Love A.D.D.erall
At 21 they diagnosed me with AD/HD & gave me smart pills. My grades shot up & my future brightened & some said I was better. But I am numb inside of this drug. People I love become distant strangers sometimes, so proud of me for victories I didn’t earn. How do I tell them I am not what I do or have done. I’ll never be happy on this drug, but I’ll never be successful without it. If only I could Love Adderall.Archive for April, 2008
Advice: From Ex-Mentors to Future Nobodies
If I had a little foresight, and wasn’t hungry for a better world, I’d think more strategically about “professionalizing” my portfolio. I need to reframe my brief streaks of insight into a more coherent shtick, something “academically marketable.” Then I can devote an entire career to perfecting my diatribe. I’ll stay current with all the pertinent jargon, whatever’s relevant to my irrelevant niche. Every year or so I’ll publish a new article, each mimicking the last though slightly nuanced in some new way. I’ll take care not to step on toes, of course; not to trespass in the substantive territories where fancier scholars have already squatted.
That path leads to tenure, the world we’re told to covet. Most grad students anticipate feeling at home here, once tenured, at 40-ish.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even professionalized yet.
The trick to “professionalization”, my ex-mentor advised, is to “network, network, network, network!”
Here’s how it’s done. You shoulder your way into the groveling pools—semicircles of grad students kissing ass and hoping for future favors. Get to know “the big names in the field,” especially the “stars.” Watch how idolatry follows them at national conferences, be jealous. Pretend they’re baseball players, and gush like groupies. Bond with them; and, again, be jealous. The bonds will feel forced, the jealousy contrived. Welcome to academic life.
“Don’t dwell on the bigger problems,” or the implications of living a life that implicates nothing.
So says my ex-mentor. His body language carves an epilogue, admits what his words never will: that if you spend too long living inside a box it stops mattering what happens outside. That’s why somewhere along his prolific marathon, his printed tour of the unread & unreadable prestigious-journal circuit, my ex-mentor happened upon a happy-medium citizenship, whereby not caring became okay and suddenly felt normal. Now he moves confidently through the world without ever really having to exist in it.
Embrace that tunnel vision, young scholar. Make it your asset, your confidante. If such private esteem doesn’t excite you, neither will this boring vocation. For my ex-mentor, few things in life were more fulfilling than out-sparring a less-credentialed man in a trivial debate. Nothing cranked his joy-buds like the insular orgies of academia, its geeky circle jerks and anticlimactic climaxes. It amused him to expand his inner empire, to surround himself with grad students who promised to pretend to admire him. Protégés are validation for followers who need to feel like leaders. I could build a bubble just like his, he promised, with round soapy walls to polish my presentation, wash my mouth out, cleanse the frat guy I’d been before, and smooth over the coarseness in my truer inner voice.
But the perks of being comfortable only douse my spirit. Polite golf claps can’t silence the disquieting noise of nothing happening, nothing changing, inside or out.
The longer I sit still in my ivory tower, the more I’ll come to resemble something else. Who I am today will surely dwindle, with dreams of youth falling off me like hair from a widow’s peak on an aging scalp.
And what, in silence, would become of all my words? Somehow I know they’d stop sounding original. They’d learn to reveal little about my country & my own voice, more about my subculture—the nuanced academic circle in which I chose to voice it. My message itself, whatever it grew into, would become less important to me than how it was received. This happens when one connects with likeminded others, or when his mind starts feeling at ease among those to whom his random decisions randomly connect him.
I have nothing against connecting.
But I am petrified of disconnecting.
To become the professors I pass in these pointless halls would require all the passion & energy I have today to slowly drain out of me.
I wonder if passion is indeed like energy, like atoms we recycle when we die; if the fire inside my belly now came from somewhere; if previously it belonged to somebody else, someone better; and if it might migrate elsewhere, later, whenever I set myself ablaze or fade like a hologram. I wonder, will the zeal I know only as my own float off to something new. If so, where will it go? Will it get snagged on another trap, caught in another circular life like this one? Or will it flee to the paradises I never found but in my head, those magic hotspots more receptive to passions?
I wish I had some say in the matter.
Rewind
Every day I wake up remembering yesterday–not the recent one that still existed when I went to bed, but the more distant variety that died years ago.
I journey backwards inside my head, however far back I need to go, to get back to that place in time when my goals were clearly articulated and yet still seemed plausible. There in my waking minute—those magic moments of morning when old dreams are malleable to a new day—mistakes are reversible. I find hope then, pure and unadulterated, as it looked before it went to cower in the closet, before vague promises that I could be anything fell silent.
I miss those promises, laughable as they seem now in a world that rewards creative thoughts only when the thinker commits them to the status quo. Even if they only come out at night, I need those promises: “You will succeed at whatever you do.”
But each morning it’s the same, the way they break again. The clock awakens before me and sword fights with my fantasies. It takes a few moments of being awake before reality kicks in, like Klonopin cutting off Adderall. Then the cold air outside my blanket touches all my uncovered parts, startles hope like an icicle to the testicles, sends all my American dreams fleeing for cover—back to wherever they hide while I’m wake.
Fighting the Good Fight (vs. Rotten Tomatoes)
If, while you’re on Adderall, some aspect of the sameness in your everyday routine gets flung awry, you might find you have no choice but to overreact.
Depending on the time of day, and where you happen to be in that day’s Adderall cycle, the extent of your overreaction may vary–from an annoyed jaw-clench to a bizarre anxiety that consumes the rest of your afternoon, and a fixation with getting some sort of revenge against whomever, or whatever, you decide is to blame for things not being “just so.”
