Tomasso

Playing soccer... as a former doper I've grown so used to playing on Adderall that it feels awkward without it... like mentally I just can't get into the game.

Anybody in here live in New Orleans?

Alright so it's time for an update. My last pill was December 14th, which I took before my last final exam. I went from then until January 26th without taking a pill. That's about 44 days, or a month and a half. I finally caved for a 6v6 soccer match on Saturday Jan 26, I can't remember exactly my dosage but I estimate either 5-10MG. I also took 10MG for a soccer match on the next Saturday, February 4th. So in 65 days total, (December 14 - February 17), I have taken my pill on only 2 occasions. Not bad. So now that you have an idea of what my cycle has been like logistically, I'm going to talk about each area of my life and how the lack of Adderall has effected it. First, let's talk about academics. The amount of time I dedicate to studying has declined significantly, but at least it's not at zero. Fortunately, I haven't had any serious assignments due yet, just a homework for Advanced Financial management that was graded on effort, not accuracy. I have my first quiz on Feb 7 for the same class. I haven't studied yet for it but I hope to do that tomorrow. As far as reading assignments, I've been doing them, but not necessarily taking notes or retaining what I learned from it. I can't really go into detail with academics because only a month has passed. I will update this in the future. Next, sociability. This has been mixed. Being my natural self, I've been able to have alot more fun with people I'm already comfortable with. For example, I had a soccer game on Jan 19 that I didn't take a pill for. Afterwards, I went to lunch at an Indian restaurant with a few players on the team and I had a good time, we stopped at one of the pre-Mardi Gras parades too. I was able to let loose and not be so self-conscious about myself. I also went to Subway with the same group an earlier time and had a blast. Also, when I see soccer people I know at school, I now say hi and try to have a small conversation. Before I would have tried to avoid them. I've hung out with my dad and sister a few times. We watched the Super Bowl together and I've eaten dinner over there on the past four weekends. So that's the positive of sociability. Now here comes the negative. There were certain things that I was convinced was a product of the Adderall, such as my anxiety and shyness. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to believe these things are part of my personality, and Adderall simply magnified it. I still don't feel comfortable or confident in myself whatsoever. I constantly feel anxious in my management classes that I'm going to get called on and that people are going to notice how nervous I am. I'm dreading the presentations that I'm going to have to give in class later this semester. One of my management professors makes the students stand up when they raise their hand and look him in the eye to answer. So daunting, and probably the reason why I will not participate the entire semester. In my strategic management group, we've had a few group case studies that me and my 4 other group members have gotten together for. They all discuss the issue, and I basically sit there silently. In that case, it's a combination of shyness and an inability to manipulate the information presented in front of me, which goes back to my ADD. I feel like a useless team member and it's frustrating... Now I will talk about my general mood. It's strange. From when I stopped Adderall and at the beginning of the semester I was so optimistic and upbeat. I felt happy to be free from Adderall. Life just seemed so much more serene and enjoyable, I felt like life was actually pretty good. Then starting about 2 weeks ago (No coincidence after I took Adderall for soccer), I started having those same depressing thoughts from last semester cloud my mind. You know, the usual "I'm such a loser", "No girl will ever love me" nonsense... It has really gotten to me to this day... Now I feel glum all the time. I have not gone out this semester and nobody has invited me out either. I feel extremely isolated from the majority of the student body and I don't know how to get in. I feel like if I tried everybody would reject me because they would remember how I'm always nervous and awkward constantly from the past few semesters, if they even know who I am. I feel invisible to girls too, like they find me repulsive, which I don't believe is true at all. I don't know if my situation with girls in life will improve. I guess you can say that despite reading and knowing all that game theory, you've still got to have the courage to execute, and right now I don't have it. I do understand that if I don't change this mindset then I'm going to end up alone, which is my greatest fear in life. I'm just scared. That's the only way to describe myself right now. Fear. I've let fear ruin my life. I've also made 0 attempt to prepare an internship for the summer... I don't even really care either.

