Reflexions on being normal

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Physical exercise, however complex, rich, and varied, would never be a cure, because AS arises from genetic difference, but perhaps AS brains are particularly in need of daily "reconnection" with the body? Perhaps increasing inactivity in modern society is having a disabling effect on people with AS brains.

I am most interested in how you became an NT fernando, I mean what did you do exactly to get this new life? It can't just be a bit of exercize.

I don't want to put a damper on your new found freedom, but do you think that instead of Aspergers, it might have been Social Anxiety Disorder or another condition you had?

if becoming NT improved your singing... it didn't improve your grammar.

I don't think I could ever become a NT. I think that I have gleaned enough information from watching people around me to pass for a NT in a crisis situation (if there ever is such a thing) but I'd just attribute that to getting smart enough to fake it. I don't think I'll ever really be "normal" in that sense of the word.

- I stopped lining up objects a few months ago. I didn't notice when. I know that i was still lining up things a couple of months into the cure, it must have faded around may or june.

- Pretend play appeared about 4 months into the cure, it's likely that it was there before but i hadn't noticed cause i'm quite old and don't play anymore. I discovered that the lack of pretend play in aspies is a direct result of the inability to recognize emotions, to read faces. As an aspie, when i saw a toy jumping around all i could see was a plastic figure jumping around and it seemed pointless. Now as an NT, when i make a toy jump around i see happiness, and if I make it walk slowly it looks sad, i make it walk fast and it looks mad, and that creation of emotions is quite fun.

- I keep throwing away old stuff from my room, more and more stuff as months go by, stuff that "aspie me" was gathering, that I know I'm never gonna use now. Deleting lots of files from my hard drive.

- It is likely that my allergies are fading away because of my therapy, but i know nothing of allergies, so I'm gonna have to wait until other researchers report on this, if that ever happens. If that turns out to be the case then my therapy cures all symptoms except the mirror neurons thing. I had a case of eczema that started small but in the end had taken most of my arm and was starting to appear in the other. It is now gone.

- My Myers-Briggs personality type moved from the INTP i had in 2006, before any contact with the cure, to ISTJ and judging from the impulses i feel, it is moving towards a ESFJ, making me the polar opposite of my aspie INTP. To put it more graphically using Lost characters, i moved from a Daniel Faraday into a Sawyer.

- I have a hard time making sense out of numeric tables and even graphs.

- I have developed a peculiar fighting style that seems to be a direct effect of my therapy. I use my fingers a lot. My fingers are my weapons, i keep them spread and attack/defend with them. My fingers have become strong, i've found myself squeezing the other person's hand too hard during handshakes.

- I think enough time has passed to say with certainty that i don't have nightmares anymore. My mind still creates dark dreams, where i'm alone at night in a dark and magic place and great monsters come to attack me. Before the cure i would panic and run for my life and that would make it a nightmare, but now i stand and fight.

Do I behave like that in the real world? In short term situations yes, but once i have a chance to think things thru i behave like an aspie, i guess it's because i still have 26 years of aspie memories in me.

- I walk slower now.

- Procrastination is inversed. If i have a list of things to do in a day, as an aspie i would start with the less physical, more mental ones, which meant procrastination of the rest. Nowadays I start with the more active ones and procrastinate the mental ones, like reading.

I used to be a night person that sleeps all morning, now i'm a morning person. I used to spend between 2 to 4 hours thinking in my bed before getting up everyday, now i spend 1.

- I experience emotions much stronger, last time i got angry i reached new levels of anger i never knew before.

- I need to go out every now and then. I am not capable of being indoors alone for too long. Its like my batteries drain out and when i go out they recharge and i come back home with enough power for two or three days. I... gotta... get... job... dammit...

- I made a girl laugh at the supermarket. And i wasn't even trying, she just asked questions and my brain fed me funny replies. Never in my aspie years did i make a stranger laugh. Makes me wonder what would i be capable of if i was actually trying.

- I watched a few scary movies and i confirmed the "i don't get scared anymore" thing.

- The way i run changed, and i enjoy running like that. Maybe i should explore sports.

- On august 11 I started experimenting with self-hypnosis many hours a day. I felt like i was slowly returning to my old aspie ways, i even found myself rocking back and forth one day. I stopped it a week later, took the cure again. Something interesting happened during that week, my eczema returned very strong. I have heard that allergies can be indirectly related to psychological issues but this was very direct, it disappeared again by the end of the week as i resumed taking the cure. This deserves to be researched by someone wiser and more resourceful than me.

- It has become evident that there are many "antidotes" to my cure, many ways you can go back to aspie mode: there's the "official" antidote, which is nothing else than the inverse of the cure, then there's hypnotism as i just found out, you can also ride the next trigger event or you can go some place where you were autistic, surround yourself with people in front of whom you were autistic and let that environment push you back to your old ways.

- I got a glimpse of what it's like to feel lonely, to wake up in a quiet place and not to like it.

- I started this thread thinking i was gonna run out of things to report in a few months, but i didn't. Changes keep happening. Meanwhile i haven't been aspie for half a year and i'm forgetting what it felt like, its getting hard to compare "new me" with "old me".

