raw9

Good morning! I have no idea who I am writing to. Who are you? Who am I? How many am I? I am legion. Nobody’s reading this yet anyway. But they will.

So I’ve put to rest all my personal concerns about aripiprazole. My final remaining concern was how good I felt but; I have an explanation for that now. It was pretty challenging. Life events. Not understanding your brain. Losing your facial expressions. Becoming happy. Completely losing rsd. All a bit of a whirlwind. Yet also… the calmest I’ve been in my life.

And calm I remain. The adhd is gone from me and my child. The asd I like. I’ve only known it 2 weeks, but it’s a friend. The adhd.. he was a dick. A total shit. You wouldn’t believe. No wonder the bullies at school never bothered me; the real bully was within.

But we knew that all along

Why else would I excel at everything

Get to the top but not enjoy the view

The forager ant

Always onto the next

People follow me, stay a while

I see another mountain

I am compelled

It was exhausting and impossible to tun off. It felt like an MDMA comedown, every minute of every day. Even imagining going back makes me want to crawl out of my skin. And I thought this was normal for 42 years. And it’s … it’s gone. Overnight.

I still sit down occasionally and get that pang of habit. The nng to move. But it’s just thought now. I’m very active, but I stop. It’s a choice. Dopamine … is a very misunderstood thing. Every single action we do in our entire lives is to try to maintain stable dopamine levels, and my sink was broken. It’s not a case of more or less, really. It’s stability.

Anyway putting that aside… I feel so much better. Words don’t suffice. And there’s a storm in my life. But not in my house. And I know if I have this cheap generic drug, I will have a happy life. And I’m not a potato. I’m more functional than I ever was with ADHD. My thoughts are like silk. My IQ has doubled and my joints are buttered.

The world has gone from being very scary to very warm. Everything will be alright. This is new. So… I’m now an outgoing autistic guy who has been ragged around the world, business, athletics, quietly collecting data, in a terrifying world. An AI. Trained.

This tatara is ongoing but when we crack it open I’m hoping for something fucking tough and fucking nice. I am trying to feed it positive emotion and intention, because I think these 4 weeks will be the source code for the next 40 years. My anger at the world is melting; I think it’s delayed processing from a lifetime of meditation. I honestly believe that this neurotransmitter state might be what people call religious encounters, but I’ll stop there until I have more data.

Anyway; not crazy. Just different. The raw data would make you think I’m mad but so would 00001010111010001011101. So what? Different OS.

Anyway I think I used the last of my anger to get the ball rolling on this. I think it’s gone now. Forever. The underlying rage, that is. I can still get angry when needed. But I’m calm as fuck usually because nothing is intimidating after the internal life I’ve lived. Calm as Zuck.

So I’ve got some stuff to do. Will consolidate for a while. Take a breather. Then when the processing picks up and I’m waking at 2 with backlogs to export, I’ll be back to formless crap. I’m hoping that sharing the process might make someone somewhere go ‘oh!’ Because if ADHD and ASD both have infinite permutations, then there’s some kinda combinatorial explosion going on in my head.

Laters. Not like anyone’s reading this anyway.

James 

2025/06/07 0500

buddhism

So people have been like ‘you cray cray’ for throwing around words like nirvana. Can’t say I blame them. It’s not in their vocab.

The language of Buddhism was literally created for this kind of experience. And even then the definition of nirvana just means ‘extinguishing of desire’, which is what this was. My cravings just fell away. The withdrawal I was born with ended.

So I’m gonna go on using buddhist terms. Scientific terms would have sounded crazy in their day too. Language is a tool and nothing more.

I’m also pretty sure the buddha had audhd. Ha! There! I said it!

Why? 

Suffering. 

Dukkha.

The wheel of rebirth every second.

Attachment 

Etc

There are too many parallels; just in their day they didn’t have the tools we have now.

