Source: Twitter X

(Diary: Recovery)
Not because I want the attention, but because it might help others, I should do a video on my experience over the past few years with autistic disassociation and then reintegration (recovery) as stress and illness affected my higher cognitive faculties, perceptions of the world and less so my emotions, followed by slowly recovering – taking about as long as the human forgetting curve (three years).
I’ve had cancer twice, two other serious illnesses, all while building midsized companies, and then a very stressful period in my life including health, business crisis, and divorce at the same time. Then the crisis in Ukraine. Then taking care of my ailing mother until she died, and the probate fights and such afterward.
And because my psyche consists of ‘never give up never surrender keep driving forward regardless of cost’ the cumulative mental and physical stress produce interesting cognitive consequences. ;). The disassociation between reason, emotion, and health. I retain my autistic talents but I lose the subtleties at the edge of consciousness(intuitions) that are where my macro-association faculties exist. And I lose all contact with my emotions as well as my physical state. This is why I’ve worked myself into the hospital by exhaustion a few times in my life. ;). The Energizer Bunny eventually runs out of body to expend energy. 😉
Again, I find this experience rather fascinating as, because of these illnesses and stressors, I end up being my own research subject a bit more regularly than I’d like, and at much higher cost than I’d like. 😉
The resulting point is that my cognitive recovery (reintegration) doesn’t happen gradually as much as in a step function – with leaps. I can remember each of them over the past three years.
Over the past week I’ve had another leap in recovery at which I think I might almost ‘be done’ recovering. I can’t explain it as other than an inner calm that allows auto-associative functions to work unimpeded by stress.
So instead of working hard to do any work, and working to exhaustion to get into the zone (working on intuition), It just naturally flows without much effort.
I might have had some material world assistance, because I broke down and bought a much more powerful desktop instead of using the macbook pro, and with three monitors and twelve desktops I can keep all my projects (contexts) available, and readily switch between them, which reduces the burden of context switching so difficult for those of us on the spectrum.
My work is a vast project no one would set out to produce, and I only produced by accident. So keeping it all in your head is quite an exercise. 🙂 And external help from computers really does help.
Anyway, for those few of you who care about such things, and for those for whom our vastly failing psychology profession cannot understand, (borderline aspies etc) the simple answer is the one my grandmother gave me: “keep life simple and focus on what matters to you and nothing else”. And “Make sure you have a room, with not much in it, that’s neat clean and organized.” ;).

Affections.