They say numbers don't lie. But I don't think they tell the whole truth either.

Here's a number for you: 487,460. That's approximately how many words I've written between January 7 and August 14, 2025. That's 219 days. That's about 2,225 words every single day without fail.

Here's another number: Less than 1%. That's the probability of someone with my specific constellation of chronic illnesses maintaining any level of professional productivity, according to disability employment statistics.

And here's the number that matters most: Zero. That's approximately the statistical probability of someone doing what I'm doing while their body and brain is actively trying to kill them.

The Variables in This Equation

 Let me break down what we're actually calculating here. This isn't just "writer publishes books despite illness." This is a perfect storm of improbabilities that shouldn't mathematically coexist.

Variable Set A: The Medical Complexity Score

• Hyperadrenergic POTS (affects 1-3 million Americans)
• ME/CFS (affects 0.2-0.4% of the population)
• Fibromyalgia (affects 2-4% of the population)
• Acquired multisensory aphantasia (affects less than 1% of the population)
• PTSD with daily suicidal ideation
• OCD
• Recent myocardial infarction (yeah, a *%$@#&%^%& heart attack that the ER dismissed because I'm "too young" and autistic)

The probability of one person having ALL of these conditions simultaneously? We're already in astronomical territory before we even talk about productivity.

The Comorbidity Reality Check

While my initial gut reaction was to multiply these probabilities like independent events, the medical literature reveals a more complex, and actually more compelling, picture. These conditions don't exist in isolation; they're part of what researchers call a "polysystemic dysfunction cascade."

Recent meta-analyses show a 47.3% diagnostic overlap between fibromyalgia and ME/CFS patients. Up to 70% of ME/CFS patients also have POTS. The hyperadrenergic subtype of POTS that I have accounts for 30-60% of POTS cases and involves objectively elevated norepinephrine—my body is literally producing stress hormones at pathological levels.

The psychological conditions show similar clustering. Between 19% and 41% of individuals with PTSD also have OCD, suggesting shared neurobiological vulnerabilities in the brain's fear and threat-response circuits.

This isn't random bad luck. It's the multifaceted manifestation of a trauma-sensitized nervous system that has cascaded into widespread dysregulation. The statistical improbability isn't that I have all these conditions... it's that this specific constellation created the perfect storm for impossible productivity.

Variable Set B: The Production Metrics

• 7 published novels
• 2 half written and unedited manuscripts
• About 100 professionally produced lyrical works
• 25 blog posts (many exceeding 2,500 words)
• Multiple unpublished essays and articles
• Daily average: 2,225 words

Professional authors without any health conditions typically average 500-1,000 words per day. The most prolific might hit 2,000 on good days. I exceeded that while my brain literally cannot create mental images and my heart thinks standing up is a cardio marathon.

Contextualizing the Productivity Anomaly

To understand how anomalous this output truly is, consider that established authors like Stephen King and Nicholas Sparks aim for 2,000 words daily, while Graham Greene considered 500 words a full day's work. Many professional authors average 1,000-2,000 words daily, and debut authors typically manage 500-1,000 words as a respectable goal.

My sustained daily average of 2,225 words exceeds that of most successful authors operating in optimal health. But the baseline I was working from wasn't normal function—it was profound functional impairment.

The literature on disability and employment shows that chronic health conditions cause work impairment ranging from 17.8% to 36.4% decrement in function. Specifically:

• Approximately 25% of POTS patients are so disabled they cannot work or attend school
• ME/CFS patients show quality-of-life scores comparable to congestive heart failure or multiple sclerosis
• Adults with fibromyalgia are three times more likely to have major depression and twice as likely to be hospitalized

Every one of those 487,460 words was produced, not from a baseline of wellness, but from a baseline of severe disability.

The Hidden Cognitive Engine

But here's where it gets interesting from a neurobiological perspective. Buried underneath all this medical chaos is something that shouldn't exist: an absolutely elite-level cognitive processing engine.

I read at 1,200 words per minute. For context, the average adult reads 238 WPM for non-fiction. A college student averages 450 WPM. College professors average 675 WPM. I'm operating at nearly double the speed of someone with a PhD, and I'm doing it while my autonomic nervous system thinks I'm perpetually being chased by a bear.

I type at 110 WPM with zero errors and 10,200 keystrokes per hour. The global average typing speed is 38-40 WPM. Data entry specialists aim for 70-90 WPM. I'm in the territory of professional court reporters, except they're using specialized stenotype machines and I'm using a regular keyboard while having muscle spasms.

