in sterquiliniis invenitur

You're right. I made this decision 'cause I realized the way I'm going through school is: to morph myself into the label of an "obedient student". I started Adderall, fundamentally, to quell the loud blaring alarm in my psyche telling me that school (which is perfectly designed to make learning how to think critically, write, and otherwise master the skill of articulation.... virtually impossible, even to teachers who make a conscious effort to promote those skills) is structured to inevitably lead people to the conclusion that it's a waste of time... or a hurdle to ignorantly and passively jump over (at the expense of 13 years of critical cognitive development). So basically, it granted me the ability to meet the low-end demands of my teachers without internally crying as I question the flawed fortitude of the entire game I was playing. Maybe that's not the case if you use this drug for 1 day or 1 week; in those cases, you get to exploit the little "honeymoon period" for maximum returns of productive bliss. And if there's a single soul out there with a temperament that can enjoy that honeymoon and then indifferently/inconsequentially withdraw, I commend you. But for the rest of us, we (or a lot of us, I suspect) have used Adderall to tranquilize our conscience (which is giving us good advice: pay attention; you might be playing a meaningless game) and instead, gain access to an expedited and disproportionately heightened alertness/passion... shrouding our higher-order reasoning in a sorta veil of sympathetic arousal. I think it'd be a hell of a lot better if, instead of shaping my identity around this notion of being an obedient lap-dog for teachers... perpetually agreeing with their ideas and only making comments that embellish them... and then doing assignments just "to get the grade".... I (instead) stepped back from the burning and "corrupt" machine and made my own plan to justify going to school. And then built my studying around a personal vision for the future... not in terms of what salary I'd earn but... in the context of how to productively contribute to my family, community, society and so forth. So then, instead of being locked in this constraining and putrefying box of corrupt justifications ("You have to take this class to get your grade so you can get a diploma") I actually have a profound moral reason (extending to other people) for sitting in front of my desk at home and pulling out my homework. Maybe I can turn this game around, so that I don't feel literal shame for "wasting my life" in front of a desk. And I think that's where Adderall loses its "grip" of temptation: the drug triggers sympathetic nervous system arousal... which is (in the most fundamental sense) survival-related instincts packaged into a physiological and psychological toolkit. So, of course you're gonna turn to it if your life is full of "uncontrollable" superordinate corruption and malice and insufficient justifications for your miserable life. But if you actually have a vision for why the hell you trudge in and out of classrooms... that is, if your day-to-day responsibilities are connected with superordinate values... it's not that Adderall becomes useless but... the basic impression that, "I need it to give me an excuse to not kill myself or sulk perpetually in a blithe coma"... stops manifesting itself. So while I'm technically wrestling, today, with a basic short-term problem (angry parents, disappointed teachers, dumbfounded by my sudden lack of drive), I'm also wrestling with the "archetypal spirit of long-term drug dependence" and that thing, man... it scales exponentially; if I hadn't decided to fight these mini-battles, who knows how quickly the problem would have increased in size tenfold... or a hundred-fold. Okay, it's 6:24 AM. Of Day 7. I'm going to start (or resume) my day and drink lots of coffee and enjoy a lot of ice-cold showers (which sorta forces the adrenal glands to gush out epinephrine--a natural way to emulate one of the effects of Adderall). Thanks for the support..! I can't express my utmost gratitude yet 'cause... I still have no idea how much it'll mean to me 1 year from now.

Day 6: I've relapsed since the time of starting this thread but... I put myself back on the "track". Even though it really doesn't feel like a track or any sort of goal-directed framework at all; I feel like I not only limited my ability to do work... but the framework/value system evaporated from under my feet and nothing related to academics matters one bit anymore. I've been having random bouts of incapacitating sense of meaninglessness shrouding my activities; I see no intrinsic meaning at all in my homework and, every time I sit in front of it to do it, it's not like I'm just "unable to do it"-- I'm unable to conceptualize a value structure sufficient enough to justify my miserable existence. My favorite passtime now is daydreaming vividly, long enough to forget who the hell I am when I snap back into reality. I don't know if I was treating ADD with Adderall or something far worse. But I'm not the same person right now than who I was just a few days ago. Let's see where this is going.

