hopeful ideas and thoughts.. and a couple confessions

[in sterquiliniis invenitur]

Here's a little chronology of recent events..

• I made it 6 days without Adderall
• I relapsed for one lousy day (30mg only)
• I made it to the end of the 8th day without Adderall 
• And at like 10:00 PM I started popping little pills (I took 12 10mg capsules of the short-acting stuff... over the course of 20 hours), pulled an all-nighter, worked myself into a manic raging fire of uncontrollable passion
• And it started to rapidly die down the next day at 6:00 PM. 

And I call myself faithful! I have no faith... or rather, I can write a cute little post where I immaculately articulate the value of faith and virtue and how far it can take you... but you know, there's some widely known philosophy out there (I think it's existentialism) that outright says... that if you want to know the nature of a person or the root of their problems or whatever... you can't rely on what they say or (God forbid) how well they say it.

After all, a high intelligence or "IQ" is a random and (one can say) undeserved quality if you happen to have it. I don't want to sound arrogant saying that. I have no "street savvy", minimal social skills, and a VERY tiny range of actual skills. Even then, those "skills" are more like under-exercised talents that were forced into very occasional, short-term bursts of development while on Adderall (AND... here's the kicker: I think Adderall abuse actually kinda, in my experience, makes you better at getting "things" done but highly limits the degree to which your brain uses things like sleep to potentiate information... move certain useful memories of your own damn accomplishments into long-term storage... build deeply-ingrained procedural memory that elevates your skill level etc. etc. etc.)

Man, if you wanted to look at it from a Christian perspective... Adderall addiction (and withdrawal) matches perfectly into the mold of that "escape slavery, wander the desert" motif. You become a slave to a neurochemical state... which grants you readily accessible benefits which you can't get anywhere else (at least, nowhere nearby in the spatial and temporal and social geography in which you live). And so... what are you gonna do? You work... you work diligently, constantly, even creatively and gracefully... and you produce REAL QUALITY (the kind that other people may genuinely respect you for)..... but here's the kicker: ALL of that quality... was rendered in the service of strengthening the rationale that "my use of Adderall is positively improving my life, and has minimal drawbacks, with very little reason to try and withdraw from it.". 

Right?! I mean, I have a long-winded way of putting together ideas... because it's not like I'm just writing down what I already fully knew in my head. I'm trying to grapple with this. But nonetheless, I hope I made sense there: Adderallics--who use Adderall outside the peripheries of an organized medical system (which goes to great lengths to make the diagnosis and treatment of problems objective and factual beyond belief)--basically...

(A) Lose their protective relationship with the medical system (which, again, helps you think about Attention problems through a very clarified, objective lens... minimizing the impact of scary subjective anomalies like "building up a tolerance" or "feeling speedy in my interpersonal interactions"). As a result, we react more erratically and simplemindedly to all sorts of experiences that are subjective (and no longer bounded to the advice of a medical professional). (Example: "Here, I'll just pop an extra Adderall and drink some coffee to compensate for my 3-hours of sleep"; "Well, I feel an arbitrary but super-powerful compulsion to keep working on this so I guess the outcome might be so meaningful that I shouldn't sleep at all tonight to keep working.")

