Hi,
I thought I would expand on something touched upon in the last newsletter: my body's horrific yen* for stimulants, which means I have to be careful even with coffee. I'm often asked whether I take ADHD meds, and this same genetic quirk is precisely why I don't.
*I just thought to look up why we use 'yen' to mean 'strong desire', along with the more common 'Japanese currency' sense. Seemingly it entered English via the Opium Wars; if you're not sure how the British came up with a given word, the best guess is usually 'colonial violence'. 'Yen' comes from a loose anglophone transliteration of the Cantonese 煙癮 jin1 jan5, i.e. 'opium craving'. But back to ADHD meds.
*
For over a year in London, I was prescribed first Ritalin and then Elvanse.
I never got addicted. When I went to collect my prescription and found the pharmacy had already closed, I did feel a bit off until I could return the next day, but I wasn't throwing a brick in the window to grab my fix. Nor did I ever resort to the moonshine market that anyone who's spent time at Oxford has access to.
Still, it frightened me how soon my body got accustomed to stimulants. There was a subtle improvement for those initial two weeks, then back to baseline until my psychiatrist upped the dose. There is only so much amphetamine a person can legally take, and so I decided meds weren't for me. If there'd been a dose that could have given me those first two weeks forever, my life would have been much easier. But there wasn't. I'm an adaptable person, and mostly that's good – but when the thing you're adapting to is large quantities of essentially speed, sometimes less adaptation would be nice.
The way I stopped taking Elvanse was classic me: when I impulsively moved from London to Berlin, I rationalised my laziness about finding a new psychiatrist as a golden opportunity to try stopping meds. I simply went cold turkey, which I do not recommend. (I would recommend few of my personal decisions.)
I was a bit tired for a while afterwards, but otherwise I was fine. Elvanse was too slow-acting for me to get a high from it, so there wasn't a comedown as such. I know people without ADHD who claim to take the meds as party drugs; I intellectually understand they're not lying, but nor do I actually believe them. A high from Elvanse? What next, from peppermint tea?
In any case, despite not being all that pharmaceutically experienced — at least not compared to most people I know in Berlin — I've reached certain conclusions through analysing both my Ritalin/Elvanse era and my relationship with caffeine. Caffeine is fast-acting, and I quickly develop an eight-cups-a-day habit when I'm on it, with much of the space between each cup spent longing for the next one. So these two strings of data — I adapt unusually quickly to stimulants, and if they're fast-acting I crave them with Gollumesque desperation — have led me to avoid the things as much as possible.
How, then, to manage ADHD?
A caveat first. Stimulants work well for many ADHDers, and there's a clownish amount of hysteria and moral panic around them. Because a certain milieu of rich Americans has easy access to Adderall, the British and Irish media have concluded that it must be the same here, when the reality is endless hoops and a lot of your GP asking why your symptoms do not align precisely with those of a four-year-old boy. That's why I've never written a journalistic article about my time on Ritalian and Elvanse. People would just read whatever clickbaity headline got slapped on it and conclude I was arguing against meds.
For me personally, meds weren't the answer. I'm still glad I tried them. The brief periods when the meds did work helped me see how different my life could be.
I've been moving closer to that ideal life ever since. Rather than micromanaging everything, I've developed systems.
There is a place for everything in my apartment, and if it's not there then I'm currently using it or it's lost. When there's something I would rather die than do, I set a timer for fifteen minutes and promise myself that I can stop when the time is up; usually I keep going because the dreaded thing turns out to be fun, though I somehow manage to forget this the next time I don't want to do it. My executive function works best when I'm taking good care of myself generally, so I stretch every night before bed and stay off Twitter. When I make mistakes, I don't yell at myself; I ask how I can improve my systems so it doesn't happen again.
When I'm not sure if I'm focusing properly on my writing, I do the piano test. I play a piece I know well but not perfectly — Chopin's nocturne in C# minor, say — and if I'm botching that, too, then it's time for a break.
Thanks to those two-week honeymoon periods on meds, I know how 'normal' is supposed to feel. I can sense which actions are bringing me closer to a calm, efficient state of mind.
I don't always want to be calm and efficient. Sometimes I want to be intense and extreme and too much for everyone, and all the other things I innately am. But when I want to tone it down a little, simmer, do my work, this quiet mode is available to me now. It doesn't work perfectly 100% of the time, but I've made progress over the past few years.
*
Anyway. My new foray into Pilates is going well. I'm doing mat, not reformer, because I travel a lot and don't want to depend on having access to certain equipment. The combination of working largely overlooked muscles and obsessively monitoring form makes it the hardest form of exercise I've ever done, and I say this as an Exercise Autistic. (We of the spectrum tend to either fuck heavily with things or not fuck with them at all, such that there are autistics who hate exercise and Exercise Autistics and little in between.)
I'd imagine it will get easier. For now, I like having something I'm not good at. It's therapeutic for the part of me that has historically used hyper-achievement to overcompensate for feeling unloved. The problem is I keep needing to find new points of mediocrity, because one thing about Aries, we're gonna get good fast. (This is a joke because it was getting too earnest. Here's something I have managed to stay bad at: letting vulnerable moments breathe.)
I also recently read Iris Murdoch's 1954 debut novel Under the Net. I loved it, and it made me realise how much I hate plot. That is, I hate plot that announces itself as plot. Alexandre Dumas can be as plotty as he wants because it's a fluid extension of his no-nonsense prose — but when Murdoch sporadically ventures into plottiness, stymying the delightfully digressive narrative voice, it feels like a sort of betrayal. Fewer events, more philosophical asides, please! (From what I've heard, she obliged me in the later books.) The worst parts of the novel are where Murdoch crams in action for action's sake, and the best are when she lets her clever, shiftless protagonist Jake's inner monologue run rampant.
That said, the logistical hijinks do add situational comedy to Murdoch's one-liners, so that by the end you're even privy to certain in-jokes. When Jake vows near the end to find a part-time job in a hospital, his hilarious aside ('I am very conservative by temperament') only works if you remember an earlier chapter where he stumbles on it as his first gainful gig ('I had never in my life before attempted to get a job'). Murdoch dedicated the book to Raymond Queneu, whom I’ve been meaning to read anyway, so maybe that will be next.
I hope 2025 is serving you well.
Till next time,
N