At age 51, I have started taking speed. Adderall XR, prescribed for my ADHD (combined, but mostly the inattentive type, what used to be called ADD).
Just before going on the meds, I was anxious and unhappy. I was scared about what they might do if they didn’t work for me – I have a family member with bipolar disorder/what if the speed triggered a manic episode in me? And I was glum about what it means if they DO work – that I should have been on them years, decades ago – all that time I wasted, failing to get my shit together to do the things (write the books) I wanted to.
I was on kind of a shitty roller-coaster ride this week, and I hate roller-coasters.
My NP (nurse-practitioner, or Nice Pshrink) and I agreed that I would start to ramp up from the innocuous, ineffectual 10 mg she had started me on. I took 20 mg for three days, then 30 mg for two days. The first day on 30 mg was my favorite. I didn’t feel speedy; I felt clear. Brain fog was gone. I understood how other people had described their ADHD meds as the mental equivalent of the right eyeglasses prescription.
I did not time it well. It was a weekend when I wasn’t trying to do anything mentally challenging. And then I was out of pills. I went back to the pharmacy on Monday for my new higher dose, and they couldn’t dispense them because the higher level of this controlled substance required a special phone call from pshrink to insurer. Then the pharmacist forgot he was holding them for me, and dispensed my pills to someone else, so when I came back with the proper approvals, he didn’t have enough. After two days at 30 mg, I spent two days at 0.
This is where it gets hard. I felt frustrated and disappointed at the pharmaceutical roadblocks, but was that enough to make me mopey and irritable, or was I in withdrawal? Taking a psychiatric medication has exacerbated my mild hypochondria – I’m constantly testing my own mental state, poking at my moods. With a sample size of one, I couldn’t tell whether my energetic droop, my gloominess and headaches, were due to going off the speed, or peri/menopausal hormone swoops, or both plus the weather, or food/sleep/coffee, or the bad news cycle. (How did I feel before 2016? How did anyone?)
Day two at 0 mg, my brain kicked into a familiar mode: self-hating. It’s spent many hours mired in that sludge when I was hungover after binge-drinking. I haven’t done that in years, but the old pits are still there, the psychic scar tissue from clawing at myself.
I know what to do. I forced myself to go for a longer walk than I was interested in. I ran a few errands. I did some housecleaning and decluttering, and I worked on … maybe terrible, ugly art, but it was a thing to work on (and uses up some weird trash from the Atelier).
Wednesday I took the newly prescribed dose: 50 mg. I spent part of the day being happy and productive and energetic -- and not knowing whether that was okay or not. Was it a simple good mood or a mild euphoria? It did seem to be too high a dose for my immediate state – I wound up feeling stuck and speedy: muscles tensed up, hunched over my phone, skimming Twitter and then Facebook and then right back to Twitter – procrastinating even worse (more efficiently?) than before I ever tried the drug.
I went from feeling good, and distrusting that, to feeling dizzy and bleary, a bit like the time we did a bunch of Marinol and went to see Cronenberg’s “Crash.” I came out of the theater in the middle of the afternoon and felt like I was on the wrong planet. Again everything felt a little off, a little smeary. Like a brand-new eyeglasses prescription that makes the ground appear to tilt.
My eyes do adjust. Maybe I just need a little more time to adjust to this, too.
For now, I have gone back down to 25 mg. I will try the 50 again in a few days, and then check in with my NP about the effects. I don’t think I am “in my addict” about this (but writing this blog post is partly about staying honest and accountable). I’m not chasing the sensations of the higher dose; I am pursuing that clean-spectacles feeling.
Now I recall my college self’s affinity for R.W. Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball”: floating everywhere and seeing all, but BODILESS. At my most nubile and conventionally attractive, I wanted to be pure mind. Whereas, in recent years I have been embroiled in my physicality, my sensual body – and its raging and ranting hormones. Perimenopause for me meant brain fog and crashing fatigue, then estrogen withdrawal headaches (though they were not as bad as the ones I suffered back in college and in my early 20s, when I was on the Pill).
(Oh my, I’m glad I wasn’t exploring kink/bdsm in my 20s! Nowadays my reckless embodiment is not so reckless; I have some wisdom. Intuition I’ve earned through decades of experience and observation.) Even in Intro Philosophy, I never fell for Descartes’ separation of body from mind. I believe them to be inextricable. Mind is an amazing and glorious bio-electro-chemical phenomenon, and we are righteously addicted to our own neurochemistry.
So fragile, so tenuous and so temporary! We’ve been making our wills – my nesting partner and friends signing our names as one another’s witnesses, getting our “durable powers” notarized in case of badness unforeseen. We are doing the things that we can do. And when my brain speeds on its hamster wheel, I am using it to clean my house, declutter the Aerie, to winnow and preserve and recycle. My levels will settle, one way or another. If the amphetamine salts don’t work out, there are other neurochemical tactics to try.
Blog structure note: There is a sidebar with links and tags, but it is not visible in the Mobile version. Newest linkage: the Off The Cuffs podcast, which is all about BDSM and – in the current episode – also discusses ADHD: Plan for the Best and Hope for the Worst.
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