New member; what's up?

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

I'm seventeen years old. When I was 14-15 (2020-2021), the pandemic convinced me that life was essentially meaningless and I developed a (pathological) inclination to sit in one spot and do nothing for 10-14 hours per day as a source of (I guess) pride. I did this for 16 months. 

Instead of clinical depression, or a complete lack of friends, or a cultural chasm of chaos that opened up thanks to federally-induced alienation, I was convinced this was all caused by Attention Deficit Disorder. And yes, that was true; I had all the symptoms but, I feel like that wasn't the right rung to start off with. 

Nonetheless I got diagnosed and... after 5 (f**king) months of my "conservative" doctor trying out all the conservative non-stimulant medications there are, and after all of them failed to render any improvement in my will to live or work or do anything... I finally got Adderall XR. 

Fast forward to about 11 months later--aka today--and I'm just as clueless as ever before. I have a job now; and my grades are relatively stable; and I have a very rigorous workout routine; but I still feel like there's a deep (DEEP) iceberg of repressed problems which are masquerading on the surface as "ADD" but really includes stuff like: (quasi) Oedipal parents who didn't encourage me enough to socialize in early childhood; a lack of rigorous, genuinely stressful opportunities which would unlock new genes inside me and build my self-confidence and integration with the world; an endless repository of (really F**CKING AGONIZING) traumatic memories of sitting in one place doing nothing in a fetal ball for 1-1/2 years. 

Here's the best explanation I've been able to dig up about Adderall abuse: (this took me a LONG time to finally realize)

So I'm hammering on the keys of a little keyboard to animate little typographical characters on the screen and I'm gonna post this as a thread on a forum. So we're not in person, talking, but the process of mutually joining a forum and reading each others' messages is almost like an in-person conversation. You could even call it an "abstract representation" of a real conversation. 

Bear with me here. 

Example 2: Sports. Athletic sports are viewed in arenas which require billions of dollars to design and build and maintain; these arenas are congregated with (sometimes) tens of thousands of people at a time, with cameras broadcasting the players to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. What the f**k are we (humans) doing exactly? And one answer is: sports seem to be an "abstract representation" of the way early humans formed coalitions with tribal members who--as a group or team--went out with their spears and hunted prey. So it's like: by watching people play basketball or football or whatnot, perhaps we're leaning (on an abstract level) how to act in the world in a manner that best guarantees the ability to obtain the prey (reach our goals) which provides us sustenance so that we can keep on living. 

Okay, okay. So... 

Here's my theory or interpretation: Adderall is an "abstract representation" of stress-inducing situations which demand our full attention in order to quickly complete work (and acquire skill) which readily benefits our survival. 

In the same way that movies allow us to feel the same way the character is feeling... in the same way that watching sports elicits deep emotion toward our home team... Adderall incudes a state of sympathetic nervous system arousal which MIRRORS what our body/mind would naturally do in a STRESS-RIDDEN situation (which demands quick critical thinking/action)... but the work labeled as "fight-or-flight mortal threat" is just an essay or something of the sort. 

So it's not that it makes us superhuman... it just takes our natural proclivities (our intellect, creativity, etc.) and those natural talents get used at full-throttle for something that our brain now tags as a mortal threat. It builds skill quicker-than-usual. But those skills are built with the underlying assumption (in the brain's primordial detection circuits) that "I 

So what? What's the real cost of this induction of stress? -- Well, you'll burn yourself to a crisp. You'll never feel... well, you know that "Maslow's Hierarchy" chart? I hate that damn cliche thing but I think it makes a good point in this context: I don't think you can truly live and act in the "self-transcendence" or "self-actualization" rung at the very top if you're constantly wrestling with an overwrought sympathetic nervous system... which is tagging everything you do as a threat. Your life degenerates into a succession of neverending threats--a perpetual warzone. 

