Tag: recovery

Who Vibecoded This Upgrade? [en]

Unverified AI transcript (22.07.2026):

Lausanne, 16th July 2026, 21:10

I’m on the balcony, Juju by my side. He’s not afraid of the storm, after all his years outside. He’s more afraid of people, moving objects, loose cloth and phone lights in the dark. It’s nice that the temperature is bearable again. It rained yesterday evening.

I’m trying to figure out how to get my life back. It feels like my “life energy” is the product of a lot of moving parts, a complex dynamic system that feeds it, in a state of delicate equilibrium that got toppled when I had my accident, and that I’m struggling to put back in movement although almost all the individual pieces are now repaired. But it’s one of these 3D mobile puzzles which only manage to stay together when every single piece is in place and moving right.

If anything is missing, the whole thing collapses. Not because anything is fundamentally broken, but because there is no easy path to putting everything back together at the same time.

It’s a scaffolding held together by routines, habits, ongoing motivation, exercise, fun and challenges, the right amount of social contact and rest, a sprinkle of urgency and pressure.

The trap is to try to rebuild what was. That ship has sailed. As with any crisis, loss or transition, what comes after can be good, as good or even better, but it will not be copy-paste from before. “Time waits for no-one”, sang Cat Stevens, I think.

Today’s struggles and challenges look a lot like my old ones. Some I recognize from the times preceding the accident. Others — and that is a little more demoralizing — carry me back to my pre-diagnosis years, a sense of being untethered that I thought I had left behind me for good.

I can’t just pick up the pieces and put them back the way they were. I need to rebuild. Re-solve issues I thought I had dealt with. That’s where patience comes in. If my ADHD diagnosis and treatment gave me the user manual and admin rights, the accident “upgraded” the system. There are regressions. The user interface has changed. And I’m the one who has to update the manual.

Right now I’m trying to work out the new usage limits and understand which runaway processes are hogging the resources. I’m spending a lot of time using workarounds, and monitoring, and doing trial-and-error.

A few things are becoming clear: lack of physical exercise is definitely an issue. It has to be reintroduced progressively. Lack of social life and fun activities, too. These will increase available resources in time, but right now they are limited and need to be carefully allocated. Certain activities that require excessive executive function are now placing a visible burden on the system, when before, the extra expenditure was just background noise… So I need to track them more carefully and spread them out over the day and the week. I need to make sure I can exit certain activities early, press pause regularly so the system doesn’t overheat.

I’ve looked at a bunch of habit or symptom-tracking apps. No surprise, none of them does precisely what I need. I took Claude’s suggestion and set up a very simple Google form that allows me to checkbox-capture the various dimensions and signals I think are useful. It all goes in a Google spreadsheet, timestamped, data to be tortured in any way I see fit.

As I have been writing night has fallen, it has almost become cold, and rain started threatening my words of ink. I have retreated inside, escorted by rolls of thunder and discreet flashes of lightning. Juju followed close behind and is now working on his kibble.

This week has been up and down. Lewis Capaldi in Montreux two days ago. Learning the death of a young colleague yesterday. A pit of discouragement this morning. Calm and hope tonight.

Brain Crutches [en]

For some time now, I’ve been feeling with my time as one feels with space when on crutches. My world has shrunk.

On crutches, everything is further away. You can’t drive places. You can’t hop on your e-bike and be there in 5 minutes. Taking the stairs requires a rest at the top. Sports are off the menu.

These days, everything seems to take more time, directly or indirectly. More time to do, but also more time to recover. I have to stop and catch my breath all the time. (Figuratively.)

I’ve barely started my day, and suddenly it’s mid-afternoon. Or early evening.

I think about what I want to do today. I modestly rein in my ambitions. I’ll write a blog post. And maybe pot some balcony plants.

I’m tired, the blog post isn’t written, the plants remain unpotted. Will I read, take a nap, try and set up the TV screen to watch a movie?

The TV screen has been waiting for me to set it up for movie-watching for weeks now.

Who ever heard of procrastinating diving into the two last seasons of Doctor Who? Because that’s what I’ve been doing.

Another day has gone by. I don’t like the fact that time is going faster, that I’m going slower, that I need to go even more slowly, and that the road ahead will probably not be made of more and more things to do, make, read, discover, live.

I still want to do all of the things – and more.

I’m getting better at saying, with an accepting sigh “well, no, that’s not going to happen today.” We’ll see what tomorrow brings. But I’m not happy about it.

After so many years trying to fight procrastination, and these last few years which felt like I finally had a go at beating it (thanks methylphenidate), it feels very strange to willingly give in to the underlying discouragement that has always accompanied facing something to accomplish, and say “if it feels like too much effort, I’ll just not do it now”.

I’m realising how much I have learned to push and push myself, power through, and how instead of learning to listen to what my tiredness and discouragement could be telling me, I learned to beat myself up and feel like a failure for not managing to push them aside yet again.

It’s very strange to be allowed to allow (!) myself to be tired or not have the energy for something. And it’s scary, because the amount I feel able to do if I really listen to myself is not very much.

I know I’m still in recovery. Things will improve, I’ll have more energy, I’ll be less tired, doing will cost me less. But I can see, very clearly, that even once I’m back on my pre-accident feet, as I will not go back to pushing myself as I did before, I will do less. Hard choices will have to be made.

Or, with a bit of luck, if I have managed to grieve the unrealistic expectations I place upon myself enough, maybe they won’t be that hard.