"Day 0" of a little personal log

[Jon B]

On 1/25/2023 at 9:24 PM, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

I'm 17 years old now 

 

Straight up with you. You are at an age where many of us would kill to be at right now. Just quit the shit,  and be done with it.

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

14 hours ago, Jon B said:

Straight up with you. You are at an age where many of us would kill to be at right now. Just quit the shit,  and be done with it.

Ha, that's the double-edged sword! On one end of the coin, adolescence is supposed to be a time of venturing out into challenging circumstances and coming back with "data" to integrate into your personality (which amphetamines have done to quite an extent, for all intents and purposes). On the other end, if you fly too close to the sun (which there is a far greater tendency to do in youth) you just spiral exponentially into long-term problems later in adulthood... and then the regret/blame falls on your "past self". 

It's a silly conundrum but a (what should I call it?).... well, let me restart that sentence: My use of amphetamines has reminded me that my life has no intrinsic meaning to it--or, not enough to (on its own) justify the regulation of drug temptation. 

So what? -- So, if I were to truly quit, I have to replace the drug with a meaningful life. And I really don't know what that looks like yet; I'm learning every day and... this most recent (so far, successful) "stepping down process" will hopefully help. 

[quit-once]

On 3/28/2023 at 8:35 AM, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

- So, if I were to truly quit, I have to replace the drug with a meaningful life

That is a tall order and perhaps a false choice.  A meaningful life is not assured just because you kick an addiction.  A meaningful life is something you must grow into.

An addiction to amphetamines is unsustainable in the long run.  And that was the number one reason why I quit after nine years.

[Using Dreams]

This is being written for the 17 yr old young man with a brilliant mind, both on and off of drugs. I believe you really are trying to quit(because you are smart enough to know why) yet, I also believe that you spend way to much time rationalizing your screw ups that are happening over and over.

If you are really going to quit, why not quit torturing yourself with all of the unnecessary stinking thinking (thank you NA), and just dispose of the pills?
Maybe you’re only thinking about quitting, is that it? I doubt with a brain like yours that I need to say anything more huh? 
 

You’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain the difference between a young man coming into his life and how and what his personalities will or might end up looking like both after taking amphetamines and by no longer taking them. Are your actions stunting your growth or potential? Right now you can’t have an answer for that, you’re not done yet. And, you’re too young.

It more than likely doesn’t matter but I’m 62 years old. I use to be 17 too. And I use to(still do and you will too because we’re born this way!) constantly sit around and analyze every single thing or action just to hopefully find an answer or a way to satisfy the ends to a means that will cause the lesser suffering. And little brother, you’re gonna have to suffer a little. Buddhists believe that suffering is life, I’d almost have to agree. 
 

Coming off of stimulants isn’t the hard part, hell that part’s easy. The hard part is the desire to use more, while you’re trying to stay strong and get healthy. That’s your addict brain talking to you. Anyone can quit knowing they have some more pills in case it’s too hard. Isn’t that true, in the back of that mind? You are so incredibly smart. Some aren’t. You’re already winning aren’t you, to a degree? Now finish what you started already.

I look forward to saying I’m proud of you! 
 Christopher

 

[Piano90]

Hi I just joined the site. Didn’t read all the writing sorry but thought I’d put some positives of No adderall. 
you sound like you’re still at school or college , please don’t let it carry on for years because that’s what I have done (I’m now 32) and my health is a mess. 
so positives for being OFF :

-not having heart problems 

-being able to sleep

-being able to eat 

-not having as many panic attacks 

-not developing dual addictions (for me it was benzos and opiates)

-not Developing psychosis 

-being authentic and honest with people

-not acting tweaked out 

[Piano90]

Also all the overthinking is likely down to the adderall. I used to think it helped me, I had a successful business but i was physically and mentally a mess. 

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

Today is "Day 7" of sobriety! And... it's 9:10 PM so... it's almost the start of Day 8. Day 8 is (if I remember correctly) the streak I managed to reach in the initial (most active) stage of me posting on this thread... back in February or so. 

It's really quite amazing how "plastic" the brain is and how... even if you throw it into a wretched burning fire... it finds a way to bring a certain "musical continuity" to your experience. Even on a really painful, exhausting, begrudging day, it's not just one linear experience of one linear negative emotion; there are "ebbs" and "flows" and some amount of autonomous control over how you respond to those things to learn from them and determine the course of the next moment. 

