#my rsd is fuckin WILDING right now

[revenancy]

someone ask me wip questions, @iucemon is watching the new transformers movie and i'm lonely

[yelloskello]

small adderall thoughts/things i’ve learned over the last almost four months, thanks for coming to my rambly TEDtalk

1: do u have any fuckening idea how amazing it is to have? a rational? thought? like, not just to have a rational thought, but the thought literally just occurs to you instantly, like duh, this concept was always there, your brain was just fucked enough that it couldn’t occur to you? You don’t have to train yourself to believe this rational thought, it just, the clouds part and the fog clears and now this totally common sense thing occurs to you, and you believe it? what the fuck?

2: i’m still flabbergasted that my anxiety has reduced so immensely. fucking shocked. I hadn’t expected this to happen at all. It suddenly puts the last uhhh entire lifetime of mine in a new perspective: did I have an anxiety disorder, or did I have garbage emotional regulation because of a lack of executive function + INTENSE fucking RSD, which ended up looking like an anxiety disorder? This all suddenly puts my medication attempts into a new light - explains why most of them didn’t do shit or actively made things worse, and the only thing that even remotely worked in making me less anxious wasn’t an anti-anxiety med or an antidepressant, it was a mood stabilizer. It puts my big, overblown reactions over shit into a new light, too.

2b: do you know how wild it is to compare how I used to react to shit not a handful of months ago, versus how I react to shit now? The same damn problems are so much more... Handle-able, now. Fucking wild.

3: it won’t always feel as good as it does the first month, but it will, consistently, long-term feel better than it ever did off-meds. If I was operating at a 3 before, I was operating at an 8 for the first week, a 7 for the first month, and about a 6 since. Maybe down to a 4 or 5 on real bad days. Still fucking better than a 3. (an 8, to put it in perspective, was having the energy to make my SO a bowl of soup one night after being at work all day.)

4: Speaking of bad days, holy shit, you really don’t realize just how bad shit was until you have an off-day and go back to how you felt before. Like, even when you recognize that it’s bad (or, I guess, recognize that it was bad), when you go back, it’s way worse feeling, even when you actively realize this is all the same shit you were dealing with before. Before, I was miserable because I felt nigh-nonfunctional. I was exhausted all the time. I couldn’t concentrate on jack shit. I would be too understimulated to do anything, which would lead to further boredom, which would lead to feeling worse. It was awful. Now, I go off-med, and that same shit straight up feels like i’m actually dying, and I don’t know how the hell I ever functioned like that.

5: Speaking of real bad days part deux, what a persnickety fuckin med. Doesn’t work as effectively if you’re failing to take great care of yourself in other ways - staying hydrated, staying fed, getting enough sleep - which has been confusing and a pain in the butt when uhhh i’m still dealing with bad habits from a lifetime of not knowing how to self-motivate without intense fear. Can’t consume anything super acidic for ‘at least an hour before or after’ taking your pill, probably better to wait longer honestly, because that shit’ll wipe adderall out of your system. Soft drinks count among acidic stuff. Antacids can fuck up efficacy. No orange juice, grapefruit, etc. Has a lot of interactions with a lot of other medications. How dare you force me to practice better lifestyle habits in order to feel good, lil’ pill. How dare you.

6: they ain’t fuckin around when they talk about your appetite being suppressed! (the good news is, this means i’m not  binge eating anymore, which I am genuinely grateful for. Hooray, some semblance of impulse control!)

7: they ain’t fuckin around when they talk about being dehydrated/dry mouth! Drink some fuckin water, punks!

8: back to ‘what a persnickety med’, wow, god help you in finding the right doseage. Thus far i’ve been on A) 20mg instant release, two 10mg pills a day; B) 30mg extended release, and C) what i’m on now, 20mg extended release. A came with HUGE crashes inbetween doses. B was too overstimulating and came with INTENSE hyperfixation on FUCKING EVERYTHING as well as increased skin-picking, to the point where I was dealing with a hefty infection from it. C fixed the issues from B, but i’m seeing some symptoms showing up again - i’m a bit more consistently tired, can feel a bit foggier, I can definitely feel when i’m coming down from my dose at the end of the day, etc. I can probably continue to manage with C, it blows being off meds WAY out of the water still, but I think I want to try like... 25mg, maybe. And I know there’s an even wider array of potential adverse reactions people can have to the wrong doseage too.

9: every medication to treat ADHD symptoms can feel different, so if one doesn’t work, another might, and i’m not even talking ‘adderall didn’t work? k, try ritalin’. A person can have a great reaction to adderall XR but find adderall IR awful. Meds that closely related can feel that different.

there’s probably more but i’m just gettin down what I can while i’m still remembering it. this post has been brought to you by ‘I basically set up a perfect storm of shit to fuck up my meds yesterday and had such a terrible day that now that i’m feeling better, the difference is so jarring I feel I want to talk about this stuff’.