[Can't relate to the positive wanna get sober me]

I can completely relate! You feel like you are two people in inhabiting one body, well it feels like that often actually in day-to-day life, but with addiction the warring insides are ten times more at odds. I went through the same cycle of withdrawal then thinking that I could use again in small amounts but by the third or fourth day I would be back up to scary amounts and miserably being up all night.

It's been said many times, but once you pass the point of addiction you just can't use a substance casually anymore. Your body won't allow you to.  The best thing that I've found is meditating. It's the only thing that kept me sober actually, because in meditation having a calm, present mind is the only thing that matters and Adderall absolutely prevents you from that.  It's very hard at first, I would only be able to stand 5 minutes of meditation with tapes but you work your way up and you begin to see the value of having your healthy, agile, free mind back. It's really the most important thing in the world actually, the free mind, and it seems like you have realized this its just finding alternatives like meditation and exercising when you get cravings and reminding yourself that you are worth more than the drug. And just get rid of everything you have so there is not option.

[I want my life back]

Moving slowly is the best way to go. The biggest paradigm delusion I always fall into is that radical change is the only way.  Radical change feels great in theory but is never possible in reality. The only change happens in the present moment when you're fully aware of the positive step you are taking. Thats why no real change is possible on adderall, its just numbing as you said. 

Think about what a positive step it was the you got off adderall and also, your self-worth shouldn't be bound up with dumb gossip.  You have a free mind now and that is the most valuable thing.

Hope some of this helps!

[The Writing Life after Adderall]

I have to agree, I tried to read it in high school, and I think again in early college.  Which sounds like it would be the perfect age to read something like that and be really positively affected by it right?   It was so boring, I couldn't get past the first couple chapters.  I tried so hard to like it but couldn't.

 

I wonder what it would have been like if he had written it clean. Probably better.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote on some kind of speed too.  I read some of his writings when I was tweaked out.  Even then, I didn't find Being and Nothingness to be very well written, or very good.  I don't know if it would engage me now that I'm clean.   His writing sometimes just isn't......human.  It's like his heart is missing or something.  He has a pretty agonistic and dehumanized worldview, and he says some pretty messed up things too.  Come to think of it, looking back, I can see the amphetamines in the personality that emerges through his writing.

 

Also, when I read student writing, I can sometimes tell, or at least strongly suspect, if they wrote it while tweaking.  (One of these suspicions, btw, was confirmed when the student tried to use her ADD med as an excuse!)  I grade probably thousands of essays a year and many/most of them write like human beings, with mistakes and a heart and a genuine voice and everything.   Some of the tweaked out essays ARE good.  But they're usually really boring to be honest, excessively dense, go off on tangents, repeat themselves, etc.  You can almost hear the fake adderall confidence (sometimes arrogance) in their writing.  Still, some of them get A's.   But some of them get B- or C's because they go so far off track.   So it doesn't automatically make their writing better--they just think it does.  

 

Also, lately I've been rereading some of what I wrote when I was on adderall and felt so "inspired" at the time.    I even bore myself!!!!!! 

 

When it comes down to it, if I had to choose, I'd rather read half-assed bad writing that was obviously done with minimal effort than some tweaked out b.s., which is sometimes even worse anyways.

 

Thanks everyone.  I know that there is no choice in going back, the self-doubt just gets very powerful sometimes.  Most of what I wrote was absolutely "tweaked out b.s." even though some profs said it was great. That's the problem, when the people who are supposed to be teaching you and who you genuinely respect keep congratulating you on the stuff you know is more adderall than you, at least in the bravado.

 

I also realized that Sartre was completely heartless, after spending a foolish year worshiping him.  I don't care if that man won a Pulitzer Prize, I'd rather have basic love for humanity than literary recognition.

[The Writing Life after Adderall]

Any writers out there who thought they'd found the key to being the next Kerouac when they had that first buzzy, words-flowing-faster-than-I-can type feeling on Adderall? I did, and then I found out that Kerouac actually did write On The Road in a haze of amphetamines, a realization that confirmed my conviction that I'd found the key to literary success. I've since decided that I'd rather live fully than give myself up to take adderall and write some whacked-out philosophical rambling prose.

I've been on and off for a year, about a month sober right now, but I still love writing, have hopes of doing it professionally even, and can't shake the nagging feeling that if I just had one more pill I could get that short story started.  

 

Any advice or commiseration out there?

[What book are you reading?]

The only thing that got me through any of the first time I tried quitting cold turkey was Lit by Mary Karr.  It's a memoir mostly about alcoholism but all the addiction stuff she goes through is the same.  I woke up to that book every morning for a month and it kept reminding me how I was wasting my life on adderall. Life on the drug is such a limited existence, like walking around in a space suit, separate from everyone. 

Here's one beautiful quote I always go back to. She's referring to booze but its the same for Adderall: "[Drugs] ensure that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings -- sorrow, fury, joy -- I had their junior counterparts -- anxiety, irritation, excitement."  

[NYC]

Also, 

Did an NYC Adderall Meeting happen? and is there another one planned?

[NYC]

Hey,

I've read the forum a bunch. Have been trying to get completely sober for about a year now and just impulsively cancelled an appt with the Doc because the best part of myself knows that there is no graceful way to use Adderall without spiralling again.  Anyway, I think I really need to start going to a group.  Does anyone go to NA meetings or anything around upper Manhattan/ the Bronx?