(Early morning of, Day 2) My spirits are fluctuating wildly and in impulsive compulsions of both thought and conscious recognition of depleted energy level (which generates more emotionally-charged thought). Lo and behold, it's an assignment right in front of me that I know I'm intellectually capable of doing... yet feels a hundred billion miles away from touching the "sea of passion chemicals" which are withheld by a massive dam in the back of my psyche. Yesterday I actually managed to scrounge myself up and lug my numb and bleeding consciousness through 6 hours of classes and then played the facade of sitting in a cafe for 3 hours pretending to do homework (when all I did was take notes where I found a succession of a million different ways to complain about my fatigue). I also went for a 2-hour walk; my head was pointing straight down and I couldn't help but assume a slouched defeated posture as I trudged monotonously through a beautiful little park/neighborhood. I then came home and got the sudden urge to watch pornography as a way to regress into another pathetic habit to cover up my withdrawal agonies from this one; spent 1 hour in an "abstinence battle" and by scrounging up the final ounces of willpower I had, and "won" the battle (virtually against all odds). I then asleep for about an hour... and upon waking, promptly began to clean my room. Lustful thoughts and also wild compulsions to take the adderall set in about 20 seconds after I opened my closet to reveal a hoard of monstrous mess--60 or 70 old shirts and pants laying around clumsily in a tiny closet. God, the fact that I abstained is unfathomable to me! But I did! I set a 5-minute timer and spent all 5 minutes folding some socks. Then another 5 minute timer. Then 17 minutes passed and I acted completely sane at dinner-time and... ended up having an engaging and thought-provoking little conversation with my family for upwards of 25 minutes. I then chugged a 5-hour energy shot (may I mention: my 4th one that day) and used it to go for a 5.7-mile run and then lift weights for 25 minutes at the gym (I'm quite used to working out so... it was infinitely easier to do this with depleted energy than to do anything remotely cognitively demanding). Well, then, I came home and fell asleep and... now... I'm faced with this assignment. It's 5:20 AM or so... and... school starts at 8:30 so... I have absolutely no reason in hell to not finish it. If I just pop a pill right now I'll be able to use the willpower and excitement of anticipation to start the easier parts of it right now and... 40 minutes later... I'll be grinding it out full-throttle and.... after 95 minutes I'll still have enough time to stuff some cheese and meat and an apple down my throat and get to school and then... have a productive and invigorating day of passionate ecstatic focus in all 5 of my classes. And then I'd go to work and maybe lock myself in a long dance with a dense book that's playing in audio form while I assemble food items and take out the trash and conduct all those other little activities. Damn you! Stupid worthless rationalizations! Hilarious, hilarious that my psyche sees this as a sin. My wet dream is to be a productive and studious citizen... not to get satiated... not to waste away on a couch or mellow out or induce a psychedelic experience... but simply to be able to cut through the impetuous fog that sits in front of me and enter a state of engaged and robust work. I want dopamine to gush through my brain and revivify the divergent thinking pathways... I want acetylcholine to intensify the memory and potentiate my studying.... I want epinephrine to calmly trickle through every cell in my body and keep me in a state of calm alertness, ready for everything, doing just one thing forthrightly and competently... never looking back... never sulking, never being a fetal ball of wrought-out insecurity, trembling at the sight of a single ounce of cognitive performance. Jesus help! What will I do? The meds are RIGHT THERE! Idiot! Idiot! Idiot! It doesn't matter how smart I might be or how much "potential" is locked away somewhere if I can't bring it out to the surface. Is the only way forward really to abdicate what I feel is the most safe and effective crutch in my vicinity? Man, damn me; in sterquiliniis invenitur is literally the username I made for myself. In filth it shall be found. You have to dig through all the shit... the most horrid, wretched, decrepit shit.... in order to find the thing you need most right now.

