[starting again after 10 years/ thank you]

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.  

[Depression or ADD or addiction???]

I think depression has a lot to do with it.  It's so hard to quit when you have this amazing hot body and everyone around you rewards you and compliments you for it, and we live in a culture where a woman's physical appearance (especially weight) is directly tied to her self worth.  Best of luck in trying to get off, I'm struggling too.   I have depression and adder all seemed to have masked it.