neurotypically speaking

I've often wondered what the world would be like, if we could even get a glimpse of how other people experience it.  I think most of us would be shocked at just how much it varies.  I strongly suspect that experiencing the world as someone else for a while would make for one hell of a trip.

We have these countless little dials, everything that impacts us, everything we value, everything we assume to be objectively significant, but must vary in degrees from person to person.  Dials that within a certain range, are considered well within the margin of sanity.  Yet, can really vary all over the place.

From the moment we open our eyes, what's it like to get up in the morning?  We have morning people, morning-hating people, and people with bi-polar mania, OCD, and severe clinical depression.  What happens when a "morning person" gets to experience what it's like to wake up suicidal?  To truly be trapped in that entirely different mindset?  Would it change their opinions and behavior towards people who don't get going quite as easily as they do?  Every moment, of every day, we experience the world through all these personal parameters.  None being objective or factual.  Nothing that science can help up to come to any concrete consensus on.  Sanity is basically just defined as the range we're most familiar with.

The assumptions about what we all agree matters.. without really knowing what other people think, aside from what they can communicate, and we can logically infer - but we do so in an inherently biased way, in which we assume others to be neurotypical until they indicate otherwise - and still, we may miss all sorts of signs, because we're so determined to see normalcy ..and how do we define said normalcy, without knowing anyone's experiences but our own?

It all skews toward people assuming the rest of the world is much like themselves.  Even when they're nuts.  Some of us feel well outside the norm for one reason or another, some more accurately so than others, but exactly how far, and in exactly what ways?   It only matters because it's how we seem to define sanity.  Without consensus, what?  Sanity is just whatever we think makes sense?  Even if we're the one who might be nuts?

How much sanity itself matters, like everything else, also varies.  Why would someone care whether they're sane or not?  One way in which it varies, is that some do, more than others.  One possible reason for this being that sanity equates to being aware of reality.  What's actually in front of us, and not some delusion.  In the very simple sense of wanting to be sure that we're not obliviously walking headlong into a wood chipper.  The more concerned a person is about their safety and security, the more they might care about this slippery concept we call sanity.  Why people are more concerned about their safety then varies; the parameters of their amygdala, their experiences, whether they feel the world is generally safe, or not.  Whether they're the sort of person who would care.  All these steps coalesce into very different sorts of worldviews.

I was looking forward to the farmer's market opening this year, as it makes it so much easier to regularly buy fresh ingredients.  It's much closer to where I live than the grocery.  Yet, I only went once all season.  I agonize about going every week, but I'm too neurotic.  I struggle with how personal they are, how person to person.  How I never know what they'll have, so I often need to make decisions on the fly.  With some person standing there in their little stall, smiling at me awkwardly.  Sometimes I just sleep too late, to get there by 2pm, when they close.

Not only that, but last time I saw my cousin, she suggested going to the market together.  Sure, just let me know, one of these Sundays.  Or I'll call you.  Either way.. except we've both got our reasons for never calling.  I don't know what hers are.  I know she's a bit of a shy person herself.. maybe she's waiting for me to call.  Maybe no one told her that I was crazy, and she should probably call me first.  Or she's just been busy.  Who knows.. but I don't call her, why?  I don't know why.  I don't know what to say.  I'm not sure I want to go.  What am I getting myself into.  What if I end up agreeing to be trapped in some hellscape for the rest of eternity.  Or maybe just a few hours in the hot sun.  Same difference.  Or maybe I just can't think of the best way of saying hello.  Really, it's a lot of guesswork trying to figure out why exactly people make me want to barricade myself into my bedroom and never come out again.

Anyhow, it's ridiculous, that this combination of issues I have has resulted in me never going.  It's annoying in the abstract, it's frustrating that I'm basically still a social being, who just can't handle being social.. but it's also a fucking pain in the ass, when it makes it difficult for me to even get some vegetables to make a curry with.  If I could simply cut it the fuck out, I sure as hell would.  There is no way for me to convey what it's like.  Putting it into words never seems to do it.  I don't even believe myself.  It makes no sense.

A paradigm shift in worldview can be as real as anything is.  The massive amount of information bouncing around in our heads, defining everything we think we know.  If only we could swap that out for a while.  Experience what it's like when someone else's twisted reality feels just as real as our own.  Maybe the world would be a much less lonely place.  Least my version of it probably would be.

building routines

I have nothing to say.  I hate when I have nothing to say.  I feel burned out and withdrawn.  I overthink everything, because I don't understand what I'm going through.  If this is pretty normal, why doesn't anyone else live like me?  I don't understand it.  I don't know what to do about it.  So, I think about it.  A lot.