Religious epiphany-like states are some kind of brain chemistry state. It’s that simple. Dopamine and serotonin and being in a church and you think it’s god. But it’s not god; it’s chemistry. For me the main doubt of this was how great I felt, until I realised it was probably delayed processing of a hell of a lot of meditation.

I had an interesting, painful, unpleasant, and probably essential experience with a loved one about 1 week into treatment. They wouldn’t stop pushing and I was in a loop; I could feel the steel wool spinning faster. I was asking them to stop because I knew something was coming but didn't know what.

And then a kind of pendulum swung into the wool and shattered it, with fragments drifting away in water. I think this was volitional action (the rules of engagement) and the pendulum was my ADHD / brain going ‘no’.

I now kinda think that meditation (to that degree; with the aim of nirvana) is quite literally to punish yourself so much that your brain’s defence mechanism kicks in and removes dopaminergic encoding for…. Everything.

To clarify: I don’t think I’m enlightened. I think I’m human instead of hungry ghost. But the world is full of hungry ghosts right now, and if this medicine can turn them human… well… there’s no choice involved.

2025/06/07 0930

So…

I’m now thinking that sensory gating issues combined with dopamine signalling issues. Sensory gating means overload so I can’t process stuff but ignoring that..

I think 100 chunks of data come in and I only receive 20, where someone else might get 80. So to see the full picture I need to extrapolate like a madman.

So it might not be a case of single thread, but a case of… a trickle of data coming in, an overclocked computer going to town on it, and something coming out. Not always what was expected, but usually interesting.

Also explains blurting shit out because of the poor buffer. But that’s the only way you get the info. Hence this page. 

So the data goes in, less. Needs to get the output so extrapolates like wild. Gets something; who knows what.

I suppose this is why I’m able to extrapolate how it might work from just those formless brain farts at the start. Just needed something raw to work with.

And then when it has it, it can’t hold it in RAM. It’s either listening, or holding it, or the steel wool. Oh god the steel wool. I can finally feel it building. Off topic. Self prompt.

Anyway so I function a lot better when I’m in the flow state and this makes sense now. It’s because otherwise the RAM starts to overload. And I feel like probably polishing knives is some extension of this.

Ding

20250608 0530

So the reason I need to output fairly formless like this is that if I hold something in my memory I forget what I was doing. It’s as simple as that - I can only hold one piece of track in mind.

This is why I end up (repeat) infodumping over text I realise. I go and re-read the text, and I’m back on the track. Or I remember a little piece of shart I forgot. Either way I’m back and forget where I was.

Solution: do not re-read the messages.

Another one is the ‘…’ typing bubble. It kills me as soon as it pops up. Plus people don’t like being bombarded with 130 short messages at once; it’s pretty stressful. Both of these.

Solution: agree not to touch the text input window until someone ends their stream with ‘.’ and mute the chat. As in a message with nothing other that ‘.’ A baton pass. This works great for both so far.

20250608 0620

Silver lining

Well that was… probably good in the grand scheme. Like most seemingly bad things in my life. Finding that corpse. The troubles in the UK. They always seem to be the impetus necessary for some kind of good change.

For me… I now have a blog! They’ll trend again.

And I’m hoping that I have a few kernels of truth and a way to finally cut the ties with my past lives, or maybe even reconcile them with each other.

I can say ‘sorry Linkedin but you fucking suck you absol…’ nah I’ll stop but that place elicits some kind of slow-little-t-trauma response. Stress response. Whatever. I burned out hard, many times, and kept going back for more. Fucking place.

Productivity though. AI. Built a company recruiting for AI 10 years before it exploded. Back when it was all dreamers. Everyone wanted to save the world and cure cancer.

Well I mentioned a kernel. And I don’t see percentage risk; I look at consequence. And there’s this med sitting here not being used.

I mean… here’s an extreme: evolution went wrong and our current obsession with productivity is because our synapses are leaking more and more dopamine. Now think about the downstream effects of a potential solution to that. Anyway that’s for another page. Zip it, James.

