So I’m ADD. I got it from my father, who never realized he had it and probably would have considered it a bullshit diagnosis. For a while, I did, too.
In my thirties, I had a therapist, and I was talking about trouble I had in school, and she asked me if I’d ever been tested for ADD. I hadn’t. She gave me a test, which involved concentrating on a single blinking light. I did what I always do when I have to concentrate on a single point. I closed one eye and covered the other so all I could see was that one light. With nothing else to see, I noticed the light blink about 75% of the time, which registered as borderline.
I’ve looked at medication since then. I asked a doctor who said that, if I was feeling anxious (and I was), ADD medication would be bad for that. A little over a dozen years later, I resolved to try it again. Mostly, this has to do with work.
For personal things, there are a lot of coping things I have. When I leave the house, I start to repeat to myself “Four things”, for the four things I need to leave the house: backpack (has my bike lock in it), phone (has my credit cards in a pouch on the case), glasses and mask.
I was worried medication would make me unbearable to be around, so I waited until the end of quarantine so my family and I wouldn’t be locked up together. I made an appointment with a doctor, who told me to make an appointment with a psychiatrist.
I talked to a psychiatric nurse, who put me on Amoxetine, which is a non- stimulant treatment for ADD. I hear a lot more about Ritalin and Adderall, which are low-grade amphetemines. Honestly, I didn’t know what Amoxetine does.
Seven days in, I still mostly wasn’t sure. Then I started putting together this website. I did some beginning setup on Thursday, planning to be done Sundsy.
I was done Friday. I set it up in Jekyll, put together the CSS, made a responsive layout (meaning it works on a phone, tablet or desktop), wrote two blog posts, converted a bunch of stories to markdown, created and configured an S3 bucket, got a domain, pointed the domain at the bucket, found an easier way to do deployment, and it’s done in a third the time I’d planned. I was thinking I’d work, surf, play some games and alternated, but I couldn’t stop going back to one more thing.
And make no mistake, I don’t think this site is a worthy endevor. It’s a personal website long after the age of personal websites are done. I’m doing this because people think it’s a good idea, and I respectfully disagree.
Even so, I couldn’t stop working on it. I just kept thinking, I’ll feel better taking a break later when more things have been done. The next thing I know, it’s 1AM, and I’m trying to wrap up copying and pasting 83 chapters I just realized exist nowhere but on LiveJournal.
So this is my first real success story with Amoxetine. Before this, it was little things like that I’d managed to leave the house without initially forgetting one of the Four Things.
