Who Moved My Dopamine?

Dopamine is supposed to let us know, that we're on the right path. Our brain is giving us little dopamine breadcrumbs leading us down a path it believes is going to be beneficial for us. The dopamine breadcrumbs are the ones that allow us to move. Or think of it this way, the lack of dopamine breadcrumbs is what hinders our movement forward effectively paralyzing us.

The best example I heard is - imagine someone is telling you to put your hand on a hot stove. You've burnt yourself before your body knows it's bad for you, the body resists doing it, and to override that paralyzing feeling you have to exert quite the willpower. But now imagine that the same sensation of not being able to touch a hot stove or make a scary jump is how you feel about the most ridiculously mundane things, like taking a shower, getting 'ready' for something, heck, even answering a question.

Each of those activities you CAN do, but only after you've exerted your will. And turns out your willpower also needs a cooldown. So you're brute-forcing your way through life by sheer willpower and then hear others call you lazy, unmotivated.

Or say you've done a difficult task, an actually difficult task and 'theoretically' should feel good about it, feel like you've accomplished something, like you've done a good job.. but.. *crickets*

So the next time you have to do a similar kind of task your body already knows that it's not going to get rewarded, so it doesn't provide the dopamine crumbs to even start and it's a whole battle of wills all over again. And again, and again.

Sure, the brain only wants to protect you from doing harmful things to the body, but if that list of 'harmful things' includes things that you 'can't avoid' in order to 'function properly in the society' then suddenly OTHERS start to have an issue with you, because, "We're all doing things we don't like, you just have to get over yourself." Welp, I've been getting over myself my whole damn life just to pass as a 'human being'.

And yet..

And yet there are things that I've done with greater ease than most neurotypicals, in fact, exactly the more difficult things that actually take willpower to power through, because.. well, because I have already been doing it with willpower. I don't have to switch when the 'going gets tough', because it has already been tough and we just keep going. This is why it's sooo tricky to feel my limits more often than not, because they have constantly been just left waaay behind me and as long as I haven't run out of WILL yet.. fuck it, we ball!

I know it might not make much sense and feel like I've just contradicted myself, and, yes, living like this DOES, in fact, feel like I'm just a ball of contradictions on legs. There are 'simple things' that are difficult to me and difficult things that come simply to me, and that's just how my weird brain is wired. And I've had to make the best out of it and use all the resources availabe to me to make it easier on me.

And I believe that's what we all are supposed to do - find the things that make it easier for us with our own specific composition of 'spice' in our brains to make things easier on us. Explore, experiment, see what works, what doesn't work. Observe how our brain and bodies react to what kind of things. Where we struggle and what can we do easier than others to lighten the load for others as well, because for us it comes way easier.

And if we recognize how each of us are different and stop projecting our own issues and hangups on others but come together with more curiosity of people's experiences then SOOOO much of frustration and misunderstandings could just dissolve, because we truly cannot know how it is to live as someone else, we can just share our experiences and try to reflect and draw parallels to at least TRY and understand the other person and what they are struggling with.

Because we truly each have our own quiet battles that no one knows about and we shouldn't presume someone elses quiet battles are less difficult than ours because we could never know that. I'm sure if we did have the ability to switch places with someone else we'd really quickly exclaim - AND YOU LIVE LIKE THIS? - and wanted to be back in our own bodies ASAP. Better the devil you know, as they say.

But back to the Dopamine!

Strangely enough, sometimes.. sometimes when I've managed to do something that I MYSELF consider impressive (usually is related to creating something that I myself find beautiful), then, THEN the dopamine is flooding, and flooding and it gets silly and embarrassing, because I can't stop being all giggly, flappy handed and skipping around like a magical pixie horse, but achieving THAT state usually involves constantly overcoming irrational fear after irrational fear and probably also some spells of overwhelm, but if at one point it looks like it's starting to come together after all.. then the dopamine floodgates spring open and it's basking time..

But how feasible is it to constantly impress yourself?

I'm not sure, I haven't tried that for a living.. yet!

So to the central question of 'Who Moved My Cheese?': "What would you do if you weren't afraid?" my answer would be - I'd make beautiful and impressive things!