Sharing our crazy OCD creative behaviors

[Jon]

It is apparent that most, if not all, people who are drawn to Adderall are creative by nature. The intent of this thread is to shine a light on behaviors that produced something of beauty and at the same time caused us unhappiness, frustration, lost friendships, insanity or death.

 

While on the drug, our creative endeavors seemed productive and useful. It is only after we have some clean time, that the insanity of our behavior became recognizable. It is disheartening to savor the beauty we created on Adderall.  Beautiful though it may be, it is not worth the cost.

 

One of the crazy OCD creative behaviors I indulged in while on the drug was excavating quarry rock from an old abandoned sand wash, as the old timers called it. It was located at an industrial site that used a machine that gathered up boulders, rocks of all sizes, pebbles and ultimately sand from a freshwater lake. The lake was fed by an underground stream, origins unknown. The rock was tumbled and mesmerizingly beautiful. 

 

All of this circumstance came about because my job got outsourced. The company I worked for kept me on the payroll but moved me to another state to work in. So, every day I traveled from one state to another to make my living. I hated my new job and the awful commute. I was severely depressed and I was looking for a way out. I discovered Adderall through a psychiatrist who was treating me for depression. I began to kick ass on that stupid repetitive job and still had more juice to go after work. Thus began the romantic era with Adderall as a newly born Superman. Every day after work at 3:00 PM, I drove over to the quarry and changed into my work clothes. I wouldn’t get home until after dark. It was rare that I missed a day and would often go back on the weekends.

 

A machine gathered everything and put all of the rock on a long conveyer belt. The belt ran from the water to the shoreline, where it deposited the rock in perfectly sorted piles, large to small.

In summer, the piles of rock were completely disguised and impossible to see. This is because vegetation covered everything. The sand wash business closed up over 30 years ago and that was more than enough time for Mother Nature to reclaim everything.

 

I harvested the rock during winter, when the weeds and the bugs died back. The rock pile was huge and triangular. It was as long as a football field and about 100 feet tall on the big rock end facing the lake, trailing all the way down to lake level at the sandy end in the rear facing the industrial site. The pile slanted long and low on each side like a mountain. I drove my car up the mountain on a road that led to the summit.  The view over the lake looked west reflecting spectacular sunsets. It was my own secret place. It was a place where Adderall and I could really shine. In complete isolation, I worked like a machine until dark every day of every winter for 6 years.

 

I would unload the car at night using a garden cart to wheel the rock into the woods behind my home. I was using the rock to build a rock wall. The wall is 150 feet long with 2 entrances into the woods. Lying before the woods are 4 garden beds where I plant perennial and annual plants, each bed laced with a bed of small tumbled rock. There is another bed in the woods, adding pattern to the design. I harvested (dug out) and hauled roughly 250 tons of rock. Think about that.

 

All the neighbors make a point to stop by and tell me how beautiful my backyard is. I tell you that it is hard for me to take too much pride in it, although I have to admit that it is indeed beautiful.

 

In hindsight, you could compare the work to the toughest jobs at hard labor prison camps. The dangers were many; snakes everywhere, carrying heavy rocks over steep, rough terrain, working in low light levels and alone under these dangerous conditions. If I were to have taken a fall and got hurt, I would have died of the elements. They wouldn’t find my body for weeks or months. I told no one what I was doing, knowing all along it was insanity, but I was creating something beautiful.

 

Adderall used my mind and body. I think it was trying to kill me.

[resetBrain]

Jon,

Wow, that story is more intriguing with detail. You write well. Thank you. It sounds amazing, but it also sounds so lonely. Was it? I mean did you feel that way at the time?  I used to isolate so much with 'tasks.' Nothing I ever did on Adderall was of this scale....but even with smaller things, staying up all night knitting  (yes, crazy) I would isolate myself. Didn't want anyone around to mess up my count.

[Jon]

Yes, sometimes I felt lonely, but those feeling were covered up and numbed over by the drug. I never cried out there watching a beautiful sunset alone, but it makes me tear up now when I realize how I was running away from my problems.  

 

I remember Mike talking about "Epic proportions" in our approach to things while on the drug, but it doesn't have to be epic. It sounds as if knitting all night kept you from facing some painful feelings too, sweetpea. I'm crying at the thought of it now.

[Motivation_Follows_Action]

I can't help but think of this (sorry, I know I've posted it before).  And this is not to diminish in any way your all consuming OCD behaviors.  It just highlights how sadly close adderall addition and meth addiction really is.

 

[Jon]

It's relevant to the topic. I saw this episode. The poor guy didn't even care what was in the hole, just that "it's down there"

 

I was never addicted to Meth, and I'm sure glad about that. I have never in my life dug a hole in the ground for no reason.

[resetBrain]

This makes me laugh. I have never dug a hole in the ground for no reason, but some days I feel like I've dug a hole in my life itself for no reason.

[Jon]

Goob point RB. The analogy is quite accurate. I have certainly dug a hole in my life for no reason.

[quit-once]

 I have never in my life dug a hole in the ground for no reason.

I did.  I dug a few holes with a backhoe just for the hell of it.  And I moved a few 500 lb rocks with no backhoe for no good reason.  Looking back at my tweaking moments, I did some really stupid things that were sooo goddamn important at the time.

