#brainkeeping

have been thinking of myself as sooo "high-functioning" lately, albeit not in those terms because that is not my preferred language either as pure description or as qualitative assay, but also my bar for High Function relative to past performance is like: staying sober; showering and brushing teeth regularly; leaving the house most days; eating solid food; occasionally talking to another person in a non-medical and non-retail capacity; walking without a cane. and if my plans are unexpectedly disrupted i can contain it to screaming "FUCK" on the sidewalk instead of having a meltdown on the sidewalk that might prompt someone to call the police. like that's 30 flirty and thriving as a set of goals for a disabled adult living independently with a lot of support, perhaps a plan for a resident in those quasi-assisted living apartments, but i don't have much in the way of practical support. unless you count a practical handbook for the actor lol. so i guess under those conditions i am Exceeding Expectations, functionwise.

currently at an impasse re: "social safety net"/access to "disability supports" because i reflexively assume a calm, agreeable, and presumptively competent persona when communicating with case workers over the phone or interfacing with healthcare workers in person. this is obviously defensive on account of i have been incarcerated in a psychiatric institution and had the cops called on me by doctors and social workers when i did not perform situationally correct "behavior." however this gives the impression that i don't need Additional Support when in fact i went so long without being able to clean or take out the trash that i am now on a first-name basis with the mice in my walls. how do i access an aide without exposing myself to the threat of coercive (neuro)psychiatric "care" when my case workers realize how disabled i actually am lol

i found the only good AA meeting and it 1) is zoom-only, 2) is for autistic adults, 3) does not reference the 12 steps or quote from "the big book," 4) does not involve evangelical-style testimony about How Someone Got Sober & Found God, and 5) instead revolves around non-hierarchically selected discussion questions proposed by group members that often have tangential relevance to sobriety or no relevance to sobriety at all

was trying to articulate this yesterday re: "threshold experiences" and what i feel in my body after being shocked or hit very hard isn't the same "category" as sexual arousal; i only perceive it as erotic in the sense that it's Of the Somatic Order, the way that aesthetic-sensory experience is a cousin of erotic-sensory experience, related but not identical, nor even immediate kin? it's closest to any other physically-grounded "task" where the object is to push yourself as far as you can--possibly farther--in order to "stage an encounter" with your absolute limits (or surprise yourself by surpassing them). like doing an extra 10 reps at your heaviest deadlifting weight until your arms give out, or taking a megadose to see what happens, or seeing how long you can go without eating or sleeping. it's basically the euphoria of endurance and/or extremity (marathon vs. sprint) that tethers you to embodiment; it's a pillar of the somatic order. which is a core principle of the erotic, sure, but wholly unrelated to "genital arousal" (for me at least). then again i'm sure this is 101 shit for anyone who actually practices bdsm but here at chicago-geniza dot tumblr dot com we have to take the analytic philosopher's approach of deriving everything from scratch in our own terms lol

turns out it took the combined power of two (2) ADHD medications for me to unlock the ability that I had heretofore assumed was sort of mythologized, like the construct of "the neurotypical," i.e., I didn't really believe anyone was ACTUALLY capable of it, rather, it was an asymptotic institutional standard of behavior to which everyone aspired but ultimately fell short. and that ability is "thinking about an action and then immediately overcoming inertia in your body/mind and Just Doing The Action." I saw an energy gronk can on the floor and thought "oh I should put that in the trash" and then. just. stopped what I was doing. switched tasks. got up. put the can in the trash. and resumed my interrupted task. without the Invisible Wall and without half an hour of psycho/somatic recalibration between every Task-Switch and Positional Adjustment in Space. is this how people live

oh by the way i started taking choline supplements to offset the liver/cognitive side effects of statins and they have had an almost miraculous effect on my working memory and lexical retrieval. i have not missed a bus stop since i started taking them and for the first time in five years was able to remember the three-digit code on the back of my debit card without checking the physical card. no i could not retain a three-digit code no matter how often i repeated it and no matter how many mnemonics i tried over half a decade. it took me almost 10 years to memorize my own phone number but now information just "looks" different inside my head. it color-codes itself and arranges itself into filing systems. i can see it and sort it and reach for it again later because i remember where i put it down and why i put it there. apparently these processes are mediated in part by acetylcholine