- 6 months into the cure, the fading away of my aspie habits is like 90% done. There are some former habits i had that now i find repulsive to do. Like if i lined up objects i would be like "why i'm I doing this?". The few times i go back to some aspie habit i get quickly distracted, by anything.

- I have been experiencing pain in my neck ever since i got cured. I didn't report it because i couldn't believe it was related to the cure, maybe it was the chair or something else. But now i know it was the process of my neck adjusting to a new posture. The pain lasted about 9 months, started right after i got cured and it stopped around october 2008.

- Six months into the cure I finally cleared my room to the point where the back door is open-able again. I finally understood what people were talking about when they say that my room smells bad. The owner of that room is now dead and i took over his life. I'm trying to carry out his plans, all the things he wanted to do, but i don't enjoy them as he would have. By february 2009 i don't feel that way anymore, the things i'm doing now are my own plans, but i still feel like someone died and left me his room. The way his plans were left unfinished... was just like when someone dies.

- I try to be noticed now, in the past i tried to be invisible, to hide, now i'm happy when people comes home.

- Something wicked is happening to my memories. It's like my mind has gotten used to me being an NT and now it is rejecting my aspie memories. The "me" from my memories is starting to behave like an NT. I sometimes try to force a memory where i'm aspie, but i don't even remember what being aspie felt like anymore. The best example is what is happening to my memories of being bullied. I was always the weak intellectual kid, 3 years younger than my peers, who got beat up daily just for fun. Now if i try to remember those moments my mind "creates" a memory where the situation, timing, environment is all the same, but now i am the bully and i'm beating up a smaller kid. Even if i try to remember me as the bullied kid, my mind represents me fighting back, instead of just defending myself as i know i used to. I am now sure that memories are not stored like movies, they are interpreted by the brain based on stuff from past and present mixed up.

- I'm slowly learning when its my turn to speak in conversation, i don't interrupt as often as i used to.

- Pretending to be aspie is getting more difficult every time.

- By mid 2008 i started reading outloud and counting with my fingers, things that i didn't do when i was aspie and that are normal for kids, before they learn to read and count in their mind. It could be argued that this is proof that i am dumbing down because of the cure, or regressing to childhood level of skills, but i don't see it like that, what happens from my point of view is that my mind and my body are now more conected than they used to and whenever my mind is doing something, my body wants to participate. If my mind is reading words, my body wants to speak them, if my mind is counting, my fingers want to count too. I guess this is how body language arises anyway.

- I am slowly reaching the opposite end of the aspie obsessions, now i get bored and drop subjects quick. I don't worry about perfection anymore. I don't stare at girls as long as before. Music is the only thing i still like with the same intensity as before the cure.

Conclusion: External happiness is hard to come by while you are going thru a personality change, until you get used to the new you.

- The pressure of being responsible for all things around me is overwhelming me and then i remember that i didn't feel responsible for anything before the cure. Back in aspie days i would just depend on others for my food or to keep everything around me in order, now i feel it is all my responsibility, i have to make sure everything keeps running and it is stressing me.

- I feel as if i have grown up. I remember my aspie days as if it was a childhood and being NT feels like being an adult. Getting cured very much feels like growing up.

- My storyteller skills are still very poor compared to natural born NTs.

- Body language is the coolest thing once you know how to use it. If i want a conversation to end i don't have to make up an excuse, i just move my arm a certain way, move my eyes a certain way and the other person automatically knows that i want the conversation to end and starts saying his goodbyes.

- Allergies are a far away memory now.

- I find it easy to cry these days. I used to have one song that could make me cry, now i have many. I cry at most movies, even comedies. I can cry at any love song.

- There's another thing i've been feeling for months but i didn't know how to word it until now. When i was an aspie and i wanted to say that something is hard to find i would say "this is hard to find" now i would say something like "you might as well look for water in a desert". I suppose this is the opposite of what i call "aspie speak", which is when an aspie has a weird way of wording things, for example instead of asking "what's aggro?" an aspie feels an impulse to say "what is this aggro that you speak of?". I think this proves that grammar is wired into the brain.

- I've been rewatching movies. I enjoy romantic scenes now. Also i appreciate better the acting, now that i understand the little clues they give with their faces, their body language. Undestanding facial expressions makes for a better experience at movie watching. A good example are the ghosts from Pacman. When i was aspie i saw them as mechanical units that do a 180 degrees turn whenever i eat the special dot. Now when i eat that special dot they look scared, they run away from me. I sense their fear. I didn't see fear in them when i was aspie, just mathematical behavior.

