Dopamine Deficiencies
My therapists (yes, plural) and neurologist and I have spoken at length about how both my childhood trauma and the trauma of the last 2-5 years has impacted my brain’s endorphin & neurotransmitter production, as well as the many ways my body and brain have compensated for what would’ve otherwise created a severe lack of crucial neurologic chemicals.
Essentially, under the threat of dopamine deprivation (a cheeky term I enjoy saying out loud), I subconsciously create situations and experiences that will give me nearly instant gratification and system-wide soothing.
I have for my whole life, in fact.
The fun part?
WE ALL DO THIS.
For me, instead of choosing conflict or resorting to sex, food, alcohol, drugs, shopping or whatnot these days, I choose work, effort and what are called ‘material environmental alterations’.
It’s always been part of my internal coding as I would go build forts and treehouses and other things as a kiddo, and then paint or install new superficial fixtures as an adult, but it became my hard, go-to coping mechanism and survival tool during the coercively abusive relationship that began in 2019.
Something changed in my brain around 2017/2018, we all suspect, that created the newly-formed deep-brain CCM discovered in 2019, and led to a series of otherwise seemingly random and unexpected alterations of my actual tissue.
Concepts and ideas I had never grasped fully began flowing easily, and my former ‘drugs of choice’ (DH racing and fighting with strangers on the internet) no longer ‘ticked my boxes’ for the neurologic cascade that keeps us all alive.
The only thing that had changed around that time, however, was everything.
In 2017 I had my best year racing EVER, then followed it up with a life-changing bike giveaway in Albuquerque that winter, and solidified my hit-or-miss legacy in 2018 with a promisingly injurious finish to my very rocky professional DH career — I was sick and ill and crashed nonstop, starting off by shattering my shoulder in March during a bout of pneumonia that would reveal scar tissue across both of my lungs leading to a diagnosis of ‘idiopathic’ pulmonary fibrosis (we knew it was, but they don’t have a fancy word for idiots who treat their lungs like party favors by repeatedly popping them), then some smaller and nagging issues that I ‘pushed through’ instead of pulling back to rest and recover.
I had fallen out of love with racing, but I couldn’t admit that to myself.
So I pressed on through training and distractions that year, eventually crippling myself during my final practice run at US National Championships on Sunday, July 22, 2018 when I shattered and dislocated nearly each bone and joint in my foot, ankle and right leg below the knee after hitting my favorite road gap at Snowshoe, WV.
Cue ‘best possible outcome of a worst-case scenario’ joke here.
Because of the force of the impact, my tib and fib bones both sustained double spiral compound pilon fractures and had ejected through my skin on either side of my Achilles tendon (another rare stroke of luck), exposing everything within that confined space to MRSA, a dangerous bacteria that lives in the dirt out there. The infection would almost cost me my life AND my leg a few months later. But it didn’t, and I managed to keep it upright through another near-miss.
That’s not what this post is about.
This post is about the aftermath of that time period, during which I’d had the first lower leg injury of my life (not so much as even a broken ankle!) that kept me from running or riding or otherwise escaping the oceans of pain that frothed inside of me.
This post is about the thing that changed my processes and my life by recalibrating my brain.
Previous posts have mentioned my consciousness-altering Thanksgiving 2018 acid experience, but I haven’t fully sat down with it here and told the story yet.
I’m not sure I want to, here. That’s a bit too… exposed.
But it was the thing, amongst other things, that electrified my fatty meatloaf enough to kickstart six months of massive mental and emotional growth that, at the time, I didn’t realize was happening.
It was also the period in which, for the first time in my life, I kicked a man out of my home for being disrespectful, and prioritized my own safety and needs over the comfort of someone else and the specter of them ‘choosing me’. Fortunately, it would not be the last.
It was, however, the last moment of an invisible alteration — because I began seeing myself as more than the caricature I had allowed myself to be.
The old me had taken on a new shape and, into that form, I grew.
Without knowing it or realizing what I was doing, I gave myself permission to write a new story, and live.
