Sossi

A clarifying ps ~ The above is an example of the lack of clarity in my writing. A large part of my living problems today are not just because of the damage amphetamines did to my brain and body but also due to the lack of discipline I lived with while relying on a pill for pretty much everything. To clarify, yes, I am five months clean! Yes, Friday, frustrated with my now 170+ pound 53 year old body and my very sluggish and depressed state, and extremely messy house, I set out to pick up two weeks of Vyvanse medication. Yes, I finally popped back onto quittingadderall.com. And finally, no, I didn’t pick up the Vyvanse. Yea me, and yea to all of you at quittingadderall.com - this is the only place I have found where I can read and share about what clearly must be epidemic proportion misuse and desired recovery. Thank you all for being here. I have re-set my expectations and priorities around recovery. I now realize it will take quite a long time to recover fully, I may not ever recover fully but my chances are greater and my recovery will be greater if I put more effort into working towards who and what and where I want to be. Time to add exercise, healthier food and stop romanticizing the missed euphoria and embrace and celebrate that middle place of just being, breathing and feeling ok.

Um, no. I am sorry to hear of your struggles. The universal struggle, at least for many of us here. I had not been back on this site since being almost 30 days clean back in March of this year. I then went back on the meds until June. Fast forward to today and I am now five months clean. Strange that I didn’t come onto the site for support. It’s been everything I have read about since logging back on this weekend - rapid, and massive weight gain, feeling like I don’t know myself anymore, lethargic, slow, sleepy, and feeling like I am some kind of pretty significant disabled. I was on my way to get two weeks of Vyvanse Friday when I somehow got the wise idea to come on here for some inspiration. I’m sickened to come to the awareness of what I have done to my body and mind. It’s been helpful to discover that a heavy and long term user such as myself can anticipate the extensive damage and the painfully slow recovery I seem to be experiencing. And then I read your post - and got to read about what would have happened if I had filled that script. Yuck. Fuck. Damned if you do and not quite as damned if you don’t. Guess I’ll take not quite as damned. Thank you for posting and continuing to post.

Exactly inneedofhelpBP - the cleaning, the rearranging, the not showing up, the not being able to leave the house. Holy shit, this is exactly what I was experiencing and I felt so alone and the worst addict and that nobody possibly could be abusing this shit as bad as me. Other regrets are all the profound, spiritual experiences I thought I was having when it was actually a stupid trap laid by the fucked up system that even allows this stuff to be legal and allows pharmaceutical companies to make billions off our addiction, misery and loss and that it was actually just drug induced psychosis. So many more regrets that I have. But I'm going to go to sleep now. This is the first night in 13 days cold turkey off a huge dose I was abusing that I am up this late. I've been sleeping tons and it's after 4am now, so I am going to try to sleep. It's been a real struggle. Tonight I binged so to speak on this site but I have no regrets there because my resolve was getting weak and I feel really pumped up now about staying stopped. Those stimulants suck!!! Robbed me of some of the best years of my life. Grateful to be here and wanting to stay stopped - finally. I guess that's the last point. Really regret picking up this drug in March of 2010. Seven years. Glad it's over. Hope I start feeling better soon and I hope everyone in their early days starts feeling better. One more time with feeling: ADHD stimulant medication sucks!

" I want my life to change but I continue to do the very thing that I know is the reason I am stuck in the same place. I want to be happy and healthy, yet I just can't help but sabotage every chance I get. " This is the realization I came to on Saturday March 17th. I got paranoid that one of my adult children was going to declare me mentally incompetent. I had recently moved the contents of a storage locker that held the remaining contents of a four bedroom house I closed when theee of my children moved to their Dad's. My fourth child (a young adult) lives with a roommate. The storage contents were strewn about and piled high in my now 400 square foot apartment that I live in by myself. I looked at all that shit - the wreckage of my past and the four walls around me and I realized I was never going to get any better, that I was never going to realize any of my dreams, and that i was never going to earn back my self respect, nor the respect of my children if I didn't change, namely quitting the amphetamines (Vyvanse in my case). That first sentence holds the key to my new found freedom, as sluggish and lethargic as that freedom is today. "Came to the realization". Yes, something had brought me the gift of step two. "Came to Believe". It was definitely the beginning of the spiritual experience that had evaded me in attempting to get off this drug. The next part of my spiritual experience came after I finished a nice conversation with my son later that same day. I was sitting in the sun - - rarity in this month of March having just been declared the rainiest March in Vancouver, if you can believe that, since 1937. I started researching natural supplements to help get off stimulants and also researching what stimulant overuse does to our bodies and brains. I was horrified, but determined that this was the end of my love hate relationship with Vyvanse. I rode that pink cloud until the next day, and the next amazing part of my spiritual experience. I was sitting in Starbucks - now not having slept for three days, but having taken my last pill the morning of the day before and this guy asks if I am finished with the newspaper on my table and sits down beside me. I honestly still question if this guy was even human, and felt maybe he was a guardian angel that walked in. He starts steering the conversation towards me: asks me point blank if I have a problem with prescription medication, which I initially denied and then gets to the point where he got me to accept his prescription for my freedom, which was this: "just do step three and step seven every day and drink lots of water". Finally when I was on my knees so to speak and bawling my eyes out, I watched as he was fairly moved, his eyes open wide while I recited from memory those very steps and then said to him: "can i get an amen". Lol - so I get up get some water, because I am now willing and teachable and go to the bathroom and come back. We stood up, we gave each other a big hug and he walked out the door. All I know is he said his name was Phil. Bizarre and amazing and now I am on day 13 cold turkey - ouch! It's been brutal - I haven't been keeping up on the prayers and water these past few days. This site really helped a great deal tonight. Holy shmoly I think I am in for the ride of my life. If I stick to it I know everything is going to change - drastic, positive change. I know this and feel this but it doesn't stop my longing for the drug and my lethargy, boredom and serious low energy. I am 52 - almost 53 and a year into menopause. I've gained about 13 pounds already and it sucks. Gaining back my credibility, a life worth living, self respect and the respect of my children and siblings will be worth it, so worth it. I hope I can make it this time. Came to believe - yes! Turning it over? I can turn it over when I come here - my hope comes from all of you. Tons of gratitude and respect to everyone here - especially the founder, Mike. Wow, thanks. Feeling shitty will pass eventually but it will never pass if I continue the cycle of going back. Love to all ❤️