(B) So, like this, we turn into (especially if we're doing something we have some intrinsic interest in) obsessed, skillful, creative people... but I just have to ask: When was the last time I did any sort of work for the sake of its intrinsic value to other people? You (the reader) should ask yourself that too because my suspicion is: well, no Adderallic is a follower of hedonism (that is, the belief that life should be about self-centered pleasure seeking and derivation of maximal sensory pleasure before dying); after all, no Adderallic takes the drug to sit cross-legged for 8-12 hours and indulge in its effects. BUT... (tell me if I'm wrong here)... I think being a work-craving Adderall user (or a workaholic in general, probably).... is fundamentally motivated by the subjective pleasure derived from overcoming hardship to share the "lessons learned" with others. It's a hero complex, if that's a psychological concept: "I want to be like that thing I see in movies where the main character is an archetype representing...in a hyper-obvious way...the way a person can overcome challenges." We Adderallics don't like a normal life. We don't like the burden that's ironically tied to trifling "simple pleasures" like dinner with the family... or a short chat with a parent/sibling... or a slow day at work where there's time to just talk and reflect on what got us through the really busy days. Heck, even before I was addicted to this substance... during the summer break months... I was positively terrified of and averse to "short-term pleasure" or "value-less" activities. I would sit in my room from 8:00 AM to about 7:00 PM and simply study concepts related to a career I wanted to have in the future (I'm 18 now--but this "pre-addiction" reflection goes back to when I was 15-16; I still have the same obsessions, though it's a bit more clear to me now WHY I have those passions--and what road it can lead me down; anyway back to the main topic: ). Sometimes though, it would be more like 8:00 AM to about 12:00 AM or longer. I took a break in the afternoon to run for an hour or hour and-a-half... and I took a power nap of about 25-minutes sometime after that... but... well, I never "fit in" with the normative tide of social expectations. I despised the notion of a "balanced" life. But before I started Adderall... well, before I get to the subjective/"hidden" positive element I should say there were REAL problems: I had real trouble at school and my "range" of emotional experience was sort-of shallow and acquiescent (not depressed... just kinda detached... until I got to the part of the day where I could cram in some time with my obsession; even if it was only an hour or two there was a time dilation effect going on there where it felt "timeless", like a sort of infinity). 

But anyway, that said, there was a positive side to my pre-Adderall existence and it is something like: I wasn't afraid of getting tired. I often worked on my obsession (which was writing, or rather, studying the principles of direct response sales writing.. and the underlying psychology that powers those principles) at midnight after a day of sitting in classes while trying to creatively hide slips of paper from books I was studying talking about those principles... or hiding very successful sales letters that I would "study" in a sort of directionless obsessive frenzy of trying to find out everything that made it work as well as it did. And then after sitting in those classes I'd run like 5, 7, 10 miles and then do my homework over a period of 4 hours and THEN... FINALLY... I could do my "obsession-powered studying" but in a quiet, conducive environment. I was exhausted all day, every day...but I was free. 

Gosh, that's a real cliche isn't it. But it's true, even if it's incomplete (because being human is more complex than abstinence and a healthy obsession). Alas, I'm tired. I will continue this type of ranting later. I don't know when though. Ha, it's funny: see that biggest paragraph in this thread? After the first 30% of it my medication "kicked" and then I went off the rails and into a world of self-reflective babbling. Only 10mg though (if that's any solace to me).

OK it's now a few minutes later. Anyway, my original point before derailing was that the Adderallic personality is obsessed with the drug's ability to trigger a feeling that "you are the hero or messiah in this situation; you can do this". By default, in my case, before Adderall, I did not have any sort of "hero complex" where I had some massive ego about the effort I was putting into life. I was doing it 'cause I hated slothfulness with a vile vengeance and found the stuff I was doing intrinsically valuable. I was sacrificing good grades/a social life/all the markers of high school success... for some hunch that the alternative path I was taking was, though a bit dumb, still effortful... and would thus lead me to a more sorta adventurous and meaningful life. BUT... WITH Adderall... well, I could do anything, anywhere, under any parameters instead of hiding from most of life. And so I think it ascribed a sort of intense pride to skills I always had and was always humble about. But that pride got entangled with the experience of being on Adderall. SO... basically, in unconscious form... I was telling myself "Actually, all that time I spent obsessed with sales copy-writing was completely worthless and... rather than being a smart and humble and careful person I was actually just a weak, innocent soul subject to the force of a stupid education system and NOW... with this Adderall... I get to redeem myself by being something of value in some arbitrary sense to the teachers and classmates. Damn it! I know it doesn't make sense but at least you love doing everything so shut up and head to class." 

Does any of this make any sense? I did amazing work throughout my time on Adderall but... 
 