I must admit, though; the one "lifeline" for me is... this sort of "flaring pride" I have for my ability to abstain from anything that's "lazy". I never give in to the temptation to sleep or scroll endlessly through my phone or anything. If I can't do shit, I can still walk; a few days ago I walked for 6 or so hours straight along sidewalks and just hopped into random coffee shops to chug down black coffee every 3 hours to keep me going. But I didn't stop. Or yesterday, for example, I spent 80 minutes walking through neughborhood streets/a new local park, reached a coffee shop to do 40 minutes' worth of homework, then walked 60 minutes back home and then ran 7.3 miles. 

OK, time to sleep. I'm not going to draw this message out endlessly. But here's a "nugget of [at least partly] earned wisdom" I gained... 

Most people around you (anywhere you go) are, by the fundamental laws of nature, not really willing to accept or "vibe with" change. They will do everything to preserve perverse, old belief systems and hide in shallow "cold comforts" like proverbial pigs in shit. That's why success in any given pursuit is proportionately meaningful and "real": because a "hierarchy" governs it. A hierarchy, by definition, has an exponentially enormous clump of "pigs in shit" at the bottom... and as you cascade upward, you get less and less people but those people are more and more hyper-actualized. 

That said...: (what relevant thing did I want to say?) -- There are so many people suffering from an addiction that it's just unbelievable. And if you start to commune with the masses, one of the things that'll just naturally tend to happen is you'll drown in a sea of real, genuine pity and acceptance from these people... reinforcing the carbonized shit comprising your pathetic, decrepit paradigms of inferiority. 

I think there's a point in there (what is it?) and it's this: you ultimately have to take responsibility for your own change... and... stop comparing your degree of suffering or degree of decrepitness to other people. Your burden is horrible enough; stop trying to heave somebody else's by identifying with them. You've been dealt certain cards and... other people have been dealt different cards but... the one continuity is the randomness of the whole thing, the "bad luck" you can rationalize out of the hand you've been dealt, and the "luck" you can engineer by exploiting the unique set of opportunities you get to play with. 

That was very poorly (or at least in-cohesively) struck together but... such is life. I'm going to bed. 

 

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

8:36 PM

 

I must invest my life in something worthwhile or else it’ll go to waste and I’ll be dead before I take a first step.

We’re always trapped in this dumb delusion that we have an infinite amount of time to dabble around in ignorance…

But we don’t! It’s over! The ignorant bliss is over!

What’s left? What’s left is the reality I’ve been hiding from incessantly with my greedy hoarding of heightened faculties.

Why was that intrinsically wrong? It wasn’t! It was just an unsustainable means of attaining a power which I directed at something indeterminate. I had no clue that what I was doing — I just knew people accepted it… and it was easier than being in a sober, inattentive, lazy stupor. It’s better to be ballsy and bold than it is to be meek.

But in the final analysis, I wasn’t really “bold”; I was just running on a treadmill of delusion — thinking I was productive and esoterically self-actualized… when I was really just expending energy in a direction that seemed to be justified by the hedonistic, short-term “positivity” it rendered.    

Was it completely useless? — No. Because it led to this moment—the moment of realization.

But how do I use the moment of realization? — Well, I can probably either: (a) ignore it or (b) build a cohesive understanding of a more sensible way to move forward.

What’s the most sensible way to move forward through life, from hereon out? — Well, the answer isn’t gonna strike me on the head like a flash from heaven! I have to sow the answer into being… through genuine moral striving.

What does that “genuine moral striving” look like? — I have to let all the deadwood burn away, by deliberately subjecting myself to intense periods concentrating on articulating “top-down” rationalizations which question the overarching purpose of an assignment by first looking at life from a perspective of “becoming the best person I can possibly be within 5 years”—then scaling my frame of reference down over and over again until I finally concentrate on the sensible, rational purpose of doing the first 60 seconds of work on the respective task… and only then… beginning the task… and only then… begrudgingly, harrowingly, with great moral agony and voluntary subjugation to the “unfairness” and “cruelty” of the whole game… sowing the seed that will grant me a respective “step forward” in the overarching context of striving toward that vision of the ideal self.

