Phone call out of the blue from car dealer about organising a service. Changed location, date, various sundry questions, all in Portuguese, all with no more stress than had it been in English (which given I hadn't taken my Elvanse yet is a very low bar). Even a year ago that would have been unthinkable. Something has "clicked".
Being a member of the Cult of Amphetamine is all consuming in a way that even transition isn’t.
The trans thing these days is easy. You take HRT and then forget about it (we outsource “constantly being Normal about trans women” to Joanne Rowling and Shut Up Wesley Streeting).
But this … the thing is you have the whole Flowers for Agernon daily speed run (pun possibly intended). You count your hours and plan your day around the likely time, plus or minus a bit, when you will suddenly turn from being a functional adult into an overstimulated bag of cats.
A true revolution would be giving us all day relief. You can’t do that with stimulants though.
And as a result, you kinda end up leaning into the whole “medically sanctioned speed addict” thing, especially as irreverent humour is already something having ADHD tends to prime you for.
ah yes welcome to the 'is the person I want to be?' angst. After 5 years I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that career success isn't worth it. I frequently miss being embodied chaos.
@Cy I have Elvanse 70, which is delayed release rather than extended release, and Amfexa 20, which is instant release dexamphetamine, which I normally take in doses of 10mg
yeah just today I slept in and thus couldn’t really take my extended release pills anymore cause it’d still be in my system round bedtime so I was useless all day. Jokes on me of course as I clearly ended up staying up late enough anyhow
i sleep fine on stims during the day (planned and unplanned naps) but not at night. I think it’s purely psychological (worrying i’m not gonna sleep keeping me up) but knowing that doesn’t change it
The Greens eye-catching victory in the Gorton & Denton by-election has shined a light on the Reform Party, and specifically Nigel Farage’s key policy of being horrible cunts, which seems like …
Is there any chance we can make naming the parties part of the democratic process? I would love to rename some parties “Flock of Horrible Cunts,” “The Diapers” or “Come Caca” for a Spanish version (we could go way harder, but I'm trying to keep it civil)
In a surprise byelection upset, it’s a thumping victory for estradiol. Testosterone must now rethink its focus on “growing hair in stupid-ass places” and get back to basics.
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 equ
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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.
Well, we're also the ones who spent several years busting hump to fix all the software we could think of that didn't understand that the year after 1999 was 2000, not 1900 or 19100. We had vendors sending us new releases in July 1999 that were still not compliant, we worked like mad dogs in the background to make sure everybody's milk got bottled and their checks got printed, then heard the world say "Oh, what a joke that Y2K thing was, all that fear and nothing bad happened! What a waste of time and money!"
So I'll say, on behalf of said academics, "Nah, we already knew they're all drooling lackwits, at this point it's become sick entertainment watching it all unfold."
I remember reading Knuth's Art of Computer Programming in the mid 1980s and thinking: yay, mathematical rigour will make CS really a "science". Then in my second round of university in 1986 a programming course was teaching Hoare's formal specifications and I thought: yay, software will have real "engineering".
Then I dropped out of the industry for a few years. When I came back to it (say, mid 1990s) there was no rigour, and "science" and "engineering" were just labels.
I was taught Software Engineering by Ian Sommerville when he was at Strathclyde University. So its infuriating that people are now vibe coding via plagiarism machines.
UK TERFs hate this one simple trick! Use your workplace toilets legally by adding the word “cleaner” to your job title and carrying an emotional support mop.
@m0rpk Nah, it probably just means toilets are not really single sex spaces. Especially if there is a single, lockable one-sex-at-a-time loo somewhere on site. @goatsarah
I know that some people swear by (rather than at; important to get prepositions right) the stuff but I’m convinced that Ritalin largely exists to make people like me feel better about not getting a childhood diagnosis.
Elon became the billionaire with the highest score ever at billionaireing and the other billionaires will won’t have him on their rounders team. That’s got to sting.
