You’re Not a Functioning Person. You’re a Functioning Moment.
Functioning Isn’t a Trait. It’s an Equation.
There’s something nobody told you when they handed you the gold star.⭐️
When they looked at your output — the emails answered, the projects delivered, the way you held the room together while quietly dissolving inside it — and concluded something about your nature. Your capability. Your level.
They were doing bad science.
And somewhere along the way, you started doing it too.
The category error that ate your life
We treat functioning like a trait.
Like eye color. Like bone structure. Like something you either have or you don’t, something that stays roughly constant across conditions, that tells us something stable and true about what a person is.
High-functioning. Low-functioning. These are the words we use. Past tense built into the present. This is what you are.
But here’s the equation of what’s actually happening inside a nervous system on any given Tuesday:
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