Universal Theory of Neurodivergence (as of 2025 Dec)

Prologue:

I started writing this out (finally: I'm a few years in now on testing-against-observations and refining-the-detail) to explain my response to a reel by a trusted ADHD content-creator, and then (1) it was getting really long for a Fb post EVEN FOR ME and (2) I realized having it in blog-form would DEFINITELY be useful for linking as a reference in future social-media reactions -- plus (3) I think I finally found an autism researcher who might have the right mindset to take seriously a hyper-intelligent dilletante -- so here we are, back in the longform blog I haven't been using much in recent years, because I am fairly confident about this and if I'm right it's not only useful but also important to share this.

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Terminology:

Although I have recently (2025 as I write this) heard that the term "neurotypical" was invented by a neurospicy person to make "medical diagnostic" commentary about how "weird" non-autistics are to autistic people -- objectifying and "othering" them and pathologizing their behavioral patterns and ways of perceiving the world for political/ psychological commentary in a parallel way to how the social establishment treats people who display autism -- it has come into general use without the satire attached, and I object (heartily) to the presumption then (ironically) attached to the "typical" part of the term.  In science, a "type" is the standard of a species, against which all individuals are measured for divergence, and fuck that as a presumption.

So, many years ago now, I switched to using "neuronormative," and I have strongly pushed others in my sphere to do so as well, to defang the rhetorical implication that the social norms reflect the core "type" of homo sapiens.  In science, the term "norm" gets at many of the same concepts as a "type" does, but it recognizes that the centering definitions are mental constructs, not actual (psychologically-fundamental) truths -- that the standard against which individual datasets are being measured might not actually be standard, that the "standard" is a useful-seeming guess, not a stand-alone reality.

So: violent-control social dynamics/ social structures founded on coercion are //normative// in most human societies today, often from the smallest social unit all the way through to the largest, but -- once one looks at history, anthropology, archaeology, or animal studies with ANY sort of objectivity -- violent-control dynamics are NOT, on the evidence, //typical// (fundamental to the definition of how humans-in-society most-instinctively or most-"naturally" work).

[Side note: The concepts of "instinct" and what is "natural"

will be a significant portion of the body of this essay.]

I am not at all convinced that what English-speaking societies are now comfortable calling "neurotypicals" are in fact "typical" of the species, nor even perhaps that they are the genetic majority of the species.  I suspect the prevalence (or perhaps the degree) of the neurotypes, and the social norms associated with specific societies, over the last 100K years has shifted back and forth depending on survival needs in each population (place, time, surrounding events).

[I will give, that my perception that we (neurospicy people, non-normies, 

auties) might not be as "unusual" as mainstream society would like to 

perceive, is likely at least partly due to living in a city which clearly 

displays HEAVY genetic lean towards non-social-norm neurotype people.  

(Apologies for the "incorrect" use of commas in that sentence, I'm using 

them there in the traditional sense: indicating a partial-stop, in verbal 

speech ... a sense-making pause, rather than a "correct" written structure.)]

Similarly, although I used "divergence" in the title of this post for clarity to any strangers to this level of my conversation, I object (heartily!) to the way the term is applied as the other half of a binary that (in real-time/ functionally) assumes a dominant/normal population and a subordinate/weird population.

I don't have a term I'm really satisfied with to counter the concept of a standard and a "divergent" population, but many English-speaking adult autistics use "neurospicy" to try to get at both (1) denying the (false) concept of a clear binary and (2) accepting that, although they do seem to be somehow related, the ways a person might be "on the spectrum" (autistic or autistic-trending), ADHD. or several other statistically-correlated "diagnoses"* of "disability"* can vary widely.  It's also resonant to the famously/infamously "spiky" and sometimes unpredictable [capabilities] and [lack of capabilities] neurospicy people and/or people "on the spectrum" (autistic, but setting aside the 20th c. prejudices and eugenicist definitions) experience living with.

So I will here use "neurospicy," a term adopted and used by many neurospicy adults in the newly-available free-wheeling conversations enabled by the internet since around 2019(?).

(Enabled: Not only including increasingly-global connectivity, 

even for socially isolated persons and communities, but also 

including that permanently or temporarily non-verbal people 

can communicate in real-time via technology and specifically 

via text ... more on that later if I remember to add it.)

* (In "" because "diagnoses" are, in the end, things normative society finds inconvenient enough to consider "broken" about a person, not all of which are actually about the person; many are more or completely about social norms.  "Disability" can be of the person -- various people have various physical, mental, or spiritual aspects that make survival and enjoyment of life more challenging rather than less challenging -- but often "disability" is about society making things easier for some people and harder for others, and/but refusing to acknowledge that the lack of potential ease and joy in our shared lives is a failing of the society and not a personal failing of the individual.  For easy witness: the shifting written-and-published definitions of perversion in the formal psychological diagnoses of the last 100 years.)

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ACTUAL ASSERTIONS:

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TL;DR (academically known as the article's "ABSTRACT" ;) ):

For those who haven't chatted with me in person in the last couple of years and therefore haven't heard from me about my Universal Theory of Neurodivergence, I'm fairly sure that what differentiates a neurospicy brain from a neuronormative one is that we neurospicy folks, for one reason or another, can reactively or (when older) semi-consciously turn off/disable the chemical signaling that neuronormatives consider a baseline of "human" functioning.

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Underlying brain structure working-theory:

Not big visible structural differences, but about strength and number of connections and neuron pruning

Neurospicy people, by my observation, live more in the newer parts of the brain than in the older parts. This was the key to unravelling the tangle of symptoms that both irritate modern mainstream societies and frustrate those of us on the spectrum while trying to be accepted as "human beings" by our various modern mainstream societies.

