#4 the Adderall shortage is a national emergency
what are your thoughts re: switching to Ritalin
January greeted us with a Full Wolf Moon, howling into the beyond as winter slowly closed its grip around a dwindling holiday season. She also fucked with my sleep a lot and stared me down through my bedside window, judging me for falling asleep with mascara on (again). Anyone else feeling some playful animosity from Miss Luna these days??
Did you guys know there’s a fucking Adderall shortage?? It’s a whole thing and it’s ruining lives AND making it superrrrr hard to write newsletters. Not to be an ADHD apologist on the internet, but it’s quite difficult to maintain a functional schedule that you’ve built on a foundation of medication when you suddenly no longer have access to that medication. Please give a hearty listen to this excellent podcast episode with Dr. Russell Barkley if you don’t get what the big damn ADHD deal is, or if you also got nicknamed Distracddison by your CO-WORKERS and need some good sciencey proof for why, actually, experts agree that medication is extremely important for your overall success in this here capitalistic hellscape.
Here’s another hot mental health tip for ya: if you notice that every major essay in your newsletter involves the phrase “I’m super fucking depressed right now,” maybe take a good looksey into your medicine drawer and dust off ye olde faithful SSRI that has literally never done you wrong. Celexa hive rise up! We are still depressed but in a way less gross and hopeless way!
So yeah, I’m out of Adderall, knocking back L-Tyrosine like it’s Methadone, and s t r u g g l i n g to sit still (mentally, I’m still forming a permanent dent in my bed physically(there’s a gigantic motivational-dysfunction section in the podcasts just listen jeez)) long enough to write a grocery list. HMU if you have NYC resources, and enjoy an older essay draft in the meantime that is — YOU GUESSED IT — extremely related to feeling a lil’ depwessy. I swear to Hecate the next one will be about something else, and you know I mean it because she’s terrifying. Obligatory BK picture up top to set the mood.
Hey! Just your friendly neighborhood Zillennial here, over-using clinical pathology language to describe my human emotions and ascribing value to my personality traits in an unhealthy way. I fucked up.
Today, I hurt my friend’s feelings and in doing so, my own. I have not felt this much like a toddler in many moons.
I’m not going to gossip about the specific thing I said that was hashtag not welcome, but it was a pretty classic case of “yeah it’s true but you didn’t need to say it”. Which is kind of an eternal battle in my brain and also how I most frequently end up in a “FUCK I hurt my friend’s feelings again” situation. As a
Sagittarius INTP Enneagram 5w4 and every Buzzfeed quiz ‘stone cold bitch’ result available on the internet, I have a problem with honesty.
I crave it, exhaustively, and I supply it, indulgently. But every tool can be a weapon if you hold it crooked.
As soon as I realized I’d fucked up, my brain went into fight and flight mode. That’s where it sprints into a vortex at 100mph waving a knife. Here’s a brief transcript of the ensuing debate, a conversation happening aesthetically inside of a tornado as it picks up steam, debris, and stray cattle.
God DAMNIT you dumbass look what you did. Again! BITCH!!!
Okay but what you said was true!
But this wasn’t necessarily the moment to say it!
But ultimately truth is our one-reason-for-life-north-star-good-time-boy-rotten-soldier! We must always seek her!
Yeah and that feels applicable to, like, holding powerful people accountable for their actions that affect others, but maybe not in a group text about a tweet where the author made SSRIS into an acronym about beer.
But you weren’t TRYING to be mean, you thought it was a funny joke that would bounce off, not poke a hole.
Yeah but impact > intent and just because you didn’t see the spike doesn’t mean you didn’t throw it.
Fuck okay that’s true. BUT THE ORIGINAL THING YOU SAID IS ALSO TRUE AND IT’S NOT THAT BAD AND YOU WEREN’T TRYING TO BE MEANNNN!
Yeah but you were! So say you’re sorry and fuck off!
This is why there’s so much infighting in leftist politics.
In one morning on 30 mg of Adderall (Editor’s note: the fucking good old days man, no one tells you you’re in them when they’re happening), I pissed off my sister and my platonic cis male girlfriend with unnecessary bluntness. As soon as I realized what had happened was, amphetamine brain kicked into overdrive and I became DESPERATE to feel seen and understood and loved and appreciated like, as soon as possible, to counteract the quickly advancing shadows whispering how awful and mean and nasty I was and how that’s why I never feel truly close to anyone.
So I tweeted four times in a row and texted another friend about how horrible I felt to try to make myself feel better, and then noticed how much I was making this whole situation where I was mean to my friend about myself while simultaneously trying desperately to self regulate my emotions because I am FUCKING DEPRESSED (three points to Ravenclaw) and actively trying to re-learn how to experience my own emotions from the very beginning without imploding.
