Timeout — xNet

I am writing this from a recliner, eyes half-closed, speaking rather than typing. If you walked into the room you would see a man doing, as far as anyone could tell, nothing. I do a great deal of this. Hours of most days, for many months now: sitting nearly still, letting my body do something it never got the chance to do — feel what it has been holding, and begin to put it down.

It looks like rest. It is some of the hardest work I have ever done. I've started calling this season my timeout, and this essay is about the three things that word has meant to me — because I've come to believe the third one is the reason xNet exists. The other eleven essays on this blog argue for a way of building software. This one is about where the argument came from. It is a personal essay, not a manifesto, and definitely not medical advice; it's one person's account, told from a chair.

The corner

The first meaning is the one we all learn as children. A timeout is a punishment. You did something wrong — or something in you was too much for the room — and you are sent to sit apart from everyone until you can behave.

I'm autistic, and I have ADHD. I found out at thirty-five. Which means that for thirty-five years the world arrived at my nervous system at an intensity I had no name for — louder, brighter, faster, more, always more — and my body did the only wise thing available to a system with no better options: it turned the volume down on itself. The clinical word is dissociation. From the inside it feels less dramatic than the word sounds: a gradual stepping back from the surface of your own skin, the way you'd step back from a speaker that's too loud — except the speaker is everything, and the distance becomes where you live.

There is careful research on this now, and it says something I find strangely hopeful. The felt sense of the body — hunger, heartbeat, warmth, the weather of emotion before it has a name — is called interoception, and studies of autistic adults keep finding the same curious pattern: the difficulty reading those signals travels with a trait called alexithymia, common alongside autism but not intrinsic to it — and people like me often turn out to be confident about their bodily signals and inaccurate. The signal was arriving the whole time. It was the reading that was hard. I knew about my body the way you can know about a country from books. At some point too early to remember, I had been sent to sit apart from it — a timeout from my own skin, served, as far as I can tell, since birth.

But here is the thing about the corner: you can see the whole room from it. The years I spent away from sensation, I spent receiving everything else. In school I got to try almost every way humans make things — theatre, animation, filmmaking, sculpture, drawing, mixed media, electronic sculpture, computer art. And I took in stories the way other people take in air: film and music, anime and manga, science fiction and romance and horror, every genre, every register — thousands of hours of other people's ways of being alive, studied from a safe distance.

I moved through the world the same way. I grew up in Connecticut and Maryland, went to school in Rhode Island, and then went looking: New York, Berlin, an island in the middle of the Atlantic, a forest, the tropics, San Diego, and now San Francisco. I started businesses and closed them. I made friends everywhere. If I wasn't going to live in my body, I was going to live everywhere else — and somewhat disconnected from my own signal, I became very good at picking up everyone else's. Surfing the ether. Collecting vibes the way other people collect souvenirs.

And I went deep on connection with one person. I met my wife just after college — two nervous systems that had each been wanting touch for a long time, recognising each other. For fifteen years we met that want in each other, and we grew each other up. We're divorcing now; she is still my best friend. I don't know how to compress fifteen years into a paragraph of an essay about anything else, so I will only say this: most of what I know about connection that was worth building into software, I learned there.

The called timeout

The second meaning of the word comes from games, and it took me embarrassingly long to notice that it inverts the first one. In a game, a timeout is not a punishment. It is called by your own team. The game is running away from you; someone makes a T with their hands; the clock stops. Nobody is sent away. You huddle. You breathe. You look at each other and re-plan.

The diagnosis at thirty-five was the hand going up. What I had been privately calling failure — the exhaustion that sleep didn't touch, losing capacities I used to have, tolerating less and less of the world — turns out to have a name and a literature. Researchers who finally asked autistic adults directly define autistic burnout as long-term exhaustion, loss of function, and reduced tolerance to stimulus, arising from years of demands that outstrip capacity without adequate support. And when they asked what recovery looked like, the answers were not heroic: time off. Reduced expectations. Acceptance and support. Doing things in your own autistic way instead of performing someone else's. In other words — the recliner. The thing that looks like nothing is the documented intervention.

