Last night I was making one of my go to meals: spinach-mushroom pasta. It was going pretty well until I finished cooking the pasta and added it to the saute, as I normally do. There was one problem though: I forgot to add the spinach. I was already in an absent minded state, so it was downhill from there, I blasted the heat but also needed to add a little water to prevent sticking and sort of steam the frozen greens, ended up with sadness in a bowl for dinner.

This kind of thing hasn’t been happening too often lately, thankfully, but it’s also not unheard of. Sometimes my brain just decides to stop working. [Sidenote: It actually doesn’t ‘just’ happen, it’s actually quite predictable, given that I know what symptoms to look for. I’m getting better at predicting and maneuvering myself into a more encouraging disposition and mindset.] It slowly gets pushed out of balance by overstimulation: (not limited to) too much noise, bright lights (especially florescents), high stress and novel environments. This is exacerbated by other internal factors, such as whether I’ve drank water, eaten something, bathed or breathed that day. I have trouble remembering to do those things when my brain craps out, so it can become a vicious cycle if I’m not careful.

Thankfully, I am learning to be more careful. For years I’ve been clumsy with my need for self regulation. Trying to keep up with a world built for speed and quick growth is the antithesis of what I am made for. I know for a fact I am far more capable, healthy, productive, energetic and in general more joyful when I have the opportunity to move slow. I’m not talking about laziness. This is methodological movement through time, calculated steps toward building the life that I want to live. Rush me and I start making mistakes, my work suffers in its quality and impact. It becomes content and loses its value. I refuse to live like this.

I’d like to say that I always live life in line with my standards, but I find myself forgetting, again and again. I believe this is common for most people, most especially for those who haven’t thought about what their standards are. When society says go you go or get left behind. If you don’t ask questions you will never realize there are infinite deviations from the norms, hot and ready like tv dinners or just ready like soylent green. Drudging through life you lose all the passion, life becomes dull, hazy, gray. Maybe some psychotropic might color it in from time to time, but most of the time, you suffer. Sorry, not you. I’ve been talking about me this whole time.

In dullness quality suffers, humanity is obscured, meaning is lost. But it’s not the end.

Dullness is the catalyst in my (your) search for light.

I’m at an interesting place in life. I am coming out of my longest stint of what I have come to understand is neurodivergent burnout. It’s been happening to varying degrees all my life, but I’ve only found out that there is a name for what’s been happening to me more recently. Almost a year ago I started a deep dive into the subject, and at this point am pretty confident in my self diagnosis. I am also in the process of getting professional help with all this; I have my first meeting with a psychologist coming up in a few weeks. I’m pretty excited about it actually.

This most recent stint of burnout began some time during 2021, and I am only now feeling like I am at the tail end of it.

I was teaching English in Taiwan. I had already been hustling for two years, working as much as I could to save up for my next travel adventure. Taiwan had gone into a pretty strict lockdown pretty soon after the first cases were announced in China, and was well prepared to keep the numbers down, which I cannot complain about at all.

I am an introvert, and though I like socializing and being around people, I recharge by spending time alone. Teaching is a very extroverted job, especially when you are teaching children, and I found that my social battery became increasingly depleted, especially when trying to balance a social life on top. I, like most people I’m sure, like having friends. Throw teaching in the mix, and I started to feel less and less like I was having enough recharge time between my plans and obligations. My brain started to buzz with all of the information it was taking in in a single day. At night I was finding it more and more difficult to calm down, to stop the repeating memories from the day. Only now I know that these spinning thoughts are normal in a brain like mine, which is highly attuned to sensory information and prone to overload in certain situations. At that point I only knew that I wanted to find a way to quiet it down.

Now, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been meditating pretty diligently since 2015, I am a buddhism enthusiast and have spent a few years of my life wandering from Zen center to Vipassana retreat to Thai forest monasteries to yoga ashrams. The monastary or meditation center is pretty much synonymous to ‘paradise’ in my mind, but I’m trying to be more of an active player in this world.

I can’t say that I’ll become a monk at some point, but I also can’t say that I won’t.

For now I’ve been just working on being a human in the most fundamental sense of the word. Meditation works wonders in the retreats. It’s a little more difficult when you live on a busy street in a metropolis.

