An Unexpected Turning Point
From burning alive to sitting still, with the help of AI
Equanimity, as I’ve come to understand it, is neither stoicism nor mere endurance. It is the cultivated capacity to remain present amid conditions that confound both explanation and acceptance. This understanding has not arrived gently. It has been etched into my psyche through years of burning feedback sensations that overwhelmed every sensory and visceral channel—sight, touch, sound, sentiment, even digestion. Arousal in any form, whether cognitive, emotional, or sensory, triggered an internal cascade of physiological torture. Most mornings, I’d open my eyes to window light triggering a fight-or-flight response more suited to incoming mortar fire than a sunny Tuesday. Here we go again, I’d think… and, why is it like this?
Equanimity, for me, was also the refusal to flee this realm when my body became an enduring torture chamber. There is nowhere else to go except, maybe, sleep. Not TV, no distracting sights, sounds, or food. All of it would aggravate the human vessel.
For most of my life, my nervous system was a beautiful partner in the act of inhabiting the world. Truly. I appreciated it as a fine-tuned system that sensed the world wonderfully. After the injury, it was a misguided security guard. Loud, uncooperative, and belligerent. It interpreted light as danger; silence as suspicious. Meanwhile, my all-too-intact conscious mind, calm and composed in default disposition, tried very hard to tell the guard that the overhead lights in the grocery store are not, in fact, weapons-grade.
For years, this was a permanent state. Consciousness became an exercise in mitigating logic-defying limbic sensations. And yet, amid the physiological violence of this dysregulation, I found myself returning, reflexively, to one enduring question:
Why is it like this?
(I repeat: because the “conditions… confound both explanation and acceptance.”)
Those who’ve known me for awhile are a bit mystified to see me continue my science experiment. But when you’re inside a burning body, you simply must ask. Why why why why why. And not in an existential, spiritual manner (though there was plenty of that, too). Like, what is going on in there? What is the series of faulty mechanisms at play here?
I’ve witnessed the human mind, when spared total hijack by exhaustion or hedonic distraction, revert to its evolutionary job description for pain avoidance: observing, hypothesizing, and adjusting. It’s inquiry-as-survival. I was, as ever, the lead researcher in a long, poorly funded N=1 study.
This deep curiosity was recently paired with the useful reasoning capacity of AI. And, my god, I think it’s finally pointing toward an off-ramp. Or at least a lane change?
Enter the AI dialogue partner
A few weeks ago, I typed in the question that had hovered beneath the surface for years:
“Let us suppose the 5-HT2A receptor has sustained some form of hypersensitization or chronic dysregulation. If it no longer filters excitation reliably, how might we compensate for that failure?”
It was a hypothesis posed long ago by a European doctor I spoke with over WhatsApp at some discounted rate for tormented souls like me. He delivered the news that this was going to be a long-term issue and suggested hypnotherapy. That, as you might deduce, didn’t work (though I get the method: calm the deep pre-cognitive limbic system. Some deeply-wired existential anxiety. Nice theory. It just happens to be deeply, utterly insulting idiocy).
Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d tested the receptor hypothesis. But this time, we were forging a new path. We went back and forth, layering hypotheses, pharmacological pathways, gut-brain feedback loops. I caved in to privacy concerns and uploaded a huge batch of functional tests gathered over the last few years at great expense.
A clinical collaboration between man and machine, with my perception, comfort, and mortality hanging in the balance.
With all the rich layers of context, the machine had an answer to my why. Why arousal in any form (cognitive, emotional, sensory, digestive) triggered such a torturous cascade. No judgement, just sheer reason. It understood and connected dots no practitioner ever had.
What emerged was a protocol something like this:
A cornerstone antagonist to block and stabilize the receptor system (of all things, an old antihistimine, cyproheptadine)
Another one for the same receptor class in the gut (5HT4 agonist)
Another to temper the downstream sympathetic cascade and heart/vascular system (prazosin)
Another to soften the downstream glutamate storm (baclofen, a new form of GABA)
Basically, the 5HT receptors regulate the vascular system, gut motility, and vision (they're very dense in the occipital lobe). This governs the visual distortion, heart rhythm, blood pressure, and gut. When they're not working, gaba and norepinephrine also get messed up downstream, contributing to tinnitus and exhaustion. So the shoe seems to fit, here...
These are all pretty simple medications and molecules, some of which I’ve rotated through before. Not the heavy anti-epileptics that some other folks had success with. It was not a proven, tested list; just a coherent set of molecules to respond to the screaming signals my peculiar body was giving.
I found a doctor to help me gather new prescriptions. Some meds were buried in an old storage tub in my closet.
A few days into the protocol and things began to really shift.
My heart rate—previously more appropriate for an Olympic time trial than a seated meal—began to fall. My breath, long trapped in my upper chest, descended to my diaphragm. The static in my limbs softened just enough to resemble sensation rather than alarm.
For the first time in years, I could sit without being neurologically scolded for it.
Nothing around me had changed that drastically. The world remained unrepentantly bright, fast, loud, and patterned. Things still felt “off.” But the difference was that I was no longer being tortured by it.
I could perceive detail again. Fine-grained gravel, condensation, the movement of grass, the choreography of a coat in the wind. This was the long-forgotten steadiness of plain ol’ ordinary attention. The simple act of perceiving.
And you might expect fireworks to go off here. But no, there was no swell of emotion. The grief, I realized, had long ago been grieved. Flare by flare. One disjointed interaction at a time. Years of internal chaos under a mostly (sometimes barely) composed exterior.
All this time, externally, I could pass for “normal.” A bit withdrawn, perhaps. A touch odd, somehow. But within the bounds of social acceptability. Internally, however, it was not neurodivergence, but neurological wildfire. That word which sounds like an overstatement until you experience your own internal wildfire: torture.
You saw someone a little pale, maybe distracted, eccentric, but tolerably functional. What they didn’t see was the internal clamp sensation pulling my chin toward my right elbow. The shooting electricity in my limbs. The sound of loud cicadas in my ears. The sting of very ordinary light. A heart forever thumping at 120 beats per minute.
That’s burning alive with a smile, my friends.
But, by some miraculous interaction with the AI-gods, the fire has subsided just enough to feel human again. This post will have to suffice as the grand announcement. Otherwise, I’ve just got a quiet, quasi-clinical realization that the internal storm is diminishing, and that’s enough for now.