Need support!

[Lilah]

Hi everyone!

A lot has changed since I last came around. I got hit out of the left field with an incredible (I mean, really incredible) career opportunity at a very well respected Fortune 500 company. The kind of thing that, if I succeed, will bolster my resume and earning potential beyond words. The title? Great. The perks? Great. The pay? Amazing. I'm suddenly making more money than I know what to fucking do with. I started about a month ago.

But it comes at a price. It is very high pressure, and the hours are fucking long. (10+ hours a day on average) I went from freelancing and having a pretty carefree schedule and life to having hardly any free time. Worse off, I don't really like the work. It doesn't interest me. And I have tons of responsibility on my shoulders... so the stress is in epic proportions. My shoulders are rock solid with knots and I'm breaking out like a teenage boy going through puberty due to all the stress hormones.

I'm pretty sure a lot of my colleagues use Adderall. What can I say? It takes one to know one.

I've been off Adderall for over a year now. I was doing fine. Suddenly, I think about it all the time. I've caught myself thinking about how I could go about getting a prescription again. I know I have friends that could get it for me if I really wanted it. That scares me. I've been thinking things like "if I don't get a scrip... I just buy a couple pills a week off of so and so... then my supply will be really limited and I'll just get ahead on the days that I take it and it will make the other things so much easier..."

I don't want to fall prey to this! I could use any words of support or advice you can offer. I want to succeed at this job... everyone I know is so so so proud of me that I got it and it really is a life changing opportunity. I just feel incapable of doing it without chemical help.

[jason]

Lilah,

I am still going through (slight) withdrawal....but I can't ignore your plea for help.

How on earth can you find any reason to go back to the most self-destructive drug that you have (probably) ever used?!?

In your earlier posts you mentioned how you, "needed to start taking more and more to achieve the same effect. And then eventually, years later, I couldn't achieve it at any dose. I would take Adderall, only to pace around in circles for hours and never really get anything done, which would be followed by a catastrophic bout of depression that would occur as I laid awake restless at night. My sleeplessness got so bad that some nights I would find myself combining red wine, marijuana, and Xanax... and still would lay awake tossing and turning and essentially wanting to die. I contemplated suicide on more than one occasion. I had thoughts that did not feel like they belonged to me. I totally socially isolated myself. I started breaking out like a teenage boy going through puberty and my hair started falling out at an alarming rate. My resting heart rate, even when I was off the pills, was far higher than it should have been. I began obsessing over these things."

All I can really say, Is any of this going to be worth it?!? The approval of your family and friends, the $?...won't it all be pretty much fake?

Even if you don't care about their "real" approval, you will know it's not real. Deep down inside you will know what's really fueling all this "greatness"....not you, but adderall!

All I can really say is, believe in yourself...do what you want to do in life! Fuck the approval of your family and friends! Think about your life in the longterm. JUST DON't GO BACK!!!!

[CosmiKitten]

Lilah!!

Happy New Year!!!

I'm sorry I didn't get back to you sooner, I've read your post several times and have been drafting a response for days! But today I feel most comfortable replying - Today is my first day without adderall! and the beginning of a desperately needed four day weekend. Thanks to your well-written and informative post about nutrional needs (which you wrote WITHOUT adderall!) my house is stocked full of good stuff for me (minus a bit of leftover chinese food from new years, hehe). I got eggs and yogurts for breakfasts and whole grain pasta, lots of fruits and veggies. It felt good going out and buying all that stuff, it made me actually feel excited about quitting!

I hope you have been strong enough to stay away from the crank. Seeing your struggle even after a year of not using reminds me that this really is an addiction, its not just something thats going to go away after the withdrawal period. Having quit once before for over a three year stretch, I know the feeling of wanting to go back is very powerful.

I had a lot of the same thoughts as you in going back on it as far as wanting it for career reasons. I liked my job OK, but it was incredibly hard work and paid barely anything, I needed to find something else but I couldn't get myself to work hard enough at applying for other jobs, I was too exhausted from the one I had already. I was disorganized, lazy, gaining too much weight, blah blah blah, you know the drill. I found myself thinking more and more about going back to adderall. I was remembering my "glory days" of accomplished lists, a bright, happy, outgoing, energetic personality, being a star at work, being really skinny. How magical. I harped on it in my head long enough to pursue a prescription.

What I went through to get this prescription still blows my mind. I moved too far away from my last doctor to consider going back to him, so I got myself a new one. This process ended up involving a three hour psych evaluation, a neurological exam, a loonnng bullshit fill in the bubble personality diagnosis test, an EKG, an EEG, a session with the worst psychologist I ever met, and multiple visits with my PCP. Five doctors, nine appointments and a couple weeks later, I finally meet with the psychiatrist capable of giving me what I want, and within 20 minutes and without really consulting my file too much, he was glowingly happy to start me back up on adderall. He tells me he is going to start me on it slow and we can increase it later, as I had suspected of course, but ends up prescribing me one 20mg XR pill a day. He says he feels comfortable starting me on such a high dose because I have been on it before, and its obvious that I really need it. I was shocked and overjoyed at his irresponsibility, and began my addiction again. To be fair, I never lied about my ADD symptoms, though I emphasized them when it seemed right, and lied, of course, about why I stopped before, lied when they asked me if stimulants made me feel "really really good".

