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.
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 push 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.
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