People are being VERY hard on Elon. Who amongst us hasn't taken time away from your children on Christmas Day to email a convicted sex offender to tell him you'd like to party on his secret island of underage girls? Perfectly normal behaviour!
“China is eating our lunch” oh thanks for letting me know the good news, we have a pretty nice cuisine that’s very different from theirs i think they will like it
(Seriously though, I’ve heard that Psychiatry UK were so snowed under with demand that they closed their waiting list shortly after I joined. They’re overwhelmed)
Have talked to Sylvia’s psychiatrist about the possibility of him prescribing my ADHD meds rather than having to get them from the uk.
The problem is that my prescription is a hybrid Elvanse 70mg, Amfexa 20mg regime and whereas the Elvanse (lisdexamphetamine) is available here, the Amfexa (dexamphetamine) is not.
The latter is literally pharmaceutical grade speed. That’s not hyperbolic. That’s literally what it is. Some countries are a bit funny about prescribing it. Portugal is one such. They were going to before the pandemic but it seems to have fallen but the wayside.
The former is a prodrug which converts to dexamphetamine in the blood. This makes it much less attractive to addicts because you can’t snort it and it has a delayed effect.
That delayed effect makes it rubbish as a booster. It’s also fickle. Sometimes it just doesn’t work very well. I am extremely reluctant to give up my dex.
Said psych suggested a few possibilities:
1 - take Elvanse later in the day. That’s literally rationing sanity. A
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Have talked to Sylvia’s psychiatrist about the possibility of him prescribing my ADHD meds rather than having to get them from the uk.
The problem is that my prescription is a hybrid Elvanse 70mg, Amfexa 20mg regime and whereas the Elvanse (lisdexamphetamine) is available here, the Amfexa (dexamphetamine) is not.
The latter is literally pharmaceutical grade speed. That’s not hyperbolic. That’s literally what it is. Some countries are a bit funny about prescribing it. Portugal is one such. They were going to before the pandemic but it seems to have fallen but the wayside.
The former is a prodrug which converts to dexamphetamine in the blood. This makes it much less attractive to addicts because you can’t snort it and it has a delayed effect.
That delayed effect makes it rubbish as a booster. It’s also fickle. Sometimes it just doesn’t work very well. I am extremely reluctant to give up my dex.
Said psych suggested a few possibilities:
1 - take Elvanse later in the day. That’s literally rationing sanity. An Elvanse 70 pill is 6-7 hours of Flowers for Algernon speed run. That’s no way to Live. My facial expression made him discard that.
2 - switch to methylphenidate, the other arch stimulant. Available in sustained release form as Concerta and in instant release as the very well known drug, Ritalin.
Problem with that is as far as my body is concerned (I have tried methylphenidate. I will not elaborate on this point), it’s basically “a bit shit”.
I free to it as “a coffee tribute act”, or if I’m in a scathing mood, “shitalin”. It’s a very big the “sit in the corner and shut up” zombie drug that was always used as a threat as a kid if I didn’t “act more normal”.
3 - Elvanse with Ritalin booster. See 2 for explanation as to why this can get in the bin and stay there.
4 - Elvanse with Elvanse booster.
Ok. Not ideal. Elvanse is at least amphetamine, which is the med that actually works for me, even if the neurotypical world seems to treat it as basically raw addition fuel (weirdoes), although it’s fickle. And slow.
But I was encouraged to experiment.
So I have done
Some months ago I tired 70+30. The 30 gained my about 90 minutes and had me running back to my beloved dex at the end of that. Useless.
In November I tried 70+50. Got 4 hours extra. They were rubbish hours. And the drop was horrible.
Getting a bit despondent here.
Today I tried the nuclear option. At 10:28 I took my usual Elvanse 70 and waited.
20 minutes later I started to feel myself turning into a functional adult.
Bit rubbish and distractable for the next 6 hours. Despite being trans I do have a monthly cycle (I can see it oh my resting heart rate graph. It also syncs with Sylvia’s period which is freaky) and I’m at my low and - see previous comments about Elvanse being fickle.
