Leaving Tracks: Waking up · 6:27am January 25th

Gosh where to begin with this one. Well, the thing is, I am writing again. It's too soon to tell the speed and thus too soon to give any ideas of when I will be back to publishing, but I've hit a breakthrough on it. All because I'm not goddamn tired.

See, I have bad ADHD. And ADHD is often treated with stimulants (this is because the ADHD brain is chronically under stimulated, that's the actual problem, people with ADHD can't focus on things that don't stimulate their brains). So I was on a prescription amphetamine to treat my ADHD and it worked! For years, it worked. I was very productive on it, and had little in the way of side effects.

Then my meds got all fucked up when I moved from Virginia to Colorado about a year and a half ago. For a long time, I struggled with having access to medications for various reasons related to the move (including the time I just fucking lost a whole bottle of pills for a year!). This all got ironed out in time, but with my ADHD, it just was never the same. It wasn't as effective, and more importantly, I was so sleepy.

So a stimulant, you know what those do, more or less. Gets the body going. Except ADHD meds, they don't really do that (well, they do if you don't have ADHD, but if you do have it and have the right dose, then they just treat the under stimulation without making things different otherwise). I don't claim to know all the science, but like, these are meds; they are designed not to get you high and the like.

But still, stimulants. They stimulate. And my body just... became reliant on them. I didn't build up a tolerance, exactly. They worked as intended. But I would just crash so hard. Like imagine the most tired you've ever been, then imagine you spend every single day that tired for almost the entire day except for a few hours when the meds are working, during which you range from normal to somewhat tired anyway. My body just got used to having my amphetamine, so it was fine for the few hours that it was in my system, but it devoured it and then crashed because my brain is a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum when it's out of drugs.

This is, obviously, very bad. I was not addicted in the sense that you imagine med addiction to be where I was going out of my way to get more. I never once took it any way other than prescribed or anything. But like, whether I was addicted or not is splitting hares, I was dependent on it to say the least.

So how does this affect my writing? Turns out the medicine helping me focus doesn't do jack shit if I'm just fucking tired nonstop! Can I focus? No, bitch, I'm sleepy...

Clearly the answer was to get off that med, but that's only clear when I present it like this to you after coming to that conclusion over the course of months. See, we tried adjusting the dose, then we tried switching from once a day extended release to twice a day instant release, no real progress on either. But both of these trials took time. Either one might have worked. But neither one did. So that was what I've been doing for the past two months or so, I've been adjusting meds and trying to find the right way to fix the issues with my doctor.

The right way was, after all, to get off stimulants completely, at least for now. I am now on Strattera, a non-stimulant ADHD med. The first week was a little rough, because if I was crashing when the meds wore off, imagine cutting them out entirely! But now it's been a bit and... I'm not as tired. I'm sleeping through the night and staying awake all day. And for a while, all I did was play Diablo all day every day. But now I'm writing again, at least a little. And I feel energized and excited for projects in the way I used to feel when Adderall was working for me.

So that's the update. I'm not unbearably sleepy everyday anymore. I'm a little more tired than is warranted but it's better than it was. And above all else, I'm writing again. Today I've just felt happy, like things are finally working out. I am not, as a general rule, a happy person. I have severe depression and in time I've learned to be good with being content. But today, as I edited a chapter for a friend before turning to my own fic, I am happy.

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