quit-once
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Posts posted by quit-once
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Your New Years resolution: to find inner peace and not hate yourself for fucking up your life. In one word, the key to your resolution is Forgiveness. Even though you cannot change the past, if you can forgive yourself (and everyone else who has wronged you) and let it go, your future does not have to carry the baggage of the past. I just wish I could tell you how to do it, but that is something which needs to come from within your own soule. Forgiveness is an essential element of inner peace.
"Today is the first day of the rest of your life."
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Nine months. That was the point in my recovery where I started to think more clearly all of the time. It was when I started to get sustained energy and motivation. Nine months was when those annoying adderall thoughts started abating. Nine months was about the time I started to make a plan for improving my life into the future. It was when the random mix of good days and lazy days gave way to lots more good days than bad, and it all happened in a a pretty short time frame- like in about 2-3 weeks.
Nine months was when those adderall thoughts turned from inward to outward - let me explain. I was consumed by the thoughts of "last year,at this time, I was doing _______ with the help of adderall, and now I don't have that", as I looked over my cluttered, neglected surroundings Or, "I was never this fat when I took adderall". More often, those thoughts were about how much better my life was, in general, now that I don't take the shit or use tobacco anymore. Around my nine month mark, my best friend went into amphetamine psychosis and spent a week in the hospital. And I continued to post and read posts on this forum. So the thoughts of "poor me without adderall", or good for me without adderall" began to be replaced with "wow, I am closing in on a year and I have this addiction kicked", re-enforced by all the stories I read here of people in different stages of recovery, relapses, and their general struggles of addiction recovery we all read about in this forum. I saw my friend go through the painful stages of early recovery, and I realized there was not much I could do to help, other than listen and empathize. In other words, it became more of a study of addiction and how other people deal with it rather than reflecting on my own adderall experiences.
Sorry for the rambling response, but for me nine months was huge. I got my shit together and made plans for the future. At about a year, I started doing the things I had planned, like exercising, doing yoga, and a better diet. I started getting shit done. I finally felt like my "old self" had returned for good. I wrote a post entitled "the R's of Recovery" last June on this forum that summed up how I felt at a year. Once in a while, I still have a bad day but the bad days could be a lot worse and more often, and I think that life, in general, dishes out a mix of bad days, better days, and great days. I would still like to find a girlfriend and have a few more friends in general, but I know better than to make those kind of things as goals or objectives because meeting new people involves luck and opportunity, and failure can induce depression.
Anyway, congratulations Ashley on nine months and happy new year to you all.
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Falcon, cool updated picture. It is a more gentle version of yourself than your prior photo that looked like you were ready to kick some serious ass. My new photo features the dog and the tree, me not as much, and would you expect anything else from somebody with face blindness?
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Sky:
Reminds me of the Nicoderm commercial where the little band starts playing "I just want to celebrate" when the guy refuses a smoke. High five to you! All that stress would still made me crave a smoke too. The best thing you can do in those situations is delay, delay, and delay again the actual purchase of a pack (or lighting one up, if offered) until the craving passes, and get those cig thoughts out of your mind. I know, it is easier said than doing it. Got anyting you can reward yourself with for that stellar act of resistance?
For what its worth, here is how I look at it. I believe nicotine and adderall act on the same reward centers. That is one "why" I quit the cigs within a month of kicking adderall. Another reason I coupled them up is they are both harmful addictions and I yearned to be free of those self-destructive habbits. When you make one lifestyle change, might as make another one with minimal effort. #3 reason is that it could be years before you feel like quitting again, once you resume smoking. I quit for 2.5 years twelve years ago but started again when the addie addiction came on. And that brings up my final point, which is that I feel that somehow I would be more vulnerable to an addie relapse if I were to resume smoking, because, after all, nicotine is the master gateway drug. I wrote a post about a year ago entitled "does nicotine drive the speed train?" and it included a mini-poll. Cheers to ya, Sky, and here is to a new year free from cigs and adderall!
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Neversaynever, I have this magic delete button on every post. It is one of my administrator tools. I just took care of those duplicate posts for ya.
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Whoami,
What will it take to break your cycle of binging then abstaining from adderall? Sounds like you are content to be miserable. The food thing will take care of itself once you finally quit adderall. Do you not have the patience and inner drive to persue your own long-term recovery from this addiction?
