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Day 5 — Ketamine Journal
Day five of taking Ketamine and I’ve stopped taking Adderall. During my Ketamine session I read a series of articles that made me recognize how much Adderall could be hurting and not helping my ability to focus and work.
Adderall, or it’s generic equivalent, amphetamine salts doesn’t, as everybody thinks, actually improve your concentration, only your energy and drive. You hyper-focus on objects and tasks and can do everything you think needs to be done. Whether or not they need to get done is anyone’s guess. It’s like you find a loose fiber on a carpet, and you keep pulling at it until you’ve thrown out all of your furniture, purchased new furniture, and repainted your entire living room. Amphetamines help you do things, but it’s usually too much and not, perhaps, any of the right things. But, as an engine that drives commerce, it’s not likely to get outlawed. It should be. It’s highly addictive, causes paranoia, and compromises the quality of your work, though not the quantity. Silicon Valley runs on amphetamines. It’s the drug that built the internet. Coders could stay up for nights on end and never run out of ideas. Doesn’t the internet feel like that? Too much all at once, never-ending, and most of it isn’t any good.
Amphetamines are in board rooms, sports arenas, and recording studios. They’re also in many, many successful writers’ medicine cabinets. One could argue that all of New York City’s upper middle class is cracked out on speed.
That was one of the things that drew me to it. I needed the edge those writers had. I wanted the ambition they showed. I had to have their careers. More than anything, I wanted a different Amy. Please, God, show me another Amy and let her be the one that will save me. So, when my psychiatrist suggested I had ADHD, I jumped on it. Yes, please let me have ADHD! I’m sure that’s what’s been wrong with me all these years. I’m sure that’s why I haven’t lived up to my potential.
That was six years ago, and I can’t tell you whether or not it has helped me. I had so much else going on with my trauma resurfacing a failing marriage and the loss of so much work. On balance, I’d say it neither helped nor hurt, but mostly made my anxiety worse — a thing I refused to admit to myself or my doctors lest…