Lest one think I mean neurospicy people are “better” humans: nope! Just a different evolutionary experiment ... a different weight of resource allocation within the spectrum of possible human neurological variety. Probably a more "advanced" sort of evolutionary experiment, just based on the fact that it had to begin after the development of all the newer parts of the brain, but please remember that most evolutionary experiments fail, so being a "next step" does not inherently imply "better" or "more useful." I think in the case of humans it is at least useful in providing population-level variation in capabilities, but pretty clearly (in modern social structures) it has usually not recently been "useful" to the individual humans embodying it (higher rates of social ostracism => less happy human, and a variety of health, death, and lack-of-breeding consequences).

Living more in the newer parts of the brain has very practical positives and negatives. It means we tend to be extra-sensitive about things housed in the newer parts of the brain, like constructed logic systems and fine-tuned sensory issues (the latter can be beneficial or disabling), and less connected to what society sells as deeply “automatic” behaviors, feelings, and patterns (which can be, I won't lie, very freeing, and/but it can also trigger people who can't perceive that freedom as "natural" to dehumanize us/ see us as other ... quirky in times of less social stress, dangerous in times of high social stress ... largely depending on how well we can mask that we don't react "naturally"/instinctively, which depends on us noticing in the first place that we lack a "natural" reactive feeling, which ... well, you can I hope begin to see the psychological and intellectual tangle THAT could be!!).

I talk about the feelings part in the rest of the original post, but the patterns/behaviors piece deserves some explanation here: Lacking a reliable connection to "instinctive" reactions and behaviors (brain chemical signals, it turns out) means that we (depending on how much our individual brain disregards the more ancient style of in-brain messages) don’t form habits, we use routines … meaning, to “brush my teeth” or to “get ready to leave the house” or “to take a shower” — for someone like me anyhow (I might be an extreme case?) — never “becomes routine” (a habit, I don’t have to think about it) … I have to think about it, still, in steps, every day, in my 50s.

This takes enormous mental processing, all the time, every day, not even getting into the processing required to “pass” as normal in real-time interactive social behaviors without the support of "instinctive" reactions.

For me, the social behaviors part I can move into habit, but any expected/normed behaviors not based instinctively (for me) on kindness and love has to be constructed fairly consciously. Rejoining physically-interactive society after the pandemic meant re-learning "how to human" with my body signaling and verbal patterns, after a couple of years of almost-exclusively online text communications. Eventually starting to work in an office again led to another round of trying to remember long-disused skillsets for "how to human, subset: office setting." I was raised in a very masculinized social environment as a kid and then had (what I now recognize was) a remarkably neurospicy set of peers in school, so I didn't get a handle on how to present smoothly as a normative human female-presenting person until my late 20s when a well-meaning older friend pushed me into a leadership role in a group of 200 very socially-normed women and the behavioral-analysis task became vital ... no longer could I be the quiet quirky one on the edges of the social group who found ways to be accepted by doing quietly useful things, I needed to be able to communicate smoothly with the normies without triggering what we now call the Uncanny Valley reaction.

Anyhow, point being, normies mostly have no damn clue at all how much WORK those of us with neurospicy brains are doing when (if) we manage to pass for normal. Most of my adult life, out in physical society, I pass extremely well for normal. I'm one of those people that "normies" prefer to disbelieve when I mention that I consider myself at least autism-adjacent if not actually autistic.  

(Occasionally displays of my high intelligence will trigger the 

uncanny-valley effect even without any of the behavioral-display

triggers.  I tend to foray displays of high intelligence that cannot 

be plausible-deniability'd away only under three circumstances: 

(1) I actually trust the person(s) present to keep seeing me as 

human despite being slightly-creepy, (2) I don't expect to ever 

see the person(s)-present again so if they see me as slightly-creepy 

it doesn't matter, or (3) if it is VERY necessary despite the 

probability of never being able to recover the social relationship(s) 

again. Uncanny-valley triggering sets off core chemical "fear" 

reactions and in practical terms is very difficult and sometimes 

impossible to recover from, and I don't like being an object of 

fear. There are several aspects of who I am that trigger fear in a 

lot of people, and started teaching myself as a child to avoid 

displaying those. (More on the Uncanny Valley later.))

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Neurochemical aspect:

(Now back to the original post I wrote last night, which focuses on the neurochemical aspect of my unified theory, starting with copy-pasting the thesis from the Abstract/TL;DR:)

I'm fairly sure that what differentiates a neurospicy brain from a neuronormative one is that we neurospicy folks, for one reason or another, can reactively (instinctually) or (when older) semi-consciously turn off/disable the chemical signaling that neuronormatives consider a baseline of "human" functioning.

And to some extent we can (sometimes at least) turn it back on later. Probably only partially though, like learning a language before age 5 embeds it naturally in the brain at a very different functional level than learning it as a gradeschooler, high schooler, or especially as an adult. Neurochemicals we've turned off the production of or stopped acknowledging the signals of (either works, although the former is less stressful on the body for sure), especially if we turned them off as an infant or a young person, re-learning them later in life will never be as instinctive or fundamental to our perception and situational analysis as they perhaps were to start with, nor as instinctive or "fundamental" as neuronormative folks experience them.

Reactively turn them off: I watched two of my kids at two different times -- one the first week of birth and one at about age 30months -- turn OFF a sensitivity that they very obviously started off with. (At the time I didn't think of this in terms of chemicals signaling.)

--> The baby, we got it switched back on with an intervention after a couple of days (yes, dear child: this input *is* important and despite the overwhelming amount of it, is isn't data-noise, it's important to track).

--> The toddler, I did what I could to keep the option open in the long-term despite very real experiential stresses I couldn't completely mitigate, and around age 18 they felt ... safe enough? not oppressed enough? not overwhelmed enough? ... to start exploring *feeling* that set of mental/ sensory/ chemical signals again. Somewhat.

--> I know from both their self-reporting and my longer-term observations, that one of those kids turned off several other inconvenient, distracting, or considered-useless sorts of nerve-/brain-/sensory-input- signals later in childhood.

