ADHD meds and response to "Search Engine" podcast

 From an email that I sent the "Search Engine" podcast team.  It is a really intriguing series and I am pretty invested as I have struggled this last few years with a lot of anxiety and frustration trying to keep focused.  

https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/whyd-i-take-speed-for-twenty-years

I feel like I should start this email with something like on talk radio where the caller says - "long-time listener, first-time caller." I have been a big fan since the beginnings of Reply All.  It was one of the first podcasts that I listened to every episode of and I have enjoyed the new podcasts you have done since leaving that show.  

This series though I put off listening to.  I wasn't sure what you were going to say, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to hear it. I am 46 and I have a three month old prescription to Vyvanse that I just started taking.  I was officially diagnosed with ADD three years ago after my wife pushing and pushing for me to start seeing a counselor about it basically for 20 years.  I wouldn't have started to take medication at all, but we had a huge fight about it and I ended by conceding and admitting that maybe, maybe that taking something might help me.  

And it has been three months where I keep thinking - "why didn't I do this sooner.  Is this how regular people's brain's work?"  and to my wife's credit she hasn't once said I told you so.  

I don't have the same experience as most people that were given ADHD meds.  I do remember in 2nd grade that my teacher, Ms Murr, made a special rule for me that I had to be touching my desk at all times - and I have this moment frozen in my brain where she is at the front and i am standing with one leg hooked around the leg of my desk and going around in circles while she talked.  She also told us she would put up any artwork we did in the classroom and my neighbor and I that were obsessed with dinosaurs got a roll of butcher paper and drew all the dinosaurs we could find pictures of in the encyclopedia and she put the entire roll up on the wall, cutting out a circle for the clock.  

I was smart, I did great in classes.  I read obsessively everything I could and being a fast reader was my superpower.  My parents were divorced when I was 11 and my mom went back to school to be a math teacher at that time.  I saw that doing well in school was a way I could escape and get the life I wanted.  And I was driven.  I worked so hard that I used to fall asleep doing homework at 1 or 2 in the morning and then deliver papers before school every day through high school.  

I pushed hard through undergrad, masters, PhD and work in a unique RnD job that I kind of made up and Monsanto and then Bayer keeps paying me to do that is everything I wanted.   But things were starting to fray and fall apart.  The ways that I was forcing myself to be productive and focused weren't working anymore as I got into my forties.  Then with Covid, I had crippling anxiety and that made it harder and harder to focus.  Working from home those years made it worse and I desperately tried to cover that up at work, but at home it was increasingly clear to my family that if I was going to survive this I needed an intervention.  It was like a reverse intervention where my wife and kids one on one and in a group basically were like - you need to start taking drugs.  

There were signs before. Most people assume that I have ADD/ADHD - I can hyper-focus and I survived for years by procrastinating and then desperately finishing at the last second. This is a stressful way to live.  I had three seizures in college - which my neurologist attributed basically to lack of sleep and overwork.  I had MRI, EKGs, all of the other tests he could find but I refused to go on any medication because it took all of the focus I had to try and force myself to get to the end of my degrees.  

I was insistent though that I could handle it and I have been for my whole career.  I felt like taking medication was admitting to a weakness that I was overcoming with just hard work.  And I was doing it, but looking back a few months in I realized that I was also doing it with a lot of anxiety and desperation that I didn't need to have.  

My first day on Vyvanse I sat down and wrote out a to do list and then proceeded to do it.  Just like that.  Without any procrastination or anxiety.  It was insane.  I did feel a little buzzy - and at the same time quiet.  Like my brain was silent while I worked and I didn't know what to do with that.  I worry a little because I crave that feeling now even after just three months.  I wake up in the morning and I find myself thinking about it and wanting it.  I dread that I am dependent on this drug and that I am unable to feel like that without it. 

I loved the series.  I appreciate your public introspection and honesty about this.  I don't know what my life would have been like if I had started taking this sooner, but I feel a little sad that I fought it for so long.  Maybe, I would have been happier.  Maybe I wouldn't have had to struggle and fight my own brain to get to where I am now.  Maybe not.  Maybe it would have made me less creative. 

I swore to myself as a teen that I would live without regrets.  But now in middle age, I think that is impossible.  I wish I would reboot my life like a video game sometimes and see what difference it would be if I had taken a different path.  Or like a choose your own adventure book where I could turn back the pages and find another chapter that took me on a different journey.  But, I can't.  For now, I guess I will see what my brain and life is like as I take a low dose of meth every morning. 

Meditations on memory and focus

I don't know if it is a peculiarity of the eye, the brain, or the camera lens but I can never seem to get the focus on the camera to match what I see or remember.  As I flew home from India over Greenland, I looked out of the window and saw a plane that seemed to be just below us - so close I thought.  Contrails erupted from the tips of its engines and I could see clearly the logo of the other airline and dots of the windows reflecting the glacier and fjords below both of us.  But in the photo I took with my phone, the plane is far away and a pixelated blur against the horizon and clouds.  

Was it an illusion of the mind and eye that when I looked out the window it seemed to zoom in or is a fault in my iPhone camera skills to be able to mirror this focus and clarity?

This is probably a testable hypothesis or googleable question, but I like the idea that my brain and eye can make the sunset and the nights sky better IRL than the camera of my phone.  

I want to be able to pull that clarity on my self and my time.  I wish that I could see it better than it is captured by a camera or a word, but the reality is that I cannot and it slips away so fast.  

Even the image that I had so clear of the plane, that seemed so profound, is losing its realness.  Pieces I can remember - the parts I described above.  Those even closer images are zoomed in and crisp, but the rest of the details are just an outline between them and now as I write the memory becomes this. I see the blurry edges like a sketch drawing and the focus sections blown up around.  

Will that fade to be replaced with just words and memory of what it felt like to write this? The ache in my hand, the tired feeling from being up too late, the drying tears of the sad book that I finished before looking down on the plane, my cold from India and my suppressed cough in my throat, the sweat on my sandals and my cracked lips. 

No, that too will fade.  Even as I read these words in the future I will have to imagine this moment.  Maybe then I will remember but each time I try it shifts and changes by the act of remembering