westexaco

Hello. This website is fantastic! Really glad I discovered it. I'm 27 years old and my story starts when I was misdiagnosed with ADD in my early twenties. Once upon a time I visited a doctor that made very liberal use of his prescription pad. I complained of anxiety and he prescribed Klonopin. I told him of occasional panic attacks and he tacked on Xanax. He gave me Vicadin for headaches and Ambien for occasional insomnia. When I mentioned that I was experiencing a bit of brain-fog (and who wouldn't on all these drugs?) I was given 60x 30mg Adderall IR per month. Over the next six months I developed a tolerance and was gradually bumped up to 120 tabs per month. That is over 3.5 grams of pharmaceutical-grade Amphetamine every single month. For a while everything was fine. I had more energy and got more work done than I could ever have imagined. Doing things, doing anything, was super fun. Fear and anxiety became impossibilities... I was like a social God! Some of the best conversations of my life were had on Adderall. Things that scared me before, like public speaking or talking to women, suddenly became as trivial as tying my shoes. This was life on easy mode! Fast-forward six months or so. I now needed Adderall to motivate myself to do anything at all, but saw no problem with this because Addy was so much fun. Occasionally I would binge for a few days and nights, because why not? I had more Adderall than I could use and effectively doubling my waking hours made me feel like superman. I slowly started transitioning from using Adderall for medicinal/utilitarian purposes to using it 100% for fun. I would only hang with friends that had Addy or meth and we'd see how long we could stay up. The longer we stayed awake, the weirder/cooler things got. We started having shared hallucinations. Seriously, I'd see a shadow monster and my friends could see the exact same thing. It was awesome. It was like we were exploring an alternate dimension together. We would tweak together, mixing Adderall and meth and sometimes coke, doing pills, tripping out in our private world. The longer we stayed awake the more real things got. We could talk to these shadow people after the 3rd or 4th day. After day 5 we generally lost the ability to differentiate between real life and shadow land. None of this insanity seemed wrong or unhealthy to me because I had lost the ability to feel negative emotions. Amphetamine was an absolute blast. Fast-forward a year or so. The good times stopped being so good. I didn't used to get come-downs from Adderall or meth, but now the come-down was almost unbearable every single time. The only way to really deal with it was lots of weed or lots of benzos. Even then it was nuts. Intense paranoia, insane muscle aches/cramps/pain, jaw-clenching, no appetite but I was still very hungry, racing thoughts to the point of insanity, scary hallucinations (not the fun kind from before)... it was bad. But I still kept doing it. Amphetamine became my sole source of enjoyment and pleasure. Besides, it was still super fun until the come-down. So fun that over the course of a year I didn't even notice that ALL my family and friends had either grown to hate me or cut me out of their lives completely. I was in such a dopamine/GABA fueled haze. It took me getting arrested (a few times), crashing my car, hospitalizing myself in ICU for a week, getting a concussion and rehab to finally get it through my head that I needed to sloooooow doooown. Been clean for 7 months now. No amphetamine, no prescriptions, not even weed or cigarettes. Totally sober. Still haven't regained my ability to enjoy things again. I have zero motivation and very little energy. I've heard it can take years to recover. I know my drug use may be a bit outside the scope of this forum, but I'm asking for help anyway. Does it ever get easier? When do I start enjoying life again? I think about going back to Amphetamine every single day. Hell, every single hour. More, even. An Adderall prescription is only a phone call away, you know? I haven't forgotten the bad times and I know they would happen again if I go back. But once you've seen just how INSANELY FUN life can be, and once you realize that normal sober life cannot possibly compare to that... how do you not go back?