(Again, this was all before I pulled the pieces together to construct my unified theory here.)

I also know (and again, I recognized this stuff before I constructed my unified theory) that *I* did this signal-dump/ signal-editing:

--> When I was a child and teenager, in several stages in each case, about some "basic" human functions (hello, refusal to deal with horrendously negative social pressures about sexuality and food)

--> As an older teen and young adult, my disgusted rejection of the stupendously counterproductive experiences of hatred and jealousy meant I just … never felt them again. (At the time I thought it was great moral discipline on my part, which is also true, but now my theory would suggest I had a physical brain capability on my side that made these experiences a one-and-done moral development instead of an ongoing psychological struggle.)

--> See also: My extremely "odd" (according to what society insists is "normal") relationship with safety and threat, wherein most of the time (unless deeply overwhelmed), I simply (it feels simple to me, I now understand it is NOT simple for a lot of people and maybe most people) dissociate from the panic and Do Shit Anyhow, and then later deal with (some times more successfully than other times) the “feelings” engendered by whatever panic chemicals got loose into my bloodstream. It’s a weird (from a normative point a view) ability to discount/ ignore the “basic” reactivity of a mammal.

Ability to (whether from birth or learned during life) discount the "basic” mammal [chemicals/feelings reactivity] freaks a lot of neuronormative people out, and is a big part of what makes [very neuronormative people] X [very “autistic” people] often not really, at a deep level, be able to instinctively register the other sort of person as entirely “human."

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The reason I put together/ realized it might be deep-level chemical reactions, is that I read a (fairly annoying, but intuitively I knew there was something in it I needed to read) book by a business coach who was spending alllllllll this time talking about how amazing his work was, helping people to avoid business mistakes that were "very understandable" but very stupid. I've forgotten what the other ones were, but about 3/4 through the book he went on and on about "revenge." Speaking of "revenge" as if it were a natural reaction. As if it not only was it "natural," it was "of course" SO VERY overwhelming that it would make business owners and managers tank their business if the reactivity got triggered. And that he as a consultant was a big giant hero for helping coach people on how NOT to let this amazingly-basic perceived-"need" run away with them and irrationally ruin their own lives.

Y'all. The level at which this was shocking to my perceptive system cannot be overstated. Literally WHAT?!

... but then. But then I realized that movies and books and songs and sometimes in conversations, this was indeed treated as if it was a fundamental human experience, that explained (and sometimes "justified" -- but not really) plotlines and actions and psychological crises and just All Kinds of Things ...

... it was like the day I realized the way people talk about sexual attraction in songs was actually the way they felt, and not odd (and often very unpleasant) poetic metaphorical language.

And then I realized. I realized that everything "autistics" do "wrong" is monkey-brain stuff. We are demonized (and sometimes feared as "other" -- the uncanny valley) for doing all the basic stuff, "wrong." We do lust "wrong." Hunger "wrong." Fear/panic, "wrong." And, although I had never in my life (before this business consultant started riffing on his amazing anti-instinctual prowess) seen it cast into the same pot as all these other "basic animal instincts," revenge ... revenge we also, consistently, do "wrong."

"Wrong" in all these cases might be too much, or too little, or weird pockets of yes and weird pockets of no within the category, but we don't experience lust, fear, hunger, and revenege in a flow-state of inevitable naturalness than neuronormatives (on evidence of nearly every book, song, poem, and movie, now that I am aware to notice) do ... 

.... and certainly not in the overwhelming way that neuronormatives need to believe "everyone" feels them in order to make deeply immoral behaviors "understandable" (usually implicitly therefore "justifiable").

(Or to make plotlines FUCKING PLAUSIBLE. A plotline based on hot-blooded reactive revenge or lust making someone do inexcusable things makes NO SENSE to me, y'all. It was always apparent that to some large part of the population, it actually does feel understandable, and directly-cathartic to partake in. But the level at which that *does not have a correlate* for me, is so extreme it might be absolute.)

The daignostic storyline for autism -- the one driving interventions in the 20th c. especially -- tended to focus on gaps that should be pushed into displayed-compliant behaviors, and oversensitivities that should be bullied into NOT-displaying them via behaviors. Somehow conceptually, the overarching bubble of 'what autism was' was a problem with overactive primitive-brain reactivity, when on the evidence, it's actually a difficulty with overactive newer-brain reactivity and unreliable connection to older brain patterns. When I first had the insight that neurospiciness was actually living 'too much' (for social norms) in the outer brain and 'too little' (for social norms) in the inner brain, I happened to be living with a K-12 autism specialist nearing the end of her career, and her immediate trained academic reactivity was (paraphrased broadly) that, no, autism is about being too trapped in the more primitive parts of the brain. (To her credit she quickly grasped my alternative interpretation of the data, and uncomfortably it added to her store of pain for how autism intervention for children in schools was managed, especially in the early part of her career.)

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Conclusion:

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Anyhow. EVERYTHING about autism

-- and from what I understand of them, at least several of the other statistically (and increasingly, genetic-marker) correlated diagnosable (remember: "diagnosable" = inconvenient for society) issues which are more and more coming under the umbrella of neurodivergence/ neurospiciness in the popular conversation even if the medical establishment is not seriously considering some of them yet (so, not only autism spectrum brains, but also brains that get diagnosed with ADHD, schizophrenia, BPD) --

EVERYTHING makes more sense if neurospicy brains default to perceiving+processing the world more in the new parts of the brain and default to being able to disregulate or stop the more primitive perceptive+processing aspects of brain-structure and brain-function.

(All of which ignores the question of spirituality, and we can pretend it ignores the question of psychic or other body-related but not body-enclosed energies (although it doesn't). But one of the useful things about this Unified Theory of Neurodiversity is that it implies a bunch of avenues of (boringly, lol )physically-empirical testing could be possible.)

