Today I threw out my bottle of Adderall and I'm happy with my decision but I'm afraid my brain won't ever go back to the way it was in 2019.

As a kid I always struggled with time management and could never get places on time or leave the house without help, but I did well in school until high school honestly. I started to barely scrape by in the things I didn't care about (everything but theatre, lol). My mom died suddenly and tragically when I was 18 and that's when everything went downhill. Got diagnosed with ADD during my first and only year of university and scored a prescription of Adderall XR 10mg.

My first 6-8 months on Adderall were some of the most peaceful and happiest of my life. It was like hearing the birds sing after a winter that lasted a decade. Or the feeling everyone had at Camp Green Lake during the first rainfall in 100 years. I lost a ton of weight and was finally happy with the way I looked, and I could study like the way I did when I was a kid. The world was shut down and lonely, but I had the warm embrace of my little blue pills. Nothing mattered, and I was happy.

Fast forward to 2021 and the pills sometimes work, sometimes don't. And I'm getting reliant on them. It's 2023 and I'm using the rush to get me through my miserable 9-5 retail job, despite me trying to quit twice. Now it's 2024 and I know these (now very short) highs and (mostly) lows are not a sustainable way to get through life. I'm watching my peers get accepted into grad school now and I've done nothing with my life but work dead end jobs popping pills, go home, jerk off, repeat. I'm afraid to face reality but I need to. It's my only comfort and I'm scared.