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If you are sad or depressed, go get some L-tyrosine pills at GNC. Otherwise just have plenty of patience, and allow your body the recovery time it needs to heal from this awful addiction. It won't be easy and it won't be quick, but it will be much, much better than living even one more day in adderall hell.
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Falcon, when I read your posts I just sound out the words and I know exactly what you are trying to say. No appology needed, I just wanted to help you be aware that some people really do have ADD/ADHD and they need their meds to fuinction. Most of the time people just ask their doctor for the drug and the doctor just says yes because if they say no then they loose a customer. Oh, by the way the word you were trying to spell is legitimate. I never use the spell checker either so that is as close as I can get.
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Welcome to the forums, Davemyers. That message you sent to your doctor took a lot of courage and it also broke your regular supply chain. Congratulations for quitting!
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re: Falcon's post #9
Falcon, it does not have to be spelled right or look good to get your point across, and you do a great job. I gotta take issue with your first sentence in this post. Be careful about bashing or not believing in ADD/ADHD. While it may be greatly overdiagnosed and treated, I believe there are some people who need medication to function properly. Just like you need antidepressent medication to combat your clinical depression, there are some who truly need stimulant medication for their ADD/ADHD, or narcolepsy disorders.
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Why did you quit?
One of the underlying principles of Eastern medicine is that any drug (or treatment), when abused or used improperly, will actually cause or worsen the condition it was meant to treat.
So if you think resuming adderall use will help you sail through four years of college,.... you should also go and invest your tution money with Bernie MadeOff while he is still in prison. I hear he has some really good ponzis.
Why did you quit?
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Isn't it great to start cooking and eating real food again? I discarded and gave away a lot of stale food after quitting that I bought but never used while existing on adderall. I think guys do have hair issues when abusing adderall, but it is just more normal for men to go bald and thin as they get old so we tend to blame it on aging. I believe I have less gray hair now that when I was using.
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Yesterday was Christmas Eve and it snowed. Alot. The snow quit falling with about an hour of daylight left so I bundled up and found my biggest new snow shovel and went to work on my driveway. I was motivated and excited to use some extra energy and get in some physical activity. I blazed through my driveway in about a half hour and I wasn't even tired, so I took on my neighbors driveway and sidewalk. She is a single lady and older than me, and I wanted to a good deed for someone as a holiday gesture. I was about halfway through shoveling when two carloads of people arrived home. I acknowledged my neighbor and kept right on shoveling, without looking up to see who arrived. That's a common practice for me since I have face blindness and I wouldn't reccognize or remember these strangers anyway.
I stayed on task as these people got out of their cars. I was wearing a mid-length brown coat with a hood and I kept looking at my task at hand and just moving snow. Somebody ( a 13 year old boy) was approaching me saying "don't hurt yourself"...and I ignored it. They came closer and said "Gramma, don't hurt yourself, let me shovel". I stood straight up, peeled back my brown hood and said in the lowest, gruffest voice I could muster: "My name ain't gramma". "Oh, sorry", he said as he tucked his tail and slithered into the house. I finished my good deed; wished them all a merry christmas and went back home.
If I had been on adderall, that encounter would have been analyzed and re-anylized and overanylized trying to figure what would make anybody mistake a middle-aged guy like me for some kind of grandma. But I simply brushed it off thinking "maybe that kid has face blindness, too, so I am gald I wasn't any harsher on him at the time". Merryfuckinchristmas everybody!
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Different people approach and solve the same problem in different ways. Here is my approach to the memory issue:
What memory I have left is all I got for this lifetime. I have likely fried some, maybe lots, of memory cells from adderall abuse, mushrooms, acid, weed, coke and getting too drunk too many times. Thank God I never ate lead paint or had a concussion that I am aware of. So it really doesn't matter what caused it because it is all past behavior and lessons have been learned from being stupid. What matters most to me is how can I preserve and enhance what little is left cuz I am gonna need it all to get through this lifetime.
Computer games, luminosity, stimulating conversations, studying anything, puzzles, games and books, coupled with some kind of regular physical activity and of course taking fish oils are all things that can be done to get a better memory. I need to do more of these for my own memory. Supplements like ginko billoba or Yerbe Matte tea might help. Don't drink too much aspartame. Don't binge on sugar or other carbs.
Ashley has a good point: look into the influence of your ambien (and any other drugs or pills you are taking right now) on your memory, because that IS something you can control or change.
More recovery time will also benefit your memory especially if you eat well and take a few antioxident supplements, You are stil in the "mental fog" stages of early adderall recovery - you are not even to 90 days yet. Please have some more patience and just go with the flow of your recovery.