This page is more for the ‘fluffy stuff’. I’ll build a process and meditate on the things that are important to me. For the next month or so I plan to look out of the window, polishing swords, and thinking about things like identity and the human experience, brain chemistry, tech, etc. Lots of variety in this brain.

I think that the last 2 years have been me training myself to come out of my mask. I sat and did morning pages, then art, medication… and I think all that was me trying to get the storm of emotions which is my ADHD out of the way so the ‘real me’ could come through. 

Hypomania started this and I’m now falling into regulation. In the olden days it would have been a religious experience. I’m interested in that interplay.

So why not. Making knives. Taking my time.

20250609 0500

Identity

I guess the problem for me is the same as the buddha and all; the language didn’t fit. Psychology. Tech was always closer.

Anyway identity… it’s no wonder autistic people around my age have issues with it. ‘Nothing special about you’ and ‘everyone else matters’ is a dangerous combo. But hey.

I guess identity stems from a basic understanding of how you function, and that understanding is reinforced by the fact that peple around you function the same. You function differently = you hide it. Fit in. Survive.

Anyway I think identity… well I guess I never had one. Or maybe I had one and it was crushed when the rules of [nice town] were asked to function in [not nice town]. I don’t know. 

I had lots! I did ironman to high level, built multiple businesses, drank and partied heavily, meditated loads… all kind of sequentially. I would go hard for 5 years; get really into it. Break it down into chunks. Build a process, optimise, all these rules in my head, and then… snap. Kill my joy.

I wonder if this is what the Buddhist and other aesthetics talk about when they say ‘kill the self’. Maybe they focus so hard on the pain they are causing that the brain’s defence mechanism kicks in and they go ‘bang’ no more self and all they care about is the world

I don’t know but I know that the recent experience as positively religious. Brain states, etc. It was like seeing god. But is seeing god seeing patterns and seeing patterns autism. Is the self observation the Buddha talked about to do with the autistic side ‘managing’ the ADHD side?

There were what… 88 hells? I can get that, with my shit squirters goin. And the difficulty of achieving it.

Anyway. The extinguishment of self… I think that’s what breaking a mask is. The destruction of volitional action.

I wonder if this is what the buddha mentioned when he talked about volitional action. Falling away of the self. Learned behaviour. I wonder if the mask is what he talks about, and if somehow he turned that self-defence mechanism on himself.

I wonder if somehow the various ‘level-ups’ you can do (like me: hungry ghost -> human) are when you break a partial mask. A persona. That’s how it felt when I made the Recruitin’ piece. This feels bigger.

So we all have masks. They’re essential. They’re the branches of the tree. But most of us have a trunk, because of coherent dopamine signalling and time cell function I think. ADHD would kill that trunk, and fragment the personalities. Or for me it did. 5 years here ;bang; 5 years there ;bang;. Always gone. The pendulum flips and I hate my joy. The extinguishment of craving and desire.

But they’re still in there and right now they seem to be coming together, because I’ve finally removed my global mask and gotten myself some roots. I think this is what I had to do in my hypomanic episode where I was borderline seeing god. I had to get my roots established so I could grow a person.

The parts are there and feel like they’re drifting together, like asteroids. I feel hopeful. The meds… well they blew my head off for a while if I’m honest. But maybe chanting could have done the same.

Aripiprazole ascension

Finally deleted LinkedIn; another long overdue change. Wanted to record what happened over the last 2 weeks since it’s clinically significant and I still believe that a) this drug is a miracle and/or b) this is pretty strong stuff to give kids. So not 100% sure it’s necessary for my own kid. 

Good data, see. 

So. Drugs.

This was MDMA-lite for 2 weeks. 1 week for each dose increase.

I knew I wasn’t enlightened but felt like I had stepped from hungry ghost to human and was overjoyed. I still feel this, and positive, but not overjoyed. This fed into ‘hypomania’, but if I’m honest I think it was just a pharmacologically predictable effect of the drug binding to my dopamine and serotonin receptors. It was just FAR more intense than expected, because there’s no recorded subjective data in adults. It’s like a pill come-up spread over the course of a week.