Well, I might as well start a log. Day 0: I've been thinking recently: well, I love to portray the front of being diligent and constantly busy with intrinsically meaningful work. That was true before I discovered Adderall and when I started using it. But... the difference is... when I'm not taking it, the "reward system" in my brain is insufficient in terms of communicating to me, "Yeah man, you're making progress! You just did something useful! Keep going!"--and so I end up falling into long periods of just, I don't know, disparaging over my inability to reward myself for taking steps in some cohesive direction. Is it because of a lack of friends? A lack of competitive environments to keep me in check? Yeah, probably. Sometimes I feel like I should just ditch academia and join something like the military and spend less than 90 minutes a day doing stuff like reading/writing... so that I have all that epinephrine from doing intense physical activity gushing through me and it can be maintained just long enough to complete something more stationary like writing. I don't know, man. I always had this strange "complex" or dynamic with work (academic work or even artistic stuff like poetry) where I hate it for the fact that it feels too obscure... not masculine enough maybe (although I find that interpretation repulsive; probably because it's true but I don't want to believe it's true). I hate the idea of sitting behind several desks over the course of a day at school, doing work which benefits nobody but myself in some indirect and incongruous way. I want to do meaningful work. Not "subjectively meaningful" work like taking stupid notes on stupid lectures and then going home to do 2 or 3 more hours of compiling and grappling with those notes. But like, carpentry maybe. I also like my job at Taco Bell which is intensely practical (I can see the direct benefits of my work by the smiling faces of little kids and the stress in neurotic and overworked adults melting a little when I hand them bags with their tacos or Mexican pizzas--melting just a little, but just enough to make their evening not horrible, a little less horrible, giving them a little more will to live). And I guess that if my life was filled with more frequent "practical work", it would (sorta, I guess) "justify" little bouts of time (like 90 minutes) where I could sit down and do "subjectively useful stuff" like (God I'm repulsed by the idea but) pursuing something artistic like writing fiction/poetry/drawing or... music like learning to play an instrument of some sort. Yeah, and those 90-minute sessions would be intense. They'd be focused and passionate and all that... but rooted on solid ground because I'd know that, "Well, when I finish this I don't have to feel guilty about doing something that seems useless on the surface." And then maybe on top of that, I counterbalance the routine with something like school (college courses)... but not to a point where my schedule is just incongruously overwhelmed by this stupid human act of spending 2, 3, 4 years just sitting for like 10 hours a day and studying things. It's nauseating to think how our society is organized to stuff us into these fluorescent-light-filled buildings and shove us into these little wooden desks and then we're told, "Okay, so what you're gonna do is--and we're gonna excuse you from all civic and practical societal responsibility--but what your job is is to listen to this teacher and just write down what he says and then write essays and read all this extra stuff there and take tests. And do that for 16 years or so." Yeah I think that's just about right: Attention Deficit Disorder is a 'label' sorta ascribed to people in order to give them medication which quells their overwrought conscience (which screams at them to pursue something more meaningful) and as a result, convinces them to ascribe infinite value to work which should be like a 90-minute-a-day "cognitive exercise". Like yeah, sometimes lectures are interesting and sometimes writing an essay is an incredibly formative and transformative experience (with a ton of intrinsic value that you can transfer over to conversations and the way you make important decisions and the way you negotiate with people)... but to create a culture and lifestyle around doing that for 10-15 hours a day...?! Well, okay. That's not particularly useful. Or at least, not a "foolproof" argument; because there's a little bit of individual responsibility that has to reside in counterbalancing yourself against something that seems corrupt. I don't want to force myself into a position (or make the claim) that "it's society's fault"... because yes, everything about society is always going to be implicitly corrupt. Society can never be perfect because trying to make it perfect means fitting into one set of beliefs and contradicting a whole set of other axioms and beliefs and etc -- which are sometimes useful/relevant. But, like... what did I learn by dumping my thoughts on here? -- Well, here's what I learned: A. I used adderall to care more about work that, implicitly in my conscience, I've always known to be "not the ultimate central point on which I should stake my entire life on". B. I have a very strange aversion to creative endeavor because of its lack of implicit meaning; and that's because I'm already