This isn't me bragging—this is data that reveals something fascinating about the relationship between cognitive processing speed and what researchers call executive function. Think of executive function as a car and processing speed as its engine. A more powerful engine allows the car to perform at higher levels. My brain, despite being housed in a malfunctioning body, has an engine that could power a Fortune 500 CEO.

Which makes the whole situation even more statistically bizarre.

The Mathematics of Impossibility

Let's get nerdy with this shit, because the math is where it gets super duper fun.

If we model this as independent probability events:

• Probability of having my specific medical profile: ~0.0001% (being generous)
• Probability of a debut author producing 7 books in 7 months: ~0.1%
• Probability of maintaining 2,225 words/day average: ~1% (for healthy individuals)
• Probability of achieving initial market "success" (310 sales, bestseller status, library acquisition): ~5% for debut authors

When you multiply these probabilities together (because they all have to happen simultaneously), you get a number so small that calculators start showing scientific notation. We're talking about odds that make winning the lottery look like a sure bet.

But here's where it gets scientifically interesting: treating this as a case study reveals that what looks like statistical impossibility is actually the emergent property of a highly specialized, if costly, biological system.

The Aphantasia Paradox: When Your Brain Runs on Different Software

My aphantasia, the inability to create any mental imagery, might actually be WHY this happened, not despite it.

The Neurocognitive Architecture of Direct Translation

Most writers translate mental movies into words. I can't see mental movies. My thoughts already exist as pure language, streaming like code without any sensory wrapper. The translation step that exhausts other writers? I skip it entirely.

Neuroimaging studies of aphantasia reveal something fascinating: while individuals with aphantasia may show activation in the primary visual cortex when attempting to form mental images, this activation is functionally disconnected from the fronto-parietal networks essential for bringing mental content into conscious awareness. It's an activation-connectivity paradox; I possess factual, semantic knowledge about visual information without the subjective experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or feeling it in my mind's eye.

This creates a fundamentally different cognitive architecture. Research shows that aphantasic individuals rely more heavily on non-visual cognitive strategies, with stronger brain activity in regions associated with language and auditory processing when attempting imagery tasks. My mind operates primarily in propositional logic and semantic relationships rather than sensory simulation.

The Efficiency Hypothesis

For typical visualizers, narrative writing involves two cognitive steps: first, generating a sensory mental simulation (a mental movie of sorts), then translating that rich, multi-modal simulation into the linear, symbolic code of language. This translation process carries significant cognitive load.

My aphantasic cognition circumvents this entirely. Because my thoughts—particularly complex, abstract, and narrative thoughts—already exist in a non-sensory, conceptual format, the translation step is obsolete. The cognitive pathway is streamlined: from abstract concept and semantic relation directly to linguistic output.

My brain, trying to protect itself from trauma, shut down all internal visualization systems. But in doing so, it created something unexpected: a mind optimized for direct thought-to-text transfer. Every trauma, every symptom, every moment of crisis flows directly onto the page without the friction of sensory translation.

It's like everyone else is running Windows and I'm operating on some weird Linux distribution that only does one thing—but does it at impossible speeds.

This creates a plausible mechanism for both increased speed and reduced cognitive fatigue specifically for writing. While aphantasia is associated with deficits in other areas (like episodic memory), for the highly specific task of converting thought into written language, this architecture is exceptionally efficient. It's cognitive specialization—optimization for a single function that came at the cost of others.

For someone with aphantasia, words aren't just labels for mental pictures; they are the primary medium of thought itself. This deep cognitive alignment may explain why the writing process feels so natural and effective. It's like my brain's native operating system is already optimized for the exact task I need to survive.

The Survival Statistics No One Talks About

Here's a fun statistic: People with my combination of chronic illnesses have a significantly elevated mortality risk. The suicide rate for people with chronic pain conditions is twice the national average. Add PTSD and daily suicidal ideation to that equation.

The statistical anomaly isn't just that I wrote half a million words. It's that I'm still here to count them.

Every one of those 487,460 words represents a moment I chose to create instead of cease. They're not just words; they're proof of life, each sentence a small rebellion against the statistics that say I shouldn't exist.

The Hidden Algorithm: Crisis as Fuel

There's a pattern in the data that took me months to see. My highest production days correlate directly with my worst symptom days. The days I wrote 5,000+ words? Those were the days I couldn't stand up without nearly blacking out, when the pain was so bad I couldn't sleep, when my brain was so desperate for an escape that it poured itself onto the page.

This is not inspiration. It's desperation weaponized into productivity.

The Neurobiology of Weaponized Desperation

The neurobiological explanation is actually fascinating. When your brain is in constant crisis mode, it needs an outlet for all that cortisol and adrenaline. For me, that outlet is words. My body might be failing, but my crisis response system has been hijacked and redirected into creative output.