[Jon]

Honesty is the best policy. You know, a backhoe is the only piece of machinery in the world that can right itself if has flipped over. Perfect for us crazy OCD tweaked out types (past tense). I never want to go back there.

[BeHereNow]

Another of my old favorites: OCD writing on adderall.

 

Struck with seemingly divine ideas, in my adderall trance I would scrawl dozens of pages of ideas, my handwriting illegible because I was writing so fast.  I would make various attempts at organizing and outlining my ideas, but somehow I could never quite get it organized.  I would go to the library and leave with literally dozens of books, half of which I never read, or only read partway.  I would obsessively write page after page, cranking out double, triple, quadruple the word count.  I wrestled every day to make my work organized or coherent, and I couldn't understand why adderall wasn't helping me magically get it together.    On one project, I had a word count maximum of 7,000 words.  It topped out at 52,000 before I realized I needed to stop.  I could spend an entire day (or night) working on just one page, obsessing over every word, every paragraph, arranging and rearranging every section, every paragraph.  I needed help and feedback from my professors, but I was too tweaked out (and my papers were too late) to actually ask for it.  Besides, my professors wanted me to write smaller, more organized essays, and they just "wouldn't understand" my process.

 

People would sometimes complement me on my dedication or level of inspiration or whatever.   Meanwhile I was driving myself insane, and I knew it.   I started saying, "I need a lobotomy."   This eventually became one of my routine phrases.   But did I ever say "I need to quit adderall?"  Never.  

[BeHereNow]

Here's another one:

 

I woke up one Saturday morning, popped 30 mg of adderall, and while waiting for it to kick in I decided to make smoothies.  I had a lot of work to do that weekend and I just wanted to take a bunch of adderall, drink green smoothies and raw soups, and write until my fingers bled.   But the adderall kicked in while I was making the smoothies.   I just couldn't stop blending.   I made multiple flavors of smoothies with all kinds of ingredients--several liters worth of smoothies, to last me through the tweaked-out weekend.    Then I started in on the raw soup.   I was adding every ingredient I had in my house: greens, tofu, broth, broccoli, almonds, brussels sprouts, carrots, spices, things my blender couldn't even handle.  I made so much soup (which tasted horrible by the way), I had to dump some into a tupperware so I could keep adding more ingredients. 

 

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, my blender broke.  It just stopped working.  I realized it had been blending nonstop for an hour and a half.   Of course it broke after that OCD blender adventure.  It never worked again.   So what to do next?  Take some more adderall of course!

[Jon]

Thank you for sharing some your incredible stories that made you think you needed a lobotomy, Occaisional01. I can relate to both stories. I like to write and keeping the word count down was impossible on Adderall. I wanted to write well too, intensely so. Maybe I will find a place in recovery that will rekindle my writing spirit.

 

 

Would you mind if I found humor in the second story about the smoothies and your blender breaking? The images I am drawing in my head are out right out of an “I Love Lucy†episode.  It is so funny! Thank you for sharing these stories with us. Both were beautiful and concisely written, Occaisional01.

 

Humor aside, our crazy OCD creative behaviors on Adderall were soul-depleting .The scariest part of this was that we had absolutely no awareness of how the drug was driving us or who we were becoming.  

 

I love sharing these stories in our community for their content and color. Before man invented writing, all people had for community knowledge, passing from one generation to the next, were stories. These stories reveal the masked demon we were ingesting daily. They are a good way to re-mind us, and people of the future, why we struggle to remain Adderall free.

[Brandy76]

Here's another one:

 

I woke up one Saturday morning, popped 30 mg of adderall, and while waiting for it to kick in I decided to make smoothies.  I had a lot of work to do that weekend and I just wanted to take a bunch of adderall, drink green smoothies and raw soups, and write until my fingers bled.   But the adderall kicked in while I was making the smoothies.   I just couldn't stop blending.   I made multiple flavors of smoothies with all kinds of ingredients--several liters worth of smoothies, to last me through the tweaked-out weekend.    Then I started in on the raw soup.   I was adding every ingredient I had in my house: greens, tofu, broth, broccoli, almonds, brussels sprouts, carrots, spices, things my blender couldn't even handle.  I made so much soup (which tasted horrible by the way), I had to dump some into a tupperware so I could keep adding more ingredients. 

 

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, my blender broke.  It just stopped working.  I realized it had been blending nonstop for an hour and a half.   Of course it broke after that OCD blender adventure.  It never worked again.   So what to do next?  Take some more adderall of course!

OMG Like Jon said as not to laugh to make fun of you.  But you worded that so well, it cracked me up as I totally get it.  Your original task at hand was side tracked to whatever you were doing when the addie kicked in.  And sometimes that mundane task even though somewhere in the back of your head you know it's mundane.  You just can't stop yourself from doing it - so weird

 

I noticed the longer I'm on this the easier it is to get sidetracked in mundane details like that.

[JustinW]

I removed and replaced all of the zip ties in our server rack, distribution wall, and phone system with velcro straps and then got a Dymo printer and labelled everything in the room to excess.  All of this started because I had to troubleshoot a voice line.  Does that count?

[resetBrain]

1Bad88, I think it counts since you just needed to troubleshoot the one voice line, but I still hate zip ties on a rack and I still replace them with velcro ties whenever possible!!!