At about 17:00 I started to feel what I now know is noradrenaline imbalance in my peripheral nervous system. Dopamine drops faster leaving noradrenaline to go after. It means my brain is going to follow within the next 15-60 minutes and when that does … Flowers for Algernon.
At this point I would usually take my die at Amfexa of the day.
I didn’t. At 17:20 I took another Elvanse 70.
Peripheral noradrenaline imbalance continued to climb because … Elvanse. Amfexa would fix the problem in about 2 minutes.
But it doesn’t take a big rise in serum dexamphetamine to ward the drop away. Within 15 minutes I was fine.
So the question is, how long? As a primary med, the difference between Elvanse 50 and 70 was about half an hour, so I was a little pessimistic.
But then a curious thing happened. The executive function I’d been a bit rubbish on all day came roaring back. Nice!
Got to 10pm ish and had something to eat. That causes Elvanse’s prodrug conversion to increase usually and indeed, it did.
“Have the lambs stopped screaming, Agent Starling?”
That never gets old. I sat upright I stared into space. The earworm fell silent. Intrusive distractions went away. My sensory overstimulation dropped to zero. Emotions fell into line and got fully with the programme.
And after a few minutes of enjoying the utter utter bliss of a quiet mind, I got up and tidied the living room and kitchen.
At 01:10 I felt peripheral noradrenaline imbalance. That’s it. The end was coming. I have to let it happen.
Turn coffee machine on. “Esvaziar bandeja de gotas!” (Empty drip tray). COME ON! NOT FAIR!
Urgh! Hands feel gungy. Thighs are touching. It’s horrific. Every sound is loud. Getting louder. Lights so many lights. So many. So bright. Tension. Stress. Fiddle with hair. Scratch at arms. Empty the drip tray.
Double long espresso, with maximum brew strength.
Sensory issues building. Coffee grinder runs for the first shot. LOUD.
Coffee pours.
Grinder runs again. MAKE IT STOP. PLEASE. NO. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE!
01:17. Jaw starts trembling. The neural pathways that make me into a functional adult abruptly cease function as the dopamine needed to regulate the synapses became simply unavailable. Emotions go haywire. I am so sad. There are air molecules touching my skin. I have internal organs. It’s all horrible. The world is noisy and bright. I think there’s supposed to be a squirrel at this point?
30 seconds later I stabilise a little below my pre-medication baseline. My brain is now the brain of a mildly confused child. The focus, executive function, emotional regulation, clarity of thought, neural interconnect that I had enjoyed 15 minutes earlier was just gone.
It’s a lot like being two different people. One of them has to parent the other.
Oh, and the one that’s writing this has no bloody impulse control. That’s fun. I’m also twitchy as hell.
I drank the coffee. I’m now on my fourth shot of espresso. It doesn’t get me back to that beloved state but it takes the edge off and it will help me sleep.
Anyway, experiment a success. My drops are pretty much all like that so whatever. I got almost fifteen hours, and the latter few were really nice.
I’m sticking with the UK for now but I might make an appointment with the psych and present 70+70 as a hypothetical.
I feel like 70+50 he’d have no issue with but 70+70 might make him suck his cheeks a bit.
On 11:00 on the 16th of April last year I took a pill.
I did not understand what I was doing then. I had no way of understanding what I was doing. What it was about to do to me was something I had no reference frame for.
So dopamine and noradrenaline functioning in the population is a normal distribution, more or less.
Somewhere beyond the second standard deviation downwards from the mean, there is a line. On one side of that line lies 96% of the population. I’m the other side. Probably quite a long way on the other side.
At 11:15, I crossed that line, for the first time in my life.
I don’t know if I vocalised but my first thought was, “huh?”
I was sitting on the loo at the time by the way.
Suddenly I understood. I understood all of it.
That pill, Elvanse, 30mg, a dose that I would barely even notice now, was in a very real way the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
I can’t un-know what I
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That. Sodding. Book. (Flowers for Algernon)
Goddam it.
What did I have to go and read it for?
