[AE.Personal, AE.ADHD] One month on the pills.
So about a month ago, I said on here that I intended to share more specific information about my journey with ADHD meds when I had been on them for a month.
And it's been about a month. The specific benchmark I had in my head was that I wanted to wait until I had my first follow-up appointment and received my second prescription before I talked too specifically about what I was taking. This was less out of a fear that I would somehow jinx myself and more out of the idea I should give it at least a few weeks before I started talking about this brand-new-to-me thing as though I knew anything about it.
I settled on the follow-up appointment because that was the point by which I would need to have firmed up my impressions of whether and how the drug was working for me, and any ways in which it wasn't. If I could make it to the meeting without a laundry list of side effects that need addressing and without having stopped taking it due to an adverse reaction, and obtained another month's prescription, then I would have at least a foundation for sharing my experiences.
I had the appointment and I received my new prescription for the same medicine and the same dosage, so I'm ready to share.
And it's a relief, too. While medication has helped ease many of the emotional and personal obstacles I've faced in getting things done, one thing it hasn't changed is that when I feel like I am holding something in about one aspect of my life, it's like turning off a faucet that makes it harder for me to share other things. I've found it difficult to write much of anything for public consumption, here and on Twitter and elsewhere.
So today I'm going to talk about the medicine I'm taking and my experience with it. Tomorrow I'll talk more about the process of getting here. The theme may continue further on into the week or not, depending on how much it turns out I have to say.
I am taking a generic equivalent of Adderall, a blend of amphetamine salts. Even if you have no interest in or knowledge of ADHD meds, you are probably aware that amphetamines are stimulants that work on the central nervous system. The idea behind their use as an ADHD treatment is that at therapeutic dosage levels they act upon an ADHD-affected brain in a very different way than the popular image of recreational stimulant use would suggest.
A bit of a disclaimer: in mentioning what I am taking, I am not advocating that you should take it. I am not suggesting it is right for everyone or better than any other option, or even that it's best for me. All I can say is that it has worked for me, so far. It's possible something else might work just as well or better, but I have no inclination to find out just for the sake of experimentation.
My goal here is not to convince anyone to take Adderall or its equivalent, or any particular pill. If I'm trying to convince anybody of anything, it's... well, you know those internet posts that are like "If you've been waiting for a sign to try to get help, this is it."?
This is one of those posts.
So let me tell you a bit about what it was like to start the medication, and what it's been like to take it.
Even after receiving my diagnosis and prescription, I did have a bit of trepidation about starting the pill.
I had two big fears, not including worst case scenarios like having an adverse physical reaction.
My first fear was basically medical impostor syndrome. What if my brain wasn't affected by ADHD? What if I had simply been exaggerating my problems and looking for excuses? What if I'd let friends with ADHD convince me that I had ADHD because that would mean there was a solution beyond just me needing to get better at being a functioning adult?
Until I took the pill for the first time, I was afraid that I would find out it did nothing for me but what it might do for anyone else; i.e., give me a euphoric high and a bout of mania. I wasn't too worried about what that would do to me in practical terms. I am somewhat practiced in the realm of experiencing altered psychoactive states and I figured that I could ride out a small dose of pharmaceutical-grade stimulants without burning down my life.
But it would mean the pills would never be anything for me except a recreational shot in the arm.
My second big fear was similar, but... well, I don't know if it was better or worse. Maybe it just was. Maybe both of the fears just were.
Specifically, the second fear was: what if I did have ADHD and the pills did work as intended, but it didn't make any difference in my day-to-day life? What if I could cut through the executive dysfunction and the distraction and the brain fog and I still sucked? What if I still couldn't do anything? What if hours and days and whole weeks still slipped away from me with nothing to show for them because the problem wasn't the ADHD but the person who had it?
The pills were delivered by FedEx, three days after my first appointment. It would have been two days but there was a hiccup in the system. The pills required a signature, though in the age of contagion awareness this just meant I had to be present to receive them and give my name.
I took my first pill the day they arrived, in the middle of the afternoon, knowing full well that this was much later in the day than I would otherwise have taken it. I expected it to affect my sleep, and it did, but I doubt I would have slept any better with the suspense of the unanswered questions of "What is this going to do for me? What is this going to do to me?" hanging over me.
I started a journal file on my computer, which I updated almost every day in October and pretty close to hourly that first Friday afternoon into the evening. As I have said, I have some experience in observing and documenting the effects of drugs. So while a month on I don't have a lot of specific recollections of that first afternoon, I can look back and read my impressions as I felt it kicking in and as I started working on writing under its influence.
There is a point where I noted that my boyfriend Jack had messaged me about helping with dinner prep. My computer setup, pre-medication, has a monitor in which I have always my email open and a messenger open, because if they're not always visible I'll forget to look at them. A consequence of this is that I had grown accustomed to noticing when someone was about to message me, because I could see the "typing...typing...typing" animation appearing, and I would pause my Pomodoro productivity timer so I could deal with the message without feeling like my flow had been interrupted.
It's the sort of thing that I had grown very particular about over the years because if I wasn't very particular about it then I couldn't function at all, with the flipside that no matter how particular I was about things I still couldn't function very well, very often, or very consistently.
On the meds? The impending message didn't catch my attention or distract me at all. I was only notified of the message by the actual notification sound, which caught me by surprise and briefly (but only barely briefly) confused me. I was able to answer the message and go back to what I was doing without feeling like I had been interrupted at all, or like I had lost anything.
My med diary for the rest of the month tells the story of my life transformed.
I have gained the ability to make plans and follow through on them, and also the ability to adjust my plans in response to surprises or changes. Either one of those things would have been life-changing. Either one of them would have felt like a magical superpower. Having both at once feels like an impossible dream. It feels like cheating.
I no longer spend my weekends feeling like I have to make up for wasted time during the previous week or trying to get a running start for the next week, nor do I simultaneously feel like every minute of them is a precious resource that must be hoarded and guarded against the intrusion of obligation. My weekends are now simultaneously more restful and more productive than they've ever been in my adult life, which again, feels like I've found a cheat code.
The pills are not magic. They did not solve all of my problems all at once, and if I'm honest I should note that as I work to get my living and working spaces in a better order and also catch up on my backlog of responsibilities around the house, I am encountering a bit of clarity as to which of my problems aren't ADHD.
The ability to focus on a task does not give me unlimited energy. The ability to plan things out does not give me any firmer a grasp of spatial dimensions or the relative sizes of things. A solid knowledge of what tasks need doing does not mean that I have solid information about what these tasks will entail or what I will discover has been lurking behind or beneath them once I start getting them squared away.
But here's the thing that keeps all of this in the realm of magic: now, I can do something about those things. Now, encountering an obstacle I did not account for does not derail my efforts, and contemplating the obstacles I might face does not stop me from beginning.