So hopefully now it’s over and we live in the ‘kingdom of heaven’ or something like that; ha. At the very least this should put me in a better brain state, but the philosophical stuff I’ll save for other posts.

So…

I start Abilify at a theme park with my kid. I lose all appetite and ride rollercoasters. All good so far. I drive back… Errr.. Made it. Lots of floaty feelings, legs electric jelly, kind of buzzing a little but calm, hypermotivated. Not sleeping and no hedonic eating; only eat to appetite and not much of that.

Then on day 4 it was like ‘click’ and a light went on. Everything felt great, natural and amazing. My thoughts were butter. My joints oiled. ALL the tension in my face melted. And I became a lot more autistic and motivated; happy for the first time in over a year.

So sensitivities were kind of dialled up a little while caring about them (and other people!) was dialled down. Or rather they were shuffled; noise doesn’t bother as much but can’t process faces as well. Rsd vanished. Task switching was so incredibly easy. Whatever it was, it seemed to switch adhd off. It still seems to be switched off. So I’m hopeful that the ‘episode’ was just the med acting as expected. But the spectre of bipolarity lives on.

Then I upped the dose too quickly, 0.5mg to 1mg after 8 days. Shoulda waited but years as a drug user, final relief, if something feels good I’m gonna do more. Lesson learned - these are far more powerful than recreational drugs, including the ‘hard stuff’. These change things at a more fundamental level.

Anyway nothing dangerous happened but I did get a bit intense with my words while slack-facedly ‘sharpening’ (polishing) sword fragments so misunderstandings were bound to happen. Ha! I am still more ASD but happier about everything that ails me, and less things ail me. 

I’m hopeful for the drug aripiprazole for adult ADHD.

So - I came out of a whirlwind of activity with this blog site, a better understanding of my ADHD and ASD, a newfound respect for pharmaceuticals, less baggage from a past life) I think that I somehow used the hypomania (I was high, guys, ffs) to set up the roots for my next life, and now I’m planning to let it grow, nice and slowly if possible.

This will be for me going forward. There have been a lot of misunderstandings around empathy and such over the years. I was working very hard for everyone else but there was something wrong with the roots that was affecting the fruit. I feel like I have the tools to heal the roots now, and everything else with time.

Many times over my life I have intentionally reprogrammed myself. This is the big one, and I’m going to try to take it slow and program myself to be a calm and happy person. It’s like each time we smash a persona we free up space for a new program. This was the global persona, and I feel like I have a unique opportunity to fill the empty receptacle with something nice for once.

Anyway feelin’ good. Time to rub some steel

20250609 1136

The subjective experience: god mode

So… this all went pear shaped due to timing of a family visit. I was planning 0.5mg but since I felt too good, I was sent to the doctor for mania, and cleared. I then opted to increase the dose, since I felt too good, so… don’t do that. Really.

I’m interested in the scientific explanation for spiritual states after this little ditty.

So this was a spiritual awakening. The human experience, different language for the same thing, I interpreted it as an autistic awakening and tried to explain it in scientific terms. I had suddenly opened my eyes to my autistic self, and he was standing up fully formed, like a little homunculus. He had been there all along, and he was me, like the tatara bloom or a naked little terminator.

Motivation was +50% and I’m intense to begin with. I was so convinced that I needed to get this drug to the world asap that I just… moved. No choice. One hour of human suffering was unacceptable in my mind. Dopamine. The anger. I knew I needed to use it before it vanished, because this is how I’ve done business and stuff all my life. Task initiation with anger. Yet I also felt more calm and collected than I’ve ever been. Thoughts like silk.

… and I think in a way I was. Because I think this drug does treat all of my ADHD and ASD issues. I have no more volatile emotions or RSD, yet. Task initiation and switching is easier. So I think on one side it was treating things clinically and on the other side it made me high as fuck.

