Overview of Contents

This site is a hierarchically organised wiki. There are subdirectories for various topics, such as bipolar or autism or faith. Pressing Control-D gets you a directory in a sidebar. Alternatively, there is an autogenerated contents page here. If you use Obsidian, then you can download a zip of the contents of this wiki from here, and open that as a vault. (The zip script corrects some nonstandard markdown like that for including images, so the end result is readable and browsable if not identical to what you find here).

Welcome

Welcome to The Invisible Maze. I have lived with an Autism all my life; I have lived with a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder most of my adult life; often I have experienced psychosis when in mania. It has been a long Recovery Journey, and I have learned a lot along the way. With a few years of stability under my belt, my priority now is to communicate as much of what I have learned along the way, as if I will have no other chance to do so. I see my Journey as akin to solving a big Puzzle. Puzzles have Pieces, and I have found many. Some of those Pieces may also be Pieces of others' Puzzles, and so I wish to share what I can in the hope that Pieces find their way to whomever has use of them.

What you read here is a work in progress, not a finished product. Like Wikipedia, it may be edited and changed at any time. Unlike Wikipedia, I am the only one permitted to edit it. But you will find links-to-nowhere, stubs, half-written pages, and so on. I aim to make things as polished as possible, sketching out pages on private wikis, in text editors, or wherever, before copy/pasting onto this wiki, but a lot of the time I am content to just sit down and write my thoughts with the ease of writing a comment on social media.

What is The Maze

A little reminiscent of that immortal question: "What is The Matrix?". The Maze is my term for the anxiety-generated structure which confines my life. In short, we instinctively try to avoid 'bad stuff'. Thus, in a way, the 'bad stuff' pushes us away. In my case, this results in a complex structure of impassable barriers which, though I cannot go through them, do not appear to others as any kind of impediment. Where they see 'did not', due to Walls it is more a case of 'could not'. I cannot penetrate them without a meltdown of some kind, which basically means that if I break through the Walls of the Maze, I go manic. (This is not the only way I have gone manic, but whenever the anxiety behind the Walls dissolves, mania has been the result shortly thereafter.)

The Interior and The Exterior

I live my life on The Interior of my Maze, seeing the world through my eyes, listening to my thoughts. Others live on the outside, and see what I look like through their eyes. The two are very different. I describe external points of view as The Exterior. Essentially those on the Exterior, unless they look closely and take time to communicate, only see my Facade, not me.

What Is My Facade

I use the term My Facade to refer to how others see me. Life has drilled me to pretend to be normal, to the point that I feel like nobody truly knows me, as I know me on the interior. To know me takes not only time of those on the Exterior, but for me to get through the myriad layers that the Walls of my Maze present me with. By the time anything gets through, it has already become distorted and confused, both by the needs to conform to whatever concepts the other person may understand, and also the agitation of getting through the Walls at all. To say something sensitive is to incite Anxiety, and Anxiety massively agitates my fragile thoughts on the inside. Moreover, my Facade is in some sense those aspects which are not inhibited by my Anxious Avoiding nature. And Anxiety Avoidance is a topic all of its own.

My Recovery Journey

The main purpose of this wiki, as I say, is to communicate what I've learned on my Recovery Journey. I hope to also put things in book form, but that is an ongoing project. I'll give you some of my background here, such as why I explain so much in terms of mathematics, computer science, or physics. The reason is twofold: these are the source of much of the conceptual machinery through which I intuitively see the workings of the world, and also the concepts from these disciplines are things I see as very relevant to understanding how my particular autism and bipolar disorder operate.

What I've Learned Along The Way

I've explored a lot. I took up Tai Chi (or Taiji as I normally write it) at the start of 2004; spent a couple of years with a Buddhist group in 2010-2011; rediscovered church and adopted a Christian Faith, with Buddhist, Taoist, and Taiji bits added where they fit and function.

Then I have my maths, computers, and science background. I have a deep distrust of what I don't understand. I have a deep curiosity about the reasoning process itself, and the myriad assumptions we rely on, sometimes without realising our reliance upon them.

Then there are viewpoints of my Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Mania, and Psychosis from the Interior. All those things that I can't transmit telepathically, can't express vocally, can't get across to whomever I am talking to for a variety of reasons but, on the Interior, I see and I know: theories for which I have an abundant base of evidence, but for which only I have direct access to that evidence. Others have only what they can understand from what I attempt to communicate to them, and many things, due to the Maze, I can't yet even attempt to communicate. So this site is a best-effort to put across what I can, in a place where others can see it, and to which I can point with a simple URL.

My Books and Articles

I intend to write a book, or books, and articles, with the hope that others may read them. It's a lonely Journey on the inside of an Invisible Maze, so it would be good to connect with kindred spirits, perhaps making each other's Journeys less lonely.

Quirky Writing Conventions

When I have a specific meaning of a word in mind, such as Mind, I will Capitalise. When I want to pluralise such a word, I will us the Greengrocer's Apostrophe, simply taking the singular form of the word and adding 's. This odd convention has the use of marking visually in a not-too disturbing way those words where you need to take care to understand that I refer to my meaning of the word, not whatever meaning you attach to it. For most ordinary discourse, I can write, e.g. 'five', and you will know what I mean. But If I say 'mind', or 'faith', there are likely large discrepancies between what I mean and what you mean, and thus you need to be nudged to read e.g. 'Mind' as "what John means by 'mind'", but writing 'what John means by' again and again will drive readers further up the wall than the Capitalisation Convention possibly can. So that's the justification for doing this. Hopefully it aids clarity of communication even if it looks a little awkward.

About This Wiki

A while back, I wrote my own Wiki software, with a backend in PHP and a frontend in vanilla Javascript, to suit my needs. It is called Purple Tree 2. See Purple Tree 2 for the story of how this Wiki was developed. See also Navigating This Wiki.

If you press Control-D, you'll see a directory on the left hand side. Many parts of this wiki are not yet linked from this homepage. In addition, if you press Control-G (for Goto), you can type the name of a page to go to. This is slightly more convenient than using the URL bar. In addition, if, when then Goto box is open, you either click on the New Tab button, or press Control-D to toggle it, it will open in a new tab rather than the current one. There are then some special urls, starting with a dot, such as .r which will show recent changes. If you are in a subdirectory, such as /taiji/, then .r will go to /taiji/.r which will only show recent changes in that part of the wiki.

Growing This Wiki

As is the case also with Wikipedia, a Wiki has many dangling links. Often when writing one page, I will know other pages I want it to link to before those pages are written. By linking to a non-existent page, I both indicate an intention to write such a page, and also give myself the means (by compiling a list of broken links in the Wiki source files) to list what pages I need to write.