- In aspie days i could stand very low temperatures with just a shirt. Now I get an awful feeling whenever my body gets cold and it forces me to go fetch more clothes. This is proof of how deep the rewiring of my brain was. It was this new feeling what lead me to heat theory which is now the official explanation for the cure

- There's another new feeling that the cure brought me, this one i have never seen put into words, it has no name as far as i know. It feels like an electric current on the skin of my entire head. It is there sometimes, when i'm feeling emotions. I think it helps make emotions feel stronger. At first i felt it mostly during ejaculations and i didn't relate it to the cure for months, i just thought it must be part of aging, i imagined that my body was deteriorating somehow. But now months have past and i have learned how to use it. Turns out that this is also a kind of "sixth sense" because it also fires up when people close to me are feeling strong emotions. I only felt it twice on 2008: The first time, i managed to anger a stranger on the street and as i walked past him i felt a sort of heat in a circular area on the skin of my head, the area that was closest to him. It was as if he was irradiating something and the skin on the back of my head was detecting it. The second time, at a mall an old woman was making funny remarks in the queue to the counter and she turned to look at me, laughing and i felt a sort of electric feeling on the entire side of my face that was closest to her.

I feel that sort of stuff on the skin of my head frecuently when alone, like i said before, it appears that emotions bring it on. It's like it detects my own emotions the same way it can pick those of others. This must be essential in helping emotions be spread among groups of NTs. I'm looking forward to experiment with it once i get a job. I suspect all NTs have this sense but they might not be aware of it.

- I don't string together long chains of thoughts like i used to, now my thoughts are kind of shorter. I discovered that i think better if i write down my thoughts and then read them. I don't think in pictures anymore. It disappeared slowly thru the months. By october seeing images between my thoughts was a weird thing, like a scar from a past. I think in concepts now. I now understand what i did to my wall in august 2006. Lately i have found that it helps me a lot to see diagrams, conceptual maps, think with paper. I designed the cure early august 2006, i started writing on my wall in mid august 2006. All this time i thought it was a coincidence. Now i realize that what i was writing on my wall was a bunch of words, representing concepts so that i could later read them and look for relations between them. I was already starting to think the NT way. I did my wall because the cure was already changing my thinking preferences, there was no coincidence. Only now i'm starting to realize how cured i managed to get on the august 2006 period.

- I have experienced many episodes of stuttering or saying the wrong words. It happens because i no longer plan my lines before aproaching someone. Sometimes it's not even a stuttering but a complete silence, luckily i'm somewhat good at body language now so i always get by. This should fade away once i start working and talking to people daily.

- What i started suspecting on november became clear by december: i am turning into an alpha male. I am becoming very competitive, i like to put down my opponents and remind them of the times i've beat them. This was the first symptom of alpha maleness and is the reason why i consider that december 2008 was my point of maximum normality. By then i only had two remaining symptoms of Asperger syndrome: The motor clumsiness and the hand flapping. The motor clumsiness did fade away in january 2009 and it was amazing how quickly it went away once it started, amazing considering it had remained there almost a year into the cure. The hand flapping consists of sudden bursts of energy that cause me to flap my hands over my face or clap faster than NTs can even when they try to imitate me. This happens more often when i'm happy or cold and it is still happening, with the same frecuency and intensity as it has all my life. It seemed to stop for a while back in january 2008, which is leading me to the theory that it is not part of Asperger syndrome directly... i think i know how to make it stop...

- I can't stand the taste of beer/wine/energy drinks since late 2,008. It may not be related to the cure.

- I've lost 10 pounds. All my adult life I stood at 140 pounds and now i am down to 130. Since it's pretty much a fact that the cure is related to heat it is very likely that those 10 pounds became heat and radiated away.

- I first thought up heat theory on november 7, 2008 and completed it on january 27, 2009 and i consider it now a proven fact. That's less than three months for a world class scientific theory and i was very normal by the time i started it, so i think it's pretty safe to conclude that i didn't lose any intelligence during the cure, i just find it hard to see simulations moving in my mind.

- I have a job now, i started today and i will make a final update to this thread in a few months, about my first social encounters. Up until now i have been alone. I'm going back to aspie mode by mid 2009, then i'll try to get diagnosed, then taking the cure again. It's all... part of... the plan...

"THE EMOTIONAL DROUGHT"

- By early february i started to feel a thing when i was talking to someone, it felt like an itch inside my brain. It was the first glimpse of what would later become the emotional drought.

- As time goes by i keep building up more and more memories of me behaving NT and i have discovered those memories are essential to move even further.

- I took a few rides in a rollercoaster. I didn't get that awful feeling i used to get all my life, but i still didn't enjoy it, it would take a few more rides for my brain to stop expecting that bad feeling. It seems that when an experience gives you a feeling a few times, your brain learns to expect that feeling and starts reacting when it knows the experience is about to happen again. This has a lot to do with the emotional drought.

- I have become more resilient to the common cold, it ends quicker. This further backs up heat theory.

- My first three days at work went kind of well, i was neurologically and behaviorally an NT. But as days went by i started feeling something i had felt before, the thing i used to refer to as "spent social batteries". At first we were all strangers so not much interaction happened, but once they got to know each other they started behaving more emotional and i started falling apart. I kept performing my exercise the whole time, which proves that the mind is more relevant than the body when it comes to entering a neurostate. By thursday i was starting to isolate, by friday i think i didn't speak the whole day. I spent the weekend with people, so by monday 23 i was even more spent, i was behaviorally autistic. There was a meeting and everyone had chairs but me. Later they all got phones installed but me. They started walking away from me to have their small talks. I couldn't stand it and went home early. And as i was driving home the most amazing thing happened: I reached monotone voice. The neurological symptoms were appearing, i was dropping into real autism.