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leftover thoughts about "revenge"

Autistic people pretty infamously do "justice" not "revenge," but (also infamously) are often absolutely dogged about "justice" (and fairness). This is one of the places we first least that society lies through its teeth about what "society" itself is like/ wants/ requires, because fairness and justice are not even on the actual menu most of the time, much less are they reliable or truly expected. The disillusionment and distrust because of this ONE social lie is a huge initial emotional and psychological trauma for a lot of neurospicy people, and foundational (in my observation) to many neurospicy people feeling not only no guilt about questioning, but actually a moral responsibility to question, social rules and authority assertions. (Not that we usually love hierarchy anyhow -- another common "no, we don't access the primitive brain's reactivity for that reaction" issue society -- as it stands today -- finds frustrating.)

But, caveat: When we get abused enough that the brain chemicals turn back *on,* (1) they tend to be overwhelming because we haven't grown up practicing coping mechanisms to not act on them like neuronormatives apparently have to and (2) it's hypothetically reasonable (imo) to presume that we are *extra* sensitive to a lot of inputs and sometimes that is specifically *why* we turned them *off* ... so if someone abuses us hard enough to turn them *on,* they are very, very, very "on." Neurospicy people I've seen triggered to the point where they feel a need for revenge, it scares me in a way normal everyday "revengey" people don't. We tend toward "cold-blooded" actions in this arena (if justice needs doing and we see a way to accomplish it, we don't pursue it in a revenge'y way, although we might feel positive if/when the deserving party gets the comeuppance/ consequence they've chosen to deserve); adding "hot-blooded" reactivity to the "cold-blooded" calculation makes a person's choices less predictable and way more likely to be harmful to themselves and collateral people around them (like, now that I know to look for it, "regular" revenge'y feelings do for neuronormative people, which is what that business consultant was so -- justifiably I now realize -- proud of himself for being able to redirect and defuse).

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... on abusing people into being "properly" "human" (also called "socializing" someone):

Abuse is also how many "rehab" training programmes (spelling deliberate, I mean programme -- structured 'teaching' imposition, a word really used that way only in British English) work on "correcting" how "wrong" an autistic person might be about displayed food behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof), displayed sexual behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof), or displayed fear behaviors (or uncomfortable lack thereof).

A lot of the ways kids have been "treated" to "fix as far as possible" these "socially disabling" (unconforming) behaviors could be seen as not "help them to get along in society" (I do believe that most adults involved in the abuse think of their actions that way), but instead

--> "abuse each kid into acting normal until the negative stimulus is so great their monkey-brain chemicals are finally stimulated at a level that makes the kid's reaction 'correct'," or

--> "abuse each kid into acting normal by making the overall pain in the system worse for them if they keep the nonsense-data (chemical) switches off, so the child (consciously or instinctively) turns them back on, and then their reactivity, although from the child's inner perspective more dysregulated than it was before, now looks more 'genuinely human' to us neuronormatives -- who were very uncomfortable with the ways the child was trying to find a way to live comfortably in this highly-artificial built environment."

We could (and should), especially with this new "brain chemicals work fundamentally differently" lens, design radically different early- and childhood- interventions for young people with perceptive systems overwhelmed with modern environmental input.

Many "alternative" educational environments already seek to do this, by having observed children and designing their pedagogical and physical design choices around the demonstrated needs of the children (without requiring an explanation for those observed needs) instead of around dehumanized goals imposed by society (and particularly by ideologies like capitalism or authoritarian communism).

Evidence on the ground (around the world) shows that nervous systems held gently (physically and emotionally both) will quite often regulate themselves over the years, without pushing and trauma and imposition of outside judgements of how to be a "correct" human. And the ones that maybe never will, it's still overtly an evil act to impose what is OBVIOUSLY trauma on a young person, no matter what the theoretical social goal is. (On adults is arguable -- there are some adults who definitely cannot be trusted to be out and about in society -- but on young people, imposing trauma is evil and statistically related to producing the sorts of adults that end up untrustworthy in society. Which ... it's not an irrational reaction to a society that tells you you are fundamentally unacceptable and feels not only no-guilt but feels righteous about abusing you and people like you. I'm not saying it's healthy, I'm just saying society is objectively really, really stupid about its stated goals versus its demonstrated goals :(.)

The cost to society of all the imposed trauma (not just on neurospicy people, but on all people) is HUGE.

People (all) who are affected by trauma are (shown by scientific studies) less facile thinkers, less facile emotional-processors, more prone to both short-term and long-term diseases.

Not scientifically studied, but just on observation and logic: we all spiritually stunted and psychically stunted from our potential because of truama-blocks.

We tend to pass these damages down to younger generations (some through chemicals in the womb and through genetic damage, some through how we treat them and the lessons they learn after birth).

Like most aids for disabled people, making life objectively easier for neurospicy people by removing the expectation that traumatizing or ostracizing anyone who is socially inconvenient is "going to help them adjust" is also going to aid everyone who isn't as obviously socially inconvenient, and also literally everyone else. Removing all acceptance of manipulative violence (physical, psychological, eomtional, spiritual) would be even better.

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As I've stated in several unrelated posts, but it applies here too:

Evil only exists because we can't (of late) bring ourselves to believe it's not necessary.

Each person can *always* choose kindness. There are no circumstances where one is prevented from maximizing kindness. There are no circumstances that, in the moment, justify choosing evil.

Every breath is a new opportunity to choose <3.

