sense

I never even realised I had sensory issues. Or rather, I never realised that everyone else didn’t. Is your red the same as my red? Quantifiably not.

So I think this all ties into the highly sensitive person thing, and emotional intensity. As you get tired, your dopamine system seeks more stimulation, the stimulation becomes more overwhelming, your executive function breaks down, you get the picture.

So I never realised everyone else couldn’t hear the constant low-pitched hum of transformers and large engines. We are talking a 50Hz hum coming through the concrete from 50 metres away, or an engine several kilometers away. The type of sound that cuts straight through everything else but is dB-c so not picked up by most sound meters.

The type of sound you lose 5 years of sleep to while people tell you its all in your head and you start to question your sanity. That type of sound.

Well there was meditation, which was fucking useless. Thanks Buddha. Or there was drugs. Meditation would maybe have worked if I’d pushed it into defence mechanism territory, but fuck that. Take my 620 yen.

So I have a single track mind and issues with the data pipeline. I can not tell you how just how profoundly starting aripiporazole freed up a logjam of thoughts. That’s what this blog is! The initial flood was chaotic but still, the flow remains.

When I started guanfacine the sensory issues became obvious. It dialled down my NE and removed my defences. The new understanding of adhd and stimulation seeking also showed me that a lot of what I was doing in ‘expanding my comfort zone’ was probably just making myself feel stressed for a thrill. Ha. Sobering thought. 

So yeah - kids screaming, bright lights, engine noises… all bother me intensely but I’d never realised. The last 20 years of my life I’ve repeated the mantra ‘fear and excitement are physiologically identical’ and taken anything that scares me then repainted it as excitement. I have devoured my fears.

But this was all feeding into an overbearing and overwhelming exhaustion and eventual breakdown, over the course of 2024, which I think will take the whole of 2025 to recover from. This is ok. I now know how to structure a real recovery instead of just dusting myself off and getting back on the bike.

It was exhaustion from a lifetime of sensory stimulation seeking and masking to myself. Wrap it up, nice and neat, and put a bow on top.

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