L. C. Dialogos
Happiness Unintentional
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A noir about masking, exploitation, and the particular cruelty of a self-help book that was never written for a mind like his.
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A Note on Language
Alex Breisburg keeps a notebook of phrases he doesn't understand. This book, in places, may ask something similar of you. His mind runs on vocabulary most readers won't encounter anywhere else — synesthesia, alexithymia, the specific mechanics of a nervous system built differently than the one telling most stories. That vocabulary isn't decoration. It's the only accurate way to describe what it's reporting.
You don't need to know any of it to read this book. The story will carry you regardless. But if a term stops you — if you find yourself rereading a sentence because a word in it is doing work you can't quite place — a full glossary with plain-language definitions and further reading waits at the back, in A Reader's Companion. Flip there any time. It isn't a spoiler; it's a dictionary.
A few terms to start with
- Synesthesia
- A neurological trait in which one sense automatically triggers another — a word registers as a taste, a name arrives with a color. Involuntary and consistent, and for Alex, often more trustworthy than what he sees.
- Alexithymia
- Difficulty identifying, naming, and describing one's own emotions. The feeling is there; the label often arrives late, or not at all.
- Aphantasia
- The inability to voluntarily create mental images. Alex cannot picture faces, including the ones he loves most; what he retains instead is data — measurements, textures, sounds.
- Dissociation / Depersonalization
- A sense of detachment from one's own body or actions, as though watching from outside. Alex's own term for it, used throughout this book, is "the meat suit."
- Masking
- The conscious or unconscious suppression of natural behavior in order to appear neurotypical. Often exhausting, often invisible, and rarely optional.
- AuDHD
- The combination of autism and ADHD occurring in the same person, producing traits that can look contradictory from the outside.
- Autistic Burnout
- A state of physical and cognitive exhaustion from prolonged masking and unmet needs, marked by the loss of skills that are normally reliable.
- Interoception
- The internal sense of one's own body — hunger, heartbeat, pain, emotional state. Many autistic and ADHD people experience this sense as unreliable or delayed.
This is a starting point, not the whole map. For the complete glossary — including citations, further reading, and terms specific to individual chapters — turn to A Reader's Companion: Clinical Terms and Resources at the end of the book.
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