On 11:00 on the 16th of April last year I took a pill.
I did not understand what I was doing then. I had no way of understanding what I was doing. What it was about to do to me was something I had no reference frame for.
So dopamine and noradrenaline functioning in the population is a normal distribution, more or less.
Somewhere beyond the second standard deviation downwards from the mean, there is a line. On one side of that line lies 96% of the population. I’m the other side. Probably quite a long way on the other side.
At 11:15, I crossed that line, for the first time in my life.
I don’t know if I vocalised but my first thought was, “huh?”
I was sitting on the loo at the time by the way.
Suddenly I understood. I understood all of it.
That pill, Elvanse, 30mg, a dose that I would barely even notice now, was in a very real way the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
I can’t un-know what I know.
Immediately before that point I was overweight and gaining, abusing alcohol more and more with each passing month, had blood pressure pushing grade 1 hypertension, blood markers that were starting to scream something about Type II diabetes, and was engaged in an experiment to disprove the idea that you can’t live on a diet made up exclusively of wine and cheese triangles.
I was also objectively a really bloody nice person even though I hated myself quite profoundly. I didn’t deserve to.
I am, today, objectively better in pretty much every respect. My weight is ideal. I eat well. I don’t drink alcohol. My cardiovascular health is beyond what a 52 year old has any right to expect. My relationships are so much better. I am not in a hostage situation with my own emotions any more. I am not constantly tormented by my own nervous system and the belief that everyone secretly hates me. I sometimes LIKE myself. I get housework done. I drive better. I move better. I have a new therapist who I get on really well with and who is helping me immensely.
And in a few hours I am going to become that person I was before 11:15 on the 16th of April and I resent that.
What does that say about me?
Tomorrow: repeat. Sunday: repeat. Monday: repeat.
And so on. Speed running (hah!) the bloody book every day.
And I KNOW.
And I can’t ever not know.
And if this is ever taken from me, the pain from wanting it will be indescribable. I’ll also turn to alcohol again within, I was going to say 2 weeks. I suspect it would be more like 2 days.
Medicine does not understand the structural problems in my brain enough to fix them. It found this treatment by accident. It’s suggested that if you start it early enough in life you MIGHT get some baseline structural improvement.
Might.
Some.
We evangelise to those who are the way we were, you know. We know the pain and we so desperately want them to have the ability to be free of it and even love themselves, the way we now can. Most of them find this a bit weird and incomprehensible. I did too when it was me.
“I will look into it when I’m less overwhelmed”
“But that’s what it fixes! That’s like going out into a snowstorm to get something from the shop in shorts and a T shirt and saying you’ll put your coat on when you get back!”
Incomprehension
But even then knowledge has a price, and there are no refunds. Some of that knowledge is knowing that I spent five decades going out into that snowstorm undressed when I didn’t have to.
(Ok, maybe some of them. I was born in the 70s after all)
Would I did it again if I knew beforehand what it was going to do?
Yes. I would. I would be compelled to.
But part of me wishes I didn’t know.
I’d hate myself. I’d get diabetes. And cancer. And die far too early, never understanding why I yelled at the people I loved as I drank myself to death, and tormented by a life of executive paralysis and emotional tempests, while wanting to crawl out of my own skin.
But I wouldn’t have known anything better was possible.
I'd rather have guaicfine because I feel like the productivity given by stimulant meds isnt going to be enough to counteract my severe RSD but basically they're bound by NICE guidelines so I have to go through all that (also annoyingly the NP I have seemed kind of against it because "you have to take it like antidepressants" - I don't want antidepressants because they arent right for me, not the taking regularly issue. I did it for 4 years. I just want something that works.
@Heather 👻 If methylphenidate makes you feel like a zombie, don't be afraid to ask to titrate on Elvanse. Some are fine with the former but I know a whole bunch of people (myself included) who do not have great experiences on it.
When I tell recent transitioners about how, 20 years ago, I was required to socially transition without hormones to prove I was serious, they are appalled.
