Dopamine

For a long time I didn't realise I was chasing something.

It doesn't feel like chasing while it's happening. It feels like living, or working, or simply being interested. But when I look at the pattern honestly, there is something I am always reaching for underneath all of it. I think it has a name. Dopamine. The small internal yes that tells my brain this matters, this is worth doing, you are switched on. Most people seem to get it quietly, in the background, from ordinary things. I seem to get it in spikes, or not at all.

What reliably gives it to me is novelty. New ideas, new problems, new places, the start of something. Beginnings. A blank page, a thing nobody has built yet, the first version of anything. That is where I come alive. The newer and more uncertain it is, the more switched on I feel. I can go from flat to electric in seconds if something genuinely new appears in front of me.

But the same wiring that makes beginnings electric makes the middle of things go grey. Once the newness wears off, the signal fades. The task hasn't changed. It is just as important as it was an hour ago. But something in me has quietly stopped registering it as worth doing, and no amount of knowing it matters seems to switch the feeling back on.

That's where the strangest part lives. The contradiction I have never been able to explain to anyone properly.

There are things I cannot make myself begin. However small, however much they matter, however much I want to want to. They sit there, simple and undone, and I feel the resistance like a physical wall I cannot push through. And then there are other things where I become unstoppable. Hours vanish. I forget to eat. The rest of the world goes quiet and slightly unreal. It looks like discipline from the outside, like focus, like drive. It isn't any of those. It's just where the dopamine happened to be. I didn't choose it. It chose me, and I followed.

So from the outside I must look like someone with enormous drive and almost no consistency. Capable of extraordinary effort and incapable of ordinary effort, sometimes within the same hour. I've spent years reading that as a character flaw. Lazy about the wrong things. Obsessive about the rest.

And when it's gone, when there is nothing new, nothing urgent, nothing lit up, there is a particular kind of flatness that I find hard to describe without it sounding like sadness. It isn't quite sadness. It's emptier than that. Greyer. Like turning the key in an engine with no fuel in it, again and again, and hearing nothing catch. The intention is there. The wanting is there. But the thing that turns wanting into doing simply isn't, and no amount of willpower seems to manufacture it. That's the part people don't see, because from the outside it just looks like I've stopped trying.

I read once that the simple act of writing things down gives the brain a small dose of the very thing I'm describing: a little reward for completing something, for closing a loop. When I read that, it landed with an uncomfortable kind of honesty. Because it might be part of why I'm here, doing this, again. Maybe these entries aren't only me trying to understand myself. Maybe they are also the most reliable, harmless hit I've found. A small yes I can hand myself on the days when nothing else is lit up.

I don't really know what to do with all of this. I can't make my brain produce the fuel evenly. I can't talk myself into caring about the grey middle of things, and I can't talk myself down from the moments it takes me over completely.

Maybe the most I can do is stop reading it as a fault. To see it as wiring rather than weakness. To build a life with enough new things in it to stay lit, without burning through them, and enough forgiveness for the days the engine won't turn over at all.

I'm not there yet. Most days I'm still just turning the key, and listening.