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ContactWelcome to your Adventure
April 3rd, 2009 by Mike
Well, technically it's either no pill or the orange pill
When you make the decision to quit Adderall, you are consciously choosing the unknown…an adventure the likes of which you cannot possibly imagine at the start. This adventure will bring you to new heights, give you a sense of discovery almost daily (on the days when you aren’t a miserable depressed sloth anyway), and will lead you to the kind of person you always wanted to be…will lead you to the life you always wanted to have.
You are choosing  faith in yourself and in an earned happiness over the manufactured euphoria provided by that little orange pill.
Einstein said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If you want to change your life dramatically, you have to do something dramatically different. Quitting Adderall definitely qualifies.  Once you quit Adderall you’ll be doing everything different. Consequently, almost everything about your life will start to change.
When you first quit, everything’s a mess. Only after a little while, as you make efforts to pick yourself back up, do you start to feel the changes in yourself and see them in your environment and daily life.  Some of these changes will come in the form of new (or re-newed) desires and urges, and the ways in which you indulge them. Maybe it’s an urge to go outside and run. Maybe it’s an urge to start drawing or writing again.
These little urges, and the opportunities that often come with them, are like breadcrumbs on a great path set out for you. Follow the breadcrumbs. The more breadcrumbs you eat, the more they take shape in your stomach. With each step comes a new glimpse of where the path is leading you. And that makes it easier and more exciting.
There will be times when you are stalled by self-doubt. This is normal. Most entrepreneurs report being plagued by self doubt all the way up to the moment of their success. And effectively, this is what you are: an entrepreneur. You are doing something totally new, and you’re taking an unknown path simply because you have a kind of faith in yourself and in the rewards of being genuine.
You will go through periods when you stop caring about breadcrumbs and greater paths. You will feel complacent; filled with bitter numbness. You have to keep forcing yourself back on the path. You have to look at the next breadcrumb and say “fine, I’ll eat you, even though I don’t believe in you”. Once you eat it you will believe again.
Once you’ve gone through this process of getting depressed, full of self-doubt, and complacent, and then forcing yourself back on the path and feeling better and taking the next steps, you’ll get better at it. The whole depressed-to-restored cycle will take less and less time.
One day you’ll look back and realize what the breadcrumbs actually were:Â Little pieces of your soul, your truest self, that you’ve been collecting and using to build your inner light bigger and brighter. But they are also pieces of your future. The more you collect, the more your future becomes your present.
That is the best part about this adventure (and the aspect that Adderall cannot give you): it is cumulative. Every step forward makes the adventure more grand, more spectacular.
Just keep following the breadcrumbs.
P.S. For those of you that are spiritual, the real choice is: Take the pill, or take my hand.
Hello again,
I have posted a couple messages here. If I’m posting in the wrong section, I apologize. It’s been 5 weeks without Adderall (or in my case, Vyvanse) and I’ve been surprisingly ok. I “stepped down” for several weeks beforehand. UCLA begins next week and I’m fairly nervous though. I have to say I was doing pretty darn well – and then yesterday (according to the Vyvanse ads on every website I looked at) was “Nat’l ADHD Awareness Day” and I had to read the story of some woman w/ a perfect body from “Dancing w/the Stars” talking about how in school she could hear the teachers talking but was not processing what they were saying. I can relate to this totally. Does that constitute a medical illness requiring meds?? And looking at how fit she is and how I’ve gained a little weight since quitting – just really took the wind out of my sails.
I came back to your site to refresh my brain w/ the inspiring words that really helped me to kick this in the first place. I guess I became jealous of this woman and everyone who still takes Vyvanse and it really put me in a tailspin. I have no plans on taking it again but it was a bit of an emotional setback.
I’m looking forward to my upcoming Adderall prescription regardless of the negative experiences others have had. For decades I’ve been struggling with a lack of energy, focus and commitment to tasks ranging from school to work to personal relationships, and I’ve suffered setbacks in every area because of this frustrating chemical imbalance and its symptoms. Not to mention getting in trouble with the law for self-medicating with marijuana in a state that doesn’t yet accept its use, be it medical or recreational. I’ve always been a huge procrastinator; having to force myself to begin tasks, and even when I begin them trying to stay focused and on-track to see them through to completion is a constant struggle against myself.
I was always the type of person who thought ADD/ADHD was a load of bunk and people just needed better self-discipline – Never imagining that I was suffering from every symptom while dismissing the condition. It wasn’t until I browsed the Internet for ways to help me focus on my work that I came across an article talking about college students using Adderall for energy and focus, and upon trying a pill I got from a friend I felt a huge difference.
For the first time in forever I had the energy, drive and motivation to get things done. On that one pill I finally got around to cleaning and organizing my entire closet, and when it wore off I absolutely hated feeling like my old sluggish, lazy self and wished I could go back to feeling what I can only imagine is what it’s like to be “normal”. It’s after that experience that I saw my doctor about diagnosing my adult ADD, and after he referred me on to a psychologist who gave me the ADD/ADHD test (on which I scored about a 9 on the 0 to 10 symptom scale) I was finally able to get the recommendation for Adderall that I so desperately wanted.
Hooray for drugs!