After I complained on here about my difficulty in getting ADHD meds, a friend referred me to her psychiatrist and other friends helped me actually get an appointment set up and I went to it and I got prescribed ADHD meds. A couple different kinds, so I can document how they affect me and figure out with the psychiatrist which ones work best.
I took them for the first time last Thursday. Theyâre supposed to last a fairly short time, four to six hours; I took one before I went to work and had a fine day at work, productive but not outrageously so, nothing to particularly write home about, and I had mostly forgotten that I was on ADHD meds by the time I got home.
There was a choir staging rehearsal, so I was watching the baby for the evening, and the dishwasher was broken so there was like a week of dishes in the sink, and I really wanted pasta with homemade tomato sauce so I started that on the stove and put the baby in his high chair with a spatula to chew on and sang him songs while I washed the dishes -
- and about halfway through this I realized that all of this was so profoundly out of character that my roommates, if theyâd been home, might have suspected bodysnatching aliens.
I am too tired when I get home from work to cook dinner. Sometimes someone else cooks a thing I can eat, and sometimes I just drink an Ensure and go to bed. I hate doing dishes when the sink is full; I kind of hate doing dishes even when the sink is not full, and Iâd done the dishes exactly once in the previous six months. I am not usually too tired to play with the baby, but only if he wants to come headbutt my pillows while I lie in bed.
Well, I thought, I guess ADHD meds actually do something! And I finished the dishes and finished the dinner and fed us both and did my laundry and cleaned my room and started putting the babyâs books on the bookshelves, which he objected to (he firmly believes that his books should be evenly dispersed through the house, so if he wants one it is always nearby), so I gave up and worked on a writing project Iâm in the middle of.
If you knew two people, one of whom came home from work and cooked and cleaned and did childcare and then wrote fiction, and the other one who came home from work and crawled into bed and browsed Tumblr all evening, you would probably attribute other, underlying differences to them. The first one is motivated and driven; the second one is immature and not used to having to keep her own space clean and do her own chores. The first one is trustworthy and conscientious and gets things done; the second one, maybe not. The first one has more willpower; the first one works harder.Â
Itâs none of that. Itâs brain chemistry.
Iâm not saying that you can never accomplish anything through concerted effort - obviously you can, and effort matters a lot. Iâm not saying that thereâs no point in trying to expand the number of things you can do without changing your underlying brain chemistry; there is, and I do a lot of that, and it often works really well.
But I am saying that we attribute far, far too much of peoplesâ behavior to virtue, to hardworkingness, to willpower, to passion, to values, when the actual underlying thing is none of those. And because of that, people hate themselves for being lazy, for being slow, for not trying hard enough. I wasnât trying harder on drugs. I wasnât trying at all. Cooking dinner on a normal night really is about willpower and effort and careful planning around my limitations and advance strategic decision making and triage. Cooking dinner on stimulants is just - the thing that happens when I walk into the kitchen and want to eat something.Â
Drugs donât work for everybody. (Honestly, they donât totally work for me; I donât like taking them two days in a row, and I wouldnât want to take them if I had to get a specific thing done instead of Doing Things in general.) I think people who have a drug sometimes work for them are really lucky, in a lot of ways, because itâs hard to really believe that itâs not your priorities or personality, itâs your executive function, until you can observe how you behave with the same priorities and the same personality and vastly boosted executive function. But I also think this is true of people who never have a drug work for them.Â
People vary, a lot, and one axis along which they vary is executive function, and itâs really hard to imagine what itâs like to be someone with way more executive function or way less executive function than you. At least for me, it doesnât feel like trying harder or caring more. It feels like not needing to.