The stillness has content, too. Somatic therapists describe how a nervous system that mobilised enormous survival energy and never got to complete the motion will hold it — for years, in the muscles, as a kind of standing clench — and they describe discharge: the body, given enough safety and enough time, releasing that charge in trembling, heat, tears, the long exhale — the way animals shake after a near miss and then simply carry on. So I sit still, and my body finishes sentences it started decades ago, at whatever pace it chooses, in whatever order. Sensation is coming back — much more slowly than I would like. The image I keep reaching for is plugging the cables of a nervous system back in, one at a time, and waiting for each connection to hold before touching the next.

(I care enough about this that I keep a small, free site about nervous-system work — no products, no accounts — where the careful version lives, with evidence ratings and crisis resources. This essay is a story, not advice; if any of it rhymes with your life, that site is the gentler front door, and a good clinician is a better one.)

The dream in the dissociation

So what was the rest of me doing all those years, while my body waited in the corner? It was dreaming. xNet is the dream it had.

I don't mean that as decoration. I mean it as provenance. This project is an amalgamation — on rougher days I've called it an excretion — of everything the corner years took in: the stories, the art forms, the cities, the businesses, the thousand borrowed ways of being a person. It formed while I was somewhat disembodied, floating closer to the collective signal than to my own. For a long time I thought that was the whole story: I absorbed a lot, and I made a thing.

Then, somewhere in this timeout, lying still enough to finally notice, I actually looked at what the dream insists on. Every peer keeps its own complete copy of what matters to it; the primary copy of your life lives with you, at home. Peers connect as equals, without dissolving into a centre. Consent is structural. Leaving is a supported act. And then there is the part I can't stop looking at — what the protocol thinks a timeout is.

provider.ts

// packages/sync/src/provider.ts — options I wrote before
// I understood who they were for.
/** Connection timeout in milliseconds */
timeout?: number
/** Whether to auto-reconnect on disconnect */
autoReconnect?: boolean
/** Maximum reconnection attempts */
maxReconnectAttempts?: number
/** Reconnection delay in milliseconds */
reconnectDelay?: number

From the sync provider's options, verbatim. Somewhere in here I wrote down what I needed: a timeout is a duration, not a verdict; reconnection is assumed; absence is a state you return from.

In a network, a timeout is what happens when a peer doesn't answer within the window. It is the coldest word in the vocabulary — the moment a system decides someone isn't there. And look what the dream wrote down about it. A timeout is a number of milliseconds, not a judgement. Auto-reconnect is a first-class option, sitting right beside it. And the first thing the interface offers a returning peer is a method whose documentation reads, in the driest possible voice, “useful for catching up after reconnection”: everything you missed, requested and merged. Because the substrate is an append-only, signed change log, a peer can be gone for an hour or a year, and what it did while it was away isn't discarded or rebased into shame — it merges. The whole system is built on the assumption that going quiet is ordinary, and that coming back is expected.

stateDiagram-v2
  direction LR
  [*] --> Connected
  Connected --> TimedOut: too much, too fast —<br/>no answer within the window
  TimedOut --> Reconnecting: the huddle —<br/>rest, and doing things your own way
  Reconnecting --> Syncing: cables plug back in,<br/>one at a time
  Syncing --> Connected: the offline years merge —<br/>nothing is lost
  note right of TimedOut
    The protocol's view, and now mine:
    a timed-out peer is not exiled.
    It is expected back.
  end note

The state machine I apparently needed someone to draw for me. It was in the protocol the whole time.

I built a network that treats going quiet the way I needed to be treated. I designed my own re-entry and called it architecture. The disembodied part of me spent those years drawing, in the only notation it trusted, a diagram of the connection it was missing — peers that stay whole while they touch; absence without exile; a homecoming protocol. I thought I was designing for data. I was writing a self-portrait in TypeScript.

Lower resolution

Now I have to tell you the complicated part, because founder essays usually don't, and the omission is exactly what makes them untrustworthy. Some days I don't entirely want to build xNet.