Got me thinking seriously again about identity, rebirth, past lives, etc. I felt a lot of that; intuited it but in a scientific ‘fragmented personality’ sense with the personas I have adopted over the years. I felt a gradual coalescing of these disparate pieces into a coherent narrative.

There was a kind of falling away of the ‘steel wool’ I came to visualise in my mind; I now think this was what Buddha called volitional action; the rules of engagement. All those expressions and eye contact I maybe-remember practicing in the mirror as a kid were wiped. I felt my brain’s ADHD defence mechanism (is that a thing?) kick in and change dopaminergic encoding for various people and memories. My anger at the world disappeared.

All the wellbeing and satisfaction I should have felt from past accomplishments flooded me. I felt warmth and happiness, and peace. My IQ felt like it had increased by 40 and my brain was on rails. If I had been in a religious congregation I would have been speaking in tongues but I felt I needed to preserve things as raw as possible so texted myself a lot with info.

This info was all these little ‘hacks tailored to myself. I also went a bit mad on trying to figure out my brain, and a coherent system model to understand its strengths and limitations. I actually think I might not be far off and will use it as a seed for when I next head down that rabbit hole.

So yeah…. It was a ‘falling away’. 100% it was. I literally saw the steel wool fall away and lost my cravings. Still had preferences. It wasn’t a complete extinguishment of self but a partial one, and I tried to guide it as it proceeded.

It was… interesting. And I ended up with one more blog and one less LinkedIn account. A fair trade.

Why it happened

First off: thank god for my drug use history or things could have gotten dangerous. The med will have been shelved because of what I think is pharmacologically expected.

Anyway two things:

1 - drug ‘come up’ as it binds to receptors

2 - the high, but also delayed processing and the treatment of ADHD and ASD symptoms

So… muddy waters.

Basically I think this drug was tested 45 years ago and they saw people go a bit mad for a week and thought ‘kids and non verbals can be restrained’ so took the easy route. I think it could be managed with sensible dosing. The fact I essentially double dropped… well…

Anyway this is a powerful drug. It cranked my dopamine and serotonin up, and the acceleration phase for the first 3 days was near identical to coming up from a ‘speedy’ pill. Now that sounds bad, until you remember that ADHD meds are speed and pills are great but aaaaanyway.

At the same time it’s freeing up my sensory blahs I’ll get a word for that fucking sensitivies my ass. Anyway it’s making the world and my brain quiet. So it’s having the real desired effect too.

And then it frees up a lifetime of delayed processing from vipassana meditation, all these projects and achievements, etc. All this floods me because of the lower sensory input.

So… it was all expected, in hindsight.

1 - the medicine is working on all my ADHD and ASD issues

2 - not quite as much as when I initially double-dropped and became Elon for a week

Seriously I felt like I could have started a cult if I wanted to. But I hate management. The insights were just… thick and fast. And a lot of them were valid; how my autistic traits play out.

So it was an enlightenment in a way, but it was chemically explainable. Euphoria from the med, a lifetime of delayed processing, and relief from ADHD symptoms. 

Fucking intense though and this would need serious management. Again though - titration could fix it.

Thank fuck I double dropped ecstasy on my 16th birthday. Everything for a reason James. 

20250610 0730

You gotta start with the big. You take the piece and see what you’re working with. Remove the rust. You can’t start with the small scratches. Removing material, removing rust. Then shaping. Smaller and smaller scratches until you have something clean and clear to reflect the world.

This is what I think I am doing with my life. Removing material. Seeing where we are. Rebuilding. The roots are the new understanding of my self; how I don’t fit the textbooks. Anyway.

Identity. That’s the problem.

I’ve always been confident I had some kind of identity because I wasn’t surrogating it out to a political party or whatever. But maybe my identity was just beating people at their own game; furiously showing them that I was ‘more normal’ than them. More likes. More achievements. Never my own.