I moved both forward and backwards into versions of myself as I expanded the spectrum of who I was allowed to be after retiring from racing and trying to fit into the tiny box of ‘appropriateness’ demanded of me… and it made me sparkle.
In spring of 2019, I fell in love. Deeply, fully, and in a way that I had never loved someone before and that I doubt I’m capable of loving anyone in ever again.
But this post isn’t about that love story, either, or the toll it would take on my life and my future…
This story is about how that love and the circumstances it created intertwined with my return to and expansion within myself.
So I fell in love — Irrevocably and permanently in love. And it was the sort of love that forces us to become the best version of ourselves, simply because the person that we love deserves only the best version of us.
If you’ve loved like that, you know. When it’s good, it’s often the foundations of world-altering and history-making love, because it’s so big that we constantly improve and grow and morph, simply to become the person that the other person deserves. That’s real love — when we give our whole selves to someone or something on such a level that we’re actually able to pour back into ourselves and explore the limits of our own potential simply because it will benefit them?
That’s what I think unconditional love is.
That’s the sort of love that makes new parents get sober, the sort of love that quietly says “I will be the best version of myself so that you will have the best of everything” and “I will give you this so that you can glow”… and that love changes the world.
I didn’t know that kind of love existed, or that it lived inside of me. I had seen shades of it in my love for other people, in my need to help others, in the way I had always known I would be the sort of person to throw myself in front of a moving train for my little brothers… but I didn’t know it could exist in a romantic relationship.
I still don’t know if it can.
But that love, and my newly altered brain, sparked curiosity and a need to do whatever needed to be done to make the man that I loved happy. Get a different job? Get any job? Fight for those jobs? Rescue a bike shop? Fight for that shop? Fight the heavens itself?
I did. And I’d do it again. Because it meant that love lived inside of me — and that I was capable of loving myself that way, too.
Perhaps this post is about love, after all.
Because that’s what did it, and that’s what convinced me I could do anything: the love I was able to give to someone else at a level that I altered entire universes to make way for.
Simply because I thought they deserved only the best — so I gave them my best. I did my very best.
I still am, in fact.
And my best, as I had always suspected it of being, is truly phenomenal. It’s breathtaking.
It’s built from tiny efforts, all directed towards one goal: change.
That’s what my ‘new’ neurological process that prioritizes instant gratification now wants: visible results. I get my hits of dopamine from seeing changes, improvements and alterations that are fueled by both my creativity and my belief in myself about the end result that I’m capable of producing.
Before, I assumed it was just luck — hit or miss. But now, I know it’s a formula.
Now, because I was brave enough to take a leap for someone I loved beyond comprehension and do crazy things for, I know that the magic ingredient was ME.
I moved heaven and earth for someone I loved.
I shook the very grounds of the universe for someone, simply for my desire to give that person what I thought he wanted — to make that person happy.
In the process, I changed everything I had ever believed to be true about myself because I put all of myself on the line — I left everything on that track.
And now, as I carefully make my way through these bits and pieces of a life I had, of the one that I built, I see those very real things that I created from nothing (or even less than nothing) and I marvel.
I marvel at the process of my brain, at all that makes me who I am, at the courage and fearlessness and determination and tenacity I possessed, and my ability to create, and I’m stunned.
I’m stunned that I never gave myself all of that cosmos-shaping love before I handed it to other people, and I’m grateful that I still have an opportunity to do so now. I’m shaken that I know all of these things at age 37, and at how long I might still have left to use my brain‘s power as it winds and moves and wiggles.
I’m enchanted by my ability to feel, and to see, and to sense and to heal.
Even as I work my way through the pain, as I feel through it rather than numb it and as the waves of that ocean froth inside of me and smash upon these rocks of mine… I keep coming up for air.
I continue to make and build and create and alter so many things in ways that leave last impacts on my life and those of the people I touch, and I run forward in curiosity and awe at the ‘newness’ that I’m still alive and able to embrace.
Dopamine deficiency be damned: I have superpowers.
(The makings of a home gym/bike trainer/fitness party room in a basement I pay way too much money to not use.)