Flowers for Algernon
Apr. 17th, 2011 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goldkinI'm noticing a pattern in my personal journaling habits: I post here very little unless I genuinely need help. Most of my happy and squee is getting posted to other sources, like my Twitter account or various IRC haunts, so if you'd like to read my posts on happier subjects until I figure out how to properly blog them here, you'll find them there.
This one is about me, though. And, after carefully gathering evidence and working with candidate solutions over the past several months, I've hit a point where I genuinely need help.
Currently, I feel greatly privileged. Over the past year, I've pulled my life up out of the pit of unemployment and gotten re-employed as a software engineer at an institution specializing in cancer research. I'm greatly happy about this; I couldn't have picked a more compelling career for myself, even if my skillset is slightly orthogonal to what I'd like to be doing with it. No matter; this is the subject of future posts.
However, I've hit a roadblock that's preventing me from getting the work done that I'd like to. Cutting straight to the chase, it goes something like this:
My higher order mental abilities are heavily influenced by precise metabolic conditions. If I tip things just slightly out of balance -- too much salt, too much sugar, not enough water, not enough protein, not enough sleep -- I lose all but the most basic of abilities and fall quickly into survival mode. While this doesn't affect my physical coordination (indeed, my dexterity is very good, and I've always been gifted with the ability to track high numbers of objects spacially with little or no effort), I quickly lose the ability to make strategic decisions, to converse fluently, and to make any amount of sense to anyone around me except the fortunate few that are capable of connecting what I want to say with what I've actually said.
The usual symptomatology is classic aphasia, retrograde confusion, inability to process or access long term memories (that are otherwise paired with everyday thoughts and quite strong in my mind), befuddlement, and in more severe cases, corruption of sentences as I try desperately to put my thoughts together coherently. In other words, the classic symptoms for electrolyte imbalance or lack of proper nutrition, except far more severe and common than anyone I have ever met.
Survival mode, meanwhile, takes the form of extremely rapid linear thought containing information that may be wildly inaccurate. All cache misses for accuracy are completely ignored; at this stage, I'm simply belting out information to get me out of the situation and into one I have more control over, in which I will most likely be trying to figure out what my body is doing this time.
As best as I can tell, this is related to having an overzealous metabolism. I process inputs very quickly, showing the effects of substances twice as fast as most people I've known, and suffer severe shifts at levels otherwise safe for consumption. I'm outright terrified of what might happen if I abused anything other than caffeine, but fortunately I have no taste for alcohol, nicotine, or anything tending toward the illegal range of the spectrum. Score one for practical aversion to substance abuse, I guess.
I've of course talked to various doctors about this, having received results well within the normal range for the standard suite of bloodwork tests. I'm also not convinced this is necessarily a pathology: I process sugar, salt, and other substances equally quickly, with their expected results... just at greatly increased speed and linearly-increasing magnitude. This is otherwise good news, as it ties directly into the strength of my immune system and healing response, both of which are greatly above average.
As a result of the mental block, however, the best I've been able to do is take measures to control my diet. I've slowly gained some mastery over the problem, allowing me to control most of the downswings. Still, my ability to cope with less severe symptoms and the occasional miss has proven notably poor. I feel each time as if I'd personally failed to control the symptoms and, as a result, find myself resentful of my then-current state and completely embarrassed by it after the fact.
It embarrasses and frustrates me further that the swing is between normal and genius levels of the bell curve. I routinely swing between what feels like an IQ of 96 and 148, with the occasional peak as high as 168, assuming that the standard Wechsler tests actually meaningfully measure intelligence.* A swing this large has clear effects: it ruins my consistency, I trust my strategies and my work very little during the downswings, and it gives me a (highly justifiable) inferiority complex with people that are more capable of expressing mental clarity than I am. While it's absolutely fascinating that my mind works this way, it's also why I write less and less longer prose here.
So I suppose my questions are twofold. First, have any of you ever heard of this symptomatology in anyone else? My pleas for medical advice have been greatly unhelpful to diagnosing the problem, and I'd like to know if I'm looking at a severe medical condition down the road that I'm simply not aware of. My second, much more immediate question, is how you'd cope with such a handicap. Since my career and much of my social time are structured around my ability to act intelligently, I genuinely do not know how to react when I'm incapable of doing so. I feel that my strategy of reactive aversion and proactive balance is greatly lacking, yet I find myself incapable of seeing the immediate flaws. All of this is conducive to opening the question up to all of you.
I feel that in many ways, I don't have grounds to complain. I feel blessed to have my health, my intelligence, and my career very much intact, yet this last piece prevents me from operating at peak capacity. I'm also curious what you all think, sufficient to make this an open post.
For this, I will also be opening comments back up on LiveJournal. Watching the ebb and flow of conversation, it's clear that much of my audience is still there, and forcing all of you to jump through the registration process on Dreamwidth (or sign in via OpenID) just seems greatly disrespectful. So, we'll try splitting the comment thread across two locations this time, allowing for comments to sort of meander between posts.