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Hey Gonzo,
If it is challenging for you to view quitting and addiction in [forever] brackets at this point, look into the approach used by AA/NA which is one day at a time. Hopefully you are a little closer to flipping that internal switch that Sky refered to. Once you reach that realization, the quitting process becomes easier and more objective and it is just a matter of follow-through with the Quit and recovery. Thanks for coming back and giving some thoughtful honest answers to those tough questions. I dunno if you need to see a therapist - you seem to be solving your own problems just fine.
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Yoga! 2-3 times/week!
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You are a great asset to this forum, Falcon, and 90 days is a huge mile stone in the recovery process. I gradually lost the mental fog and started getting noticibly more energy and feeling better in general around the ten week to three month mark. Welcome to the period of growth I call the "middle recovery stage", which lasted about six months for me.
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Day two may not feel as good as day one but it seems that quitting has had a minimal impact on you so far. Good job getting rid of all your pills. When I hung onto mine, they started to tempt me about five months post-quit. When I was unloading them to my friend I was lamenting it and he asked me what would ever make me take them again. I could not think of ONE reason I would ever go back. Then he said "what if you were dying" and I took pause, and agreed that adderall might ease the pain of dealing with a slow death. But that is simply bad karma to keep a stash of pills around for that grim and unlikely reason. So I gladly unloaded all of them and never looked back.
Have you given any thought to dealing with your friends who still take adderall? My friendships were based on more than just adderall (execpt with my dealer) and I wanted to keep them after quitting. So I told all of them that I would be really pissed if they EVER offered me any, even in "good faith". Since you have told your close friends you were quitting, you have likely already addressed this issue. And wow, what courage that took to tell your parents. I read a biography of somebody who quit smoking like that: told everybody he knew he was quitting and his honor kept him from relapsing. Just wish I could rememner who it was.
Welcome aboard this cool forum, Blesbro. I have never met so many like-minded people in one place. Congratulations for beginning an adderall-free lifetime!
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To Roxbury: Good job putting those pills down last week. I really believe this is the only way you will succeed in your new job. Do whatever it takes to stay off it. Did you tell your brother to dispose of the remaining supply? Calling the doctor to cancel takes a lot of courage. If you are not comfortable telling her you were abusing it, just say that you had some really bad side effects and they don't work for you or agree with you anymore, and no, you don't want to try another stimulant medication. But it is important that you cut off that supply option.
Neversaynever: There is no time like now to buck up and go through with the quit. Your little kid is full of kid energy and you will be dragging ass. Whatever shit happened for a reason, it did happen so now is the time to deal with it, and no matter what you have to deal with, it will be easier to handle without the complications of that awful adderall addiction. It is a long road through the recovery forest but it has to begin with the first mile. Congratulations.
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Hi Movitation...
If you thought you did good through the entire interview, then you did good. The results might still surprise you. If your intuition was right, however, then for whatever reason he did not think you were a good match with his company and that is OK too.
Sky, that post was FUNNY! You certainly postulated many of those "whatever reasons" with a really funny twist. thanks for the laugh.
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Christ, I feel like a therapist and I am certainly not one. OK, back to question #1. Think outside of the drug box. Are there any habbits or other behaviors that you have permanantly absconded from? Have you ever ended a relationship with an intent of permanance? Have people close to your ever died? Just trying to get you do do some soul searching to get your mind in a quitting forever mentality, if that is possible at this point. Do the bad things adderall makes you do to other people outweigh the feeling of "that was excellent, look at all I did"?
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OK. Since it was not total abstinence I would downplay the significance of your "relapse". You never really gave it up for good, in your mind, anyway. What do you think it will take to change that mindset to where you are so repulsed by adderall and all it does to you that you would leave it behind forever? Were there any consequences or bad effects other than the addiction itself when you were using at 30-60 mg daily?
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InRecovery, were you ever arrested or interogated by the cops? You seem like such a mellow person I just can't immagine you being handcuffed into an ambulance. Although I am sure that is just one of many of your experiences with addiction that you are glad is behind you never to repeat again. Experiencing life as a normal (unaddicted) person again sure is great, isn't it?
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Gonzo, how long was your break from using/abusing adderall? Are you back to your prior level of usage yet?
displaced anxiety
in Tell your story
Posted
Wow, MFA, that really works well for me. Breath in peace, breath out release. Wow.