Sometimes, you can totally rewrite the past.
In my previous article, Why My Future Self Had New Handwriting, I wrote about the conscious decision to alter my handwriting style, something that required ongoing practice.
While writing that article, I had the idea to try something I had never done before. What would happen if, now, two years after beginning to craft and write in this new style, I tried to form letters the way I once had?
Turns out, I absolutely cannot “turn off” my new style and return to my former handwriting. That version seems to have been deleted from my neurocircuitry, overwritten by the conscious style I chose, practiced, and gradually automated.
I put bipolar I disorder into remission by implementing metabolic therapies that improved my brain and body’s ability to transform and utilize energy. Since then, I have spoken with many others whose experiences mirror my own, people who have recovered from serious mental illnesses. Many of us had to rebound from a prolonged loss of cognitive capacity. We clung to the concept of neuroplasticity as a lifeline, trusting that even after years of blunted cognition, our brains could be restored, that executive function, memory, and creative and intellectual vitality might return. Neural pathways shaped by years of mistreated symptoms, impaired metabolic function, medication side effects, and harmful coping strategies are not fixed. We rewired them and proved to ourselves that healing is possible.
One of the reasons I launched Radiant Beast: The Open Workbook was a desire to connect with others who understand the steep trenches and ecstatic peaks of this adventure of remission and reinvention, and to offer those just beginning this journey a vision of empowering possibilities.
Steve Wolf has been a consistent and thoughtful presence in the comments on the workbook, often making me reflect, sparking new article ideas, and pointing me toward resources worth exploring. He is clearly intelligent, inquisitive, and well-read. Recently, he shared in a comment the persistence it took to restore his cognitive faculties after years of impairment. He described how his ability to read had been “vaporized” for nearly a decade by olanzapine, the same antipsychotic I took for a similar length of time. I asked him what it felt like to regain that ability and whether he had any guidance for others on a similar path.
(Read the rest of the article on my free Substack, Radiant Beast: The Open Workbook, generously sponsored by Baszucki Group and Metabolic Mind. The link is in the comments.)