But it’s gotta be top-down. I can’t do bottom-up anymore. Without Adderall, surely it isn’t impossible but… it is exponentially more unnecessary and agonizing to do the homework assignment before you realize its intrinsic purpose in retrospect to the amount of effort it took to do it. With no motivation to begin with, it makes more sense to justify the living daylights out of doing it before you even begin… to start by looking at your 5-year goals… then 1-year goals… then 1-month goals… then 1 week… 1 day… 1 hour… 10 minutes… and then… as you gain an equilibrated insight on the meaning of 10 minutes of genuine moral striving in the frame of this one assignment… you operate within this active framework for the few minutes that it can sustain its untrammeled clarity and perceptual relevance… and maybe(!) … just maybe… you can do those 10 minutes of work… and then another 5 or 10… and then another 25… and then reap a little sapling of truth in your garden of moral striving.

Look, it's pretty easy to roll a boulder downhill--at least, easier than it is to heave it uphill. With all the experience I've had journaling about my own emotional states... in a loop of pathologically high-resolution self-consciousness... it seems sensible to... instead of sleeping or eating or lounging around in front of unfinished work... just sit down and start viscerally going through the physical process of writing out the emotional states and rationalizations that beset me before I start any given assignment... and slowly... articulate actual reasons why it's a good idea to get started. It's only a crutch and it doesn't make the pain worse... but... it does create momentum that justifies the pain. I think (I have a vague suspicion) that the amount of influence we have over other people is often imperceptible and governed by no specific laws. Take, for example, the randomness of seeing some homeless guy playing a spellbinding guitar solo... to which you respond by tossing a couple quarters at him. Then, you're on your merry way and... that guy who just gave you 35 seconds of spellbinding transcendence (of time, self-awareness, compulsive thoughts about your fatigue/hunger/etc) will eventually stop playing and regress into a fetal ball of semi-starvation in the cold street... a pitiful animal who--just a couple hours before--delivered a small crowd into a state of collective, transient divinity. 

What's my point? Damn it, I don't need to always have a point but I think it's: the "specifics" of your "moral striving" doesn't have to be understood by everybody. There's no perfect thing to do at every given moment of your life--and often, the most wretchedly "pointless" activities--as long as they require time and attention and vision and effort--can render the greatest long-term value... often in virtually imperceptible ways. 

Goodnight guys. (I've regressed back to "Day 1", by the way.)

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

Well anyway, how do I expect to awake tomorrow? My choices, of course, are: blithely, pessimistically, with the compulsion to pop another pill to briefly absolve myself of the deeper more “axiomatic” moral challenge in order to enter the domain of a higher-resolution, more short-term goal-directed frame which—as a result of entering—instantly sets fire to more of the surrounding and underlying territory… thus subjecting that small patch of goal-directed land to a catastrophic collapse into irrelevance. The flood will still drown it in a sea of anomalous details that invalidate all the “effort” I applied for those 5 fleeting hours of productive bliss.

 

Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether or not I can articulate that. What matters is that I can actually keep the promise to myself that: tomorrow, I will wake up and immediately jump into life—without succumbing to that ultimate temptation. I will immediately make my bed… and jump into an ice-cold shower… and grab a cup of coffee… and breathe the morning air outdoors at 6:00 AM… and walk the dog while listening to podcasts which favorably package information related to upcoming exams into digestible impressions of thought that potentiate/recall formerly-studied information… and come back home to have a high-protein breakfast… and have a communal, mutually beneficial conversation with the members of my family… and reach school 30 minutes early to have time to read something like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”… and then conscientiously enter each class with the intention of subordinating my pride to my receptive ignorance and the willingness to rectify that ignorance… and then head to my minimum-wage job with the intention of not feeling like it’s “below me” but rather… doing my duties dutifully and in a spirit of reciprocally influencing the quality of the customers’ days by assembling and packaging and serving the food under a guideline of favorable impressions left on those customers within the bounds of everything the restaurant can control/optimize. And then… end the day with another run… sufficiently lengthy and up a sufficiently steep incline… so as to burn that carbonized deadwood of limiting inferiority complexes that have (by that point) once again started to form under the weight of the transitory chemical imbalance.

 

Ultimately, the question lying at the root of such a plan is: am I willing to change the things I can change… while accepting the things I can’t as implicit realities which I must work with (as opposed to balking at them)? — Yes, and the first step is a “good night’s rest”.