I hope in 20 years, people are similarly incredulous that in 2026, ADHD treatment involves strictly rationing the number of hours you spend as a functional adult each day, with "eight" being considered an acceptable number.
Like, I get 12. 14 on a good day.
And I regard that as cruel and inadequate, but my prescriber is one of the progressive ones for giving me that much.
And it isn't like transfemale HRT where you can just say, "screw your crappy meds regime, I'm getting my own".
Because ... well getting your own all gets a bit Breaking Bad very quickly.
Still, could be worse. The tales I hear my American chaos goblin friends tell about getting their meds are horrific to me. Apparently their authorities cap the amount of ADHD medication that is made each year at significantly below the level required to medicate everyone prescribed it, sort of like airline overbooking.
And then they wa
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When I tell recent transitioners about how, 20 years ago, I was required to socially transition without hormones to prove I was serious, they are appalled.
I hope in 20 years, people are similarly incredulous that in 2026, ADHD treatment involves strictly rationing the number of hours you spend as a functional adult each day, with "eight" being considered an acceptable number.
Like, I get 12. 14 on a good day.
And I regard that as cruel and inadequate, but my prescriber is one of the progressive ones for giving me that much.
And it isn't like transfemale HRT where you can just say, "screw your crappy meds regime, I'm getting my own".
Because ... well getting your own all gets a bit Breaking Bad very quickly.
Still, could be worse. The tales I hear my American chaos goblin friends tell about getting their meds are horrific to me. Apparently their authorities cap the amount of ADHD medication that is made each year at significantly below the level required to medicate everyone prescribed it, sort of like airline overbooking.
And then they watch as people get to go cold turkey every month and engage in some Hunger Games, Pharmacy Edition, shite to try and get hold of them.
@static Because of course what you put into your body (at no harm to anyone) is the state’s business somehow. they blow it way out of proportion into a made up ethical problem which it is not. it’s a matter of personal health only
@zaire the insane anarchist @Briala it doesn’t help that nearly every result when one tries to look up one’s prescribed medication is an addiction resource site.
@zaire I've heard it said that ADHD stimulant medications are just not addictive to people with ADHD. But then, the therapeutic dose is usually a lot lower than recreational...
@zaire Ooh... That's interesting! Maybe I got that wrong as I don't actually know what recreational sizes typically are. But that kind of reinforces my initial point.
I read the original 1958 novella when I was still a child. There is a 1968 film, called Charly. Cliff Robertson (Charlie Gordon) won an Oscar for that. The novel was published in 1966.
YouTube has a copy of a 1961 TV adaptation of the novella, "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon", in which Cliff Robertson plays the same role.
U.S. Steel Hour: "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon." Original air date: February 22, 1961.In this teleplay adaptation of Daniel Keyes' noted short story “Flo...
I think ADHD might explain a lot of my (perceived) weirdness, and a lot of other stuff about my immediate family. I'm late in coming to this but I think I should begin to discuss it with my GP and my now-adult kids. Reading your account of your experiences here has been helpful. Thank you.
What does it say that I want a transparent glass bauble for the pills to go in. Make sure people around me understand what it says about *them* when the unused supply decreases as I spend time around them.
agreed. Can't help with the spare-pill part, though my friend Jack does do the jewelry/fidget part (look for OiShiny on Etsy if interested. UK-based, not sure current European shipping policies, think US off atm)
Openwork, so not watertight, but there are poison-ring jewelry styles that do have tightly sealing compartments. Though I find rings less fidgety than pendant necklaces.
In his culturally significant work of 1995, Mr Cocker gives an allegedly autobiographical account of a night spent in a field in the southern English county of Hampshire. The account is based on a claim, supposedly overheard, that someone makes detailing their abundant possession of a number of substances which probably include a mixture persil and chalk dust.