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Some miscellaneous related thoughts:

(1) Homelessness: I recently read in passing some statistic or other that asserted an unreasonably (by population statistics) percentage of homeless people are autistic. I don't know where they got their data (if they actually had any) and I don't remember what the stat was, but it reminded me that I had come to this same conclusion several years ago once I didn't have a car anymore and relied on biking, walking and transit for all travel. It matches my frequent observation of our local homeless population for sure, many of whom show behavioral patterns that demonstrate sensory-avoidance or sensory-seeking typical of a more-overtly-autistic person at any age, a lack of understanding of social norms (not just a reasonably-rational choice to perhaps not respect social patterns that have left them homeless, but an actual lack of easy-perception of them at all) ... and then also the reasonably-rational choice not to respect the social "requirements" would also be more within the roundhouse of an neurodiverse brain than a neuronormative brain ... . 

This is important for society to consider(/acknowledge), because 

--> if neuronormative people (mostly the ones in power politically and regarding money) are designing ways to keep people from becoming homeless, help them when they are homeless, get them housed, and keep them housing-stable ... well. If neuronormative people are designing (and approving resources/ funding for) for these programs, they will, by and large, be unlikely to work well with a large portion of the homeless population that experiences the world and the choices "available" to them entirely differently than the people making choices about how they "should" be able to.

--> in real-time, those of us interacting with homeless people in our day-to-day might have a useful lens to understand both how much them being on the streets is a measure of our social structures excluding them and how much of their "odd" (uncomfortable) behaviors might be explicable by them being literally in sensory-overwhelm, or literally helplessly-confused as to how to behave "normally" (normatively).

(2) How chemical addictions/ self-medication works for neurodiverse brains and for neuronormative brains is probably two really different answers. As far as I know it's quite established (at least anecdotally in the adult neurospicy conversation) that reliance on alcohol and pot are EXTREMELY common for neurospicy people (although many don't admit it is -- or if they are lucky, was -- a reliance until middle age). This tracks to my theory about turning brain chemistry off selectively, and also tracks to the scientific work that got some attention in the 90s in the book "Potatoes not Prozac" that tracked how sugar addiction and alcohol addiction both trigger the same temporary "fix" of a neurochemical gap in the addicted individual (the book suggested steadier and healthier ways to prop that gap closed).

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... I think that's it for now, but I might come back and refine/add stuff.

I don't, generally, enjoy food: thoughts and insights of today [May 2021]

[originally written mid-May 2021, but I didn't hit publish until now]

This is a long one.  Lots of associative call-outs from the main realization.

Trigger warnings: emotional trauma, food issues, generational trauma

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In random self-awareness news, a conversation with my local emotional eater today caused me to take a new look at my attitudes towards/ experience of food.

Hence it has occurred to me that my level of disengagement with food (besides chocolate, which honestly I don't think of as "food")* is actually probably a Thing (something that required active choices by me to be this way) instead of a Non-Thing (a natural default).  So then ... thoughts:

... it displays (/the end result is) like the kind of overwhelm/ overload reaction where the person simply turns "off" a whole set of inputs in order to prevent future overloads.  My real-life experienced reference for this is two relatives who turned off some large chunk(s) of their emotional responsiveness as children due to trauma and/or overload; I associate this particular kind of compartmentalize-and-shut-it-down with having an autism-spectrum mind.  (Side note: both relatives are now -- cautiously -- recovering capacity in those emotional areas they previously shut down.  There's a whole set of conversations to be had there, but that is not the topic of this post.)

... food is just not that exciting to me in and off itself ( = does not excite my system either positively or negatively), and I have no "OH MY GOD NO" visceral reactions to foods as if there was a pre-conscious-memories physical or abuse trauma associated with some food(s) or other.  So my lack of engagement with food is probably not based directly on food physically existing in my world ... 

... I do have, like, physical/ biological reactions to food, but really I mostly assess it as chemical inputs: calories, serotonin, digestive upset/ calm, hydration, potassium for nerve signaling, etc..  I buy food that I basically enjoy which meets my physical maintenance needs, which requires an initial assessment but no ongoing attention.  The "basically enjoy" checkbox creates an ongoing reliable situation wherein intake requires minimum psychological engagement. 

(During high stress times of my life, like now, I usually pleasure-read -- or fluff-internet-cruise -- while I'm eating, to give myself a positive-feeling reason to stay where the food is and accomplish the eating task.)

... I can enjoy food, especially if I am by myself or with someone(s) I trust.  Yes, you heard right: if I don't trust the emotional situation, eating becomes very mechanical, and I have to really shift my focus to deliberately make an opportunity to notice if food is tasty.  And if I don't trust the emotional situation, I resent and fear being socially required to pay attention to something besides the interpersonal situation; being socially required to pay attention to the food makes me panic.  (Quietly.  In a hidden way.  Because in a situation that might be unsafe, displaying panic is anti-useful.)

Yep.  Those "trust"/"safety" qualifiers are pretty clearly the key here : P.

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This is probably the actual thing: my grandmother was enormously (in that plausible deniability/ gaslighting way) emotionally abusive of my mother, with a great deal of that abuse centering, in a complicated tangle of allowance and condemnation, around food.  Food preparation skills, eating choices, manners, chore performance, body size and shape, resource distribution authority, economic dependence -- and heavy judgement about alllllll of those things ... it's a WHOLE big mess.  Very spikey and engulfing.

So I'm pretty sure I pretty early on just checked-the-fuck-out of as much food-related anything as seemed to trigger the pain.  'Bitty kr saw an utterly unsolvable emotional pain-ball -- and nope'd right out.

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Sadly, even then I didn't nope out COMPLETELY until I (very efficiently, full kudos to my subconscious, sigh) manifested an acutely-focused version of the emotional patterns of my childhood in my young-adult marriage relationship : P.

As a kid and teenager I used to enjoy french fries, and Arctic Circle brand fast-food burgers, and pizza --  nearly regardless of the context.  (Maybe because Grandma never served those things?)

By my late-20s, though?  Food was all a giant nope.  I didn't even enjoy desserts anymore.