• It was done without any sense that it has any long-term worth. I only did those things to "please the teacher". 
• It was done in a daze of self-gratifying pride. So that I could say, "See? Maybe the assignment is meaningless in the long term and you won't even have any damn MEMORY OF DOING IT... but... the fact of the arbitrary dopamine kicks you're getting from getting it done... WHILE using Adderall... means that your use of the drug in conjunction with arbitrarily-defined hard work... is a sufficient combination of actions to equal a meaningful life. Boom! The problem of meaning in life is solved for good, buddy. Now, repress this conclusion and go do something practical. Like going to the next class period."

Does any of this make sense? I hope it does. I'm not trying to write an essay here though. As I start college (in 2 weeks!) and study psychology in a more discipline-oriented environment, maybe I'll be spending absurd amounts of time in the library studying both the science of Adderall use... and the breadth of real-life accounts of people enduring this mad hell. And maybe after a while gathering this "fuel" of impressions/ideas, I can write a real essay which posits the possibility that maybe, without Adderall dependency, you can eventually trigger some mad upward spiral that leads you to "fulfilling the full extent of your potential in life" rather than "easily accomplishing the goals of day to day life with Adderall and then losing all memory of ever having accomplished those goals". It's a vague, strange, even paralyzing desire (it preoccupies me all the time)... but... I really do want to write an essay like that and as far as my unconscious mind is concerned, it's the most "real" desire I've had in years. Because...

 

• I've always tried to run from the ambiguous cloud of anxiety surrounding my abuse patterns. 
• Part of the reason (PART, not ALL) why... is because... high school was (in my subjective experience; I don't have delusions I swear) a humiliating, mocking, demoralizing, emasculating, even malevolent place... where maybe 3% of the teachers actually cared and NONE of the classes encouraged truly deep critical thinking applied to real problems. 
• But now that I'm starting college, and studying psychology for that matter, I have a system which is organized so that my effort toward understanding Adderall addiction while actually battling it... is a "playable game". That is to say, college is designed to train you in critical thinking directed at REAL problems... and why not align that "training" with the heavily emotional body of experiences I have with Adderall use, abuse, and attempts to quit? 
• And, well, what if I stopped thinking so shallowly about why I like studying the principles of salesmanship as they apply to written sales messages.? That is to say, maybe I don't want to have a career of just being a freelance sales copy-writer. Maybe what I really want is... to sell my own information products... maybe even something like a book or a detailed 100-page report... which... tries to explain the logical, sequential side of effective Adderall withdrawal... AND... bind that to the confusing emotional side of the reader's experience. That's kinda what this website does, after all. But still... while a blog post might be a unit of information large enough to give you one new tool... or another ounce of hope for a rough day... a book is a unit of information (theoretically) large enough to act like a person or a friend. As in, you get to know the author's thought process by seeing how they take a massive amount of information and organize it to be as goal-directed and useful and easy-to-understand-and-apply as possible. Maybe if I can't be the kind of friend that sets up spontaneous "simple pleasures"... I can be the kind of friend that cuts right to the heart of the matter... right to the core of somebody's suffering... and helps them engineer their own future. 
• So now I'm thinking: okay, I have some raw materials, like the college environment... the fact that I'm studying Psychology... the massive library with lots of books on this exact subject (I already checked)... the fact of my current reality which is highly bound to this Adderall entanglement... my arbitrary-but-intense enjoyment of studying ideas relating to long-form sales copy-writing. Now what do I do with them? -- And, well, that's what we'll figure out. In the short-term... I really would like to write something like a preliminary essay about Adderall abuse (although the topic will change the more I study about it). Later down the road though... I would really find it useful to start outlining something like a book or report... the one I described earlier. And maybe sometime eventually I'll put together a very detailed advertisement which actually stops some unsuspecting Adderallic cold with the realization... that... something very valuable to them has just come into their attention. And we can go from there.  

 

I think that's just about all I can "plan out" because the scope of possibility is too wide to get more detailed quite yet. I'm gonna go exercise for a little while. Have a great day guys.