The last time my voice changed, it happened while i slept, this one happened in broad daylight. My voice returned to normal by the time i got home, but I did enough testing in the car and i confirmed my theory: Humans create their voice by vibrating their chest to produce low tones and their skull to produce high tones. Aspies can't vibrate their skull, so they only have the low range of tones available to them, producing that which has come to be known as "monotone voice".

As i observed a year ago, the voice in my head (my inner monologue and aural imagination) became monotone at the same time as my physical voice, not before and not after. Same thing minutes later when my voice returned to normal.

Something more important happened in the car, another confirmation of heat theory: i felt a coldness in the lower frontal side of my brain while monotone voice lasted, located slightly above my nose.

The cure took me back into NTness after that episode, but trigger events kept happening and i kept behaving autistically.

- Those days I discovered that if you are NT and you drop into autism, people will start bullying you and rejecting you that same instant. A month later i made a cool discovery: the inverse holds true, if you go NT in a snap people will start treating you like an NT immediately, no need to slowly gain their trust or stuff like that, people are very mechanical beings.

- Conversations get complicated because i have nothing to say about myself. I don't know all those little details you are supposed to know about yourself. I can say what "old me" liked, but that's pretty much irrelevant.

- By mid march i started missing my coworkers when the weekend arrived. I didn't know what missing someone feels like, until now.

- After a month at work i had felt so many trigger events that i started getting the hang of it. I learned to feel it coming, it's kind of like a pressure in the brain, as if it was shrinking cause air had started pumping into the skull. And so i learned to stop it when it starts.

A trigger event is a strong emotion felt when you realize you are not part of the group, when "us" becomes "them". This emotion is about feeling scared, inferior, isolated, alien. It's a line of depressive thoughts. It can be neutralized by simply thinking of anything else other than how different they are from me.

- Something bad happened by late march, i called it the emotional drought. I spent a week laughing with my coworkers and after that i couldn't laugh anymore. My mind could understand the jokes and my mouth would go thru the postures of laughing but my brain refused to participate and i would feel a slight pain in the top center of the brain. It felt as if my brain was trying to do something it wasn't designed to do. I can't laugh at jokes from the radio either, i can only laugh at mine, my imagination is still funny.

There seemed to be two types of funny things, some made me laugh and some gave me the pain. Turns out that the kind of stuff i find funny has changed. There were many things that made me laugh when i was autistic and now i don't find them funny anymore. The problem is that some part of my brain didn't know about that change and was still expecting to laugh at such subjects by force of habit, and forcing the laugh is what brought on the pain. As months went by my brain learned which things are funny and which aren't. The pain can still happen but my brain learned to avoid it, i learned which things make "new me" laugh.

- It was at the deep end of the emotional drought that for the first time in my life i wished i had someone to share my feelings with.

- I don't enjoy autistic activities anymore. I posted about this before, a year ago, about how the old things weren't fun anymore, but back then i would keep doing them anyway, just for habit's sake,but now i have finally stopped doing them and my life became empty cause i haven't found new things to fill those voids.

On april 6, payday, i crashed hard, when i found for sure that my old ways of spending money didn't make me happy anymore.

- Words just flow out of my mouth without me having to think them up. It's all automatic. At first i would stop and not dare to say things, but now i just let my inner self say what he pleases. I think most normal people live on autopilot like this, which would explain what i described above about them reacting immediately to changes in my personality, how mechanical they are.

- I write a lot more now. Unlike my previous updates, this one is but a small cut of all i wrote these last months and it's still the longest post i've ever made.

- By mid april things were getting better again and the end of trigger events happened: when i'm left out of something, instead of sinking into thoughts of inferiority, i get up and demand to know why was i left out. Such behavior is sure to keep me away from the trigger events emotion for good, so i decided it was ok to end this phase, it was time to test the antidote

- Before the antidote i did one last test: i tasted beer. The awful flavor i was feeling a few months ago is gone and i still don't know if it was related to the cure.

"I AM MYSELF AGAIN"

- World first testing of the antidote began Saturday 18, April 2009, up until then the existence of an antidote had been little more than a theory.

- Trigger events started happening again and in Friday 24, i had a massive one that got me all the way back into autism. All these symptoms returned within hours of the trigger event (in the order i noticed them):
-- Not coming up with things to say to people
-- Sensory issues (touch)
-- Sensory issues (taste) <-- Food tastes soooooo much better in autistic mode.
-- Monotone voice
-- Motor clumsiness
-- Avoid eye contact
-- Lost that electric feeling on the surface of my head
-- Lost empathy, which was nice
-- Violent sexual fantasies are doing the trick again
-- Strong impulse to daydream
-- Procrastination

Thinking in pictures didn't return, so i consider it not part of autism but an adaptation to having lived in autistic mode a long time.