'Took me until I was 38 to find enjoyment in food again at all (in limited contexts, per previous), and that was due to concentrated work on re- (or newly-) opening my heart (and choosing to trust) in general.  It was mostly an accident, as I recall.  I was irritated all through my 30s about not liking food, because liking food would have made [having to eat food] so much easier, and obviously I did need to eat because I had children to take care of, but I don't remember wanting to enjoy food just for its own sake.  Liking food was kind of a surprise bonus.

(It was also useful/ an extra bonus, timing-wise, because that was about when I decided I wanted to put on weight so men would stop (1) noticing me in the first place and then (2) doing all the stupid shit that American society tells them makes sense based on that look I used to have.  I will enjoy reading the obituary notice of the Western-Civ patriarchy >:(.  I am putting the weight off again now; I'd like to say it's because it got to where it felt too unhealthy -- which is a true fact -- but probably it's actually because I can see I look 'old' now instead of 'young' and I'm pretty sure that that means most of the bullshit will pass me by, even if manage to get back to the socially "correct" shape again.  I prefer to be thin, for my own movement comfort.  I am getting hit on again, but nothing like as often as before.)

(And being thin requires less food to maintain.  So, you know, a bonus there too, as a poor person and for the environment.)

I managed to maintain for several years the reacting to food (by choice, and with effort) in a manner at least similar to how most people seem to react without choice and effort.

(Not all people, by a long shot.  But it looks to me like it's most people.)

The increased emotional trauma levels of the last few years have thoroughly drained my emotional energy batteries, though.

So I don't have energy to spend to make and maintain an inner/ mental/ preceptive "space" of perceived-safety in which I can actively choose to deal with food.  I almost *can't* spend energy to do it.  And if for some reason I decide to prioritize it and do it anyhow, I suffer elsewise for that spend.

If someone else is making a safe space for me, who finds it valuable that I enjoy the food we are sharing, then I can enjoy that food.  Them making the safe space (so I don't have to) means I can use the 'freed up' energy to pay attention to the food question.  And even when I am in a feels-safe scenario, my attention to enjoying the food is always super-temporary; I prefer to pay attention to the conversation, or the clouds, or a trail of ants on the sidewalk, or the ads on the busses going by ... .  

(I can also pay attention to interesting non-value-assignment facts about the food: this flavor exists, that is the level of spice, it arrived in a pretty presentation, the cook created an interesting texture combination.  Like, art appreciation.  Like, I appreciate the artistic accomplishment and skill of, but don't actually like or enjoy, jazz, or Toni Morrison's writing.  This frequently is as close as I can get to enjoying the food.)

-----

Also fits within the pattern: Now that I'm thinking about it, I do generally enjoy, in a manner that seems to me similar to the normal "enjoyment of food" process of other people, foods that noone in my family has ever eaten around me and that I rarely ate while I was married.  Particularly Thai food, Lebanese food, and Indian food.

Potentially this is also related to why I have actively avoided learning to make almost any of these foods.

And anything that is not homecooked makes the entire food situation feel WAAAAAAAY less threatening to me.  (Particularly, not being homecooked by someone who cares about whether I actively enjoy the food.)

Alas, takeout is expensive, and I can't eat non-organic food more than once every couple of weeks (and that's pushing it) without it making me feel ill.  The Nicholas/ Arabian Breeze restaurant (Lebanese) was organic/local last time I went there, which was fucking awesome, but that's the only one I've found.

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(NOTE TO EVERYONE WHO HAS COOKED ME THINGS:  The dumb part is, I don't think I've ever been offered food at someone's house that actually tasted bad, and nearly all of it has been quite good.  Not surprisingly, right?  Because we are all competent adults, and usually don't fuck up basic social tasks like 'offer food that tastes good.'  Again, none of this about the objective facts of the food existing.  This whole tangle preexists, and is inside my psyche and my history; objective food as a fact is nearly irrelevant to my experience of it.  On the other hand, if I've ever complimented food you've offered me -- which I'm fairly sure I've made an effort to consistently accomplish? -- now you have some idea how much work that 'simple' task has actually involved for me : P, and how much therefore I care about you and about our relationship, that I chose to accomplish it.)

-----

I was a vegetarian for 11 years, starting when I was about 15.  Although I chose it for animal-rights reasons, it meant shutting out most of my family's (meat-based) inherited food patterns.

This analytical context suggests that turning vegetarian probably insulated me from quite a lot of ongoing, not-consciously-recognized intake-trauma.

It certainly externalized and made concrete a significant set of food-control fights between Grandma and I : P.

(This is still a fucking problem with Grandma.  She turned 100 yesterday and there was a whole pre-planning session for how to keep from triggering her about a family member's literally deadly food allergy that she doesn't find convenient to believe is real.  Oh. My. God :( >:(. )  (It is my fervent hope that I never, ever ... well no.  Not true.  I don't actually care if I lose my grip on objective reality when I get old.  I do fervently hope I am never again emotionally abusive, as society taught me to be, and as I had to unlearn.  Certainly, if I live to be old, I would like to not be shitty and mean to the people who feel an obligation to take care of me.  #Goals #KeepingItReal )

... I do have some American vegetarian foods I enjoy in a limited way, even though I was a vegetarian during the first half of my food-problematic marriage.  They aren't the vegetarian foods I ate at that time, though.

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* Or maybe chocolate is the only thing I react to as "food" in the way most people experience food?

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This-all is probably why it doesn't naturally occur to me to offer food when people visit (although I have learned to mimic the behavior for some people in my life for whom I've discovered such an offer makes them feel loved).  In my psychological world, having to experience food in the presence of others is fundamentally an emotional threat unless/ until proven otherwise.  And, because of the foundational family pattern, it's one of the most fundamental emotional threats I can experience.

So I would *never* instinctively offer someone food, as (how I feel, not how I think) to do so would be a direct attack on their feeling of safety.  Offering people food just miscellaneously is absolutely an artificial overlay behavior that makes anti-sense to my feelings, but I can see it makes positive sense to a significant portion of my friends, so I superego right over my ego and my id and do the behavior anyhow.