spending 9 hours a day sitting under fluorescent lights writing down useless notes... and so I've already been using up the resources of my society to absorb knowledge that I won't be able to "spill out" onto society in the form of value for like 10 years... and so because I've already "wasted" so much time I feel even more averse to wasting even more time doing something "creative" which also lacks immediate practical implication to society. C. I have a very strange hidden affinity for the heavily discipline-oriented routines and heavily/constantly physical activities that characterize the military lifestyle. And I almost wish that I could orient my life in such a way that most of my day was spent on that intense physical rigor... and then I could have 3 hours somewhere in the day to dedicate to creative work. D. And as a slightly less extreme longing, I sorta wish I could at least spend most of my day on "practical" "in-the-trenches-type" work like being a door-to-door salesman or a cook at a restaurant or a guitar instructor or a math tutor ... and then unlock states of deep creative work in the late-night hours (or early-morning hours) -- where I can kinda get a natural rush of motivation from this almost-rebellious feeling that I'm doing this frenzied creative work while most of the population is asleep. There's something deeply empowering about that--and then I can "snap back" to helping other people in a directly noticeable way in the usual working hours. This helped. This really helped. I'm glad I did this journaling and.. I hope I don't stop doing it. 'Cause what it lets you do is it lets you "parse out" yourself from your actions so as to reflect on them and then generate the micro-personalities that engage in those actions... more sensibly and carefully and consistently. Because that's my favorite way of thinking about it: we (as individuals) are sorta this amalgamation of all our behavioral traits and memories -- and using that "database" we get to choose what to expose ourselves to. And when we're in those situations, it's not like we're always the "same person"; on one level we are, but what we do is we generate a different "goal-directed personality" to engage in any new activity. Which makes ya think: adderall basically induces a sort of "context-independent sympathetic arousal" (I talked about this in my first post, from yesterday January 24)--which sorta activates a goal-directed personality which doesn't have a direct context to apply itself to. Basically, that stress arousal is a natural state induced by situations that demand it; in those situations, you get to activate that new personality to reach a goal, and then you can reflect on it and integrate your pattern of action into articulated knowledge and thus, broaden your understanding of who you are. But what happens if mundane schoolwork/corporate work... over a period of 1 year or even 5 or 10 years... gets perpetually tagged as stress-inducing? Then you build your personality around the notion that "the only goal-directed micropersonality I have to generate is the one that--in a feverish frenzy--churns through essays and generates notes and reads books while making endless annotations; I get constantly rewarded for getting all that work done through that micropersonality... so ..." So your brain strengthens the pathway that reinforces that goal-directed personality... and that one personality sorta festers and starts to envelop your psyche. More and more of your "psychic real estate" is claimed by this one component--and I think that's what Mike meant when he talked about (in his 2009-2011 articles) reclaiming your "true self": basically, your entire identity has been shrouded in this over-reinforced micropersonality and so... all your other unique temperamental traits (which are latent inside your psyche) have been lost, or just remain in latent form. It's like, I knew the Russian language and learned it until I was 6 years old. I'm 17 years old now and... yesterday... I started a new class where I'm supposed to tutor Russian-speaking students who just came to America (teaching them to speak English). And within 25 seconds of speaking to two of them, it's like a levee or dam bursting open, allowing that stored repressed water to gush out and flood me with all sorts of intuitive knowledge about the language. Man, I think it's the same with leaving adderall behind: you burst open a bunch of dams containing locked-up parts of your psyche (your temperamental traits). And that just makes you a much more complete, genuine human being. Instead of someone being puppeted by an arrogant, overfed subpersonality, you gain access to the "center" of your psyche... the center of your individuality... and have control over the goal-directed personalities you generate. So that when you're sitting in front of your passion project, you can activate the subpersonality that's a frenzied creative perfectionistic artist... and then when having dinner with your family, you can activate the subpersonality that's a silly, relaxed weirdo with a stupid but addictive sense of humor. I think Carl Jung called this "individuation" and I heard it being compared to a solar system--where the sun exerts a gravitational pull on a multifaceted variety of unique planets. 6:23 PM. I'd better go have dinner. Goodnight guys.