Suppose, for example, a website you regularly visit unveils a brand new design. What do you do?
The answer, to the non-geeked-out you, would be simple: get over it. Adapt. Adjust. Be okay with the fact that nothing becomes familiar without first feeling strange and weird.
But on Adderall, you won’t see it that way. You’ll see whoever was responsible for the new design as crafty and conniving, jerking you around for an assload of money—those shady shitheads! And you’ll decide in your frenzy to combat their shadiness by clicking the “Contact Us” icon and writing a lengthy protest email. It won’t matter what you put in the email itself; the company doesn’t hire people to read them. But you feel like you’re on a mission now, that you’re achieving some pseudo-victory that will let you feel afterwards that an objective has been accomplished.
So, you might write:
To Whom It May Concern:
I noticed your site’s design suddenly changed, and I thought I’d write to let you know I’m hoping it changes back just as abruptly. Unlike the site’s old design, on which RT’s advertising endeavors took a backseat, the new site privileges sponsors’ by putting their superfluous ads front and center to distract and test the patience of long-time, loyal visitors.
Navigating the new site is a hassle as well. I used to be able to type in a movie title and go directly to its RottenTomatoes page. Now there’s an extra step, and I have to sift through all the bullshit your sponsors are trying to sell me (all of which is unrelated to the movie) before I finally reach my desired page.
Trying to look at the actor’s pages is even more obnoxious! I’ve always loved how RottenTomatoes let me view an actor’s entire film history profile on a single page. Now it only shows five movies per page, meaning I have to click “Next” incessantly in order to obtain the entire list. What’s that about?
It has long been evident to me that whoever ran RottenTomatoes took great pride in the website’s continued success. To be frank, the sloppiness of the new site suggests the evidence to the contrary.
As any good businessperson knows, a product’s familiarity to customers is one of its key assets. RottenTomatoes.com is now completely unfamiliar to me. In essence you have tweaked a site for which no tweaking was needed, and the result is that many of us may finally migrate over to IMDB for our movie info needs.
One would think devoting five paragraphs of thoughtful writing to this minor issue would suffice. Writing a letter won’t be enough, though. You’ll find some way to connect your displeasure with the website’s new design to your disenchantment with the world in general. You’re pissed about the website changing its fonts & color scheme, a change emblematic of how you see society: eradicating its good parts and letting the bad ones multiply like viruses. You’re pissed at the website for changing without warning, and yet pissed at the world for changing too slowly. These two very real but very different sentiments blend, until each becomes what it isn’t. And this today will be the stimulus your unchallenged brain craves, the problem of the day for you to play with, to fabricate and exaggerate and amalgamate into a vast and paranoid conspiracy by everyone & everything against you & you alone.
The audacity of these webmasters, these arrogant pricks who think just because they own a site and have its passwords memorized they can rearrange all its buttons at their leisure, change its fonts and sell advertising to shady corporations whose politics you might not approve of.
Without your meds, you’d brush this off, all of it. Your mini-crisis would be a nonevent. You might not notice the change, not right away anyway.
“It’s just a website, dude.”
But Adderall scoffs at the pushover you’d become without it. “Just a website?” That’s what they’d have us think. They taught us to never be skeptical except when dark secret realities are revealed, to keep believing in all the things we hope are true. That’s why this is about sooooo much more than a website. It’s about a way of misunderstanding the world, as the virtues of knowing truth clash with an ignorant generation that committed too soon to a state of permanent disorientation. This is a huge fucking deal, emblematic of greed’s guilty grip on all that’s good, or could’ve been good. And you are so grateful now that you took the right pills today, even if they are pink and not orange. You’re fighting the good fight and you need whatever weapons happenstance provides, and for this fight and the ones to come, your sword and shield are both made of this grand drug, and of the way it influences you.
And as the little pills dissolve inside your belly you decide you’re morally obligated now to push back against this machine. The guy in your head won’t quit, he keeps the gerbil running on that little wheel inside your brain, the treadmill that leads absolutely nowhere. You still don’t care or realize how much time you’re wasting, you can’t yet. You have to make this war, make it about more. This isn’t about a website; it’s about a culture too distracted by flashy lights to appreciate the purchasing power of the consumer. And for now it’s just you & you alone against the corporate giant mega-elites who don’t yet see you as a significant enough threat to evacuate.
This is what you get when you mix a potent drug with the constellation of diverse thoughts & energies that plague and bless the underestimated, under-stimulated A.D.D. brain.
It is a thought process that judges and condemns, and one that separates the thinker from the thoughtless. Yet the very mindset that rails against fakeness is itself dependent on artificial stimuli. There is now no way for me to be normal. I’ve surrendered my right to be willfully ignorant. In order to be right I must also be the hypocrite. Nothing changes either way.
You feel like the fucking guy in “A Beautiful Mind.”
Sure, the undrugged version of you might ask, “What the hell are you talking about?” But to hell with the un-drugged you! To hell with the blindfolded and the enslaved, and those who are skeptical only if and when dark secrets expose the abnormality of norms.
Stop. You are now repeating yourself. I have just one piece of advice. Let it go. First of all, you’ll get used to the new site. And they don’t give a shit what you think, anyway.
Your words, these words, will make no sense ever to any human being—including you—in about fifteen minutes, when you slide out of this mindset and latch onto one that’s preoccupied with something else. So let it go. Adapt. Adjust. Tolerate the little unpredictabilities of life. They make it more fun than Groundhog Day— depending on the time of day, and where you happen to be in that day’s Adderall cycle.
