Relapse; back at it (with some new wisdom)

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

I've dwindled right back to the "starting line" so to speak. At least if you look at it from a purely factual perspective. 

But anyway, I don't think it's worth it to count progress merely by how many days I've managed to begrudgingly abstain from Adderall; that line of thinking (at least for me) often forces me to disregard/forget about the genuine "implicit learning" that's going on while I abuse Adderall. 

This is not an easy problem to "rationally" explain your way out of. I don't know if any of you guys also experience this:

 

• Whenever you talk to friends, there's always a nagging compulsion to find some way to mention your problem with Adderall; 
• When you listen to that compulsion, you start to "rationalize", as in, explain all the reasons why your use of Adderall is associated with an implicit messianism ("I'm an amazing person, aren't I? I'm confronting all sorts of real problems left and right, and moving forthrightly through the world... and battling with actual fatigue and cognitive pain and strenuous/ demanding activity... to the point where my head aches and I'm ending my days with dozens of pieces of evidence that I accomplished a bunch of meaningful stuff.") 
   

And, I mean, it's true. That's the damn problem: this addiction is unique insofar as it actually (if you're willing) makes you capable of undertaking genuinely meaningful, justifiably "righteous" work. So it's literally impossible to rationally think up some kind of philosophy that will get you through the pangs of withdrawal... or the regret of the inability to achieve the same heightened state of focus. 

What's funny about that is: I heard somewhere that the way you build a skill can be neurophysiologically tracked across time. If you're trying to learn a song on the piano, and you never played the piano before, the first few sessions of playing are going to involve activation in dozens of brain areas... in a very sporadic/spontaneous/disorganized way. But as you get better and better... and you start to learn the song... and you engrain the song into your rote memory... what happens is a very small, but very densely-packed chunk of space in the back of the left-hemisphere... gets stuffed with neurons that are hyper-effective at repeating the mapped pattern of behavior. 

Point is: you can -- across time, while indulging in the false messianism and self-aggrandizement produced by your use of Adderall -- build a hyper-effective, densely-bundled piece of real estate in your brain that works like a "Adderall-Craving Machine" which is then capable of spitting out, in fractions of a second, viciously polished reasons why Adderall really isn't that bad after all... and I'm just using it to be a good person.... and etc., etc. 

I'm tired, man. I mean, I'm not going to stop moving (either cognitively or physically) but it's going to be tiring. I got up today and immediately made my bed and went for a 45-minute walk, then had a light but protein-rich breakfast, had some small talk with my family, and came into my room to start typing up this little post. I don't know what your guys' experience is but... I find that I can 

As long as I can keep "moving forward" somehow--walking, running, doing the dishes, getting a stash of 100 3x5 index cards and hand-copying individual sentences from a stupid textbook and then shuffling the damn pile so that it takes up a ton of space on my desk... and then taking a shot at writing original sentences which somehow comment on/interpret the ideas contained in the textbook--even if I'm writhing in agony from the withdrawal, it's like I can prevent an "exponential" growth effect to the latter half of the withdrawal symptoms (depression, nightmares, cynicism, denigration of "my stupid worthless classes and miserable naiveté"). I guess part of that is my above-average neuroticism (tendency toward anxiety) and when that shit really fires up, it opens up a whole new world of hell. 

How about you guys? To give some context, this last "slip-up"/"workaholic bender" has lasted since Sunday (so, 4 days); the most I've taken in one day is 50mg--the lowest, 25mg. I used it on being hyper-productive at my fast food job (at which I spent 13 hours), completing an onslaught of 9 late assignments (over the course of... 15 hours!) (ironically, those assignments accumulated during my last "withdrawal window" which I sustained for 9 days), and reading dense psychology-related manuscripts for a psych class (for about 8 hours). And lots of long-distance running; I can't believe I've contaminated this good habit with superficial stimulation but... yeah, I've been doing 7-8 miles a day as usual, though faster and up steeper inclines this time. 

Ha! I caught myself there for a sec; it's hard to not feel proud of my accomplishments, even if they're sorta oozing with a "disingenuous underpinning". 

But anyway, that's my state of affairs. It was by no means a fun 4 days of blissful ecstatic focus. A lot of those study sessions involved short breaks wherein all I could do was complain unnervingly to friends (here's a short excerpt:

ALL human beings are massively dysfunctional. 

We're all a bunch of primordial apes screaming obscenities at the top of our lungs... trying desperately to figure out at least something about how to act in the world. 

And we fuck up time and time again. We're a bunch of blundering baboons... with no [pre-installed] resolve to get better. 

That resolve has to be worked up to... through tons and tons of iterative dialogue: complaining, worrying, fetishizing, idealizing, scrapping stupid shit, planning useful shit; it's just a never-ending maze.

And then when we've finally talked about it long enough and exhausted our "time-waster circuit", as long as we ran it with competent people, maybe we can start to synergize. But it doesn't happen on its own... or by default... or in the "natural course of human development".
)

I also found myself, quite unsuspectingly, subject to bouts of extreme emotion. So as to confuse, startle and even viscerally nauseate me. Random memories of me with my family flashed before my eyes and along with them an "emotional valence" which was like: the intense desire to apologize. For what? For something, maybe for "the class of all things which you did which are contemptible in some final sense". It's what people sometimes describe as "life flashing before your eyes". 

