> I'm still very academic, so nobody would believe me; if I'm already good at something and I complain that it feels half-capacity, people don't take too kindly to that.

YES! Nail on the head.

It's like if I take a car to the mechanic and they say "Well, its performance hasn't fallen below that of a '93 Escort, runs 0-60 in 12 seconds just like it should", and I say "But it's not an Escort, it's a Taycan Turbo S and it used to do it in 2.42, and there's something severely wrong with it!" and they say "Sorry sir, our diagnostic criteria only allow us to work on it when it's no longer roadworthy"

What a crap mechanic.

I never played enough chess to have that sort of comparison, but at work, there's a machine I built several years ago, in an afternoon, didn't bother writing anything down because it all went together in my head with room to spare. Recently I had to build another identical unit, and even with the first one to look at, I spent a day and a half tracing it out and writing things down to try to figure out how it worked. My brain just wouldn't do the thing. I constantly feel trapped in a fog, some deranged medley of Comfortably Numb and Keep Talking.

I never would've consented to anesthesia if I'd had any idea this could happen. Fuckit, I'll live with weird digestive issues, just give me my mind back.