Defence

defence mechanism

So… and this one is 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 negative blank and I will hate 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 for when fight and flight fail. Sheer apathy.

Oh but James why not do it in moderation, you say. But you forget; dopamine. You will stare at water and die of thirst without dopamine. The pursuit isn't really under my control. The illusion of free will is.. maybe not even worth a post tbh.

Anyway, 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. And to be clear, I think manipulations are necessary; we just choose our manipulator. Mine is vetted and good.

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 being 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 shite. 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 songkrans that shit up and your brain is like ‘brrrrrppp recode to abuser’ and … you have some kind of trauma response to the thing you most loved. This sounds quite plausible and scientific to me.

Anyway, something was happening in J1 which so far hasn’t happened in J2. Fucking manic phase messing up my data. Fucks sake.

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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. Never again.

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. 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.

Eventually the wool will be spinning so fast and things will 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 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. This is the solution. And then a year, two, three… more complex personas take longer… and then ‘bang’. Dead. No joy. It disgusts you. The carefully crafted self disgusts you.

Dopamine irregularity, not quantity. More dopamine isn’t the answer, and I think my dopamine hacking from the ironman days made things 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.

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The knives are nicer, but with dopamine dysregulation it's not your choice.

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