Yeah, I think so. I'm definitely sick of being clueless and naive and I'm sick of running away from the plethora of underlying problems that make me turn to Adderall as a crutch that allows me to split my psyche into two--and thus, get the illusion that this "new me" is separate from the one who is nothing but a weak, pathetic, lazy coward who wastes his potential. It's incongruous, I know. My understanding of the full problem and all its wretched heads is barely cohesive, and only cohesive in tiny patches. But maybe by undertaking this "journey" I can articulate more of it. What about you? What did Adderall do for you? What did it undoubtedly steal from you that you chose to reclaim?

I'm seventeen years old. When I was 14-15 (2020-2021), the pandemic convinced me that life was essentially meaningless and I developed a (pathological) inclination to sit in one spot and do nothing for 10-14 hours per day as a source of (I guess) pride. I did this for 16 months. Instead of clinical depression, or a complete lack of friends, or a cultural chasm of chaos that opened up thanks to federally-induced alienation, I was convinced this was all caused by Attention Deficit Disorder. And yes, that was true; I had all the symptoms but, I feel like that wasn't the right rung to start off with. Nonetheless I got diagnosed and... after 5 (f**king) months of my "conservative" doctor trying out all the conservative non-stimulant medications there are, and after all of them failed to render any improvement in my will to live or work or do anything... I finally got Adderall XR. Fast forward to about 11 months later--aka today--and I'm just as clueless as ever before. I have a job now; and my grades are relatively stable; and I have a very rigorous workout routine; but I still feel like there's a deep (DEEP) iceberg of repressed problems which are masquerading on the surface as "ADD" but really includes stuff like: (quasi) Oedipal parents who didn't encourage me enough to socialize in early childhood; a lack of rigorous, genuinely stressful opportunities which would unlock new genes inside me and build my self-confidence and integration with the world; an endless repository of (really F**CKING AGONIZING) traumatic memories of sitting in one place doing nothing in a fetal ball for 1-1/2 years. Here's the best explanation I've been able to dig up about Adderall abuse: (this took me a LONG time to finally realize) So I'm hammering on the keys of a little keyboard to animate little typographical characters on the screen and I'm gonna post this as a thread on a forum. So we're not in person, talking, but the process of mutually joining a forum and reading each others' messages is almost like an in-person conversation. You could even call it an "abstract representation" of a real conversation. Bear with me here. Example 2: Sports. Athletic sports are viewed in arenas which require billions of dollars to design and build and maintain; these arenas are congregated with (sometimes) tens of thousands of people at a time, with cameras broadcasting the players to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people. What the f**k are we (humans) doing exactly? And one answer is: sports seem to be an "abstract representation" of the way early humans formed coalitions with tribal members who--as a group or team--went out with their spears and hunted prey. So it's like: by watching people play basketball or football or whatnot, perhaps we're leaning (on an abstract level) how to act in the world in a manner that best guarantees the ability to obtain the prey (reach our goals) which provides us sustenance so that we can keep on living. Okay, okay. So... Here's my theory or interpretation: Adderall is an "abstract representation" of stress-inducing situations which demand our full attention in order to quickly complete work (and acquire skill) which readily benefits our survival. In the same way that movies allow us to feel the same way the character is feeling... in the same way that watching sports elicits deep emotion toward our home team... Adderall incudes a state of sympathetic nervous system arousal which MIRRORS what our body/mind would naturally do in a STRESS-RIDDEN situation (which demands quick critical thinking/action)... but the work labeled as "fight-or-flight mortal threat" is just an essay or something of the sort. So it's not that it makes us superhuman... it just takes our natural proclivities (our intellect, creativity, etc.) and those natural