I'm fine.  Relatively speaking.  Just in some kind of rut.  Is the Omnitrope going to start helping soon?  Am I feeling worse, because I'm no longer deferring self-flagellation?  I just want to have more energy.  The motivation to do things I enjoy doing.  I'm not even aiming particularly high, but I hate being in survival mode.  Every day, more shit I can't deal with, just get through it, hope I feel better tomorrow.  Sometimes I do feel better tomorrow.  Sometimes, I feel worse.  It sure would be nice if I could figure out what makes that difference.

Running is one of the ways I both measure how well I'm doing, as well as give myself something to aim for.  It's one of the easiest rungs to reach, usually, and if I'm at least doing that, I feel like I'm moving in the right direction.. but I've been stumbling a lot.  So far, still too many days, where it just seems like, no fucking way.  Maybe tomorrow.

Cooking is another one, but it requires organization, planning, buying the right groceries, knowing that I'll use them before they perish.  It's more difficult than going for a run.  Lately, I've had to get creative with very little to work with.  When I finally do get shopping, I keep it simple.  I can't be planning anything interesting.  I'm not there, yet.

Another step past that though, would be just being able to read a book.  I don't get why that's become so difficult for me.  I'm not alone in that, really.  There are lots of book hating people out there.  I just wasn't supposed to be one of them.  I wasn't one of them, until I was.  Lots of people hate running, and have no patience for cooking, too.  They often decide they should exercise more, cook more, read more.  They often fail.

This in itself is not uncommon.  What strikes me as less common is for an avid reader to stop reading.  A cooking enthusiast to stop cooking.  Exercising regularly for years, to not exercising at all.  There are elements of pattern, familiarity and ritual to these things people do.  I get so much anxiety about travelling because it disrupts my daily routine, that I've spend months working on building up.  I stop doing things because I lose the continuity of it.   I get back a week later, and should be able to pick up where I left off, but just sort of fall apart instead.

Anyhow, when I have nothing to say, at least I can always overthink why that is.. figure it's a good exercise though.  Maybe if I can get the parts moving, I'll find myself having more to say, tomorrow.  Same reason I run, really.  Just trying like hell to get the parts moving.

progressive circles

When I was twenty, I could jog a mile, without breaking a sweat.  After ten years of a rather sedentary adult life, and fifteen years being off somatropin, I found that could barely run half a mile, without feeling like I might be dying.  Though the older grown-ups would laugh at me, for how I have no idea! Try 50, try 60, try 70..

Meh.  At thirty, I knew that old age was upon me.  I knew that it was only the beginning.  I don't want to be a hobbled old man by the age of fifty.  Given the current rate of increase for the average human lifespan, that could be well under half my life still ahead of me, by the year 2035.  On average.  I could even be well ahead of that curve, if I put more effort into it than most people do, just by getting some basic exercise, and eating a rational diet.

Why does that matter?  I've never met a 50 year old, let alone an 80 year old, who would pass up the chance at being physiologically 30 again. ..because they got to be young, already?  That was just plenty, when they had the chance?  That sounds nice and rational, and surely some people might be such paragons of good mental health, but it's not really how it usually pans out.  It doesn't even really make all that much sense.  We're not the same person we were.  What that young version of ourselves had, it's of little consequence to what we want now.  Might as well have been someone else's, but for these fading jumble of memories.

So, when I'm not pondering what it means for something to be mine, my experiences, my body, my mind, my life.. I've been trying.  I found that though I absolutely hate doing it, running seemed to provide the most bang for the buck.  As far as requiring the least amount of time, to get the most benefit to my circulatory system.  Which, in turn benefits every other system.  I'd love to be doing martial arts again too, but in the meantime, running should do the trick well, without requiring more time and attention than I'm willing to spare.  

I'm very busy doing nothing, you see, and my nothing time is very important to me.  Seriously, it is.  I can't help clinging to it, like it's life or death.  It's kind of weird.  I'm hoping I'll feel inclined to do more, as I start feeling better, and I'm doing everything I can to feel better.

I found running very difficult, though.  Everyone does, I know.. but, "everyone" isn't really everyone.  It's most people.  Some people are in great health, and can pick up running much more easily.  Other people, are not in good health, for any number of reasons.  From heart disease, to obesity, to an acute endocrine disorder that interferes with oxygenating the blood. or muscle healing rate.  So, for some people, it's especially difficult.

Anyhow, normal or not, not only did I have trouble making it half a mile, I also never seemed to get any better at it, despite diligently trying to keep doing it anyhow.  For years, I would just do these pathetic round the block runs, feeling like they were nearly killing me.  Only when I was on somatropin again, ten years later, did I find myself pushing that up to a mile.  Then, a mile and a half.  Then two miles.  Then two miles, while still feeling good and functional, afterwards.

Finally, to deciding that running two miles, every other day, should be about optimal for a healthy system, without wearing the parts out.  No reason to keep pushing it up, I had no reason to keep improving.  Just to keep doing what I was doing.  Why is that such a rare place to be?