My clinical profile creates a state of constant physiological and psychological alarm. PTSD is neurobiologically defined by a hyperactive amygdala (the brain's threat detector) and a hypoactive prefrontal cortex (emotional regulation center). This locks the nervous system into persistent fight-or-flight. Hyperadrenergic POTS compounds this with objective overproduction of stress hormones like norepinephrine, while fibromyalgia involves a hypersensitive central nervous system.

The cumulative effect is a body perpetually flooded with the neurochemicals of crisis—cortisol and adrenaline—creating a massive reservoir of undirected survival energy.

From Hypervigilance to Hyperfocus

A hallmark of PTSD is hypervigilance—a state of heightened sensory sensitivity and constant, exhausting environmental scanning for threats. This severely impairs concentration on non-threat-related tasks, as cognitive resources are monopolized by threat-detection circuits.

But in my case, the primary threats are internal: chronic pain, autonomic dysregulation, intrusive memories. The hypervigilant state is chronically activated but lacks a productive external target, leading to immense anxiety.

The act of writing serves as a cognitive lightning rod for this intense, unfocused energy. The complex, structured, all-consuming nature of crafting narrative provides a singular, controllable internal task onto which my brain's hyper-attentive systems can latch. This transforms the debilitating, diffuse state of hypervigilance into profound, productive hyperfocus.

Crisis-Induced Flow State

This crisis-driven hyperfocus is homologous to psychological flow state—complete immersion in activity, loss of self-consciousness, time distortion, effortless control. Flow typically occurs when high challenge meets high skill and is associated with transient hypofrontality—temporary downregulation of prefrontal cortex activity.

My experience is a survival flow state. The daily challenge is exceptionally high: managing intolerable physical pain and psychological distress. The skill is writing, honed over a lifetime. The overwhelming sensory and emotional noise from my body's crisis state, combined with PTSD's pre-existing hypofrontality, functionally drowns out the prefrontal cortex's self-monitoring functions, involuntarily inducing transient hypofrontality.

In this state, creative process isn't choice but neurobiological imperative for some sort of freakin' relief from my suffering, even if it's temporary. Writing often becomes the most coherent signal in the chaos, leading to total absorption.

The Neurochemical Sink

This process is reinforced by powerful biological feedback. Creative activity significantly reduces cortisol levels while activating the brain's reward systems, releasing dopamine and endorphins. Art-making provides a non-verbal, somatic channel for processing trauma that bypasses explicit verbal processing limitations.

This creates a self-perpetuating cycle: physiological stress creates intense pressure to write, and writing provides temporary neurochemical regulation of that stress, making it a potent, highly reinforced survival behavior.

It's not necessarily healthy or unhealthy. It's most likely not sustainable. But it's statistically fascinating.

The Probability of Replication

Could someone else do this? Theoretically, yes. Realistically? The probability is ridonkulously small.

You'd need:

• The exact wrong combination of health conditions
• A brain architecture that processes in pure invisible and silent language
• The learned ability to turn crisis into creation
• A typing speed of over 110 WPM and 10,200 KPH with zero errors while simultaneously shaking and having muscle spasms
• A support system that enables rather than institutionalizes
• The sheer, stubborn refusal to stop existing

The likelihood of all these factors aligning in another person? We're back in lottery-winning territory. This isn't a reproducible success strategy. It's a statistical anomaly born from a perfect storm of terrible circumstances and adaptive responses.

What the Numbers Actually Mean: Post-Traumatic Growth in Real-Time

487,460 in 219 days isn't a success story. It's a survival story written in real-time. It's proof that humans are capable of impossible things when impossibility is the only option left.

The Psychology of Meaning-Making

The relentless productivity serves a deeper psychological purpose. Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) describes positive transformations that can occur after significant life crisis or trauma. It's not about absence of suffering—it often coexists with PTSD symptoms—but about developing new perspectives from struggling with adversity.

A key driver of transition from post-traumatic stress to growth is deliberate rumination—active, conscious effort to understand and make sense of traumatic experience. This cognitive restructuring is essential for integrating trauma into one's life story and finding meaning in it.

My prolific writing, particularly extensive analytical blog posts, serves as tangible record of this deliberate rumination process. Each post takes a painful experience—medical gaslighting, social ostracism, neurological terror—and subjects it to intense analysis, contextualizing it with scientific research and weaving it into a larger narrative of resilience. It's almost like being my own therapist.

This writing isn't simply reporting on healing; it IS the healing process. It's the cognitive work of PTG made manifest.