- Monotone voice is awful, at first i didn't notice it until i started testing for it, but after that it felt like it wasn't my voice, i felt as if i had some device attached to my mouth that was making it's own voice instead of mine.

- Like a long time prisoner who gets thrown back in jail, i went back to the place where everything made sense, my habits, the things in my room, they all made sense again. I hadn't been so happy this year like i was that day and i said: "I am myself again".

- I woke up NT on saturday 25. As strongly autistic as i was the day before, i couldn't make it last.

- Some of the symptoms of autism reappeared on wednesday 29 and this time they lasted beyond the night, but i lost them by thursday afternoon. I was getting slight headaches and the pain in my neck returned but this time it was stronger and it disappeared quicker (days instead of months).

- My skin started feeling different. The deep pressure thing appeared.

- I regained the ability to discern the smallest sounds in a song. I didn't notice i had lost it, but music definitely sounds better in autistic mode.

- I feel better when walking the streets now, i feel calm. I feel as if all humans were trees and i'm the only person in the world. A universe of one. In NT mode i was always looking at people.

- By early may my autistic habits were returning and my opinions and tastes became those of an autistic person. The neurological symptoms would return for a few hours a day and then disappear. I'm sure i could have made them stay for good, had this phase lasted but a little bit longer.

- I still mantain that all human brains are capable of implementing autism, but i no longer think the antidote can do this alone. It would require the engineering of a series of situations that i'm not evil enough to talk about. For practical purposes i think even autistic people who take the cure won't make it back to autism if they've been out of it for more than a year. The antidote needs help from mental emotions and autism is too unattractive to justify the effort to artificially cause such emotions on a human.

- My autism had been giving me a lot of bad moments at work and on may 7, it got to the point where i had to leave early cause i couldn't stand it anymore. I was going to quit the next day because of all the social issues the antidote was bringing me. I wanted to start over at someother place or just lie in my room for another year. But then i realized i had another option... "NT me" could deal with this... All the things that were hurting me so much, don't hurt him at all...

"THE ALPHA MALE"

- Late on may 7 i started taking the cure again.

- My temperature went back to 99.1 a few hours after the cure, it kept steady at 98.2 all the time i was taking the antidote. (oral thermometer. ear thermometers are closer to what i want to measure but those are more evil than me ).

- On friday 15 innerchanges started happening. I like how this matches perfectly with the timeframe of march 2008. It seems the cure causes inner changes a week after started, if done properly of course. Also i've noticed it takes three days of the cure to start feeling different, relaxed, confident.

- My words come out in a bossy style. Just like autistic people find it hard to come up with nice things to say in conversation, i find it hard to word my sentences in unbossy ways. Thankfully no one seems to hate it

- I find it hard to see all possible future layouts of a chess board. But on the other side i now see chess as a strategic game.

- By mid may i finally realized how much i hate every woman in the world, for being everybody else's girlfriends but mine, and how much that hate has been driving my behavior for years. I cried hard that day, i was screaming, i'd never cried like that before. I have many traumas to deal with before i can enter society.

The hatred for girls disappeared after that crying episode. I don't understand how or why, but i guess psychologists could explain it, this falls well into their domain. My cure is a purely neurological procedure, psychology is left untouched. Everybody has psychological issues, all their life, but they can live with them because they make sense in their lives, their lifestyles caused them and their lifestyles sustain them. I can't live with mine because they belong to someone else, a man that doesn't exist anymore. His psychological issues collide with my personality every few minutes.

- By late may i started sleeping on my back, i used to sleep on my side in autistic days and all the way thru the cure until now. My ribs started aching in the morning, it was like the neck pain of last year and it faded away in about three months.

- I am worried about the nutritional implications of performing my exercise. All that heat must be coming from somewhere. Also, this hasn't become permanent yet but sometimes i use all possible muscles when i'm doing something, like for opening a door i tense my entire arm and upper body. I guess this is why alpha males give the impression of being stronger. When i was autistic i would use the least possible muscles in every activity. This reinforces my belief that alpha males consume more energy than autists.

- I now ask for help immediately when i find a problem, i could stop and think and maybe solve it by myself, but the idea of hearing someone else's opinion attracts me so much. It probably gives the impression that i can't think for myself. It's a candidate to be one of the first NT behaviors i'm gonna have to fight against.

- I feel like the Tom Hanks character in the movie Big, there's so many things new for me i wanna try, but my body is so old.

- My self esteem finally went up by late june. It went up in a single push, then it was down again and for many days it was sometimes up, sometimes down, there's no middle ground. By mid july it stabilized on high.

- I got a glimpse of what it's like to be pushed to the top of the pecking order. When i behave alpha malish, people expect me to take the best things, and when i tell them to take it themselves, they feel like they're doing something bad.

- On Saturday 20, june 2009 i had my first real NT to NT conversation, with emotions and all. It happened again twice the following week and many many times after that. I think i've reached the point where i could approach people and chat, but i want it to happen by instincts, not by me making an effort. I don't do efforts, i only do the cure and see what happens. If i made efforts i would be messing with my experiment and then i wouldn't know what the cure does and what i did by effort.

