Rock and a hard place

[stimucant]

I haven't done stimulants as long as some of you here have, and I honestly don't know how some of you are dealing with quitting. I can't speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of us has been drawn towards stimulants due to an inability to function in society without it.

I have a pretty generic story of why I started taking stimulants. The realization that I always flunked my classes in school, the inability to stay awake during classes, scrolling on reddit until my phone dies, the inability to even pick up my shirt off the floor and hang it to prevent wrinkles, forgetfulness, etc.

Stimulants made me feel superhuman, it's cliché to say that these drugs really do make you feel limitless, but it's true. The first few months of the drug made me do things I never thought I could do, without effort. The drug eventually plateaued, but it allowed me to continue performing at an elevated rate with just a tiny bit of effort, compared to now which takes me an entire day to even wash my dishes or reply to an email.

I was on the drug for about a year, and decided to quit as I couldn't see a life where I kept micro dosing narcotics to function. But without meds, I feel like the same incapable person I was before. The superhuman, or even the "normal" person who was able to do tasks is gone.

So this really makes me feel stuck. A lot of us, decided to take meds to deal with the inadequacies we felt were too difficult to overcome without, but now have decided that addiction is real, and want to function as clean human beings.

But my question is, how do we fix the core of our issues? Even if we can figure out withdrawals and be somewhat happy again, wouldn't we still live with the pain of hard it is to just wash the damned dishes? Even if I were happy, how do I continue to function if I can't even reply to important emails that I know will lead me somewhere?

Choosing between crippling addiction and the inability to function as a person is hard. Is there no easier way?

[DelaneyJuliette]

On 8/24/2022 at 8:18 PM, stimucant said:

I haven't done stimulants as long as some of you here have, and I honestly don't know how some of you are dealing with quitting. I can't speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of us has been drawn towards stimulants due to an inability to function in society without it.

I have a pretty generic story of why I started taking stimulants. The realization that I always flunked my classes in school, the inability to stay awake during classes, scrolling on reddit until my phone dies, the inability to even pick up my shirt off the floor and hang it to prevent wrinkles, forgetfulness, etc.

Stimulants made me feel superhuman, it's cliché to say that these drugs really do make you feel limitless, but it's true. The first few months of the drug made me do things I never thought I could do, without effort. The drug eventually plateaued, but it allowed me to continue performing at an elevated rate with just a tiny bit of effort, compared to now which takes me an entire day to even wash my dishes or reply to an email.

I was on the drug for about a year, and decided to quit as I couldn't see a life where I kept micro dosing narcotics to function. But without meds, I feel like the same incapable person I was before. The superhuman, or even the "normal" person who was able to do tasks is gone.

So this really makes me feel stuck. A lot of us, decided to take meds to deal with the inadequacies we felt were too difficult to overcome without, but now have decided that addiction is real, and want to function as clean human beings.

But my question is, how do we fix the core of our issues? Even if we can figure out withdrawals and be somewhat happy again, wouldn't we still live with the pain of hard it is to just wash the damned dishes? Even if I were happy, how do I continue to function if I can't even reply to important emails that I know will lead me somewhere?

Choosing between crippling addiction and the inability to function as a person is hard. Is there no easier way?

I feel this so hard.

[DrewK15]

Why can’t you see yourself living a life using stimulants to function? Answer that question and go from there. 
 

From your post it sounds like your life was better on Adderall. If that’s the case, why did you stop? Your choice is not between high functioning addiction and non functioning abstinence. Eventually your high functioning addiction won’t be so high functioning if it goes on long enough.

[stimucant]

On 8/29/2022 at 10:41 AM, DrewK15 said:

Why can’t you see yourself living a life using stimulants to function? Answer that question and go from there. 
 

From your post it sounds like your life was better on Adderall. If that’s the case, why did you stop? Your choice is not between high functioning addiction and non functioning abstinence. Eventually your high functioning addiction won’t be so high functioning if it goes on long enough.

There's so many reasons to not do stimulants. Mainly that it is actually addictive for all people. Just as how many people realize they do not want to function on drinking ten cups of coffee a day, I do not want to function only on a pill manufactured by the worlds largest industry.

Insulin is needed to survive but stimulants are not.

The list of negative effects have been said many times on this site but here are a few for me personally

• A drive to keep busy and do "work" but what really is work and why does it need to be done? If you were an office worker do you need Adderall to go above and beyond to burn yourself out doing "work"? Do you need to reply to emails instantly on your day off, and have no rest even on weekends because theres a nagging feeling that you NEED to do something because of all this energy? And if you take a weekend off, do you want to feel crippling lethargy that makes it impossible to even go watch a movie because you're so tired
• A loss of real goals. Stimulants can feel so pressuring to get work done that you forget the real goals you may have had. Want to travel the world, maybe even quit your job and just move somewhere else? You wouldn't even have that thought because the only thought is to get whatever work you have currently done, and to search out new work elsewhere if you've finished everything.
• A loss of creativity and pleasure. Painting, arts, watching a movie, music, even just going to a bar and having fun is impossible because first, stimulants increase heartrate and increases alcohol tolerance so you wouldn't even be able to have a good night out, and for me, when I didn't take my meds to drink, id be too tired to even have fun. The increased drive of stimulants is purely for the pursuit of productivity, and absolute zero creation of what I wanted to do. Everything became about increasing my money, or job title but the meds took control and the things I did were not making me happy.
• The increase of heartrate makes it difficult to work out, makes you irritable towards people who are "slower" and less of a "go getter" than you, and made me feel that everyone around me was stupid or not functioning on my hyper elevated level

There's a lot of negatives here, but it seems like you're saying the hyper elevated superhuman status I felt for a year eventually teeters off into nothing? If that's the case, it should be a cut and dry answer to quitting no?