dopamine encoding. ADHD is dopamine dysregulation, right. We have difficulty initiating and maintaining tasks. I think it goes a lot further than this.
Flipping to hate what you love. This happens to me all the time and I fucking hate it.
So every 5 years I have a personality reset. Ironman or whatever it was, it will suddenly encode to blank and I will feel nothing toward my joy. These are not hobbies, they are identities, so I lose my person. And I think it’s all because the hobby started to cause my too much pain.
Further optimisation became impossible. The pendulum swung. And bang - no joy. A defence mechanism when fight and flight fail.
It happened while I was high, with volitional action in a close relationship. I saw the wool and saw the pendulum and the rules of interaction were smashed. I could still see them and all the little manipulations that used to work, but they were… translucent.
The thing is, despite these encoding flips, I still love the activity on a mental level. The nervous system is still there and still has the same record playing. I still identify with it having spent 5 years with it my everything. Just the juices… I get no juices from it any more because I’ve had some kind of internal trauma response. I get no juices from my me.
It might be something to do with a dopamine surge or some other such arse shit. So what happens is you’re like ‘fuck yeah this is great I’m the best’ and you’re causing yourself pain trying to get even better and then your fucked up dopamine super squirter party songkrans that shit up and your brain is like ‘brrrrrppp this is an abuser’ and … you have some kind of trauma response to the thing you most loved.
How’s that for out the arse? But something was happening in J1 which so far hasn’t happened in J2. Fucking manic phase messing up my data. Fucks sake.
20250612 0600
breakdown
I guess this whole mental health thing started with finding a body hanging in my favourite park. Or rather, that prompted me to look into it. I’d solved every external problem and life was… bad and getting worse. I was retired at 40, ironman world championships level fitness, two kids a wife and a house, and felt zero wellbeing. Everything I had thrown into the void only served to make it bigger.
I’d quit my job (again) the year before, but still had one foot in the door as it was my own company. I felt so incredibly trapped. Anyway. I had a string of spinach hanging out my bumhole is what I’m saying; needed pulling out. Ha. Disgusting.
So I continue with my art therapy. I know now why real therapy doesn’t work, and the art is very good for me. I basically, over the course of the 2024, deconstructed my persona and my life, all the way back to childhood. I needed to find where the rot lay so I could try to fix it.
Things got bad when my parents visited, and I imploded a little after that but not fully. In hindsight, mask exhaustion, so obvious. I’d already gone through 2 weeks of shock and then plenty of processing for the body I’d found and it didn’t really bother me to be honest; the problem lay elsewhere.
So… I spend the autumn… just doing a crazy amount of art projects. A crazy amount. It felt like I could never do enough to justify my existence. I had to do more. And non were for me. All gifts, so all need to be done by Xmas, and just… crazy pressure. This was my fix, you see. My drug. The thrill of having a complex plan come together on time.
It all does. Somehow. With 1 day to spare, 10 projects come together…. And then I implode. I have done everything. The program of my mask has completed. Work, athletics, family, even unintentional farewell gifts maybe… all done. What now? Die?
This was not conscious. The mask was never conscious so neither could the decision be.
I basically started vibrating apart at the seams. I felt like a Dremel in a peanut shell. Honestly about to just… fucking explode in all directions. Steel wool (at the time unregogniseable) going wild and just these horrendous waves of adrenaline washing up over me every few minutes. I’m talking sat there peacefully cutting wood then ‘wooomph’ like a jet plane and then nothing. Seriously fucked. No idea why. This is after years of night sweats and burnout and shite.
Middle of the night my kid wets the bed. I can’t take it, 5 days sleep deprived, flashes of suicide every minute for weeks (I forgot to mention those but I was having more and more images of killing myself). Just… I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to hurt anybody. I love my family and I finally finished my work. I … don’t want to die. I want to enjoy this. Why am I trying to kill myself? Why the images? Punch the floor, near break my hand, distract, get my wife to find an online clinic (anycure.jp) and speak with a doc by end of day.
Diagnosed bipolar 2 and given valproate, which was a godsend at the time. Like alcohol without the alcohol. Oh god the relief. I can barely recall now, but the pain… the drive to action and the internal struggle to restrain. The certainty that you’re going to impulsively kill yourself. Just slice that wrist like butter, vvvp with the drill… not fucking nice man. Why?