- I still have the routines symptom of autism, very strong. It might have started to fade away on june when i started wanting to try new foods, or in july when i started feeling an impulse to walk new paths, but it's hard to say for sure.

- Girls run away from me now, literally, as soon as they notice me they get up and walk for the exit, sometimes they just turn and walk away from me, sometimes they look for something to do so they can avoid me. It's weird. I know i'm not qualified to assess if this is an effect of the cure since it's been years since i was fully autistic and i've forgotten what everything was like, but i'm pretty sure something has changed here. And it is relevant because until now i thought that the changes brought by the cure were internal, stuff that nobody could see, but this one can only be explained by external changes in my appearance (notice that i'm still wearing clothes i already owned five years ago... same haircut).

- Bad color combinations look awful to me now. I feel like a clown if something i wear doesn't match.

- I love spicy food now. This has to do with how insensitive i have become to all five senses. At first whenever i bought pizza, ice cream, burgers, whatever, the taste was dull and i thought well, this one was bad, next one will be good. But after it happened time after time after time, i realized it is me who's changed, i don't get good feelings from food anymore. Pizza will never taste good again. I have to live with that knowledge.

- I am still a very good programmer, i did lose some abilities but i got new ones added too.

- By mid july the emotional drought came back, this time it's happening about anger too, i expect to get angry at something, but then my brain doesn't generate the anger. The things i get angry about have changed.

Also, on the laughter side i have reached the complement of the previous drought: i lost the ability to laugh at my own funny thoughts and i get the pain in my brain when i try to do it. The bright side is that thanks to this i now spend less time thinking, which caused my hand flapping to fade away, proving my theory that hand flapping was not a direct symptom of autism, but a side effect of spending too much time thinking.

Without my funny thoughts... will i depend on others for happiness from now on? We'll see. Final update coming up, late April 2,010.

"the past is gone but something may be found to take it's place"

The future has become uncertain so I'm adding this update now that i can and i don't know if it will be the last one.

MAJOR THEMES THIS SEASON:

ON ALPHA MALENESS:
I got to a point (mid 2009) when most of the changes i was getting were unwanted. I was becoming too confident, i trust people too much. My new self wants to dress nicely, but I don't want to worry so much about clothes. I eat very fast now, and it's very uncomfortable. I hate how impatient i have become and i'm having trouble dealing with this, as i spend my time jumping from activity to activity too quick. But anyway, after a few months you always get used to the changes and embrace them as they make more and more sense in the new lifestyle you go developing.

Walking like an alpha male, with my arms pulled back and away from my body and my hands sometimes tensed like claws, was one of those weird changes. It started happening in June, for brief moments, and back then i was liking it because it felt awesome... but i wouldn't dare do it in front of people. By July it was happening too often and i still tried to avoid it cause i felt others would laugh at me if they saw it, but i was losing that battle. By August it started feeling like the right thing to do and i gained confidence by the fact that no one ever laughed at my new walk. By September it had become invisible to me, i don't notice it or think about it, i just walk.

My self esteem is now ridiculously high. For example if a girl ignores me i assume she has issues, it would never cross my mind that she sees something wrong in me, never. If i talk to a girl i then walk away feeling like talking to me was the highlight of her day. I consciously know this isn't so, quite the opposite, girls still avoid me like i was sick or something. I will probably get used to it, just like i got used to everything else. One thing is for sure, self esteem is not built up by chains of successes like i thought, it is a purely neurological setting.

On july 30 i jumped deeper into alpha maleness tho it turned to be caused by a fever. It was then that the tendency towards routines faded away completely. Also i started greeting people in a friendly way. When i find something cool or fun, i feel an urge to show it to others. It's like i can't enjoy somethings directly, it has to be indirectly, thru a fellow human.

By mid august i stopped taking the cure and all the symptoms of alpha maleness disappeared and i became just... normal. It was the most normal i have ever been. This proves my theory that alpha maleness is not the necessary outcome of the cure, it is possible to stop midway and be just normal. But i are greedy and by early september i was taking the cure again. I'm going for full alpha maleness


ON PUBERTY:
What i began suspecting by last update became clear shortly after: my body is changing. I am getting wider. Not fat, just wider, all over, legs, arms, chest. I am growing a bit more chest hair. My voice sounds deeper. Had my puberty been on hold all these years? I theorize that people with weak personalities only get a partial puberty, they walk around in childened bodies.

The widening has been causing me pain in my ribs because of the stretching, especially if i drink too much water or take a deep breath.

Now that body changes are proven to be related to the cure i should point out that there's something odd about my right eye. I have no idea what it is but it feels like it had air inside. It was getting worse for a long time, since early 2008, never painful, it's just a sound i hear, as if a bubble of air was moving inside of it. On 2009 it started improving. Also my jaw seems to be getting bigger, longer. This means my teeth no longer match into a closed bite as always before. This is the most impressive change i've seen. I'm trying to keep my mouth semiopen all the time to give it room to grow. All my life i've had small cramps on my lower jaw, every few weeks. They are gone now. By late october, early november the changed position of my lower jaw was making me pronounce words differently, leading to my theory that shared personalities are the reason why different countries have different accents. Also the changes in pronunciation thru time may be caused by changes in the shared personality of the population.