Thanks for reading. Your understanding and advice are greatly appreciated.
---
* Note these are not actual test results. Out of respect for others, I will never reveal my real numbers in this journal, if it can be avoided.
This one is about me, though. And, after carefully gathering evidence and working with candidate solutions over the past several months, I've hit a point where I genuinely need help.
Currently, I feel greatly privileged. Over the past year, I've pulled my life up out of the pit of unemployment and gotten re-employed as a software engineer at an institution specializing in cancer research. I'm greatly happy about this; I couldn't have picked a more compelling career for myself, even if my skillset is slightly orthogonal to what I'd like to be doing with it. No matter; this is the subject of future posts.
However, I've hit a roadblock that's preventing me from getting the work done that I'd like to. Cutting straight to the chase, it goes something like this:
My higher order mental abilities are heavily influenced by precise metabolic conditions. If I tip things just slightly out of balance -- too much salt, too much sugar, not enough water, not enough protein, not enough sleep -- I lose all but the most basic of abilities and fall quickly into survival mode. While this doesn't affect my physical coordination (indeed, my dexterity is very good, and I've always been gifted with the ability to track high numbers of objects spacially with little or no effort), I quickly lose the ability to make strategic decisions, to converse fluently, and to make any amount of sense to anyone around me except the fortunate few that are capable of connecting what I want to say with what I've actually said.
The usual symptomatology is classic aphasia, retrograde confusion, inability to process or access long term memories (that are otherwise paired with everyday thoughts and quite strong in my mind), befuddlement, and in more severe cases, corruption of sentences as I try desperately to put my thoughts together coherently. In other words, the classic symptoms for electrolyte imbalance or lack of proper nutrition, except far more severe and common than anyone I have ever met.
Survival mode, meanwhile, takes the form of extremely rapid linear thought containing information that may be wildly inaccurate. All cache misses for accuracy are completely ignored; at this stage, I'm simply belting out information to get me out of the situation and into one I have more control over, in which I will most likely be trying to figure out what my body is doing this time.
As best as I can tell, this is related to having an overzealous metabolism. I process inputs very quickly, showing the effects of substances twice as fast as most people I've known, and suffer severe shifts at levels otherwise safe for consumption. I'm outright terrified of what might happen if I abused anything other than caffeine, but fortunately I have no taste for alcohol, nicotine, or anything tending toward the illegal range of the spectrum. Score one for practical aversion to substance abuse, I guess.
I've of course talked to various doctors about this, having received results well within the normal range for the standard suite of bloodwork tests. I'm also not convinced this is necessarily a pathology: I process sugar, salt, and other substances equally quickly, with their expected results... just at greatly increased speed and linearly-increasing magnitude. This is otherwise good news, as it ties directly into the strength of my immune system and healing response, both of which are greatly above average.
As a result of the mental block, however, the best I've been able to do is take measures to control my diet. I've slowly gained some mastery over the problem, allowing me to control most of the downswings. Still, my ability to cope with less severe symptoms and the occasional miss has proven notably poor. I feel each time as if I'd personally failed to control the symptoms and, as a result, find myself resentful of my then-current state and completely embarrassed by it after the fact.
It embarrasses and frustrates me further that the swing is between normal and genius levels of the bell curve. I routinely swing between what feels like an IQ of 96 and 148, with the occasional peak as high as 168, assuming that the standard Wechsler tests actually meaningfully measure intelligence.* A swing this large has clear effects: it ruins my consistency, I trust my strategies and my work very little during the downswings, and it gives me a (highly justifiable) inferiority complex with people that are more capable of expressing mental clarity than I am. While it's absolutely fascinating that my mind works this way, it's also why I write less and less longer prose here.
So I suppose my questions are twofold. First, have any of you ever heard of this symptomatology in anyone else? My pleas for medical advice have been greatly unhelpful to diagnosing the problem, and I'd like to know if I'm looking at a severe medical condition down the road that I'm simply not aware of. My second, much more immediate question, is how you'd cope with such a handicap. Since my career and much of my social time are structured around my ability to act intelligently, I genuinely do not know how to react when I'm incapable of doing so. I feel that my strategy of reactive aversion and proactive balance is greatly lacking, yet I find myself incapable of seeing the immediate flaws. All of this is conducive to opening the question up to all of you.
I feel that in many ways, I don't have grounds to complain. I feel blessed to have my health, my intelligence, and my career very much intact, yet this last piece prevents me from operating at peak capacity. I'm also curious what you all think, sufficient to make this an open post.
For this, I will also be opening comments back up on LiveJournal. Watching the ebb and flow of conversation, it's clear that much of my audience is still there, and forcing all of you to jump through the registration process on Dreamwidth (or sign in via OpenID) just seems greatly disrespectful. So, we'll try splitting the comment thread across two locations this time, allowing for comments to sort of meander between posts.
Thanks for reading. Your understanding and advice are greatly appreciated.
---
* Note these are not actual test results. Out of respect for others, I will never reveal my real numbers in this journal, if it can be avoided.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-19 04:55 am (UTC)