(EDIT:  I would never instinctively offer someone food -- unless they appeared hungry!  In which case I'm offering them [category: fuel], not "food."  Fuel is a safe emotional category and morally necessary, and enjoyment of [fuel items] only logically needs to be achieved to the point of 'willing to ingest efficiently enough for the purpose' ... any enjoyment beyond that is miscellaneous, although a functional bonus.)

I have some friends who are also skittish about food like I am.  We can hang out for hours and food does not come up unless one of us hits a sugar-low.  We also, knowing the hours-thing will eventually create a fuel issue, usually negotiate the how and what of [solving the need-to-eat problem] before hanging out.  (Mostly we each bring our own.)  

-----

So, yeah.  Apparently I rejected the entire experiential category, as the least painful/ safest-feeling solution to consistent inflicted pain.

Yep.  Super great.

----- 

Additionally, I (like most people) don't enjoy having to explain my many obscure but real food sensitivities, which usually makes people's "simple" food offers fucking complicated and awkward, when the people offering legit just want to be casual and friendly.

Which all ties into the larger historical pattern/ cycle of social condemnation and rejection whenever I'm not "simple" to deal with.

AND which food sensitivities are -- ZERO DOUBT, now that I've typed all of this and can see the pattern -- at least partly manifestations of my underlying subconscious attempts to avoid the pain-ball that is "food."

(It's a pain in my ass, because I'm now allergic to some of the tastiest things, like stonefruits and caneberries, which used to be some of the only things I DID enjoy about food.  That's some higher-order manifestation of "you need to face and deal with the actual problem" : P.)  (Again, kudos to my subconscious : P.)

Sigh sigh sigh.

In good news, the food allergies my kids were manifesting during the divorce/ when they were little all seem to have resolved soon after, and they all seem to basically enjoy food.  So hopefully I managed to pass down less or very little of this inherited emotional morass.

a unifying theory of modern conspiracies (lol)

[2023 note: this was actually written a couple of years ago but for some reason (cough) I never hit publish ... ]

So, I had this great insight this spring that might be the key to explaining at least a lot of conspiracist things if not all of them ...

You see, all along, it's been the dandelions.  Secretly they are taking over the earth (this appears to be some kind of hive-mind activity -- I'd hate to consider them having individual sentience!). The ships from their home planet will be arriving soon, hoping to find us softened for the easy capture of our ever-less-hospitable-to-humans, but increasingly fabulous for dandelions, environment, so their human allies have been ramping up the pressure.  From the day they talked innocent children into planting them on roadsides to beautify the country lanes (for historical evidence see Anne of Green Gables -- it's book one or two, I think -- where the author cites this specific activity in passing) -- from that day, I think we all have to admit that they have gradually been taking over at least this country (possibly invading from Canada, per citation).

And this despite the creation of and amazing increase in the use of poisons designed essentially (perhaps actually?) specifically to kill them.  And teachings in our movies, on TV, and in our schools about tidiness and perfect lawns -- a propaganda blitzkrieg that was fairly successful at least into the 1970s, and still holds sway over many human minds today.

But my clue was watching my lawn this spring -- a remarkably perfect spring for dandelions, and a remarkably un-Portland spring: deep rains followed by a week+ of no moisture at all, with clear skies and happy shining sun, repeated over and over.  *Someone* must have been messing with the weather (seriously -- who ever heard of a dry day between January and Rose Festival?!), and there were no logical economic beneficiaries to the new weather ... but ... my *dandelions* were settling in for a long, deep-rooted summer, clearly with the goal of finally eradicating my grass!!

Could it have been the dandelions all along?!?

Could this explain the obstinate support by our federal government of Monsanto and related companies, which is otherwise so unjustifiable?!?

Could this explain why all the children, starting in the mid-1860's, have been herded into compulsory standardized schooling? Both sides have a stake in that: the dandelions want us all to be green hippie drug-addled brainwashees, and the anti-dandelion freedom fighters need to train up an army of citizens who are educated on lawn poison and its efficient application, and will react with drone-like rejection when faced with a dandelion threat!

(Of course you've never heard of the anti-dandelion freedom fighters -- who would have believed them?  I'm sure they are valiant truth seekers whose families pretend they don't exist ... or they are protecting their own families from both the unfaithful and the dandelion sympathizers, by faking their deaths.  That takes a truly dedicated and intelligent person to pull off ... .)

Of course with any alien-planet scenario it ought to be easy to wrap in the secret goals (or create new secret goals that fit better) of the space programs (although this is a pretty big leap from the Isis/Masons connection, so I'm still working on that ... anyone with better knowledge of the Masons / Isis-in-space / Knights of Templar stuff is welcome to chime in in the comments ;) ).

But I think a unified theory that wraps in chemtrails, brainwashing institutionalization + media saturation, government subsidies to highly suspect companies which don't clearly benefit the nation, AND (maybe) the "faked" moon program is a pretty good unification theory ;).

OH!  AND, I just figured out 9-11's connection -- the neo-Cons/military are the normal suspects (if one doesn't go all the way to the Masons or even the Illuminati) ... what if the neo-Cons/military are, like Monsanto, carrying a secret and noble, but praiseless and seemingly nefarious, burden of keeping up and building up humanity's battle capabilities?!  I'm sure the poor dears are horrified by the use to which some incompetent leadership has put the resources that ought to have been carefully maintained for the first significant extraterrestrial conflict!  (The oddly successful movie Independence Day, in colorfully justifying Area 51, was perhaps, then, a carefully crafted warning by the resistance, bringing the strange bedfellows of mainline shoot-em-up, minority leadership, and geek sympathies together in subconsciously supporting the preparations against extraterrestrial invasion!)

And apparently even the Illuminati might truly have been cast unfairly as devils all this time.  They may truly have the success of the human species at heart ...