The number one worst thing about this drug is that it is a BIG, FAT LIAR!!! It never tells the truth. Whether we are using it or not - it is always there telling lies. Recovery is and will be for me - continuing to ignore the lies it whispers in my ear. Yay and hallelujah to everyone here - thank you for you.

Wow Rachel - you are amazing. I hope you never go back. I was prescribed Dexedrine in 2010 and then Vyvanse. I've been trying to quit since September 2015. It's 13 days now. Thanks for telling your story so well. It really really helps me see how important it is to stay off for good - one day at a time. Stimulants really suck!

Congrats - you give me hope. Just coming up to two weeks once again but it's been brutal - maybe because I know I can't go back this time and the lethargy lack of motivation eating boredom is off the charts! So I am hanging in there - if you can do it so can I. 8 was prescribed 120mgs daily!!! of Vyvanse and I am a 128 pound 5'5' female. For the past year and half at least I was staying up for three days at a time every week. My last Vyvanse refill I went through the 120 mgs per day three months supply in about five or six weeks. Can you spell psychosis? Unfortunately, I can, as most of us unfortunately can. I don't know how I actually avoided the psych ward. So yeah, fuck Adderall and fuck Vyvanse too! And congrats once again. S

Oh God! Thank you for reaching out and posting and for all the replies. I've been a speeder too. And I could have wrote your post verbatim as it is so similar to my experience. I was diagnosed extreme to severe ADHD in 2010 and took Dexedrine and then was prescribed Vyvanse by a GP who calls himself an Addiction/ADHD specialist. However, my addiction to a Vyvanse is my responsibility and I cannot blame my pill pusher doc with a napoleon complex. I am an addict and an alcoholic. I joined AA July 11, 1989 and was completely clean and sober until April 2007. I drank for ten months which ended in me returning to cocaine for a month until going back to AA March 7, 2008. Two years completely clean and sober and then the Dexedrine prescription entered my life. I found this website in September 2015 and have found it is the only tool where I could find stories from people who have suffered from this insidious addiction to prescription stimulants. Since September 2015 I have repeatedly binged through my prescription and then would quit cold turkey lasting anywhere from three to five weeks only to cave and start again . Always thinking, this time it is going to be different and I will take it as prescribed. I have eleven days right now. My doctor had prescribed 120 mgs of Vyvanse daily - I know off the charts for sure. I went through three months of that in a month and a half this last time. I was a single parent to four children and I have gone from hero in my kid's eyes to embarrassing loser due to my addiction to Vyvanse. I have a three month refill waiting at the pharmacy for me, ready to be released beginning of May. The one thing I never did, and knew, from what I have read on this site, is imperative to do is to cut off my supply. The similarity that blew me away was sending the email due to knowing you would find it difficult to tell this to your psych face to face. I am assuming you are male, but I may be wrong. And so what I found remarkable is that I thought the reason I couldn't challenge my doc face to face was that I was a people pleaser codependent female, with a little girl lost complex and this doctor is pretty dynamic, somewhat arrogant and attractive and I was playing into that dynamic and thus the reason I couldn't say something to his face. But perhaps this fear of stating my choice of stopping the prescription is not a gender biased thing and possibly it is fairly universal amongst prescription stimulant addicts. I have been sleeping and eating and binging on Netflix, my space filled with my family storage unit I emptied into what is now an empty nest 400 square foot apartment. Super frustrated with no energy, not much of a life and mourning the energy and skinny body I had on the meds. This is such a hard journey. I am bored, depressed and also frustrated with how my resolve wears down as the weeks off pile up. It's a vicious addiction and cycle and I just want to stay stopped but also have vibrant, natural energy and health and enough energy to exercise and build an interesting life. Right now I am sloth woman, currently on episode 8 season 2 of the Netflix series Love and at least, totally relating to the Mickey character and her tenuous early sobriety. I feel pathetic and like a loser because I'm so low energy and barely doing anything. I need to somehow get into an attitude of gratitude for attempting this super human thing of getting off all those stimulants cold turkey, with the goal of staying off, even if that bright light has dimmed - I can still see it and am still dedicated to it no matter how weak I feel. You know all those AA/NA fear acronyms? What keeps going through my head this time as I lament the lack of energy and a wistful thought for the energy and high I got from Vyvanse pops into my head over these past eleven days is this: Vyvanse aka FEAR - False Energy Appearing Real. Thank you again Speeder for being here, for having the courage - and man, the worst thing is not having anyone in my life, or anyone I have met in AA over the years that I can talk about this stuff to. The damage I've done to my mind, body and emotions and the withdrawal symptoms, I find are unique to coming off stimulants and you, everyone here, -and the website founder, are a Godsend. Sossi

Hey everyone: Former Dexedrine/Vyvanse user/abuser looking for fellow recovering people for online or in person support. It's tough this time around - physically, emotionally, mentally and I find it's hard to find people in AA or NA that can relate to stimulant addiction recovery. Spiritually, yes, I believe the problem and solution is relatable but, would love to not be so isolated in my recovery from amphetamine addiction. Thanks!