Middle aged ADHD diagnosis be like, you’re in this escape room, and the window is small and locked and you’ve been yanking at it for years.

And your friend calls to you: “just turn round and follow me”

But you don’t because yanking on this window is exhausting and you need all your strength for it.

“Turn round. There’s a better way”

“Can’t. Busy”

And so it goes.

Until eventually you’re exhausted and you think, “FINE! I’ll turn round”

And your friend is standing outside the door. Which is open. It’s always been open.

And they’re holding a bottle. It has something like “Elvanse” or maybe “Concerta” written on it.

And they explain they were stuck in an identical room until recently and then they realised the door was open too.

And you walk out and half your social circle is there. They are all holding bottles with “Elvanse” or “Concerta” on them, and one hands you one.

And you take a pill.

And realise you’re in a hallway.

And it was obvious. It was all so very very very obvious the whole time.

But you never saw it.

And then you realise only half your social circle is there, but you can hear the rest of them making exhausted noises.

So you walk along the hall and every few steps there’s an open door and one of your friends is inside yanking hard on a window, just like you were.

“Come and join me!”

“Can’t. Window is stuck”

A weird thing. When I was young and did not choose my own peer group, I was a fish out of water, a closeted queer visibly neurodivergent kid (tic disorders are hard to hide) in a mostly neurotypical setting and it was basically a running joke that I was “unfuckable”. People would use the idea of a relationship with me as the butt of a joke. The absurdity was, apparently, self-evident.

I believed this. Internalised this. Assumed I would die alone.

And over time, I subconsciously chose my social circle. I guess I gravitated towards people who didn’t require so much masking nor cause so much stress via what is now called the Double Empathy Problem.

These days, my interactions with neurotypical people tend to consist of whether I want milk in that, or how much ketchup I’d like.

And meanwhile, it appears a queue has formed because, as I am told, I am “fucking hot” (even in my 50s and middle aged lesbians are the filthiest fuckers alive. We do, as they say, the weird stuff. It’s great!)

That was … unexpected.

The neurotypical response to speed (amphetamine) is still confusing me.

So the base mechanism is the same for everyone: amphetamine (alpha methyl phenethylamine) is a monoamine releasing agent. It displaces the monoamine neurotransmitters dopamine (3, 4 dihydroxy phenethylamine) and noradrenaline (beta hydroxy 3, 4 dihydroxy phenethylamine - these are all really similar molecules) from the synapses, forcing them to circulate. It then acts as a reuptake inhibitor for both, and weakly agonises both.

So suddenly lots of dopamine and noradrenaline available. Right. Simple enough. That's how it treats ADHD, a condition marked by pathologically low circulation of both to the point that certain neural activity that's supposed to happen ... doesn't.

Now noradrenaline controls alertness, and too much in the peripheral nervous system cab cause tachycardia and anxiety. This is why we titrate up. The peripheral nervous system gets tolerant to it but the therapeutic effects in the central nervous system continue.

Dopamine is the interesting one here. It does lots of things, including acing as a neural "damper" (which is why we're hyperactive), but more significantly it controls the human motivation system. If something is worth doing, completion of that something is marked by a release of dopamine. This tends to be muted or doesn't happen in ADHD which is why emptying the dishwasher feels like a five thousand mile deathmarch across broken glass.

But you add amphetamine and circulating dopamine increases, which starts the reward system functioning.

Here's where I get confused. Keep going, and you spam the system with dopamine.

Which means you don't NEED to do anything to get the "reward".

Which is why, when my meds are peaking, I can occasionally just sit there and stare into space, feeling perfectly content. Keep going and I'll fall asleep.

In a neurotypical it will also flood the CNS with dopamine.

So why do they then get wired when they too are getting constantly rewarded for doing literally nothing?

IDGI

Those following our journey south in our sailboat, Scarlet, from the Uk to Portugal know that we've been at it a few years. 2 years ago we left Gosport and eventually reached Quiberon in Brittany before we were stopped by our starter motor catching fire(!). We did engine repairs and maintenance there and overwintered for a year until last summer when a somewhat delayed start due to ADHD diagnosis getting in the way saw us reach Bilbao, where we spent last winter.