Turns out it was ADHD. Fucking intrusive thoughts. They’re gone now. As are a lot of the problems I’ve had over my life. Fucking drugs all along. They were the solution, not the problem.
Anyway that tides me over for a month and then I can see someone local. An hour later he’s like ‘you have ADHD’ and I’m like ‘oh fuck off mate I can hyperfocus’ and he’s like ‘that’s a symptom’ so I’m like ‘gimme drugs’.
And he gives me guanfacine. I do not want stimulants. If possible. I’ve done my work. I don’t need productivity. I just want less craving, less pain.
This… this is a miracle drug for me. It turns down my fight or flight over the course of a couple of weeks. I get the best sleep of my life; normal person sleep. The waves of adrenaline don’t stop immediately, but they do stop with time. The disturbing images fade 99%.
Over the next 3 months, things improve. But I know this is only half the story. Or 70%; who cares. The ADHD people only half resonate, and the autistic people resonate very little. Then I find a couple of audhd types and it’s like ‘oh my god these people are ME they’re so fucking annoying turn it off’.
Anyway so back to the doctor. My ‘squealing sensitivities’ as I’m gonna call them were playing up and I was getting ‘more autistic’ whatever the fuck that means. Struggling with crowds, lights, etc. I’d done a bit of research and one of the meds used for kids seemed like it could be a double-whammy for ADHD and ASD.
Anyway the doc didn’t believe I was ASD so I had to jump through a placebo hoop of Chinese medicine but then when I got aripiprazole… my world changed. I am waiting to see how much of this was transient and how much permanent, but everything feels better in every way, still.
So anyway there we are. I’m going to get rid of the valproate over the coming weeks but keep it on file in case I am BP2 (still a chance given my work style). After that, if stable, I will actually try lowering the guanfacine. I have a theory that it’s the downstream impacts of irregular dopamine signalling which is making people have irregular NE, so if you can fix one you fix the other. But let’s see.
20250612 1615
states
Brain states are everything. This seems so obvious to me it barely bares repeating.
Every single action we take in our life is to achieve a brain state. And yes - this includes all acts of altruism. It’s what the buddha mentioned when he talked about everything being motivated by selfish interest.
I recently had a hypomanic episode where I was desperately trying to hold myself out of full mania by getting someone to disprove my science (my god). They still haven’t, the bastards. Anyway if I didn’t have so much experience with drugs and undiagnosed mental disorders I would probably have been in trouble, but the poison was very much in the dose.. anyway..
In the winter I fought hard against myself to stop that vvvp impulse kill of self. I didn’t want to, but the brain state did. I’ve punched walls and broken fists to change my brain state so that I don’t do anything really harmful instead. I’ve eaten chocolate because I was hungry and has sex because I was horny.. you get the picture. Brain states.
The amount of fighting against my own (very strong) impulses over the years. This is why I need drugs; ironman and meditating and gritting your teeth just isn’t sustainable. It’s something everyone deals with; just me more than most.
I think there’s 2 things at play: the neurones and the juices. My juices are wacky but I like to think my neurones are not. So we have the neurones trying to influence the juice but failing; the sock on the bicycle wheel.
I am thinking of this like the land and the clouds more and more, and as I write I see that the Buddha talked about being an island unto yourself and emotions / events all being clouds that you can observe objectively as they come and go.
What aripiprazole gives me, with the baseline dopamine that wasn’t previously there, is an island to come back to. Or… an eye to the storm, in my analogy.
So I think these things you observe are the emotions, the clouds, the karma, the volitional action. The thing doing the observing is the true self, soul, atama, god, autistic pattern matching self. I think that people maybe have viewed the ‘autistic self’ (which everyone has) as the god within themselves, and the adhd self (which everyone also has) as their chaos.
The angels and demons on their shoulders. Asd and adhd. Order and chaos. There’s something there, yeah?
20250613 0645
I'm pretty annoyed about this 'mania' throwing my credibility out the window. It wasn't mania; it was the drug working as intended and we didn't anticipate it because of ignorance.
Again this is probably an example of different processing; while everyone is doing the hard work of emotions, my brain has gone for the easy fruit of data. I'll get to the hard stuff later.
So MDMA was also a pharmaceutical made for depression. It was shelved because it was too 'up and down' - precisely what I'm trying to avoid with aripiprazole. Anyway I'll use the word 'ascension phase', since that's the medical term, but anyone who has tried MDMA can tell you it has one hell of a come-up.