Now that I'm back on GH, I'm running again, but where I live now is much more hilly. The best circuit I could put together starting at my house involves quite a bit of running up and down hills.  So, it's a bit more challenging, and difficult to compare in terms of distance.  I think I might actually be pushing myself harder than I was back in Montclair.  I'm having trouble making the full mile and a half, and collapsing when I get back.  I was able to do it ok when I first got here though.  Progress is slow.

I just want to get back to that point.  It was also about the cardiovascular benefit to mental health and acuity.  Sometimes that even more so. I could sure use some of that, too.  

I'm anxious and unsure of whether I'll really want to do any more than I have been doing, but I have been doing a whole lot of nothing.  That can't possibly be a good idea.

So, I am moving forward, in these comically lame baby steps.  Maybe that's just how it works.  Or, maybe this is just one of the many tricks my mind plays on me, to keep me doing nothing.  I don't know.  Tricks like that, and my love for pot and video games.

I'm not saying they destroy a person's motivation or anything, but let's just say, you probably do need a little extra to spare.  They are going to bite into some of it.

a dubious relationship with reality

I've always been an unyielding materialist.  As I understand it, there is a concrete physical reality, and it's absurd to suggest that it would bend to anyone's will, or even that any such concept as will would exist outside of it, in any way.  Everything comes down to physics.  Shouldn't this pretty much go without saying?

Still, that's not to say that I've always valued said concrete reality, the same way.  The concept of value, of what's important and what isn't - this is all just illusive fabrication, anyhow.  Which in turn, is not to say that nothing has value.  More that, value whatever you want.  It's what you're going to do, anyhow.

As such, I grew up thinking that reality was a terrible bore.  I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi.  I watched a lot of movies.  It all seemed so much more impressive than what I'd experienced of living.  That is pretty much the point, right?  Who would want to read a book about the mundane day-to-day statistically standardized snapshot of your average person's uneventful life?  So we come up with all sorts of stories that appeal to our bored and discontented natures.  Imagination is part of how we can always see how things could be different.  How they could be better.  Imagination drives us to try to make it so.. or to just pretend.  We come up with new technologies, religions, epic stories, and everything in between.

In recent years, I have moved away from that worldly disinterest.  I lost se sen of engagement with books and movies, I even found gaming difficult to get into.  Favoring a game like Civilization the most, for being the complete opposite of immersive.  I didn't want to be pulled out of reality.  I wanted to think about everything from politics to cosmology.  I'd wondered why no one pointed out to me how much more impressive the world could be, if you really pay attention to it.  I thought about how differently my life might have gone, if I'd figured that out a long time ago.

Course, it's not that simple.  I speak in past tense, because my mood seems different lately.  I need a break from it all.  Now, I'm wondering what other factors play into it.  That concrete reality stuff, from the biochemistry of neurotransmitters and hormones, to the ways in which that might be effected by endogenous environmental sensitivity, to the ways in which such factors might have been impacted by what was going on in said environment.  I wonder if it changed because I thought about it differently, or if just maybe, I thought about it differently, because something had changed.

Does it have to be one or the other?  Maybe not, but it's easy to attribute elements of causality to both, and one or the other might be ruled out entirely.  I lean towards thinking it's thought that's more of irrelevant end result of a process that's already happened by the time we think it.  Which could have some pretty important consequences on how we understand this reality we're trying to get by in, here.

I'm back on 0.4mg of Omnitrope, and that should be swinging into effect soon.  I've been gaming almost all day, but I've also been exercising, and looking forward to a new grocery that's supposed to be opening nearby, so that I can eat healthier.  I'm doing these things, as if harboring some optimism that while I just need to crawl back into my cave for a while, I don't expect to stay here, long.

I just need to rest, after many long years of doing nothing.  Then I can properly pull myself together, and resume doing nothing.  I don't know what the hell I'm doing.  I go round and round trying to figure it out, but I'm not sure any of it really matters.  Might as well focus on trying to afford a new spaceship for a while.

avidyā sukha

It is easier to sell a solution to people when they feel they have a problem, but in Plato's iconic allegory of the cave, it's not well-being that is being peddled, but truth.  Leaving the cave is even described as painful.  One might imagine the denizens of the cave are largely so accustomed to it, that many are actually quite happy there.

The mind is very adaptive.  Unburdened by the chemical imbalances of depression, skewing a person's baseline, people can be happy despite all sorts of damp and fetid darkness.  Is this a reason to justify staying in the cave, though?

That depends.  I've always been wary of the truth.  How much it really matters.  How attainable it really is.  How trustworthy anyone is, to claim they even know which direction it might be found.  These all seem like reasonable questions, but it's interesting that I find myself taking it so far as to forget to consider it's value at all.  Such an ambiguous abstraction as to be entirely irrelevant.