This year, when the weather allowed, we started moving again. We have now reached Muros in Galicia.

We knew this section, getting round the Galician rias, was going to be a race against time. It's an indented coastline with no safe shallows with treacherous rocks everywhere. If you stick to deep water you avoid it.

But every summer some of the population of Iberian orcas that spend winter and spring around the Strait of Gibraltar migrate north to Biscay to follow bluefin Tuna. And the only way to reliably avoid them is to stay in water of less than 20m depth. This is impossible in Galicia.

Our time has run out. Orcas have now been spotted north of Lisboa. They have arrived. We are still 3 rias from the Portuguese border.

So now we may be stuck, or at least have to watch VERY carefully for a window to JUST BLOODY RUN.

I'm part of the "orcas.pt" fleet, which is a group of mostly hobbyist sailors banding together to share information and advice about the orca situation. The "official" recommendations are terrible to the point that experts mostly prefer to work with our group, and as a result we get pretty good intel on where they are (some of them have GPS trackers I believe, but that exact info is only shared with the group admin because we don't want people looking for these animals).

Here's the rub. Orcas swim (when they aren't chasing something) at up to 50km per day. We have a pretty good read on where the danger areas are. Last sighting, draw a 50km circle for each 24 hours. Are you in it? Be afraid.

Almost no attacks have ever happened west of the 10th line of longitude, but we can't reasonably go out there in Scarlet. She is a 9 metre marina hopper absolutely not equipped for deep ocean sailing. Some people do cross the Atlantic in boats like that but they're nutters.

Also she is a deep fin keel with a single spade rudder; it will take very little orca action to pull our rudder clean off at which point there is a hole below the waterline that the rudder stock exited through and ... well, the boat sinks.

Unfortunately smaller sailboats with spade rudders which are most at risk from sinking on the first hit are amongst their favourite playthings. Contrary to the popular "orcas are going after the billionaires" narrative, the boats they trend to take are likely worth less than your car if you have a half decently paying job. Big motor yachts tend to steer by thrust vectoring and don't do "floating thing go spinny when I smack the shit out of its tail fin". They can also quite possibly outrun them which we absolutely cannot.

And then you abandon to liferaft after, assuming they haven't taken out your electrics (the batteries are back there), doing the whole mayday mayday mayday please send a fucking helicopter, I think these marine sheep spawn are going to eat me, HELP! thing (we have a handheld radio as well and iPhones can send distress signals even without cell coverage).

So anyway there you are in your liferaft, watching a load of your stuff go to the seabed, all three of you (probably. We usually have 3), throwing up (because throwing up in a liferaft is what you do. They are profoundly unpleasant spaces to spend any time), which surrounded by playful teenage delinquent 6 tonne murderfish who you have heard are VERY picky eaters and will only eat bluefin tuna and maybe octopus and definitely not human, honest, but which aren't above violently tossing floating shit around into the air for the lulz to see if it makes more fun vomiting and screaming noises, hoping that you don't drift into the rocks on what is literally called the "Coast of Death" when you translate the name into English.

So we're gonna like, properly pay attention to the "orca forecast", as it were.

And if we aren't absolutely certain it's safe to run for Vigo as fast as we fucking can, we may be stuck in Muros until autumn.

Let's see. Worst case we get the boat hauled out onto the hard and re-antifoul her (disgustingly messy but strangely pleasurable job).

if the worst does happen, assuming your boat is still floating and controllable after the first hit, apparently the thing to do is disengage autopilot, start the engine if not already running, apply FULL throttle, and motor directly away from the pod (preferably towards shallow water) as fast as possible. They can swim faster than the boat can go, but remember, they're juveniles doing it for a laugh, and apparently if they wander off from the pod by more than about 300 metres their mothers yell at them to come back.

"Aw mum! I was sinking the thing!"

"You can sink the thing after you've eaten your dinner, now come HERE"

"Dinner is tuna again. It's always tuna. I'm BOOOOORED. Can I have beef?"

"What the fuck is beef?"