talents get used at full-throttle for something that our brain now tags as a mortal threat. It builds skill quicker-than-usual. But those skills are built with the underlying assumption (in the brain's primordial detection circuits) that "I So what? What's the real cost of this induction of stress? -- Well, you'll burn yourself to a crisp. You'll never feel... well, you know that "Maslow's Hierarchy" chart? I hate that damn cliche thing but I think it makes a good point in this context: I don't think you can truly live and act in the "self-transcendence" or "self-actualization" rung at the very top if you're constantly wrestling with an overwrought sympathetic nervous system... which is tagging everything you do as a threat. Your life degenerates into a succession of neverending threats--a perpetual warzone. Adderall is free motivation at the expense of your humanity. You slowly degenerate into a being who is living solely for... well, it's like there's a psychological incongruity: an unconscious primordial part of you is tagging this Adderall-induced state as a "mortal threat" whereas you consciously know you're alive in a pretty safe society. So that's like a miniature schizophrenia of sorts: you're living in one world (the empirical, factually-described world, which can be summarized by the objective structure of your safe society) but also in another world (this abstracted "hell"--where all the qualities of hell have been parsed out from the empirical reality which would constitute an external hell)... and no matter how much you try to convince yourself that you're safe and successful, you're still in (F***ING) HELL. No wonder I've been terrified of my parents. Terrified of my teachers. Terrified of making friends or getting into an intimate relationship. It's because I've tagged all human contact as "a source of contact which would--in unraveling itself--reveal the hell implicit in my psyche". So I built a wall around my heart; I hid behind work that made me think I was valuable somehow to society. I thought that I could just show off my amazing intellectual and athletic capacity and get away with living just by building this artificial character--this artificial "me"-- that masqueraded as a competent, effective person who's always right and always on top of things. That's no life for a human being. That's the life of a prisoner. A schizophrenic in a psychiatric ward. Sure, go ahead and be Mr Right all the time and get all that work done without any implicit psychological "motivational struggle" behind it. By eliminating the seemingly-impenetrable barrier that guards the treasure of any given learning curve, you kill the human inside you... and the person who's doing that work is no longer you. He's no longer really challenging himself; he's just following behavioral compulsions... "taking orders" from the sympathetic arousal. Am I a little too extreme? Of course; no idea could ever be influential if it didn't portray the "extremity" of any given behavioral pathology. Yes, it's possible to use Adderall sensibly to treat problems with concentration; but (but what?) but I'm not a puppet--and all this drug has ever made me do was turn me into a puppet. "Wake up. Do schoolwork. Run for 7 miles. Lift weights for an hour. Go to sleep. Repeat 100, 200, 300 times." Because of the "high" that adderall gave me--locking me into a narrow goal-directed tunnel--I never stopped to think that maybe I was doing all that homework without even reflecting on its utility for the lives of other people; I never stopped to think that, maybe, I ought to make some friends and share my experiences with them and that maybe, we could sorta "help each other live"; I never stopped to think about just how useful my skill of buckling down and running for 7 miles and then lifting weights... every DAY... could be of utility in deeply enriching competitive environments (sport teams). Ha! But it's not that easy! Haha! That's the catch! This insatiable craving doesn't go away after one day. That "artificial stress" is SO DAMN FUN! "So what that it causes an unbridgeable rift in my psyche--parsing it into an attention-craving perfectionist and a neurotic decrepit nihilist? F**k morality! F**k my psyche and my conscience! I can just create an image of perfection everywhere I go and pretend to be this superhuman... while... hiding the rapid deterioration of my psychological and physiological states!" Okay. I'll stop there. Let me know what you guys think and... help me out!