SelfCare Saturday: Executive Function, Executive Duties
Fully resurfacing after eighteen years of illness.
If you look back to the time before I got sick, the early aughts, I founded two wireless ISPs, both of them got funded, and I learned some hard lessons about how smooth people with character disorders can be. Then I started my own engineering company and the growth had begun - two full time, two part time people, but then Lyme disease got me firmly in its grip.
Now here we are, just eighteen short years later, and the slowly standing back up that began at the start of 2019 has mostly run its course.
It is a bit surreal to be shaking off a chronic illness and getting back to work …
Attention Conservation Notice:
Just some thoughts on what it’s like to emerge from a fog bank that consumed a third of my life. Working from prior experience, physical and financial recovery was accompanied by working towards a spiritual recovery, too.
Climbing:
I had terrible sleep for the better part of a decade and it really did seem like narcolepsy type II, I had a bit more than half of the symptoms. After asking every doctor I had, I received my first Modafinil prescription in January of 2019. The drug did not fix my wake/sleep cycle, but it did squelch a lot of my digestive trouble. My reading revealed that it was a modulator of dopamine. Then I read that dopamine was a powerful anti-inflammatory for the gut.
I started taking massive doses of L-tyrosine and it worked about as well as Modafinil, which was good … because I developed tardive dyskinesia at the end of 2019. I quit the stimulant cold turkey and took huge doses of DHA/EPA fish oil, seeking to rapidly replace those lipid channels that are thought to have a connection to the motion disorder.
Your gut makes most of the serotonin in your body, but it uses 90% of it locally. This was the next digestion related neurotransmitter revelation. Taking time release 5-HTP was helpful. Nothing Earth shattering, it was just a low key way to feel better.
Your gut resurfaces itself every five to seven days. That includes a bunch of enteric neurons - your tummy has about as much of a nervous system as the brain of a cat, and its interaction with your microbiome has an enormous effect on your life. Acting on the notion that this regrowth wasn’t happening in a timely fashion, I started taking Omberacetam in the late spring of 2022.
The effect was astonishing - I have been playing Mahjong solitaire since my late teens and I’m pretty quick - a bit more than three minutes for any layout put in front of me. Within 72 hours I was knocking double digit seconds off my times. This is a simple, direct measure of working memory set size and structural intelligence. I did sixty day courses the first three years, now I take a small dose about once a week. There’s no formal body that runs tournament, but the records I’ve seen here and there indicate that my 2:15 - 2:30 times have me nipping at the heels of the fastest players in the world.
Then for the piece de resistance - messing with the Claude Desktop and MCP servers, I got the suggestion that I might have MCAS, short for mast cell activation syndrome. I started the over the counter treatments, and each one improved things. I finally got a Singulair prescription about ten days ago and I estimate about 80% of my lingering troubles are just gone. When the world is not burning down around me, I can sleep like a normal adult …
And now I mostly feel like I did in my late thirties before I got sick.
Leveling Off:
Last spring, before the recovery started, I already slipped into the Brand Defense Strategist role for Cicada 3301. This came after they agreed to produce Shall We Play A Game?, the puzzle I’ve been working on since 2020.
I had a surgery in early July for some mechanical stuff that was bugging me and that was when I got a chance to spend a lot of time with Anthropic’s AI, self-diagnosing my long term health burden.
Since then I have:
Published my first MCP server, Parabeagle, on the way to restoring Disinfodrome, the document imaging service I shut down in January.
Obtained that commercial role I’ve wanted for so long. I am not saying much about it except that it exercises my technology R&D capabilities and writing skills. This is something that’s going to float the boat monthly once my portion of an existing business is up and running on its own.
Begun serving in the R&D CTO role for a startup here in the Bay Area. I got this because I have a flawless, basketball sized crystal ball for technology issues. Stuff that other people can’t get their heads around is once again easy for me, after so many years of being adrift more often than not.
Met with a Bay Area NGO to talk about security stuff. This did not go as well as I hoped, but the seeds were planted, and I am doing Personal & Organization Safety Consults. This is happening for several reasons - my recognition that things are getting hot out there, a desire to not simply discard all my experience, and I do still need the money while these other things are standing up.
Cruising:
While things are on an upswing for me, despite the country’s overall malaise, the same can not be said for people around me. I have tried to help where I can, but my business strategy crystal ball is not heeded when turned to personal issues. As for me, I think it’s abundantly clear that self medicating over complaints that should be addressed with physical therapy and doctor supervised prescriptions is a really bad idea. Not everyone can see this.
Addiction to drugs is one thing, addiction to one’s own neurotransmitters is another. Like gambling or sex addiction, the constant overstimulation from social media is a problem for a lot of people. I went through a period of this back when I started using Twitter, but had been steadily reducing exposure since 2014. When Twitter cancelled their API in 2023 that was the end of my being able to monetize studying activity at scale there, but it took another year before I locked myself out of an account I’d had since 2008.
This summer was the final cauterization - I burned connections with a dozen people, some of whom I’d known since 2010. Attempts to reboot stale drama from over a decade ago played a big part in this choice. I simply will not tolerate any more low budget manipulation attempts. There are still people in my life who have problems, but there’s nobody who causes problems. Those that try get a one way ticket to the land of find someone else to bother.
Conclusion:
The last few weeks have been trying - personally, professionally, and politically. I’ve been walking for hours at a time this last month, and two weeks ago I received this little gadget.
I’ve been following Andrea Fella’s teachings on mindfulness in daily life since the month I got sick in 2007. It’s a pretty western thing to take Vajrayana vows, read/practice a Mahayana analytical meditation, and listen to a Theravada tradition instructor, but these are the things that worked for me, in the order in which I discovered them.
The west first encountered Buddhism about 150 years ago, so we’re only 30% of the way through the typical localization period that happens when the belief system encounters a new environment. I have friends who are nominally Christian and Jewish, but the dharma is strong with them, because they took side trips when they were younger.
I don’t know that I’ve ever openly said this, but I sometimes Google that Rauhauser guy, and I don’t think I like him much. Like Anton Gorodetsky in Night Watch, if you’re drinking blood so you can hunt vampires, it takes a toll on you. One simply can not bathe in hate, while filled with harmful intent, and retain compassion for all sentient beings. My contribution to 2025’s purported spiritual warfare is going to be recovering in this dimension in a manner similar to what I’ve done physically.
What are you doing to tend to your spiritual health?
How does it involve finding ways to assist other people around you?
If you didn’t have ready answers for both of those, that’s a BIG warning sign.