So yeah aripiprazole has a 3-5 day ascension phase which is like MDMA-lite. Remember that MDMA is not about the ascension phase (it's quite unpleasant) but rather about the steady state afterward, which is where we are now. Our ascension was too rapid, is all. Good data. Titration necessary.
Incidentally this med is to prevent ascension. My natural dopamine levels are insane when they go full songkran and this med will block some of it from getting to the receptors. Plus stop the redlining.
So. Two things happened:
1 - the med treated every single one of my softward issues for adhd, as well as sensory and processing issues for asd
2 - it caused euphoria and hypermotivation during the ascension phase
This was not mania or hypomania but I could feel it feeding into itself so desperately needed someone to check the science and prevent me from spiralling. Nobody could, because I think the science (of the meds) is right. So off we go, spiralling upward, but well aware and thinking clearly and trying to get people to 'snap me out of it'. But nobody can. Because facts.
This was not mania. It was an ascension phase from a pharmaceutical. It is a feature, not a bug.
The waters are muddied on the personal front but on the data front they are seeming... fairly clear.
We will need clinical trials for sure. But this feels like a long-term speedypill and speedypills are a great treatment option for adhd.
So let's see. Should have predicted this based on the pharmacology (binding to receptors) but data is mostly limited to children and non-verbal autistic folks so ... anyway I should have trusted my druggie gut here instead of the medical literature.
20250613 0922
I don’t know what but I need to output something. I have about 3 threads starting in my brain and at least one of them needs putting on the page.
I think it all stems from low memory. Everything, for me. And that all stems from irregular dopamine signalling. Everything. All my ‘autism’ and ‘adhd’ and everything - it’s all because of dopamine.
So my memory on the hardware side gets full and I need to output stuff. Writing, speaking, whatever - this gets it through the blockade and into my long-term processing. There is something wrong with the data pipeline.
So then this gets processed at whatever speed (fast for single thread and slow for multithread) and then the answer is queued up and needs to be blurted out to either a) free up memory or b) get fed back into the churn (probably both).
This rinses and repeats with more and more ideas until something legible maybe comes out.
Another idea I’ve had my whole life is that we all have ‘stress points’ to allocate to good and bad activities but that seems to quaint compared to recent realisations that I’ll not bother. Let’s just say that if you don’t give the dog something to fight, the dog will fight you.
So what the fuck is autism? Adhd is fairly clear now - it’s irregular dopamine signalling and the millions of different permutations thereof. The cause and stuff is not clear, so it’s still a blanket term. But it’s a relatively tight blanket term of ‘dopamine dysregulation’.
Autism… now that’s harder. It’s the hardware. And why does the hardware form differently? Genetics? Adhd? Trauma? Does it form to process patterns or visuals or what? There are infinite types of fence, types of tree, and ways the tree can grow through the fence.
So… autism is the hardware. Adhd is the software.
Autism is Dr Jeckyl and adhd is Mr Hyde
Autism is the angel on your shoulder and adhd is the devil
Autism is order and adhd is chaos
Autism is neuronal and adhd is hormonal
Autism is the land and adhd is the weather
Not that black and white of course.
In my case I think everything is a downstream effect of regular dopamine dropouts. I don’t know if it was always this way and I think it might be getting worse with age.
Autism and adhd are both blanket terms and there’s a very real chance that what I have could become a distinct diagnosis.
But you have to use the language of your times, so here we are.
This tug of war. The good and bad. The intent and the emotion. It’s always been there.
The strange thing now is that the tides have changed. My logic and nervous system are more in charge now, and better able to talk to the emotional endocrine system. It can communicate where it before had to manipulate.
Where previously I would desperately try not to do something but be pulled inexorably toward it, I now have no pull. No tug. Maybe a little. The tug is not emotional any more; it’s a habit of thought.
I can finally take it or leave it.
Really. I can finally influence my emotions properly with my thoughts. Not a buddha, by any means, but nearly human.
These years.. the whole life restraining the emotions. It’s exhausting. Imagine just getting lurches to punch someone in the face mid chat. Is that normal? Why is it happening? I don’t want to punch anyone. What?
Well it’s fucked up songkran time in the endocrine system so you’re gonna get these urges. And the more tired you get, the more you’ll get them. Plus the worse you’ll be at controlling them. Friday night scuffles.