I'm thirsty all the time. In fact, now that months have passed i've detected a correlation between water intake and weight increase. Whatever was causing my widening was definitely consuming lots of water in the process. I have recovered the weight i lost last year, i'm now above my pre-cure weight. I need new clothes, my old ones don't fit nomore, i got wider real fast, around September and October. This is good because i needed to change my wardrobe anyway, i like different types of clothes now, I like brighter colors. The change is not big enough for a before and after picture, but it is big enough that people who knew me before say i finally got fat.

By early November i grew about one inch taller. This has to be related to the repositioning of my jaw. Whatever made my jaw move forwards is probably making the rest of my bones move to new places as well. I don't think my bones are growing, it has to be something else pushing them.

On Friday 24, november 2009 my teeth began growing larger and i began craving human blood... lol, kidding. But really, I can't bite tight anymore, i'm getting used to swallowing without chewing thoroughly. What's more interesting is that if i push my jaw back to its old place, my teeth don't match each other anymore, not the way they used to. It's like being free of pressure is letting them relocate. By late 2009 the only contact i got when i closed my mouth was between the front of my lower front teeth and the back of my upper front teeth.

This late puberty seems to have started while i took my mid august break from the cure.


ON REWIRING PAINS:
By mid 2,009 i started getting feelings that shouldn't be there, like sometimes i felt like my legs were wet even tho i was dry. It wasn't until november that i realized this was related to the cure, it was my first glimpse to what i'm now calling "rewiring pains".

Later i started occasionally feeling slight dots of pain on my penis during masturbation. As months went by it was getting worse and by early September it got really bad, i felt as if a whole area of tissue had ripped open inside of it. Back then i didn't know it was related to the cure and i got scared and decided to avoid erections until it healed, but it didn't. Weeks passed and the pain was getting worse, not in intensity but in frecuency. Then, that magical day of September 25 i got pissed about it and decided to masturbate again. The pain didn't get worse. I realized that day....... that the pain was psychological. Then I thought maybe it would go away now that i knew it was fake... but it still didn't. It wasn't until October 5 that things finally cleared up. That day i felt a similar dot of pain..... on my right foot. I immediately knew what was happening. This is basic brain plasticity stuff. What happens is that the massive rewiring my brain has supported over the past three years has left in such a chaotic state that it can't properly tell pleasure from pain anymore. It can't properly tell apart my penis from my foot anymore. I remained scared for a few weeks, expecting it to get worse since i was still going thru constant changes, but it did't. By January 2010 it's not an issue anymore but it's not totally gone.

You can't have two personalities and switch back and forth at will.... there just aren't enough neurons to support it.


ON HYPER-ELECTROMAGNETISM (THE BIRTH OF ORGANIC PHYSICS):
Something's wrong. A feeling. It's been happening since march 2009 at least, but i used to blame it on my reluctance to buy new glasses. It's always getting worse. This one is not a pain, it's more like a bad feeling, like extreme desperation, agony. I get it when i read. But not always, interestingly i don't seem to get it when other people are near me. Also, the level of desperation goes down when i put my hand over my mouth. When it gets really bad i feel dizzy. One time it got so bad i almost throw up. Reading has become impossible without my hand on my mouth. It feels like my eyes can't focus, except there is nothing wrong with my eyes... the feeling is in my brain.

As the issue got worse, the effectiveness of my hand on my mouth waned and to compensate i started moving my hand closer to my brain, first on my nose and then i discovered that putting my hand over my eyes was the most effective, but this blocks my view so i would spread my fingers a bit to see thru. (This is were things stood the day Organic Physics was born.) On later stages, by late October, i could only calm myself if i used both hands on my eyes. Then, at the begining of November, even that stopped working and i became unable to read. Suddenly one day, after that maximum intensity, it got weaker and smaller, it wasn't all over my head anymore, it was in the center of my brain. That final day was hell, i was so scared, i felt like something was dieing inside my head, i wanted so desperately to put my hands inside my head to calm me down again, i wanted to break open my skull and grab the center of my brain, i wanted to undo this whole cure thing. The next day it was gone. Something died inside my head that day. I felt clear headed after that. I no longer need my hand over my mouth to read. I don't know exactly what changed, but something did. It might have affected my liking of girls, i don't stare at them the way i used to. Falling asleep feels different since that day, it's no longer a slow nice descent into sleep, now it feels like something shuts down in my brain in a snap, i can't put it into words but it feels like..... like when you haven't slept for two days and you are in class trying to pay attention but you feel consciousness slipping away, like something dark was taking over your brain and you fight it. And you lose.