Adderall is free motivation at the expense of your humanity. You slowly degenerate into a being who is living solely for... well, it's like there's a psychological incongruity: an unconscious primordial part of you is tagging this Adderall-induced state as a "mortal threat" whereas you consciously know you're alive in a pretty safe society. So that's like a miniature schizophrenia of sorts: you're living in one world (the empirical, factually-described world, which can be summarized by the objective structure of your safe society) but also in another world (this abstracted "hell"--where all the qualities of hell have been parsed out from the empirical reality which would constitute an external hell)... and no matter how much you try to convince yourself that you're safe and successful, you're still in (F***ING) HELL. 

No wonder I've been terrified of my parents. Terrified of my teachers. Terrified of making friends or getting into an intimate relationship. It's because I've tagged all human contact as "a source of contact which would--in unraveling itself--reveal the hell implicit in my psyche". So I built a wall around my heart; I hid behind work that made me think I was valuable somehow to society. I thought that I could just show off my amazing intellectual and athletic capacity and get away with living just by building this artificial character--this artificial "me"-- that masqueraded as a competent, effective person who's always right and always on top of things. 

That's no life for a human being. That's the life of a prisoner. A schizophrenic in a psychiatric ward. 

Sure, go ahead and be Mr Right all the time and get all that work done without any implicit psychological "motivational struggle" behind it. By eliminating the seemingly-impenetrable barrier that guards the treasure of any given learning curve, you kill the human inside you... and the person who's doing that work is no longer you. He's no longer really challenging himself; he's just following behavioral compulsions... "taking orders" from the sympathetic arousal. 

Am I a little too extreme? Of course; no idea could ever be influential if it didn't portray the "extremity" of any given behavioral pathology. Yes, it's possible to use Adderall sensibly to treat problems with concentration; but (but what?) but I'm not a puppet--and all this drug has ever made me do was turn me into a puppet. "Wake up. Do schoolwork. Run for 7 miles. Lift weights for an hour. Go to sleep. Repeat 100, 200, 300 times." Because of the "high" that adderall gave me--locking me into a narrow goal-directed tunnel--I never stopped to think that maybe I was doing all that homework without even reflecting on its utility for the lives of other people; I never stopped to think that, maybe, I ought to make some friends and share my experiences with them and that maybe, we could sorta "help each other live"; I never stopped to think about just how useful my skill of buckling down and running for 7 miles and then lifting weights... every DAY... could be of utility in deeply enriching competitive environments (sport teams). 

Ha! But it's not that easy! Haha! That's the catch! This insatiable craving doesn't go away after one day. That "artificial stress" is SO DAMN FUN! "So what that it causes an unbridgeable rift in my psyche--parsing it into an attention-craving perfectionist and a neurotic decrepit nihilist? F**k morality! F**k my psyche and my conscience! I can just create an image of perfection everywhere I go and pretend to be this superhuman... while... hiding the rapid deterioration of my psychological and physiological states!" 

Okay. I'll stop there. Let me know what you guys think and... help me out! 

[quit-once]

So, you've been on adderall for 11 mos and don't like the person or puppet you have become.  But, you love the high that it gives you.   Are you ready to quit?

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

22 hours ago, quit-once said:

So, you've been on adderall for 11 mos and don't like the person or puppet you have become.  But, you love the high that it gives you.   Are you ready to quit?

Yeah, I think so. I'm definitely sick of being clueless and naive and I'm sick of running away from the plethora of underlying problems that make me turn to Adderall as a crutch that allows me to split my psyche into two--and thus, get the illusion that this "new me" is separate from the one who is nothing but a weak, pathetic, lazy coward who wastes his potential. 

It's incongruous, I know. My understanding of the full problem and all its wretched heads is barely cohesive, and only cohesive in tiny patches. But maybe by undertaking this "journey" I can articulate more of it. 

What about you? What did Adderall do for you? What did it undoubtedly steal from you that you chose to reclaim? 

[quit-once]

1 hour ago, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

What about you? What did Adderall do for you?

You can find that answer here:   

1 hour ago, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

What did it undoubtedly steal from you that you chose to reclaim? 

My cognition.  And my future.  An adderall addiction is a mortgage on your future.