Anyway about 40% of my energy was going on holding these urges in. Quite literally, I think, because of the sheer level of relief I felt when when I started aripiprazole. The euphoria has passed but I still feel the relief.
But it’s alien, unusual. Something has quite literally removed the hum that was in my head. The toothache you never knew was there. Hedonic adaptation is a bitch and in a couple of days this will be the norm.
But for now… that’s 40% extra life force I can use for… sleeping, apparently. Because I have 42 years of catching up to do. And now I might be able to build a value-led habit system rather than just having to drown out one thing with the next.
20250614 1515
So one of the quirks of my brain is that it hates loose ends. Absolutely hates them. Can’t abide them. It’s better now I am medicated but still… everything has to have a clear purpose and be optimised toward that purpose, apparently.
What are we talking about? Get to the point!
Where are we going and what is the most efficient route?
All the fucking time. What’s the best way to fill your day so you don’t have to sit still for even a second. Completely exhaust yourself and say ‘job done’; check everything off and all the boxes ticked so you can go to bed and start again tomorrow.
Then the purpose of it all is death of course. You are just working and doing all these things so you can get all your ducks in a row and say ‘jobs good’ and then die. That’s the whole purpose, really, isn’t it?
So this is where I end up. My thought process is one of extremes, I think because of how my brain formed. In order to get to D it has to go all the way to Z and back.
So yeah. That sucked. I still have it, of course, and hedonic adaptation will come into play and everything will have to be optimised again. But maybe not quite to the same degree. Hopefully not. Because the steel wool… the whole point of this website is to try to unravel it.
… a filtered reality, around itself curled.
20250614 1600
… I also believe I have a more single-thread way of processing the world, and high compensatory speed.
What this means is that I tend to process simple things very quickly and complex things slowly. For example, data is fast and faces are slow. Not noticeably slow; I overclocked, but anyway.
So how this plays out in a conversation is that I jump 5 steps ahead when talking about the practicalities, while everyone else is dealing with the things their brains evolved to handle; multithreading / emotions.
This might be part of why I seem to lack empathy despite not actually lacking it. Just my brain is a CPU while yours is a GPU and I am processing the logic while you are dealing with the graphics. I will do the graphics later, and you will do the logic later.
You might have finished processing the emotions while I have finished processing the logic, so you get a rather terse ‘it’s so obvious’ kind of answer. My emotions are raw and the answer is old; for you it’s the opposite. At least that’s how it feels.
The threads idea would also explain why I go to such extremes with my thinking; my catashrophising knows no bounds. It would also explain the sheer agony that is a looped thought; when there’s no way out and you’re just spiralling.
And the threads are all because of short working memory, which is in turn because of dopamine signalling irregularity. This feels like a complete system, so I’m going to run with it.
20250614 1630
So I always said why rush? The destination isn’t the point. The destination is death. For us all. So why rush?
Same for everything. A holiday? The destination is home. A job? Destination retirement. There’s nothing at the end. The process is the point.
At the same time, I was incapable of simply enjoying anything. I wanted to. I couldn’t. Brain.
Don’t get me wrong; I had plenty of thrills and ups and downs. But my whole life has been about trying to learn to smell the roses. Hundreds of hours of meditation. Useless gratitude journals. Endless self criticism.
All to try to change my chemistry so I can slow down like everyone around me. Why are they so relaxed? They must be faking it. Surely. Advising me to slow down while asking how I stay so motivated…
Anyway the ability to hold the coffee in your mouth for a second. Take a breather. Count to ten. These are things that I lacked, really. I had some charicature of them, but my mind was always on the next thing, how to optimise.
And this isn’t because I was in any rush to get to the end. God no. I want to stop. More than anybody. But stopping is akin to withdrawal. My brain makes me do a Trainspotting McGregor every time I try to have a ‘couple of tea’.
A part of me wonders if the human obsession with productivity isn’t something to do with adhd or a gradually crumbling genome. High-J was like ‘maybe aripiprazole can cure the world’ by helping to tamp down a little of the rampant greed that has become the norm.
Prolly not though. Pissing in the wind. Just look after me and mine. And - aripiprazole is what enables me to do this. J1 would have been punching walls trying to take down Musk and Trump.
I’m too old for that shit.
20250614 2045