On a probably related note I have lost an ability i had, it's hard to describe it. Pre-cure, when i was listening to music, for example at the beginning of any of the good old Coldplay songs, there was something inside my head that i could "move" willingly and i would move it in time with the notes and that feeling and the sound would reinforce each other and create a nice intense sensation. I've lost that, i can't "move" anything inside my mind anymore. Now music is just there, like, in the background, i don't "feel" the melody anymore. I miss the way Clocks and Primetime used to make me feel, but it's ok, it was enough, i was autistic for 25 years, it was a lifetime, it's ok.


MINOR CHANGES:

- Since early 2,009 i don't mind being interrupted anymore, i can quickly pick up where i left.

- My desire for social contact is directly dependant on how much time i've spent performing my exercise in the previous three days. It's a very short term effect. It affects my ability to come up with nice things to say in conversation. Major changes always start happening on the seventh day on my many takings of the cure.

- My desire for routines faded away slowly from early 2,009 and it died at last on july 30. I started feeling impulses to try new things, taste new foods. My old established routines might take years to fade out. What's interesting is that since hand flapping is a side effect of thinking too much, that leaves the lack of instinct to blindly imitate my peers as the sole remaining symptom of autism... the only candidate to be genetic in nature and explain the heritability of autism.

- I have developed a tendency to look for people's faces whenever i want to laugh at something. They do it too. I never knew about this when i was autistic, normal people turn to stare at each other when they notice something funny and then they laugh together... which fits very well with my framework of theories on Organic Physics.

- My handwritting wants to change, but it's not gonna happen cause i rarely handwrite anymore.

- I can't stand reading as well as i used to, my strong impulse to keep reading and reading is gone, if the subject isn't very interesting i quickly stop reading.

- The way i react to girls has changed, i don't like them less than before, and i don't like them more than before, it's more like a change in the way i like them. My guess is that in the past i liked girls in my mind, i looked at them as if taking pictures so i could think of them later. Now i react much more strongly when i see a pretty girl, but once she leaves my sight i don't feel anything anymore. Real life has become much more exciting than imagination. There's this girl from work i have been staring at for half a year and i'm still unable to think of her, i can't see her in my mind. My "thinking in pictures" continues to deteriorate. If i close my eyes and i try to picture an island, i can't. I might see a part of an island, like a fragment of a picture and then it fades away in a second. And then there's nothing. I still spend a lot of my waking time thinking, but it's all concepts, ideas, mental models. Maps aren't as helpful as they used to be, I can't see them in my head anymore. By the way, my night dreams are still perfectly realistic, full sight and sound.

- I keep throwing out old stuff. Its amazing how much i can throw out and there's always more in my room.

- I have been sort of learning to speak. There are many words i don't know and i'm quite slow but i am getting better.

- On autistic days i did lots of weird things that needed to be kept secret for people wouldn't understand me. Now i can be more open about my feelings because they are more normal.

- The emotional drought came back in late september and reached new heights by mid october. It got to the point where i felt dizzy when someone said something "funny". It stopped bothering me by end of year. It's still there, but only when i am with someone who brings up habits that don't match my current neurostate. Whenever i meet someone new, there is no emotional drought at all. So emotional drought is what happens when i try to behave as something i am not anymore, because of lingering habits.

- As i started joining society a problem i noticed is how much they want to control my life. They keep telling me what to do, what to wear, where to go, what i should want... They are subconsciously trying to turn me into a carbon copy of them. This i am fighting because for my research it is essential that i do what i feel like doing. But i also hate it, i'm used to making my own plans, owning my money and my time. They pretty much want to decide themselves what i should be doing and then if i want something else i'd have to beg them to let me change their plans for me.

- The memory effect (did i ever post about that before?) is now starting to work on my side, there are a few places where i'm used to be NT, so even if i was feeling a bit autistic i go back to NT as soon as i enter one of those places. I am the most autistic in front of my mother and i'm the most alpha malish while climbing the stairs at work.

- I melt inside when i see babies or couples happy together. Also i became very sensitive to smilies, i get happy if i see this---> =)

- I have become very defensive/protective of my things, always willing to fight back but never willing to start a fight, i have too much empathy to do that. I seem to have developed a very paternal personality.

- I need to learn how to manage my emotions, i have no idea how to act when i'm angry, happy, sad.

- Fear of heights finally disappeared completely. My internal awful feeling towards heights was gone 2 years ago, but my brain was still "remembering" that internal feeling out of habit and it took a lot of time spent on the edge of a ninth floor to undo that habit.

- I am still very smart, in fact i am being so successful at figuring things out at work that i theorize that thinking in pictures is a distraction, not an advantage. I am going thru a "best of both worlds" situation where i have the knowledge and intelligence of an aspie coupled with the authority and social skills of an alpha male. Also, the fast pace at which Organic Physics is taking shape is another major indicator that i didn't lose intelligence after the cure.

- December is a sad month, everybody becomes hypersocial, it's the worst of times to make progress with the cure, so I quit from december 9, 2009 to january 4, 2010.

- My brain is trying to build new habits, pushing me into a new personality. It's a very sensitive time in my life, whatever happens to me in the next year will shape up my new personality for good. I could become a spoiled kid, or anything else. I gotta be careful, control this.

"old habits die hard..... harder than november rain"