ANYWAY, long story shortened, I got back on the junk, and LET ME TELL YOU, my period of reliving my "glory days" ended within two months, just enough time to get myself a new and much better paying job in an industry I have no passion for, and become more addicted than ever to the euphoria that burts out of my chest whenever I took a pill. And then it becomes bad, just like it did before, and want to go back to months ago and punch myself square in the face for thinking "Gee, remember when? I could get so much done, I could be so amazing, My life would be so much better".

So then I'm getting really anti-social. I lose most of my sex drive to the point where I feel annoyed when my fiance tries to touch me. My general productivity becomes the obsessive tunnel vision type of productivity, instead of cleaning the whole house, I have to clean this one cabinet, scrub out impossible stains, everything must face the same way, blah blah you know all that. Eventually I have trouble speaking, my words come out kind of funny, I am nervous all the time and I think everyone is talking about me. Eating is a chore. The adderall doesn't really help me focus anymore. I smoke weed a lot more often than I did before just to help me eat and sleep. I have heart palpitations, headaches. I convince myself I have anyerisms in my head and blod clots on my legs. I'm checking my skin for parasites. My fiancee doesn't really like talking to me anymore because of the way I am becoming, and it seems I might lose him if I keep it up. I despise myself for all this. So why did I contine to take it for another seven months? Because even when everything became very very very bad, the adderall still made me feel good, either by its evil, incredible euphoria, or by just numbing me to any sense of real pain.

When I see on this site that people have taken 60-80mgs a day, i can't wrap my head around it, because I NEVER EXCEEDED 40 MG a day! I took 20xr in the morning and 10 IR in the afternoon, and most of the time I stuck to that. When I decided to abuse my medication, it would either be by chewing up my IR dose, snorting it, or taking maybe 5 mg extra. 10 mg extra a day was a really speedy day for me. The point I'm making here is, it doesn't matter how little you're taking, it's what it does to you that proves your addiction.

Here is the point I really want to make to you:

However much you think you want to take adderall now, I can promise you, is nothing compared to how much you will want to take adderall WHILE you are on adderall!

And the worst part of it is, never will you want to QUIT adderall more than you will while you are ON adderall!

The internal struggle you have now about whether to take it or not, you can multiply the hatred of it by ten, and the love for it by eleven, and begin another cycle of wanting to quit and being unable to do so until you can't take the self destruction anymore. I'm there now, I'm broken and sick of it all and I can't live on adderall anymore, and I already cried today because I have no more pills. You don't want to go through this again.

Don't fool yourself with this "limited supply" idea. You didn't end up on this site by accident Lilah, and its not because you aren't an addict that you were able to offer your help and encouragement to others. It is because you are an addict, because you know adderall very well. Even if you do only take a little here and there, its sure to hurt you in some ways, whether its by a sleepless night that you were positive you would be able to combat when you decided to take it, or messing up at work because you were to overfocused on one aspect project and neglected other things, or even by having such a wonderful, accomplishing, feel good experience that you make it incredibly difficult for yourself to not go out and get more.

Im so happy you are not ashamed to admit your struggle after sharing with us so much of your success, because no one should be ashamed, and we will all need help from time to time. I know even after all I've written here, it will be easy for me to push that out of my head and find excuses to use again. If you have used again already, you can stop now before it gets any harder. As they say in NA, "keep coming", read this whole site again and again, its the only way I was able to quit. I've sent you a PM with my phone number in it in case you ever want to talk. Please keep us updated on how you are doing. Huggs!

[Lilah]

Thanks so much to you both for your posts. They both really hit home and you're both totally right.

CosmiKitten- whoa. Are you sure we don't know each other or something? Reading your post... I could picture myself right in it. I literally felt like I was watching a crystal ball of myself by this summer if I were to go back to the Adderall. Powerful stuff. That knocked the cravings right out of me for now. I haven't used yet. I probably would have done so if the opportunity had presented itself in an easy to seize way... but I wasn't to the point yet where I was going to do something dramatic to seek it out. Thanks for helping me detour. I appreciate you taking the time to share all of that more than words can say. Really.

I just really want to excel at this new opportunity I've been handed, but in order to do so, I'll really need to work on the Adderall-cracked-out level, and its so hard to do that naturally. For New Year's I quit coffee, which I was using pretty heavily as a crutch but I noticed it wasn't really doing anything except add to my stress level and keep me up too late. I've also really cleaned up my diet and have been trying to exercise more... I was really, really on that before I got this position but now I really just don't have time... I wake up, have an hour to get ready, half an hour to drive to work and then back. By the time I get home I have 2-3 hours before I have to go to bed if I want to get a full 8 hours of sleep. So I've been getting lazier about food and exercise and I think when you go from an A to a C- on the healthy lifestyle grade out of nowhere you really do feel the difference. Hopefully that will help. I'll keep checking in.