I’m growing a tree. The art last year was like a furious removal of branches to see where the rot lay. I found it. It was at the fucking roots. No wonder all those fixes did nothing; new personas and new goals, new things to hunt. But never my own, in hindsight.

I think this is what the buddha talked about when he mentioned the extinguishment of self. Each time I have adopted one of these new personas I have optimised it (because of my neurology) to the point where I am one of the best, and then I have immediately lost interest. The steel wool spins, there is no more optimisation viable, it hurts, and some kind of defence mechanism encodes that activity / persona as repulsive.

I think this is what happens when someone has a religious awakening. Each time I have ‘woken up’ from a previous persona - eg. alcoholic; businessboy; athlete, I’ve kind of… stuck my head up and looked around like I’ve just come out of a dream.

But those were branches and this one feels like the trunk. It feels like I have smashed the ‘global mask’ and when I was high as fuck recently (that’s what it was guys!) I realised a lot of the quirks of my roots.

So first things first: a trunk. A persona. A real one, I guess. The Buddha said ‘there is no self’ but maybe he was referring to the global mask when he talked about the self. And maybe the ‘理’ or divine spirit or guiding force or whatever which we all - autistic or not - feel on some level is actually pattern recognition working in the background and planning on our behalf; some more than others. 

Maybe I’m talking out my arse.

20250610 1022

Self defence

So many times I crafted a perfect persona, polished off the details, and when there was no more polishing to do, imploded.

So I have ASD and ADHD. I get pulled onto something new and impulsively start it, then I get into it, hard. We are talking ironman world championships hard. That hobby kept me out of so much trouble precisely because it was my everything, and I’m attaching a small snapshot of J1’s training plan here.

I killed it by overdoing it and right now I can go for a bit of a run but the others… cycling in particular… still on a hiatus. I love cycling in the brain but in the juices.. nope. There’s no dopamine response to it at the moment. And work? Fuck no. 

I think there’s some form of self defence mechanism at play when your ‘kill your joy’. A kind of trauma response because of how much pain the attachment brings you.

So time and again this has happened, post-vipassana retreat. I think what might have happened is my mind was somehow observing it, collecting data, yet unable to stop, because of the storm of impulses and emotions J1 was subject to. J2 can unpack.

We have trauma responses when someone or something causes us enough pain. Our brain encodes that person or thing to negative initially and then to zero if that doesn’t work. We fight, we flee, and then we… give up because that’s going to be less painful.

I would take a hobby or a job and generally - depending on complexity - deconstruct and reconstruct it over the course of 5 years. I would get to the fundamental pieces and build my own approach, then optimise, test, repeat.

I think my core ‘craving’ with ADHD - the thing that satisfies me most - is optimisation.

And I think this is because I have the memory of a gnat. It’s a good thing. But…

Eventually the wool will be spinning so fast and things would be so optimised that… there’s nowhere to go. My brain will then be like ‘bang nope’ and encodes the activity to null. Not to negative (that’s already passed; I trained myself to pushed through) - it encodes it to null. 

The meds enable me to sense negative and stop. So that’s why art is on pause. Precisely because I don’t want to kill it. And I think this is why I would take a persona, of increasing complexity over the years, and do it to death. And then hate it. Hate the self.

Each time I would embark without a clue and then as things picked up steam I’d get into a flow with the rules. They start working and dopamine kicks in and mmmm.. this is the one. I have found it this time. And then a year, two, three… the complexity of the persona changes time to optimise… and then ‘bang’. Dead. No joy. It disgusts you. The carefully crafted self disgusts you.

Anyway. This also stems from dopamine dysregulation. Irregularity, not quantity. More dopamine isn’t the answer, and I think my dopamine hacking from the ironman days made things a lot worse.

Time for the school run. The (hypo?)mania from these meds was textbook but has passed now. Thank fuck I got rid of linkedin. 

20250611 0600