These, however, would generally be regarded as excipients, resold considerably above their retail value. The significant active ingredients of the mixture would be 3,4 methelyne dioxy N-methyl dextro alpha metyhl phenethylamine (“Molly”) and its base compound, dextro alpha methyl phenethylamine (“Benny”)
These are both monoamine neurotransmitter releasing agents and monoamine neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors, with significant efficacy on the monoamines, dopamine and noradrenaline.
Mr Cocker elaborates by noting that in the middle of the night, the experience of consuming inadvisable amounts of these substances is an agreeable one. Their relatively short period of efficacy, howeve
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In his culturally significant work of 1995, Mr Cocker gives an allegedly autobiographical account of a night spent in a field in the southern English county of Hampshire. The account is based on a claim, supposedly overheard, that someone makes detailing their abundant possession of a number of substances which probably include a mixture persil and chalk dust.
These, however, would generally be regarded as excipients, resold considerably above their retail value. The significant active ingredients of the mixture would be 3,4 methelyne dioxy N-methyl dextro alpha metyhl phenethylamine (“Molly”) and its base compound, dextro alpha methyl phenethylamine (“Benny”)
These are both monoamine neurotransmitter releasing agents and monoamine neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitors, with significant efficacy on the monoamines, dopamine and noradrenaline.
Mr Cocker elaborates by noting that in the middle of the night, the experience of consuming inadvisable amounts of these substances is an agreeable one. Their relatively short period of efficacy, however, results in levels of the two aforementioned monoamine neurotransmitters becoming clinically depleted at around 6am.
In a phone call to his mother, perhaps from a BT phone booth as this story occurs just before the wide scale adoption of cellular telephones and certainly ones that would still have significant charge at this point, the storyteller laments to his mother a “horrible feeling” which “grows and grows” and leads him to deduce the absence of an “important part” of his brain.
That Mr Cocker describes monoamine insufficiency as a “horrible feeling” leads your author to regret her lack of mastery of the tiny violin as she, perhaps understandably but uncharitably contributes, “welcome to my normal life, you daft bastard. Sucks, doesn’t it?”
Must confess I'm not very familiar with the Pulp (Jarvis Cocker) discography (not proud of that, what I've heard is very good) so I had to look it up. Extraordinary. He's actually performing it at Glastonbury 1995 in the video.
Pulp - Sorted For E's & Wizz (HD Video) 1995Official promo video footage from Glastonbury Festival UK 24th June 1995https://www.jarviscocker.nethttps://www.g...
I mean, I know when I got medical dilators 21 years ago they were clinical and unpleasant and had weird handles, but the business end was essentially a very plain, slightly pointy, totally straight dildo.
That’s a fine lookin’ rivet gun you have there! I also possess a rivet gun, but straight women tend to get funny looks when they do non-girly things. Let’s just say I’ve had a lot of funny looks in my time 😂
Streaming service execs who allow your earworms to be replaced in your library need to be subject to the sort of creative deterrent favoured by the Marqués de Pombal.
Yep, maybe people get better at avoiding/managing/masking it which helps in the short term but likely leads to the problems you mention in the longer term.
I spent a while wondering why I had two identical walking socks with a "L" on them and no "R" until I realised it was a size, not a handedness (or footedness).
Interesting chat in therapy today. If you told someone on the street that I was in therapy and looking at childhood trauma then they round make certain assumptions about what we were discussing.
And they would be completely, utterly, wrong.
It’s really quite astonishing how after 2 decades the gender dysphoria stuff simply does not figure. At all.
I'm 39, and my newest symptom is somehow slipping down the last 4 steps when coming downstairs every few weeks. I started my day with it yesterday, it was 🤌
A good place to take stock after 8 months on daily amphetamine. For most of that time, I’ve taken the equivalent of 40mg dexamphetamine daily (this is complicated by half of my usual daily intake being in its prodrug form as lisdexamphetamine)
The first thing that strikes me is that at that level of usage, I’m pretty sure a neurotypical person would be considered an addict.
So am I an addict? I joke that I am, but no, I’m not. If anything, the opposite. I now admit that 8 months ago I absolutely had a substance misuse problem.
But that substance was alcohol.