Not because I stopped believing it — the previous eleven essays are the believing, and I stand behind every one. It's stranger than that. As sensation returns, I can feel — not conclude, feel — how much lower resolution the dream is than the thing it was standing in for. One minute of actually inhabiting this body — the weight of hands, breath moving the ribs, the exact texture of an emotion arriving before its name — carries more information than any protocol I will ever specify. The nervous system I dissociated from turns out to be the highest-bandwidth instrument I own, and I am only now learning to read it. Next to that, the platform I dreamed while I was away is a beautiful, earnest, coarse thing. Coming back online makes the avatar feel small.

For a while that frightened me. If xNet was the avatar of the disembodied me, does reconnecting to my body mean abandoning it? But the project already contains its own answer, and it's the first principle this whole blog keeps returning to: the primary copy lives at home. Not in the cloud — the cloud holds replicas. And the primary copy of me does not live in xNet. It lives in the body in this recliner. The software is a secondary copy of some things I believe, rendered at the resolution software can manage. That is not a demotion; it's the correct entry in the replication table. The right size for this project in my life is not a self. It's a tool — a good one, worth finishing well, that helps other people keep their primary copies at home too.

And there's a safeguard here I only now fully appreciate: we built this thing so that it doesn't need to be anyone's whole self. The protocol is open and specified. The data is yours, on your device, under your keys. Leaving is a supported act — we wrote a whole essay about that. A project designed so its users can survive its founder having a body is exactly the kind of software I would want to depend on — and it means I get to say all of this out loud without it being a resignation letter. The work continues. It just doesn't get to be me.

The peer that went quiet

From the recliner, then, one more look at the word. The corner taught me that a timeout was something done to you. The huddle taught me it was something you call for yourself. The network taught me the rest: that a well-designed system expects its peers to go quiet sometimes, holds their place without resentment, and treats the return not as an apology tour but as a sync — here is everything that happened; merge it in; carry on.

The cables keep reconnecting, one at a time, at the body's pace and nobody else's. And when I follow them forward, past the platform, the dream keeps going: food forests with geodesic dome homes grown into them; networks of communities, all over the earth, regenerating the land they stand on; people more connected to each other and to nature — a mesh again, I notice, peers again, just made of gardens and neighbours instead of nodes. The dream was never only software. Software is the part I could build from a chair.

Nothing that happened while I was away is lost. That's the property the whole architecture guarantees, and it turns out to be the property I most needed to believe about a life: the stories, the cities, the friendships, the businesses, the art, the fifteen years — the entire log of the offline decades merges back in, and becomes the substrate the next thing is built on. These days I mostly practise letting the energy move, and following the feeling my values make when something is aligned — that quiet, unmistakable reading of goodness and rightness that I now get to receive directly, in the body, at full resolution.

A timeout, I understand now, was never a room you get left in. It's a window, and a window has a duration, and the duration ends. The peer syncs. The log merges. The clock restarts. I'm coming back online.

Sources

On autistic burnout: Raymaker et al., “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout (Autism in Adulthood, 2020) — the definition and the recovery factors summarised above; see also the National Autistic Society's overview.
On interoception and alexithymia: Shah et al., Alexithymia, not autism, is associated with impaired interoception (Cortex, 2016), and a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of interoception in autism.
On discharge and the body's completion of stress responses: Somatic Experiencing International, SE 101 (Peter Levine's framework — titration, pendulation, discharge).
The gentler front door: nervous-system healing — a free, no-account educational site I maintain, with evidence ratings and crisis resources.
The machinery quoted: packages/sync/src/provider.ts in the xNet repository (the sync provider's reconnection options and the “catching up after reconnection” interface), and the protocol specification — the append-only signed change log that makes long absence mergeable. For how the log works, see The Loom You Can Read; for leaving as a supported act, The Right to Say No.

This is a personal essay, not medical advice — autism, ADHD, dissociation and burnout look different in every body, and nothing here is a protocol for yours. The research cited is summarised in one sentence each; follow the links for the fuller, messier versions. If you are in crisis, please reach for real support: in the US, call or text 988. The code excerpt is verbatim from the source; the essay around it is one person's reading. All artwork here is original.