It’s that time of month for me: that half-week after the old prescription runs out before my new one gets refilled. Over these four-to-six days I sit stagnant, reminded of how insufficient I am sans Adderall.

Maybe it’s not so bad, going without the meds for awhile. Absent Adderall there’s no anxiety; no guilty conscience when I don’t follow through on whatever I promised myself I’d do today; no rigid, self-imposed deadlines and hence no angst about not meeting them.

I can drink Honey Brown from the bottle and not keep calorie tallies; I can watch movies with no intrinsic intellectual value and not feel sorry for laughing; I can appreciate sports again, as superior to ridiculous & slightly less trivial than pointless.

After two days without Adderall, the swift droop in my brain activity is manageable, almost pleasant. The harder challenge is facing myself—the real & undrugged version of me—and realizing the character I pretend to be most of the time isn’t really real. Everything I think I am, as the pink & orange chemicals trespass through my veins, is just a simulation, my clumsy attempt at imitating a person with a purpose.

My strengths & triumphs aren’t real, or even capable of sounding realistic. I appear ready at last to abandon impractical plans, long shot dreams that seem evermore absurd. Those who forever have doubted me begin to salivate; they grab pins & nails & needles, as one does when bubbles look ripe for bursting. I beg don’t pop me—just let me deflate, fade away not burn out, skip the spectacle of messy implosions and loud sloppy debris.

Finally I surrender; to absorb their negativity and heed their doubts about me; to accept and own the gloom of being normal & average; to embrace as mine, too, the generic cynicism that exudes from Any-Town, U.S.A. like water gushing out of a thick fire hose.

And underneath that hose, once, I was the flame—just not consistently, not overwhelmingly, and not for long. The shine in me was dubious and unreliable.

Now I’m smothered—forlorn, yet oddly free. I’ve scrubbed away the issues I cared about, for I can only care about them for 26 days at a time, and then I abandon them randomly for the slowest of long weekends. Without my drug, they are stupid, futile projects; they are problems I can’t change no matter how eloquently I overthink them.

For all the ways I tell myself the Adderall helps, only in its dearth do I feel empowered. Refreshingly, I’m sick of empathizing, bored with trying to understand everybody else. And that feels good. Cold turkey, I quit all my default assumptions. No more calling others’ grievances legit while degrading my own as impulsive & somehow irrational.

Soon this cycle will become that thing in my life I’m no longer able to accept. I’ll stop letting Adderall decode who I am, as if without it I’m nothing. I’ll stop asking it to draft life for me and counting on the happy endings it pencils in.

I will not put more faith in a pill than I have in myself.

Still, it’s tempting to float through the rest of our lives on this prescribed high, isn’t it? Such an easy out it was and is for us, a great escape: just close our eyes until the stimulant takes hold, transforming who we are into the selves we’d much rather be, convincing us our bogus projects are useful & worthwhile & selfless & righteous after all.

Make us forget: if we weren’t here all the clocks would tick without us. All the stars would still resist our gravity. Trees falling in empty forests would remain as silent as dreams that die alone in the bleak night, as now. So why waste our energy, when nothing or no one new needs us? Why shout and scream, when there’s so little left to say?

Even as these thoughts unfold, almost instantly their flimsy walls crease, crumpling in on me like a fajita until I’m wrapped up & trapped inside everyone else’s simplistic depression, imprisoned by your failures to reach what you couldn’t understand.

And right about now I start to scare myself and others, so I stop typing. I interrupt the inner dialogs and I watch baseball, and I walk the neighborhood with my neglected retriever, past all the empty homes busy with drained human beings barely living. And I look at the fake light as it leaks under door frames, and think about the unfinished dreamers on the other side who can’t smile, can’t shine behind the shaded, shuttered windows that shall divide us always. And I wonder if I can elevate myself to their level, these faceless neighbors who want nothing more than nothing at all. I wonder if I too can find bliss in the vacuity of human frowns. Someday.

For now though everything stays inside, packed up and concealed, like a trigger holding out for just the right moment to click. I wait for the calendar turn over, to make my mind correct again.