Although, as a green hippie (with no drug-addling), I still strenuously disagree with the methods the freedom fighters seem to be choosing (mass destruction and poison are pretty clearly counterproductive in the long run), and I wonder whether they have sufficient objectivity on the larger historical picture to work logically past the terror-stories they may have had whispered to them as children.  I prefer to rip them out of the ground and hope I'm leaving no roots behind (and hope the "commercial composting facility" in town actually gets hot enough to kill the darn seeds, since they consistently have enough mojo stored in even just their leaves to fully transform from a yellow bloom to a puffball even after being removed!).  Also, I heartily support the Organic Consumers Association for encouraging the domestication and eating of them, as a preferable solution to poison and an ironic reversal for the eville plans (as yet unclear but clearly not for the benefit of humans) of these invasive plants!

So there you go.  A decent unified theory of all the truly crazyass shit the government has been foisting on us (as opposed to the merely annoying but I can imagine it made sense to someone at some point).  Have I missed any significant "conspiracy theories"?

I suppose the JFK assassination.  One could toss him, the CIA, the FBI, and the mob in on either side of the dandelion equation probably. It's more fun if the "goodguys" were actually the badguys, so let's put the mob/CIA/FBI arrayed against the dandelions and desperately trying to root out (ha ha), by intelligence work and some strong-arming, the dandelion supporters in the halls of government.  JFK would then I suppose be the pretty face on the dandelion movement, but it's probably not hard to argue he didn't know he was being used.

P.S. I've disturbed myself, by the way.  In case anyone wondered.  (No, I do not believe the dandelions are *actually* any of the outrageous things I've here stated.  They are, however, apparently annoyingly well adapted to live with humans in a temperate climate, like rats, corbids, starlings, and cockroaches.)

Fb post from "I Love Reading Books," stored here with links intact to give credit

I Love Reading Books

February 2 at 5:41 PM

Shared with Public

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Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

on teleportation

Well I thought I was going to sleep but it turns out I just needed to have a three hour mostly-eyes-closed think.

Not the primary part of the think, but I think I have reasonably solved (to my satisfaction) the puzzle of teleportation.

I have spent many years mulling on the physics of the problem, figuring the answer would be along the lines of "most matter is actually space, and that is why monks could walk through walls" or "time actually exists all at once, and so time travel will mostly be a matter of learning to comprehend that truth" ... but then with that latter one comes the problem of time-space: presuming we want to time-travel and end up somewhere on the planet earth (and not, for instance, in the void of space between galaxies), one would also need to comprehend also and compensate for -- quite exactly if one wanted to actually arrive on or very close to the surface of the planet -- the insanely fast motion of the planet (and the solar system, and the galaxy) through space.

And there is the problem, as a person travelling to a new space-time where quite a bit of matter already exists, of what happens to that matter, which is not going to happily co-exist with all the new matter the person is manifesting there-then.

This problem of time-space shift of course also applies to teleportation-by-intuitive-grasp-of-the-physics.  Pretty tricky to not end up in space, real problem of what happens to the displaced matter (/which matter ends up displaced and how painful is that for the matter involved).   It's actually somewhat easier, presuming this mathematical-comprehension problem is the path to a workable solution for teleportation, to move a planet into orbit around another star -- one could theoretically work out where there was likely to be little or no space dust in the proposed new orbit -- than to move a person around "on earth."

So tonight it occurs to me that the primary problems could be solved if astral-projection/out of body experiences are a real thing (which I think they are).  Of course the normal situation is that one's mind/spirit leaves the body, either on purpose or by trauma, wanders about for some bit for whatever set of reasons, and then comes back and flows back into the body -- at least in all the cases where the person comes back to tell us about it.  Some people have cultivated a skill in this.  Some surprising-to-me people have had uncontrolled (trauma-induced) out-of-body experiences.  I don't recall ever playing this game this way myself, except once when it started to slip out and I was like "HEY" and scrabbled it back in, so I have some decent initial instinctual skills or control but am not speaking as some sort of expert.

Anyhow, I think it would be interesting if the actual key to teleportation was about astral-projection traveling to where you wanted to go, and then rejoining your body to your mind/spirit, instead of rejoining your mind/spirit to your body.  It would require some of the same mind-bend that the physics solutions to traveling or walking through solid objects require (one has to fully commit to "physical reality" being just math and energy-states, not "material" in any fundamental sense -- "there is no spoon" and all that).  

This solves the ends-up-in-space and impossible-level-of-precision problems.  And it solves the equally important problems of making sure the body arrives on (or very close to at least) the ground and in clear air (not in space already occupied by a wall, or a tree, or a person, for instance).

It doesn't really solve the matter-already-exists-here problem, and it doesn't make sense that the air would magically exchange places to where you were, since the air can't astral-project itself and in any case has no reason to know where you came from, so one might still die a very messy death, but perhaps the body would show up in some sort of expands-into-reality manner that pushes the air aside ... locally loud, no doubt (interesting that Rowling included the noise in the Harry Potter series), but (presuming it displaced instead of creating a physics paradox) the air pressure change for the volume of one person leaving or arriving would be fairly minimal in terms of damage at point of departure or arrival.

I suppose if one also mastered walking through walls, one might apparate to someplace, air-included, and then move the air out of one's body-space, like a reverse of walking through a wall.  Walk the wall out of oneself.  Same reversal-of-beliefs/understandings as the teleportation proposal, actually, just hold "reality" to be the other side of the coin from what we have been taught to believe.

Anyhow I'm fairly pleased with solving the logic of not ending up in outer space and it being an intuitive process instead of one that requires 15 supercomputers and probably still wouldn't drop a white mouse within 2000 miles of where it was meant to appear.

I have been pretty sure for a long time now that if humans ever achieve time travel or teleportation, it will be by intuitive motion through time-space and not by machine.