It’s Only Boring the First Time

 

It’s Only Boring the First Time: Fracture, Intuition, and the Dance with the New

Preface

This essay explores how the human mind encounters newness—not simply as an external event, but as an inner process that fractures, reconnects, and grows. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, autism studies, and narrative theory, it argues that the mind naturally seeks to relate to the unfamiliar, yet true understanding requires intuition rather than impulsive reaction or dogmatic judgement. Trauma and neurodivergence, though disruptive, can deepen creativity by forcing the brain to build new pathways. Through poetry, metaphor, and storytelling, we transform these fractures into meaning. Ultimately, while repetition dulls perception, difference and rupture renew attention and keep the mind alive—showing why, in the dance between sameness and change, it is only boring the first time.

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“There is a pool, clear as pure, his eyes are snow.”

The words do not declare outright that his eyes are clear pools, nor that they are a frozen mirror reflecting the world. Yet through layered associations; clarity, stillness, coldness, reflection. The mind makes this leap.

As neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran notes in The Tell-Tale Brain, metaphor itself is a product of “neuronal cross-wiring,” where meaning emerges from unexpected connections across cortical regions. The process isn’t only abstract; it is physical: synapses form and strengthen, sculpting the brain’s architecture into a living network of ideas.

“The poet’s brain, a mental engine, sifts potentials.”

Creativity, then, is less about invention ex nihilo than about discovering which potential pathways to walk. Trauma studies (e.g., van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score) show that minds fractured by trauma often develop heightened sensitivity: a scattering of awareness that can either fragment or, when channeled, fuel profound creative work.

This aligns with the observation by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (The Master and His Emissary) that the right hemisphere is more open to novelty, ambiguity, and metaphor, while the left seeks to categorise and fix meaning.

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Encountering the New: Intuition vs. Reactivity

At the moment we meet something unfamiliar, the psyche asks:

“What is this thing? What change does it bring?”

This question stirs a gamut of reactions: embrace or retreat, curiosity or fear, persecution, assimilation, rejection, or ownership.

When truly functioning from intuition—a felt, balanced, integrative faculty (Jung, Psychological Types) we meet the new from presence. The mind then translates these intuitions into structured thought.

Yet when the newness cannot be “placed,” we search through memory, drawing on our living network of experience to orient ourselves.

However, not everyone can, or does, operate from true intuition. Many, lacking cultivation of that faculty, mistake raw emotional reactivity and impulsiveness for intuition. As the philosopher Alan Watts notes, “Intuition is not the same as hunch; it is the direct perception of truth.”

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Autism and the Centred Self

Autistic individuals often live this truth differently.

They know, often silently, that when they become reactive or overwhelmed, they are disconnected from their centred, harmonious self. As Temple Grandin reflects (Thinking in Pictures), autistic perception often seeks patterns and coherence; disruption is felt not as mild discomfort but as profound disorientation.

In some cases, particularly in lower-functioning autism, this distress may be expressed through antisocial or repetitive behaviours: not as rebellion, but as a desperate effort to return to equilibrium. The chronic exhaustion of being uncentred, in a world full of unpredictable demands, becomes overwhelming.

Understanding autism through this lens reframes it not as deficit, but as a heightened sensitivity to coherence and rupture.

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Fracture as Creative Catalyst

Trauma, paradoxically, can deepen this capacity.

Studies (e.g., Kaufman, Creativity and Mental Illness) show that trauma survivors who engage with poetry and art often find greater emotional stabilization and creative productivity. Their minds, forced to develop alternate pathways, become adept at seeing multiple meanings, holding contradictions, and finding unexpected associations.

Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself, is both survival mechanism and creative engine. As psychiatrist Norman Doidge notes (The Brain That Changes Itself), “Every sustained mental activity, good or bad, sculpts the brain.”

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Narrative as Pattern Recognition

This mental fracturing and reintegration mirrors classic narrative structure. Joseph Conrad argued that all true stories are variations on a single arc: a character in ordinary life is jolted by disruption, embarks on a transformative quest, and returns changed.

Even in the simplest repetition:

“Then we had sex again.”

“Then we had sex again, only this time it was different.”

The audience immediately leans forward: how was it different?

The mind’s curiosity is piqued by fracture: sameness disrupted, a new pattern hinted. As Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) observed, meaning emerges from the gap between what is and what might be.

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The Trap of Dogma

When we meet something new, we rarely judge it purely on its own merits.

We might but it requires suspending prior conditioning, entering a state of observational learning. Far more often, we react based on the sum of what we already know: cultural dogma, personal bias, the super-ego’s inherited rules.

This is not wrong. It risks distortion. Instead of seeing the new thing as it is, we see only its reflection in the pond of our past.

To truly encounter newness is to risk transformation: to let the new shape us rather than simply confirming what we already believe.

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Conclusion: Why It’s Only Kinky the First Time

Repetition dulls perception; fracture sharpens it.

A mind unchallenged by difference becomes numb; a mind invited into new patterns remains alive.

It is only exotic the first time, until something breaks the pattern, and the mind, in response, grows new connections.

In poetry, narrative, and the raw encounter with newness, we rediscover the primal creative dance: fracture and integration, intuition and structure, curiosity and meaning.

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Referenced Works (by title and author):

• The Tell-Tale Brain – V.S. Ramachandran

• The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk

• The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist

• Psychological Types – C.G. Jung

• Thinking in Pictures – Temple Grandin

• Creativity and Mental Illness – James C. Kaufman

• The Brain That Changes Itself – Norman Doidge

• Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor E. Frankl

• The Hero with a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell

• The Heroic Journey (essay) – Joseph Conrad

• The Wisdom of Insecurity – Alan Watts