starting again after 10 years/ thank you

[Frances B]

Hi, I'm new to this forum.  I was prescribed adderall and xanax and celexa all at once when I was 19.  I quit xanax and celexa within a year, but kept taking adderall for 9 years.  Now I'm tapering off and it is hell.

 I'm 28.  I feel like I was coked up on this crap through my entire 20s.  I'm doing alot of the "emotional cutting" I read about in this forum and wondering how much of the last several years was adderall, or that I'm also a little insane.  I graduated from a state University with a 4 year bachelors degree and afterwards I moved away from my parents to a big city, started couch surfing and looking for jobs, ended up homeless after a friend's mom kicked me out of the house.  So I saw a listing for working at an S&M dungeon and hoped it would be fast money.  It was.  I ended up doing this for 5 years as income.  I would drink 4loko on the way to work and pop my adderall and ...for 8 hours each day, I would do twisted shit and have twisted shit done to me. Drunk and sped up from addy at the same time, even for 8am morning shifts.  There are 10,000 fucked up stories wrapped in this.  I finally stopped domme-ing after a slave started stalking me about a year ago. I'm just beginning to process the affect that this era had on me...the zombie-robot get-things-done effect from adderall certainly contributed to my wildness, as well as my alcoholism, which has improved, but not a lot.   I'm actually pretty smart.  Thanks to a recommendation from a friend, I now work scoring standardized test essays for middle schoolers.  I'm great with grammar, and I do great at this job. Why wasn't I doing this all along?  I have rage against my choices.  At the time, I had the "fuck it I'll do anything I'll be dead in 80 years" mentality, and also survival mentality of finding somewhere to live, fast. 

 

I feel like I need therapy to work through everything, to have normal relationships, etc.but just the thought of it is terrifying.

 

and now, on top of this, I am tapering off of adderall.   I took 20mg/day at the most when it was prescribed to me.  This might not seem like alot, but I am very thin and petite.  To my system, it was a full on speed-rave coursing through my veins all day.  

Now..through a desolate and hellish 4 weeks, I am weaned down to 2.5mg/day.   I hate everything.  Life feels slow, sad, and almost comically retarded.  I'm still good at my job, but SO much slower, and my supervisor has noticed.  I wake up and go to sleep feeling like, 'what the hell is all of this, anyway'  It's almost like I'm outside of myself.  I'm mourning, in a sense.  And I'm starting to dwell on this psychotic job I had through my early-mid 20s, with shame, horror, and also some fascination.  And I haven't even fully-weaned off yet, so it isn't even my rock bottom, in terms of quitting the drug.  

 

Thank you to whoever created this beautiful site.  It's helping me a lot, and I plan to keep reading and posting.  

[NotToday]

Hey Frances, welcome to the forums!

You have quite the story, and I can relate to a lot of what you're going through right now. I, too, was using a daily cocktail of speed and liquor, and while I would hammer away in an office all day, my behavior outside of work was, at times, downright horrific. Some of the things I've done and situations i put myself in are really unspeakable, and after 15 months clean, i still bury the memories because they are too much to face. I doubt this is healthy, but for the time being, I am at least coping. I always had the same 'fuck it' mentality that you speak of, or at least I thought I did, but in reality, as long as I was still tweaked out I was numb to the ways my actions were affecting me. I never had to deal with anything. Realizing this will help you start to separate the real you vs the using you, you won't behave the same way, and you'll see you weren't really crazy but someone stuck in the cycle of addiction who is finding a new way to live.

The fact that you enjoy your new job and are still good at it without adderall will benefit you greatly during this process. I kept the same job when I quit and it was an uphill battle for a long time. 

Right now, I think the best thing you can try to do is be kind to yourself and learn to forgive yourself. I spent months locked up in my apartment, withdrawn from the world, consumed with guilt, self-hatred, and not knowing how I'd ever climb out of this massive hole I'd spent years digging myself into. That is a dark place to be and only keeps you trapped. Force yourself to do things when you don't want to, surround yourself with positive people, check out NA, do anything but dwell on the past.  Take it one day at a time, those days add up quick and eventually you get to a place where the memories don't hurt like they once did, they're there, they're always there, but you'll put so much distance between them, replaced with positive actions and experience, that you'll hardly recognize that person but you'll see how much stronger you are for now having had gone through it.

best of luck to you. Please stick around and keep us posted on your progress!! We are glad you're here