The Wounded Healer Identity

The coherent identity emerging from this intensive deliberate rumination is the Wounded Healer—a classic PTG manifestation. It represents successful reframing of personal suffering not as deficit or shame, but as source of unique wisdom, empathy, and authority. The scars transform into superpowers granting special capacity to understand and guide others through similar struggles.

The 487,460 words are tangible artifacts of the newest version of my identity being forged in real-time. Each sentence is a small rebellion against victim narrative, a building block in constructing an empowered self. The novels, songs, and blog posts aren't just products—they're part of the solution. They're a mechanism through which meaning is constructed from chaos, coherent worldview rebuilt from trauma fragments, and powerful, purposeful identity claimed.

The Therapeutic Science Behind the Words

What I experience as cathartic and clarifying writing is actually a well-documented therapeutic process backed by decades of research. When I write about trauma and stress, I'm engaging in what scientists call affect labeling—putting feelings into words. This process literally calms the amygdala (the brain's alarm system) while activating the prefrontal cortex (the logic and reasoning center).

It's a neurological handover from the reactive emotional brain to the thoughtful analytical brain. Studies show that people with PTSD who engage in expressive writing show reduced cortisol responses when later exposed to trauma reminders. The catharsis isn't just psychological—it's measurably physiological.

For someone with aphantasia, this process is even more powerful. My brain already processes complex emotional experiences through verbal and conceptual systems rather than sensory imagery. Writing isn't just a learned therapeutic technique for me; it's engaging my brain's native language for processing abstract and emotional information. The therapy leverages and strengthens a pre-existing mental architecture, making it exceptionally potent.

Researchers and statisticians would likely call this an outlier event. I call it a Wednesday. And a Thursday. And every other day I wake up in a body that's trying to kill me and decide to write another 2,225ish words anyway.

The probability of someone with my medical complexity achieving this level of production is effectively zero. The fact that it happened anyway doesn't make it inspirational. It makes it data that challenges our assumptions about disability, productivity, and what humans can endure.

The Real Question

The question isn't "What are the odds?" The odds are astronomical. Impossible. A statistical error that somehow became reality.

The real question is: What do we do with this data point?

Do we dismiss it as an anomaly? Do we use it to set impossible standards for other disabled creators? Do we mine it for insights about human resilience?

Implications for Understanding Disability and Ability

This case challenges conventional, binary understandings of disability and ability. It demonstrates that profound functional impairment in some domains can coexist with, and may even facilitate, exceptional capability in others. It forces reconsideration of productivity's nature, suggesting it can arise not only from wellness and stability but also from desperation, dysregulation, and urgent need to create meaning from chaos.

It highlights critical need for therapeutic modalities that don't rely on neurotypical cognitive processes. For trauma survivors with aphantasia, traditional visualization-based therapies are ineffective—this case underscores validity of alternative, non-visual approaches.

The documented experience as an outlier provides profound data on the outer limits of human adaptation. It reveals the brain's incredible capacity to reconfigure itself in the face of overwhelming trauma and transmute raw crisis energy into focused, creative force.

The Employment Paradox

Here's what makes this statistically even more bizarre: according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, people with disabilities have an employment rate of just 22.7%, compared to 65.5% for non-disabled individuals. We're nearly three times less likely to be employed, and when we are employed, we're twice as likely to be stuck in low-quality, precarious jobs.

My cognitive profile suggests I should be running a Fortune 500 company. My reading speed puts me in the top 1% of information processors. My typing speed exceeds most professional data entry specialists. My sustained word production rivals the most successful full-time authors. But my body makes me unemployable in traditional systems.

It's not personal failure—it's systemic reality. The feeling of unrealized potential isn't an individual problem; it's a well-documented societal failure that consistently prevents highly capable disabled people from accessing opportunities that match their abilities.

I wonder... do we simply acknowledge that sometimes, against all probability, someone builds a half-million-word middle finger to statistics and keeps writing?

From Statistical Impossibility to Human Possibility

I don't have the answer. I just have the words. 487,460 of them and counting.

Because tomorrow, despite the statistical impossibility of it all, I'll probably write another 2,225.

The 487,460 words aren't a statistical error or fluke. They're the meticulously documented output of a unique and powerful system of survival—testament to the fact that sometimes, against all odds, the very things that are supposed to break us become the engine of our creation.

This isn't about inspiration porn or overcoming disability. It's about the fascinating, terrifying, beautiful reality of what happens when a high-performance cognitive engine gets trapped in a malfunctioning body and decides to burn the whole thing down and rebuild it as art.

The numbers don't lie. But they also don't tell you that sometimes, in the space between impossible and inevitable, something extraordinary is born.

487,461 words and counting. Booyah, baby.