rebuildingexecutivefunction

I don’t feel like I have anything particularly profound or urgent to say today. I am still in recovery from the recent meltdown but I feel like my brain is able to handle the day to day again.

I never used to allow myself this recovery until total burnout. And even then I wouldn’t let the burnout run its course; I would label it as weakness and set some lofty goal and get on my bike and ride until my brain chemistry lifted and just keep riding and riding and riding until I burned out again. This turned into a self-imposed seasonal cycle that I timed with the ironman racing season: March I start, October I finish, but I don’t really; I just gun away at the snowshoe cross training until I hit real collapse.

The recent aripirazole episode was the ultimate in burnout or loss of executive function. When I came out of it I could barely think, never mind feed myself or sit still or sleep. The phasic bursts toward the end where my brain was rebuilding were dvar central and I had to figure out a way to let them settle.

What worked surprisingly well is ignoring all the advice we are given.

The advice is to have a stable rhythm and to do something quietly and consistently, I think. Lie in bed and read a book, sleep at the same time every day. This was impossible for me. What I needed to do was to flit between many things. I had this crazy variable dopamine latch going on and I needed to let it do its thing, *gently*, so it would calm down.

You can find that day here and here.

Summary:

Easy, low stimulation and low aggression activities. Allow yourself to flit around between them; zero forcing it when you start to feel a head buzz. 30 seconds here, one minute there, pace around, lie down, have a snack. Don’t worry about following or establishing even a mini-routine and don’t worry about getting it wrong or achieving anything. Flit around.

Rock around. Warp and weave and call it stimming if you must. Write short texts to yourself to offload. Keep the phone, black and white, by the bed when sleeping also to offload. Do not use phone for entertainment. Each different mode of being should have a different place / medium if possible. The key is to activate each latch and let it go without struggle.

Looking at the summary now, this is equanimity. It’s what you try to train through meditation. You see your impulses and you acknowledge them and you let them go. But this seems to be equanimity on the macro scale. I was so unable to function that I needed to build equanimity toward the largest dopamine surges I had ever experienced in my life. This was the start of the phase where my brain rebuilt, and just after I had gained control of the ship.

I needed that phone by my bed for immediate clearing of memory. I needed to get up, rub a knife for 20 seconds, lie down, write for 2 minutes, rock around in a foetal position, get up again, eat sweets. I was so messed up after 3 weeks of day-and-night meditation and then my upgrade that I just couldn’t do much else. 

And within half a day of doing this I was almost functional. At nights I would still have the crazy analysis and consolidation of understanding but during the days I was mostly able to hold it together.

The reality is I have both asd and adhd. I crave order and regularity but I rebel against it. When I started guanfacine I was able to sort out the hundreds of sanding pads in my workshop according to grit, and I cried with relief. My adhd and phasic dopamine had never allowed me to do this, because I was never taught how to manage it. I never knew I was different… the violence at school had made me block the idea out. Being stomped into the floor and called an autistic retard while people do down syndrome impressions despite the fact you’re top in the school… it made me brand it as a learning disability and just never entertain the idea. Adhd wasn’t even a diagnosis until I graduated in the year 2000.

And this combined presentation is still not a diagnosis. I think it might be the most common presentation, if my model for adhd causing asd holds true. It would basically mean that anyone with severe adhd winds up growing a brain that has lower memory and higher compensatory speed.

Anyway the rules that apply for others do not apply to me so I have to make my own.

Tossing and turning in bed and trying to sleep and get your hours. I honestly think that was part of my trauma; all those hours with the steelwool spinning in my brain, in physical pain. I carved the steelwool out at the end of my 88 hells, but chose to leave my personage, because I had finally spotted the fact I essentially had processing-overload migraines for my entire life and had never acknowledged them. I don’t know how I never realised. I guess if you are born with something you will assume that’s just how it is. 

But this steelwool is how my processing overload feels. I could feel it building the last few days; like a knot in the centre of my brain, behind the right eye and near the brain stem. This would grow and grow and for most of my life it was filling my entire brain, I think. It feels like an angle grinder behind the cheekbones, just below the temples. But then the ‘adhd loves stimulation’ thing comes into play and makes you lean into the pain. Pain is dvar; it will keep those spikes high.

Most of my trauma was ‘self-induced’ by not knowing how I was different and pretending I was not.

I would force myself to just go, gun away, become better than everyone at whatever I chose. The dvar would push me toward something and latch on hard, and then I would ignore everything but the cause and drive myself into the ground. The burnout was a self-defence mechanism.

As I said though, touching nibbana is only the beginning. Somehow I have removed that old trauma… there was so much of it and it was all hidden. Now I can see.

Nobody had a clue I was neurodivergent despite the fact I was a strong magnet to both asd and adhd types. I had no idea. I just attracted weirdos and crazies. Turns out I am both, wrapped in one, but somehow they balanced each other out so well that nobody had any idea. Apart from maybe my mate Craig who calls me ‘the most autistic man in the world’. He’s hardly a doctor though.

Spectrum. Not ‘greyscale’. It moves on many planes, like the empathy supersphere. And as my mum always said, you can’t see inside someone else’s head.

I wonder how many other people are like this.

Lots, I think.

I think my friend Mikhail was like this, until he mixed those chemicals in his bathtub. I think other very successful and driven people I know are like this. I think they have no idea.

I think they go to the doctor and are given drugs for bipolar disorder which makes them worse and they kill themselves. I went there precisely because my dvar had latched to the idea of suicide, but they just called me manic and gave me valproate which made me depressed to the point of ideation.

If you have a natural connection to the divine which you have tamed through years of self-control, and then you go to the doctors because your self-control starts to fail, and they kill the divine with drugs while saying you are getting better, annihilation will seem preferable.

Because that’s what audhd is. It’s a connection to the divine. The heavens *and* the hells.

We have high dvar so we get huge waves of dopamine. We feel ecstasy. Don’t tell me you’ve not felt god flow through you as you near the of of an hour-long climb on the bike. We get branded as manic. But as I experienced on aripirazole, mania is just when you are unable to drive the car.

Our dopamine goes crazy high and we are one with the universe; in heaven. And then it latches onto a behaviour which either destroys us and sends us to hell (alcohol, self-harm, twitter) or saves us and sends us to heaven (sports, music, dance).

We feel god. We feel fate. We feel the divine. We feel invincible. But we have no framework for understanding it. 

We push it too far and our executive function fails and we lose control or get carried away so we go to a doctor. They say ‘presents as manic’ and give us drugs which are not suitable, and make things worse. By now our executive function is recovered but the divined spark within us has been killed with chemicals, and we have no idea.

So we kill ourselves. Or we slide into a protracted depression. And all because a doctor thought we spoke too fast, because of our overclocked brains with their obsessive asd side and darting-around adhd side.

Mania is just high dopamine without the neuronal capacity to control it. Most of us control it most of the time. Until we have a meltdown because we pushed it too far, or controlled it too hard. We made the tiger’s cage too small.

So the way to avoid these meltdowns is to relinquish control intentionally every now and then. Let the dvar do its thing; let the tiger play. 

Let the pressure bleed off. Just let yourself be a monkey, swinging from branch to branch and never stopping. 

Fuck the norm.

/jb202508260653