A thing they don’t tell you when you start amphetamine for ADHD, but they SHOULD, is that what they do is NOT make you function like a neurotypical.

What they actually do is turn you into a person with ADHD with greater capacity.

Sometimes MUCH greater capacity.

And there can be a honeymoon phase when you’re all like, “OMG! I’m saved! I can do all the things now!”

And the risk is that you will use the extra capacity to mask harder and engage in more of the same stuff that was causing burnout.

And then 3-6 months later you find yourself in the same place you started but with an amphetamine habit. Also you can sit still.

I see a LOT of people online who hit the point a few months in where they conclude they have stopped working and start desperately doing meds breaks, long supplement recipes, etc to get back the “functionality”.

And these people, more often than not, also seem to have massive internalised ableism. They never accept their own disability, instead thinking it’s their “duty” to use any means possible to “not inflict my shame on anyone else”.

And using up that extra capacity from amphetamine to do that is a nasty trap because you can’t go back. Ever.

You HAVE to accept what you are.

Just seen someone saying they support bans on trans healthcare for under 18s because “let kids be kids”.

By the time I hit puberty, I had KNOWN for a decade.

I also knew that telling anyone would be profoundly dangerous.

So I hid who I was and, am almost grateful that the neurodivergence gave the other kids something else to latch on to. They were so busy calling me a “mong” that they didn’t notice I was trans.

Because that might have got me murdered.

Or pushed me into a position where I felt I had no options other than the same end result.

So I hid it.

And I hid it really well.

And one of the things that happens when a 5 year old child is terrified of their parents, or their families, or the school bullies finding out who they really are is that they end up traumatised.

A 5 year old child. Traumatised and ashamed.

Ashamed because adults openly talked about them.

Or people like them.

And what they said was horrific. What they said made it very clear that they would regard their own kids as subhuman monsters if they ever found out.

So we hid. And an important part of ourselves died in childhood. A light that should have shone, went out.

I’ve tried my best to rekindle it.

I’ve managed somewhat but it will never be right. Not really. I’ve made peace with that.

“Let kids be kids”. Trans kids like me never got to be.

Because of people who say things like that.

Imagine being one of those academics who realised in the 80s, or even earlier, that software development needed to be an engineering discipline.

And then you watch as the tail end of Gen X and the early Millennials teach themselves to code and some of them you can convince of your worldview.

But they end up working not as engineers or scientists, but as artisans in an industry that comes to depend on them working as artisans.

And then gets greedy.

And then decided it needed a million or more artisans.

And there just weren’t.

And because nobody turned it into an actual engineering discipline you then got an industry of senior artisans with a million idiots working under them

And now the idiots are being replaced with idiot machines that somehow, despite being computers, forgot how to even do arithmetic.

And then the ageing artisans are replaced by the idiot machines redigesting their own multiply ruminated “stack overflow from
2015 in a blender” over and over and over until it’s just whatever the silicon equivalent of drool is.

Imagine being one of the people who tried to prevent this and nobody listened to you.

It must be infuriating.