Hey everybody, thanks for the replies. unod1a - The thing I loved the most about playing soccer while on Adderall was that I never "thought" about what to do on the pitch, the game became instinctive. It was as if my body would automatically execute what my brain was thinking. Such clarity. Before Adderall I was a substitute center-back. After I started taking it, I was a starting support striker. Quite a radical transformation! I no longer take anything when I play and it astounds me how poor of a player I am playing natural. And sorry, but I'd rather not say what Region I played in, I don't want to accidentally implicate my high school/club or former teammates in doping, as one just got drafted into the MLS and some are playing in their last season of college, but I'll say that I did not play in Region 1. Do you still play D3? How are you coping without taking Adderall?

Hey everybody... I found this site about a week ago and I've been lurking until now. It was great reading everybodies story and I was able to relate with almost all of them. Reading your experiences motivated me to make a post about my own story, which I feel is very different from alot of the themes and topics covered. This might be a long post, so don't say I didn't warn you. Before Adderall, I was a slightly shy but friendly kid. Despite the shyness, I was confident and didn't have anxiety. I was small for my age and had always been picked on, but I always had friends to protect me. I played sports, had big birthday parties, hung out with friends, tried to impress girls, etc. I was a normal kid who was happy. In terms of popularity, I was probably lower-middle of the road. I had a financially and emotionally-stable family that loved me. Unfortunately, I had this thing called A.D.D. that took its toll on my grades once I entered High School. When I was 16, I was prescribed 20MG of Adderall XR in the winter of my 10th grade year after 1.5 academic years of poor grades. I used it everyday for that Spring semester and my grades improved. Retrospectively, the most important factor of my Adderall use during that time period is the effect that the drug had on my athletic performance (I was a soccer player for a recreational youth club team and my high school JV team). What effect did Adderall have on my athletic performance? I went from being a below average player who played because my parents said I needed exercise, to getting promoted to the top team at my youth club in my age group, I even made the Olympic Development Team for my state. I also was called up to Varsity. At the time, I had absolutely no idea that Adderall had anything to do with this, I just thought that I had gotten good. My success in soccer made me very popular at my school for my 11th and 12th grade years. I was able to date a few of the popular girls at school that I never would have been able to in normal circumstances. I spent my school days high on Adderall and loving my life of talking to friends and feeling important while my brain was flooded with "happy chemicals"... Despite this, the side-effects I felt after school were too much for me, and I ended up quitting Adderall midway through the Fall semester of my 11th grade year. As you may have guessed, my performances in soccer dipped badly. That's when I found out, to my great disappointment, that Adderall was the reason I became good. I knew that if I quit for good, I could lose my status, and the thought of losing my popularity was too much. So instead of quitting Adderall all together like a good person, I began abusing it strictly a performance enhancing drug for soccer, and I returned to my peak levels. I vowed I would never tell anybody about my Adderall abuse, but as we all know, Adderall does weird things to you. One night, I ended up telling my teammate and best friend Adam about how Adderall makes you superhuman at soccer. He wanted to try it so I gave him a pill. He loved it. We then formulated a plan about how we could make our team state champions if we put more players on the pill. So we did. Me and Adam convinced our teammates one at a time to take the pill before games. The result? We convinced 9 other players on our club team to take the pill before games. We won the State and Regionals for the next 2 years. Adam and I went to the same High School and did the same procedure with the varsity team, winning the State title my 11th and 12th grade years. Towards the end of my final season, Adam and I had built such a tolerance to Adderall that it became useless if we took it orally. We couldn't take extra pills because then we wouldn't have enough for our teammates. So for our last 3 competitive matches and after a trial period at practice, we melted the pills down beforehand and injected it in the bathroom before each match. It was insane and I feel like the ecstasy I felt during those 3 matches have numbed me to normal happiness ever since. The reason I just told you my Adderall doping story is to show you the theme that has dictated my life ever since. I built my entire ego and life on the positive attention I received from tainted victories, where I knew I was cheating the