Planning is a massive hurdle for me. Organizing my ideas and thoughts is hard on my cognition. And yet, this society wants me to adhere to their rigid and rigorous rules.
I'm expected to be methodical not only in a workplace, but also my creative works. As much as I tried to, I keep on having debilitating decision paralysis which prevents me from making major progress in my work.
As for my creative hobbies, I just draw and write anything spontaneously. I'd draw plants if I want to at the moment, and I'd write down my current painful emotions and trauma that I've been experiencing every once in a while.
I'm 'freestyling' this blog post as I write. Letting myself go without internal or external interference makes me feel at home with myself, with my own cognitive skills and spiritual energy. There's no judgement on how the end result looks and sounds like. No one's there to clown on me for my natural way of creating or how I feel about everything.
Spontaneous activities feels truly relaxing and freeing. If only there's a way to harness that in my potential major art projects or even in a workplace...
I realized that creativity is best drawn from spontaneity and authenticity. This is evident in freestyling rap and hip-hop culture at large. Rappers and artists do not care about what others think of them or their work/performance. What truly matters is speaking their truth and inspiring people. And that is what I am striving for.
Last year, I was having good progress of changing my habits for my physical and mental health, such as limiting social media or YouTube and eating healthier foods. As a result, my body was changing in positive ways.
But one outcome that I noticed is that my brain became more sensitive to noise or other sources of stress. I realized that I was desensitized for so many years until recently because I was put on sedative medications and I was having an unhealthy lifestyle. During that time, I craved for a lot of stimulation from the internet, hence my chronic phone addiction. And I thought of everything else as painfully boring, so I was trying to avoid them.
Now my brain seemed to be in a much better state. But this also led me to have an aversion to noisy people, crowds, and environments, as well as over-stimulating online content such as popular YouTube videos. On the other hand, I find myself enjoying relaxing activities and being in quiet places a lot more. I've been enjoying reading some books, and I no longer had the urge to stimulate myself with pointless media. My attention span has also improved, which means I can focus on slow-paced tasks and media so much better than before.
I think this state of mind is a lot better than the previous one, and I'm happy for it :)
You are having this fear of not knowing anything and everything.
And you want to find answers as to why terrible things have been happening to you right now.
So you seek sources of information, either from a person, a group, or a piece of media.
You begin to cling these sources of information and interpret them as ‘fact’, as they can appeal to your desire for truth as well as your emotions.
You start preaching these ideas to others, and often revolve your entire life to said ideas.
But when those ideologies reveal their flaws and start to affect you in negative ways, you flee from them.
And then you’re back to where you were before...
not knowing anything and everything.
Now, you start to questions your previous beliefs, and want a new perspective to explain reality ‘better’.
You start to consume information of topics such as ‘self-improvement’, ‘religious values’ ‘anarchism’, ‘conspiracy theories’, ‘extremist ideologies’, ‘nihilism’, etc...
You go from one subject or topic to another, yet there’s still no resolution to your questions nor your grim circumstances that propelled you to search for answers in the first place.
When will you find ‘truth’?
When will you find ‘happiness’?
When will this vicious cycle of not finding answers that you’re seeking end?
During my childhood, I was constantly traumatized by the sound of the fire alarm in the old apartments that I used to live in. The alarms were both abrupt and loud, make them disruptive and terrifying to my sensitive autistic mind.
The worst part was that most of these alarms were not due to fire at all, but rather triggered by paranoid and bluntly stupid people who think they were having a crisis when it’s just minor issues like the laundry machine acting odd.
There was even one time when some woman was cooking food (probably curry) which emitted so much fucking smoke, and she even left the door open! That caused the smoke detectors to go off hard, and then the fire alarms...
If it weren't for moronic people abusing the fire alarm systems, I won’t have this much sensory trauma throughout my early childhood.
Those experiences has led me and my family to move to a house instead of another ghetto apartment. I was begging to them to do this for the sake of my sanity. Now I’ve been living in suburban homes ever since.
Recently, I was having a conversation with someone about the house affordability crisis worldwide, and the thought about moving to a modern apartment or condo as a cheaper alternative to a suburban home, and if the alarm systems there are less harsh than in the past. They argued that even if the alarms are harsh, it’s still ‘necessary’ because people – especially deaf people – NEED to hear them in order to be aware that there’s a potential fire in the building. But I argued that there are many sensitive people like me who cannot live in places like that, and architects who forces these kind of environments to everyone is wrong.
I just don’t want an alarm that randomly goes off all the fucking time for no good reason. It’s fine if it there’s an alarm due to actual smoke or carbon monoxide, but other than that, that thing needs to keep it’s mouth shut when I’m living in the house or apartment.
My family member often thinks that I’m ‘overthinking’ about things like the WiFi when we were having problems with it, or something philosophical or political about the future. Despite them knowing that I’m autistic and tend to have hyper-fixations sometimes, they still don’t know the full scope of my patterns. In my opinion, being a deep thinker is a good thing, because I have more time to think about many things while others have less time due to their social lives or other factors.
The whole 'Dopamine Detox' is absolutely ineffective. You can't just go cold turkey and expect the process to go smoothly. Realistically, your brain needs time to adjust to the changes one by one.
Incrementally reduce your phone use and slowly adapt alternative habits. It may take weeks or even months, but you will get there. Just be patient :)
Enabling ads in relaxing music mixes and visual video content is unacceptable. The presence of ads though-out a video destroys the purpose of delivering an experience that’s meant to be soothing and not be disruptive using loud sounds and fast-paced movements.
Either it’s YouTube that’s forcing ads into those videos, or creators deliberately enabled ads in their videos to reap the ad revenue. Either way, FUCK you both for doing this shit. And I will NEVER buy YouTube Music for an ad-free experience ever again. I should not be paying money for distraction free content (I'm looking at you Spotify and SoundCloud). It's criminal.
I generally prefer to read the articles or written lessons instead of watching a video. When I read, there's no other stimuli present like audio, so I become more focused.
When I view new information, especially more complex ones, my brain works very hard to process them. This makes the learning experience uncomfortable and exhausting.
So what I do is read the text little by little first, and then reread them after a certain period of time (days or weeks). Every time I review text, it feels easier to process the information than the previous time. The more comfortable I feel processing things, the better I learn them.
Whenever I think of a bittersweet topic, my train of thought often rapidly go from one sad topic to another, and eventually themes of the nature of existence, and death v_v .
I shed some tears every time afterwords :'( , and it’s uncomfortable. It even happens when I was having peaceful or happy thoughts beforehand.
I should have stuck to positive thoughts, but I just cannot do that. I'm unable to do that sometimes. But... is it healthy? Does this make me more self-conscious, and feel more empathetic towards others?