Since the time I took my first pill, I think I’ve drunk maybe 8 units. That’s 1 shot a month.
I was self medicating on alcohol and it was destroying my health. Now I feel no compulsion towards the stuff at all. Initially I felt repulsion towards it, as I did towards sugary snacks. That repulsion has largely gone as the damage done to my body by prolonged abuse of both fades.
My attitude towards both alcohol and snacks is now a more nuanced “meh”. I d
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A good place to take stock after 8 months on daily amphetamine. For most of that time, I’ve taken the equivalent of 40mg dexamphetamine daily (this is complicated by half of my usual daily intake being in its prodrug form as lisdexamphetamine)
The first thing that strikes me is that at that level of usage, I’m pretty sure a neurotypical person would be considered an addict.
So am I an addict? I joke that I am, but no, I’m not. If anything, the opposite. I now admit that 8 months ago I absolutely had a substance misuse problem.
But that substance was alcohol.
Since the time I took my first pill, I think I’ve drunk maybe 8 units. That’s 1 shot a month.
I was self medicating on alcohol and it was destroying my health. Now I feel no compulsion towards the stuff at all. Initially I felt repulsion towards it, as I did towards sugary snacks. That repulsion has largely gone as the damage done to my body by prolonged abuse of both fades.
My attitude towards both alcohol and snacks is now a more nuanced “meh”. I don’t drink it, and my diet is better than it’s ever been.
The honeymoon period lasted a few months. In that time the apartment was spotless, dishes and laundry were done instantly, bins were emptied promptly, stuff just got done.
That’s settled a bit as well. I have now discovered the glory of “I can’t be arsed”. This, it should be noted, is entirely different to executive dysfunction; the latter is WANTING to sort my environment out and literally being unable to. The former is “meh, it’s ok if I do the thing later”, because I do actually do it later.
This deserves an asterisk. It works better with things like housework that have an instant visible payoff because that hits the dopamine thing. Stuff requiring delayed gratification … I’m working on it, ok?
Emotional regulation: the first few weeks I was Full Vulcan. Nobody and nothing got to me. I was so used to the dysregulated baseline that ordinarily modulated emotions were barely noticeable.
Since then I’ve become used to feeling emotions at what is, I guess, a more neurotypical level. This means that yes, I cab still get pissed off. I’m just a lot less likely to go straight to DEFCOM 2, or throw a full on temper tantrum.
Which brings me to the thing that is probably the single most hated thing about having ADHD: rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD).
Not only does psychiatry not regard RSD as a symptom of ADHD (nor does it regard executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation as symptoms, because psychiatry is not sending its best and brightest and still thinks this is about fidgeting and squirrels); it doesn’t even acknowledge it exists.
It exists. It’s pervasive. Lots, if not most ADHDers live in constant fear of it. The nuclear bomb lurking in your own brain waiting to just go off because someone used the wrong tone of voice with you when talking about whether you want tea or coffee or something stupid like that.
It’s still there medicated, but it’s turned down to its absolute lowest setting, and that is such a relief.
There is a downside to emotions being regulated and RSD being tamed though; I am able to get to emotional places that simply were not accessible before.
And those places are full of the horror of realisation of what this hateful condition has done to me, and the depth of the generational trauma of being the child of multiple generations of chaos goblins who never received help or recognition. It’s even allowed me a modicum of compassion towards my father who, I must add, is still my first bully, still the bogeyman in my head, and still someone I can’t quite forgive.
But I do understand him now. And I understand, probably better than he does, what he goes though on a daily basis. I was plucked from hell. He’s still there.
And always will be.
Lol
Ok. Look. My sympathy has limits.
For the first 2 decades of my life I do not have a single memory of anyone ever showing me any kindness. At all. Ever.
I have a therapist now. Her name is Hannah. She is late diagnosed ADHD like me, and like me is a member of the Cult of Amphetamine. Those were basic requirements because unless you’ve been there, I really don’t think you can appreciate what a weird and utterly messed up existence this is. She’s utterly lovely and really rather good at her job.
