vytamins; or, the pursuit of quiet pt. 2
i happen to have grown up in the specific time period that means i am punctuated by countless specific internet posts. i happen to have grown up in the more specific time period that means my heart is in particular full of tumblr posts, among other things.
this post is apparently from late 2023, but it feels like it has been burned into my brain for so much longer than that. the original post describes a dark fantasy, but for me personally this post is embedded in my mind a deep and unsettling fear.
i think at any given time everyone is struggling with something. i've certainly never really been any exception. knowing which of my baseline day-to-day struggles are universal has two benefits; firstly, it solidifies the model of other people in my mind as something i can understand and interact with, and secondly it makes it easier to push myself to actually cope with things. if there is an external solution to a problem then i struggle to take responsibility for it, but if it's Just Something Everyone Has to Deal With (and, by extension, something everyone around me is in fact Just Dealing With), then i can make myself try to own it and deal with it properly.
the idea of the vitamin goes against both of those, by revealing simultaneously that a) my conceptualisation of the normal human experience has once again been fundamentally always flawed1, and b) that there is some outside solution to the problems caused by a deficiency of the vitamin, thus dissolving my strength to fight those problems on any other terms.
in the last few years, especially, i've been struggling with developing the drive and work ethic and mental durability needed to meet a lot of societal expectations about "normal" work. i was long term burnt out, i was still recovering from a job that made me want to drive into a tree on the way home, i think i was genuinely getting better at it; i was still a long way off surviving a 9-5 job, but i was getting close at managing the 12-5 that our team tends towards.
and then someone gave me the fucking vitamin to try.
i had previously been acknowledging that i probably had something approaching adhd, but i hadn't really accepted it in any solid way. having it confirmed almost on a chemical level was brutal, simultaneously wonderful2 and violently destructive to my sense of how i relate to reality3. i didn't even get to process the second half until a week later because i was too busy actually doing things. and there was, of course, so much to do.
i realise that this all sounds awfully sour and ungrateful, so i should be clear; i started medication formally a few days ago, and those few days have been wonderful. the last few years working with people i care about on a project i care about has given me a solid sense of a future i want to work towards, and since wednesday i have felt all of a sudden like i am actually capable of reaching that future; felt like i am a person who genuinely has the tools and capacity to do the things i want to do, instead of just floundering and scrambling for enough of a grip on the world to drag myself further. i don't want to make big, dramatic judgements five days in, but it feels like this has fundamentally changed my life.
but. it's difficult.
stimulants aren't really very good for you, physically, even if you do have the tests to confirm your heart isn't going to struggle with them, and it's not like adhd is something that just gets better in a few months. so it's important to try to avoid building up a tolerance for a given medication, right? it has been recommended to me that i try to avoid taking it a couple of days a week, so as to not let my body get too used to the medicated baseline.
today was the first day without it. it sucks.
this is the problem with letting the vitamin take away my drive to just do it myself. stimulants aren't actually a perfect cover solution, and the day of falling back down has felt so much worse because i know what a better world feels like now. how am i meant to just let myself exist this way every now and then, going forward? "welcome to the real world, please make sure to return to the cave with the shadow puppets at least twice a week so your heart doesn't explode in 10 years"?
in some very meaningful sense i would almost rather not bother; given the binary choice, i would power the engine that makes me a functional human being at full throttle and just accept that doing so is going to run me into the ground sooner than i would like. but that isn't a simple binary choice i get to make, is it? i have other people to think about, and somehow i suspect my gp wouldn't want to give me prescriptions any more if it started affecting my physical health.
so if i can't just choose to burn myself to death, and i can't really retube the toothpaste of my understanding of how life can be, i guess i just kind of have to figure out how to deal with these down days. apparently it takes a couple of weeks for the effects to stabilise, so maybe long term they'll feel less crushing.
and, you know, in the meantime, i guess i will just have to deal with actually having the power to do things with my life the other 5-6 days a week. can't forget that one.
though it's not like i can claim it's the first time - i still don't quite believe that the average person is not full of repressed gender dysphoria, honestly↩
did you know, it's possible to exist in the world where you can just do things? you can decide to take an action and then go and act!↩
did you know, most people do apparently just exist in this world?↩