[Nicky_B]

I do believe in God, but there are many aspects of God and His ultimate plan that we will never understand. A good analogy is to compare our knowledge as human to God would be to think of it as a dog trying to do calculus. A dog has amazing abilities such as an incredible smell (and many other talents) but it will never be able to do calculus. In the same way as human beings, we are provided natural talents, but there are certain levels of understanding that we will never have in our lifetime such as understanding the Plans of God.

I have a son who is your age who did not believe in God due to a very difficult experience that he had to go through. I have done this many times with people who had no believe in God. I told him to pray, and say these words, "God if you are real, please show me who You are in a way that I will understand that you exist"...and God did show him in a way that only he understood that he was real.

I have made the choice many years ago to have God lead me on a daily basis and what I am to do next. He is the ultimate Captain of my ship He alone sets the course of my life. I have tried to manage my own life many years ago and I ended up wrecking my ship on the rocks. After the disastrous experience of my ship wrecking on rocks through my own ignorance, I decided to do something different and to follow His lead for the rest of my life.
Congratulations Invenitur in succeeding in your endeavor to never take amphetamines again.... slow and steady, wins the race... just keep doing what you're doing and take it one day at a time....and you will eventually look back on this great journey that created a life that you could've only dreamed of!!

Wishing you the best, my friend

 

Nicky Button

[Teresa]

@Nicky_BVery well said. I totally agree. Speaking of dogs... My mom's dog passed away the other day and she brought it out to our house for my husband to bury in our pet cemetery and he took off the collar and said it on our bbq and the wind blew it off. Today when he went out to feed the horse he found the collar laying directly on top of the dog's grave. The only conclusion we have is our German Shepherd carried it out there and placed it there for that dog. Interesting right?!

[SleepyStupid]

On 4/24/2023 at 12:24 AM, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether or not I can articulate that. What matters is that I can actually keep the promise to myself that: tomorrow, I will wake up and immediately jump into life—without succumbing to that ultimate temptation. I will immediately make my bed… and jump into an ice-cold shower… and grab a cup of coffee… and breathe the morning air outdoors at 6:00 AM… and walk the dog while listening to podcasts which favorably package information related to upcoming exams into digestible impressions of thought that potentiate/recall formerly-studied information… and come back home to have a high-protein breakfast… and have a communal, mutually beneficial conversation with the members of my family… and reach school 30 minutes early to have time to read something like “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”… and then conscientiously enter each class with the intention of subordinating my pride to my receptive ignorance and the willingness to rectify that ignorance… and then head to my minimum-wage job with the intention of not feeling like it’s “below me” but rather… doing my duties dutifully and in a spirit of reciprocally influencing the quality of the customers’ days by assembling and packaging and serving the food under a guideline of favorable impressions left on those customers within the bounds of everything the restaurant can control/optimize. And then… end the day with another run… sufficiently lengthy and up a sufficiently steep incline… so as to burn that carbonized deadwood of limiting inferiority complexes that have (by that point) once again started to form under the weight of the transitory chemical imbalance.

 

this reminds me of Fitter Happier - a Radiohead song that is a commentary on conformity and the disillusionment of it. it's worth a listen.

not to say that your plan doesn't sound healthy, but it doesn't sound like that of a real person. I think you are not only addicted to amphetamines, but addicted to crafting an identity - I know the feeling because I used to do it too when I was on speed.

On 4/24/2023 at 12:11 AM, in sterquiliniis invenitur said:

What's my point? Damn it, I don't need to always have a point but I think it's: the "specifics" of your "moral striving" doesn't have to be understood by everybody. There's no perfect thing to do at every given moment of your life--and often, the most wretchedly "pointless" activities--as long as they require time and attention and vision and effort--can render the greatest long-term value... often in virtually imperceptible ways. 

I agree! the thing is, I don't see much of these "pointless" activities in your writing. I'll be really honest with you - quitting Adderall is a process in which the first few months will be rife with pointlessness, lethargy, sudden and extreme disinterest in the things that you used to obsess over. you will not be successful in this process until you address this theme of guilt you have towards doing things that seem useless. I think this is something a therapist could help you work through, but you need to be ready and willing to disassociate from all the rationalizations and frameworks you've built around the inner addict that you are becoming.