Thankfully, this friendship is a strong one and will withstand this brief storm. And my sister is stuck with me because our parents got divorced like two years ago so we have to get along now. It’ll be fine!!!!!!! *crazed look in eye intensifies*
I am so scared always that everyone I love is going to, at any moment, decide that I’m not worth their time anymore. In the first half of my college experience, a close friend from home died suddenly, my college friends kicked me out of the group text a month later for not being fun enough, and my most serious romantic relationship crumbled from the inside, thanks in part to quite a bit of me bashing away at the bricks holding it up. I think all that swirling stew of sadness is what kicked me into emotional survival mode, and I’m not totally sure I’ve ever found my way out.
I made it through college, moved to NYC, and did that thing where I decided to live with college friends and the relationships blew up so violently within 18 months that I have diagnosed CPTSD from the experience (just girly things!). All of these major relational disintegrations were tied inseparably to suicide somehow; someone else’s, or my own ideation and evasion. So whenever I have a conflict within a relationship now, my brain hoofs it to the most drastic possible outcomes available.
When I fuck up, I’m terrified that I could have just made someone’s bad day, or bad month, or bad year, just worse enough that they do something irreversible. I think this is a particularly generational fear for Zillennials, because the suicide rate in the US, already one of the highest among wealthy nations, has been steadily increasing for our entire lives. According to Wikipedia, “On average, adjusted for age, the annual U.S. suicide rate increased 30% between 2000 and 2020.” And yeah, I can cite Wikipedia here because you’re the only peers reviewing this essay, and I know you trust it as much as I do. “Surging death rates from suicide, drug overdoses and alcoholism, what researchers refer to as "deaths of despair", are largely responsible for a consecutive three year decline of life expectancy in the U.S. This constitutes the first three-year drop in life expectancy in the U.S. since the years 1915–1918.”
I remember asking my parents, when I was home for the weekend to attend a funeral, if this was just a part of adolescence they forgot to tell me about. It wasn’t. They knew a few kids in the ‘80s who died in drunk driving accidents, but they definitely didn’t have three deceased contacts in their phone by age 19.
Generationally, we are painfully accustomed to those phone calls. The ones where they ask if you’re alone right now because you need to talk about something really, really bad. Maybe we’ve even made a few. I’ve made four that I can remember, so far. In high school, when we still had phones with physical keyboards and didn’t know what FaceTime was, we’d call each other 13 times in a row and leave voicemails because it was a funny thing to do when your friend was at tennis practice, ‘cause then they’d have to listen to 13 voicemails of you saying PICK UP BITCH I’M SO BORED LET’S GO TO SONIC. Now the thought of two missed calls in a row from the same person drops a lead stone into my gut.
So generally, when I hurt my friend’s feelings, no matter how minutely, I’m scared they’re going to unalive. And that doesn’t feel dramatic or unrealistic to me bc it keeps happening and attempted happening. I’m also scared of letting myself get so upset that I spiral into my own “your existence is bereft of meaning and you are a burden to those who know you” hole and get stuck there again. Which isn’t exactly an unfounded fear, because it’s a forest I have camped out in on more occasions than I’d care to count.
So today, when I hurt my friend’s feelings, unintentionally (but also pretty obviously in hindsight), I apologized and sent some jokey tweets and wrote this instead of putting on my stinky sack and self-flagellating like that guy in “The Da Vinci Code”. I’ll call my friend in a couple days and apologize again because I am sorry and I don’t want to be that way and I hope they feel better now.
Sure, I’m doing a bit of navel gazing in the name of introspection, but that’s what artists do, and if I can understand myself better I can minimize the harm I do to others. That may sound self congratulatory and maybe it is, but I think it’s okay to pat my 6-year-old scared inner child on the shoulder so she can know that this is progress, this is better than what we have done before, and now that we’re here we can learn even better than this. We can ease the pain of existence for ourselves and those we love and even those we don’t know.
I have a deep-seated compulsion to conclude on an upturn if not quite a high note. I have to find value in my pain or I will be devoured by it. Maybe I’ll evolve past that one day too. In the meantime, here’s the tweet I sent after my oopsie that everybody in the text group left hanging, and that’s fair.
xoxo, row the boat, gently though,
Addison
Looking for more hashtag depression content? Last month I wrote about being sad on my birthday, which I’ve since learned is widely known as Just A Girly Thing. Please confirm or deny in the comments. And go look at some fireflies if you’re actually tired of depression content now thanks though!!!
Addi,
Love your strength and your voice in these posts. Since I would love some Adderall but have not been diagnosed ADHD, I will try your L-Tyrosine hack! Yes the shortage is real, and it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be stripped of meds that make life function. I wish I could advise on Ritalin.
If my depression meds were taken away, I would die, I’m almost certain. On days I forget to take them, I save the PillPaks and add to the pile reserved in my Go-Bag (Fire, Earthquake - yes in I’m in Cali.) Besides the lifesaving meds, after a lifetime of therapy, what helps the most with surviving mental illness is the camaraderie that comes with like minded peeps, the forgiveness of friends who don’t get it but stick with you anyway, and sometimes a kick in the ass from friends who expect you to rise up and accept it just the way it is, as you do here! Make sure your self-deprecation is balanced with a healthy and regular dose of self-compassion. The meds will come!
And keep up the hashtag Zillennial conversations.