Maybe I am capable of creating a life in between the peace of the forest and the rush of the city, but as of yet, it’s been a struggle. All of which is to say that … meditation and yoga weren’t quite cutting it. My life needed to change, but my plan was sabotaged by an invisible to the naked eye virus ravaging the Earth. Like many people during that time, I was torn, between my dreams about the world I wanted to live in, and the harsh reality of a world caught off guard. I started spiraling. I spiraled back to California.

As I was spiraling, I started to pick up design again after the teaching / traveling hiatus. When the world opened up a bit I was still spiraling (albeit less so), and so I booked a one-way ticket back to India, scheduling a Vipassana retreat that started a day after I landed.1 It worked. Well, at least it kind of did. I ended up having an amazing trip. I started in Tamil Nadu where I sat the retreat, then went to Hampi and spent a week cycling through the ancient ruins and eating tons of idli and thali (*drool* I miss South Indian food. Honestly I just miss Indian food in general, and I am not talking about butter chicken, despite your protests.).

Then there was Goa. I had been before, but only for a week or two maybe ten years before. This time was different. This time I didn’t leave. This time I found community. This time I found friends. There is too much to say about Goa, so I’ll save it. At this point if I write too much about it I might buy another ticket. Goa and the people I met there rekindled my heart, but there was still a divide, a disconnect, between the life I knew I was capable of living, and the life that I was actually embodying. Which is to say, there was a lot more work to be done. Some call it integration, and I’ve been dead set on it with increasing certitude. Last year, when I came back from India, I knew I needed to find real, lasting changes in my life, although I only had a vague idea of what those changes would look like. I also knew that those changes needed to be deeper, more permanent, and totally independent of my actual location on the globe. Locations change, but I’m always still me. Right?

So, I’ve been writing. I’m on my fourth 160 page notebook since last may (actually the first one was 180 pages, if that changes anything). I’ve estimated that a page of my writing has about 500 words, you can do the math if you want. Or not, it’s beside the point. I can confidently say that it has been instrumental in facilitating profound changes, and it is still cascading through my life like ripples as I ponder over the puzzle pieces of my existence. The thing is, good habits start to compound over time. Eventually it led to me learning to code. I had dabbled in basic web coding in the past, but this time I really have been learning to code. This is also a wormhole topic that I won’t get into now except to say that coding, the entire process of coding has also profoundly shifted the way I look at the world — beyond what I’ve even created or will go on to create; it’s changed how I live.2

Writing and coding have been fundamental, pivotal aspects of the past year’s development, but there is a third, and it involves mental health. I won’t get into details yet but, though I’ve always known that I’m a little different than most people, a little bit of a weirdo, I never really had a good grasp on why I felt alien. I had plenty of theories, but there was always something vague, something beyond my verbal grasp, that I needed deeper understanding of. Another hobby I’ve picked up more seriously in the past year is understanding more about the neurodivergence movement and more precisely how I fit in to that paradigm. I’m not a complete stranger to neurodiversity, and it has been a subject of passing interest since my days as a cognitive science student at UC San Diego. But as my burnout cycles became more and more intense over the years, I dove into it more and more, leading to a self diagnosis in late Summer of last year, and ultimately seeking formal diagnosis as of this year.

I’ve come a long way and have been able to work through a lot of quirks and cognitive distortions on my own and with the help of the neurodivergence community online, but at the same time I am interested to get an outside perspective on this predicament. My burnout is better, but it’s not gone. By now I’ve seen the cycle happen again and again, and though I am getting better at balancing my spicy brain with a tendency for bottom-up, lateralized thinking, I still have a long way to go.

Even more, I’m inspired. There’s work to be done in this field, and I am wondering how I can play a part in a world that is friendly to humans of varying incline and experience.

Footnotes

  1. As a sidenote: I realize I am privileged to be able to book a one way ticket somewhere, to enter into a life of gallivanting and soul searching, but I worked hard as an English Teacher to save up for doing exactly that. Instead of becoming a homeowner or investing in a business, I’ve spend the past fifteen years or so investing in myself, gaining knowledge, wisdom and experience living in places very different from the ones in which I was raised. ↩

  2. After all, I’m writing this in markdown using VSCode, and it feels better than any word processor I’ve ever touched. ↩