I’m making more progress with her than I dared think possible, but I very much feel like I’m exploring completely new ground with no map or compass and few supplies and provisions and I don’t know which of the weird native plants are edible.
It is bloody hard work, but once one sees how utterly maladaptive the way one used to cope was, it becomes impossible to keep doing that to oneself.
But dear god, it’s painful. At times I will grudgingly allow some upsides to being born like this (hyper fantasia, amazing balance, a mind that has no coice but to be a runaway inference engine, which turned out to be quite lucrative), but I can’t bring myself to be grateful for it. The damage it has done is unspeakable.
And none of this is a cure. I am still that person. I will always have ADHD and I am under no illusions that without powerful CNS stimulants, within weeks I will be exactly what I was before with any concept of the ability to work as a functioning adult being a distant and dim memory.
I am at the mercy of the precarious supply of controlled substances in a society that shows people like us no understanding or compassion, and thinks we can “just snap out of it and try harder”.
They have no idea how hard most of us had to try our entire lives. It has broken me, utterly.
I need amphetamine to function.
I need amphetamine to function.
I won’t leave the house without it. This is not a chemical dependency. This is because I now understand the astonishing levels of stress just existing unmedicated in the world involved, and I can’t subject myself to that any more.
I’m not an addict, but in some ways I live like one. Want to meet for lunch or coffee (yes, I still drink caffeine)? Sure. As long as I can guarantee I’m hone within the 12 hours window I can guarantee that the meds are working for.
Some ADHDers with meds will go out into the world in “messy” mode. I’m not one of them. I’ve done it under duress. I don’t enjoy it. At all.
And as long as I’m big having a bad meds day, because they happen. And when they do, I’m not really all that functional then either.
Because I’m disabled. Always have been. To see me now, you might conclude diagnosis and medication have been negative for me. You might see someone who has been reduced, constrained.
You would be wrong. You probably never saw how hard I was paddling to pretend to be something I wasn’t, and how much damage that was doing to me. I was staring to enter a death spiral that wild have led to chronic ill health, type II diabetes, alcoholism and death.
And that is before further inevitable burnouts, each one taking more and more from me. They had already taken nearly everything. So much wasted potential. So much joy that hard to be in my heart that has just … gone. Taken by this hateful thing that I was born with; born AS. A brain that can’t stop arguing amongst itself about what to do, and results in doing nothing instead.
What amphetamine did is let me look at the full horror of the wreckage of my life, something I was in total denial about before, sigh, cry, and then start cleaning the mess up as best I can.
But it also gives me clarity of focus; precision of movement, reduction of sensory overload, and the ability to just shut the fuck up and listen to people sometimes.
And perhaps the ability to finally stop hating myself.
I had no idea where this road led back in early April when, together with Zoe, I took my first Elvanse pill. Well, ok, I had some ideas.
But I was not prepared for the sheer enormity of it.
Thank you. These are adderall? Or alike? My friend won’t be walking in and out without a prescription. Those are impossible to get in Germany. You need a prescription for ibuprofen here. No Cocodamol! ✌🏻
@Dr. Unabart Adderall is not available in Europe. I take Elvanse (lisdexamphetamine) and Amfexa (dexamphetamine). I believe both are available in Germany. You will need an ADHD diagnosis and prescription to get them.
I used to take adderall from time to time. I still do, when it’s around. I can cut one pill into 4 and each nip is well enough to change my day. No adhd that I know of… just some days I need some help turning the engine over. I have a couple ancient orange tiem release capsules, and a couple ancient vyvanse capsules. No idea how i’ll divvy those up. Probably why I’ve had em forever. But I hear ya, they’re total game changers. Life changers.
That’s what I’ve heard in some cases where the adhd necessitates the use. Not all the time, obv. I know a colleague who is like this with caffeine. He’ll get his afternoon dbl espresso, immediately nap out for 15-30 minutes and wake up ready to climb the walls.
🌈 Kerblambuli 🦄
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