What good is it, if people are happy without it?  Who am I, or anyone else, to even claim the cave is any less true than the unmitigated sky?  If an ant happily believes that his pile of sand is the most important work in the universe, is there any value inherent to believing him wrong?  If another ant wanders lost and confused in its search for something more, can we really defend that as the wiser path?   Just for being closer to some concept of truth?  A truth that taken in any direction, seems further from someone else's truth?

If that someone else's truth clearly undermines well-being, this suddenly becomes a much easier question.  If that person's truth justifies the infliction of suffering on others, we might not care about the philosophical relativism of defending their way as being no less objectively true.  If someone only immiserates themselves, we might let it go.  Or we might try to sell them on our version of the truth instead.  We might even sell them on things we believe to be patently untrue.

It is difficult to make the case that well-being should ever really come second.  That facing the reality of what we're dealing with seems at times self-evident, and yet the interplay between reason and well-being is interesting, one alternately obscuring the other, as I consider their relative value.

How can we honestly expect to deal any better, with much of anything life throws at us, if we're in denial, mired in delusion, ignorant of the very walls that entomb us?  Fair enough, but anyone dealing even worse, with whatever they're dealing with, is going to find it difficult to make much of a case for having found a better way.  We might assume the happier person is choosing the wiser path to have attained their happiness.  It's easy to forget, difficult to compare, and impossible to quantify, the vastly different places from which we all start.

vibhava taṇhā

When I say that we struggle to be what we already are, maybe it would help to take this down to a basic example.  Animals foraging for food.  This is not an imperative to have food.  It is an imperative to action.  It is the struggle to acquire food.  That feeling of wanting is a part of the already doing.

This does not assuage the physical hunger that might also be a significant factor, but that is not the source of what we feel.  Craving, desire, discontent.. these are not the feelings of not having.  These are the feelings our minds generate, as part of what we are.  In many instances not so easily satiated as mere hunger.  We can go through our entire lives craving and discontent.  It isn't really about what we don't have, but a process of the mind.  Part of what makes us human.  Alive.. but it's also a mirage.

You might say that life is about the journey, not the destination.  Or that it's important to do things for their own sake, not for some eventual outcome.  These are variations on the same principle, but one that that can be taken into all the workings of consciousness, how all the machinery turns, every moment we're awake, and when we're dreaming.  When we want to upend our entire lives, or when we just want to do nothing.

Each step we take, we take because taking that step is what we are,  It isn't about where the steps take us, or where we're trying to go.  It's the myriad of circumstances that impel us to take each step.   By all means, keep walking.  Or don't.  You'll do whatever you're going to do.  Be mindful of the process therein.

stories we tell ourselves

I found myself in an all too familiar labyrinth, recently.  It's one I've desperately tried to navigate so many times before, but often upon first entering, I don't recognize it.  It's only as I follow the twists and turns, trying to make sense of one dead end after another that I think, oh for fucks sake.  I  know this place.

There's a study that's been done, which I've so far failed to dig up a reference to, that shows how people can be manipulated to make very predictable choices, by giving them subconscious cues.  Not only will people assume that they're making a rational choice of their own volition, but when asked, why did you make that choice?

They inevitably give answers that are demonstrably unrelated to the reasons the administrators of the study know to be the real reasons.  People not only lack free will, but lack the capacity to understand why their fettered will does what it does.  Rather, we have this process the ego goes through, as we attempt to explain why we do the things we do, after the fact.  This is the ultimate confirmation bias.

It's not impossible that we might somehow work out the right answer, or even stumble into it.  Surely, the stories we tell ourselves might occasionally be accurate.  The more intelligent we are, the more likely we should be to come up with a narrative that isn't utterly nonsensical.  We might also become adept at finding seemingly rational reasons for the irrational things we do.  Reasons that are still entirely wrong.  It's difficult to say for sure.  Maybe impossible.

So, why do we do the things we do? From neurological conditions to how circumstances influenced those conditions.  Even things we learned as infants that we couldn't possibly remember to explain ourselves, despite that these have been experiences which structured our predispositions for the rest of our lives.  The effort to understand ourselves isn't completely futile, but so much of it is bound to be beyond the scope of what we can be aware of.  We're forced to fill in countless gaps, as best we can.

At some point, it just seems to make more sense to say, you know what?  I have no idea why I am the way I am.  I have no idea what to do about it.  I'm just going to keep moving forward, as best I can.  A lot of my efforts to move forward won't make any more sense than the very missteps that got me here, but ah, fuck it.

I'm not entirely convinced that I have the freedom to do anything else, anyhow.  Rather, that we all fight tooth and nail, doing everything humanly possible, to become who we already are.

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