And then, 5 minutes pass, I drive this intense emotion into a ditch of despair, I look around me (a desk covered in rich, thick, viciously articulate notes), and I think, "Ha! Haha! You idiot, what are you all wound up for? Look at this! Look at this work of art; your workspace is a work of art in and of itself. Nobody you've ever met can ever dare to venture so far into chaos and derive so much wealth of knowledge! What an idiot you are! What a petty fella... possessed by trifles! You childish genius, you! Always cracking me up!" And then I stand up, order a coffee (I'm at a cafe usually), grab it, sit back down, take a sip, and that sip instantly revivifies my ravaged conscience. "It's a game, after all! This life thing, it's a game and you are merely a naive little player. Good! See that girl sitting a few feet away from you? Isn't she pretty! I'll bet you can really impress her (albeit subconsciously) if you ride the wave of caffeination that's about to kick in and commingle with the Adderall. Eh? Not bad, eh? That'll give you a burden to bear; a responsibility to lug; a purpose in your purposeless life.!"

Yes! YES! YES IT WILL, you're goddamn right you GENIUS! And so I spend another 3 hours at the cafe... dancing with the keys on the keyboard... scribbling infinitely deep notes, oozing with viscous nectar. A slow, deep, rich burn of learning... as I feel the individual neurons getting myelinated second after second... YES! 

Well, and that epoch ends, I come home, take another 21mg, and work voraciously and ravenously (like a rabid [albeit stoic] dog) at my job... preparing perfectly-organized meals for the hungry, lonely, angry, tired customers... waiting for a sliver of satiation to wash them clean. I can give it to them! I have the energy! I have the mental toughness to bear my burden with unwavering vivacity. Untrammeled continuity. Watch me, God! Watch me, Beelzebub! I--a mortal man--am dancing with your energies... one foot in order, the other in absolutely unbearable chaos. 

The neurosis, I guess, is like the pang of conscience telling me, "Well, if you committed such a miserable sin, you might as well put in more effort. No, more than that. Yes, more than that." It forces me to perform at my absolute peak... and then (when I hit the peak of the pyramid) a new pyramid forms from the peak, diverging infinitely upward into a "divine domain" of productivity. 

Anyway, I drank a coffee (a tall one) toward the end of the shift, ended on a high note, devoured a free employee meal and... came home [ravaged by neurosis] to go for a 7.192 mile walk/run. Such is life. 

And now, what do I make of this? Well, one thing's for sure: I'm definitely not "defeated" after my Adderall bender; it was a masochistic rendezvous but at least it wasn't just a bullet to the head (which is the "zombie" effect -- the result of not engaging the incentive reward system soon enough after Adderall kicks in).   

If I sleep, I can sleep for 10 hours tonight... but it has to be bound by some kind of a schedule; there is nothing more agonizing (to me) than to not only suffer this withdrawal... but to suffer it without any structure; to let myself fall apart and bleed uncontrollably in the face of my responsibilities. 

Other than sleep, I intend to (hm), well, keep moving as much as I need to, to complete the work I was doing for the last 4 days. I guess now that I've come back from the chaotic hell, and got the gold (the wisdom inextricably linked with my strange experience), I can put that wisdom to use to add some "beauty" to these essays I was writing for school. 

They have the blood and bones, but now I can really make 'em shine. 

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

I'm tired. Ridden with fatigue... albeit not in the flavor of "cynical, self-righteous, and self-destructive". 

That's a horrible direction to move in... even though... it's literally the most pleasant and tempting one when you start an experience with withdrawal. It's just that, this assignment, it's walloping me with something like intimidation. It's laughing at me. And I'm, on the surface, just casually dismissing it (like, "Screw this! What kind of poorly-formatted learning model is this? What kind of website is this? Why isn't there any string to tug here-and-there which might give me a chance to do something remotely creative inside the assignment?"). 

That's disappointing. Although, it's still possible to turn rote orderly, box-governed note-taking (2 words, 10 words, per box) into a certain type of art. I opened my laptop to witness an amazing sight of: a split-screen, split between two Chrome windows, with about 30 tabs open on one side where I was Googling definitions/ideas... and the other side had another 15 tabs open... and in the assignment itself, with all its fact-oriented questions ("define this"; "go to this website and paste this specific address into this box"), I actually followed the damn rules, and found a certain vivacity in the feelings associated with taking my laterally-thinking, sporadic, spontaneous thought process and shoving it through a narrow tunnel of motor actions: click this tab; place your finger onto the mousepad; click (apply pressure to it) and drag across a certain span of text listing an address of some government official; press ctrl+c; click (apply pressure to the mousepad) on the tab with the assignment; click on the specific goddamn box wherein you are supposed to drop the piece of information; press ctrl+v. God, agonizing as it was it was addictive in the type of torturously ecstatic kick I got from accomplishing every micro-action... FORCING myself (while full of this back-burning Adderall stimulation) to conform to the rules of the game. 

I'm tired. I'd better get back to work or,... as close to it as i can conceivably try to get. 

[Trevor95]

No judgement, but did you write all of this while on Adderall?

 Trevor