entire time, yet did it anyway because winning as a cheater was more important than winning with my own abilities. Now, my traumatic life event: I went to a Division 1 soccer college on a full scholarship. My parents were proud of me and I believed that I had a good chance of going professional. Unfortunately, life doesn't always go the way we plan. My first week of class, I was caught with LSD and was expelled. (Yeah, I had a weird period where I was obsessed with psychedelic drugs, don't ask lol.) After I was expelled, my girlfriend of the past 1.5 years dumped me and immediately started dating other guys. I felt ashamed, abandoned and defeated all at the same time. I was a failure and everybody was laughing at me. I spent the next 4 months in my bedroom isolated, crying myself to sleep every night over how I had screwed up my life and wanting to commit suicide. My parents were disappointed but supportive, and I started attending my local university in the Fall. I went back to school with a vengeance, vowing I'd prove everybody wrong who thought I was going to be a failure. Predictably, I turned to Adderall, the drug that had gotten me far with soccer, but arguably turned me into a mess of a human being. At this point I still had fond memories of my warm ego buzzes every day at school, followed by the rush of playing soccer at the top of my game. It was a no brainer, I would take Adderall for school, get top grades, transfer to a top academic school, get a great high-paying job, get rich, and laugh at everybody who ever doubted me. (Take note that the plan was to get RICH... rather than happy). Now, fast-forward 4 years. I'm now 22. I have a 3.87 GPA and I'm interviewing for jobs. I had a very cute girlfriend until about a month ago, and if you hadn't read my story, you'd think I'm going places, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm depressed, anxiety-riddled, awkward, unfriendly and have extremely low self-esteem. I'm completely, 100% addicted to Adderall. So what caused me to seek help with my Adderall problem? It was my break-up with a girl who was my best and only friend in the world. Years of Adderall-usage destroyed my social life one friend at a time and eventually it was down to her. Once she left me, I was alone and all my academic and life motivation became completely derailed. It's hard to function or care when you have no friends or anything to look forward too. I have bombed all of my job interviews so far because of my lack of social skills and life experiences. After that, I stopped taking Adderall and began questioning all of my "accomplishments" in life. Could I really say I accomplished anything if I used drugs to do it? Who was I really? Was I really Tomasso when I took Adderall? Ya know, that carefree guy who used to live in the present and have fun? That guy who was naturally friendly and confident? That guy who got the most joy in life out of making other people laugh? Well after 3.5 years, I finally found out that Tomasso has been tied to a chair and gagged in the deep recesses of my brain. Who was the culprit? Why, it was none other than Addy-Tomasso, my alter ego. It's my own version of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, only this time it's very real and very sad. I feel like I have woken up into somebody else's life. The past 3.5 years I have been a victim to my Adderall addiction, and the direction of my life during that period was dictated by what Addy-Tomasso wanted. And now my world is the world that Addy-Tomasso built. I don't want to live my life as a slave to Adderall anymore. The isolation, the loneliness, the anxiety and the weight loss isn't worth it anymore. I feel like I've lost 3.5 critical years of my life. My college years. The years where I was supposed to find out what I wanted to do and grow as a person have been robbed from me. Instead of connecting with others I sat in my room alone, doped out of my skull on amphetamines studying. I was getting good grades and impressing people, but deep down I always wished that I could connect with others. I was still so defeated from getting kicked out of my first college that I decided that the horrible side-effects of the drug were a worthwhile trade off for good grades, and possible prestige and something to hold over others in the future. Who would I be today if it wasn't for the pills? Where would I be? Who would my friends be? These are all questions that I will never be able to answer. I've built my ego with glass and I'm afraid that if I stop the Adderall it will all fall apart, but at the same time, I want to be ME. I want to make friends, i want to connect with others. At this point, I feel like my entire life has been a complete lie. I have never accomplished anything without Adderall and I feel horrible. Now all I want is to put this drug behind me and build a life for myself based on what I want. I am going to quit Adderall. That concludes my story. Thank you to everybody who took the time out of their lives to read. I hope that this resonates with somebody and makes a positive impact in their life. I will be back on here tomorrow to respond to any comments.