Hi Everyone, here is my story. I hope it helps!
This Saturday will mark my one-month mark of sobriety. I used adderall on-and-off for the past four years. For the first few years, I took it infrequently enough and had no negative side-effects. At that point, it was still a miracle pep-pill that I only took a couple times a month to deal with surges in work-load. About a year-and-a-half ago the abusive habits started: monday-through-wednesday binges, dosing multiple times a day and literally working for days at a time, barely sleeping on weekday nights, then weekends consumed by comatose-level sleep-a-thons and aggro come-down fighting with my loved ones. My usage spun more and more out of control (dosing from 50-100mg a day) until I was let go my job earlier this year (in part due to downsizing, but also in part to my manic and combative "tweaked out" behavior and inability to handle my workload, even though I was seemingly working non-stop). I read a fitting comment somewhere on this forum earlier today. It said, "I lost my job due to adderall use but I used adderall due to my job". This really resonated with me: my issues with workaholism and my own insecurities caused me to abuse adderall... which in turn brought about my downfall and inevitable job-loss.
After about a year of increasingly frequent usage, I was experiencing the scary side-affects of amphetamine abuse / overdose with increasing intensity: crazy heart palpitations, fuzzy eyesight, dizziness, hallucinations, paranoia, extreme aggressiveness, twitchiness, emotional rawness / over-reacting / feeling persecuted, etc. I work from home, so the solitary, cloistered environment was the worst possible place to cope with amphetamine-induced psychosis.
Then a month ago, somewhere in the fog of paranoia and sleep-deprivation, I hit my bottom. I began googling side-effects of amphetamine usage and adderall-abuse horror stories... this went on for hours and hours, repeatedly for days on end. At a certain point, I sufficiently scared myself straight. I threw my stash in the toilet, flushed it, and in the next few days admitted my situation to my boyfriend, my mom and my best friend in order to keep myself on track. I knew if I was going to quit for good, I needed to have my support system understand my past behavior and show empathy towards any future struggles with sobriety, healing, and coping. They have all been much more understanding and helpful through this process than I thought they would be (so if you're keeping your adderall issues from your loved ones, you might want to reconsider - they just might be much more understanding and much less judgmental than you'd think!)
It took me a good 9 months to admit to myself that my last years' worth of fighting with my family, my lost job, and my unstable relationships were due in large part to the side-effects of adderall abuse. I have reached out and apologized to a lot of people in the past month, explaining the problem, but not to everyone yet... the bridges that burned the brightest are still smouldering and will need more time before I can build up the courage to re-approach them for rebuilding.
At this point in my recovery, I feel very lethargic and my productivity level is pretty low, but I feel happier than I have in a long while. I want to be able to access motivation in a natural way and re-learn how to work productively with my natural brain and the limited chemicals that it produces. I find the best part of my recovery so far is no longer feeling like I'm always mad at everyone / everything. I had serious issues with volatility while on adderall. Only now can I admit to myself that it wasn't my 'passionate, mercurial nature' it was the ebbing and flowing of speed on my psyche! This past month, my loved ones have frequently commented on how happy I seem, how nice it is to be with the 'new me', and how easy it is to talk about things that they would have avoided discussing in the past due to fear that I'd 'fly off the handle'.