queenscarlet88
Bluelighter
I've been a sucker for stimulants for the past two years. It began with Adderall. I took 80mg my first time and I was blasted so high I didn't even realize I was high anymore. I loved how all the muscles in my body stood out in stark relief beneath my flesh and my veins engorged.
A chart of my use pattern would show an exponential curve. I began spending all my money copping not only Adderall, but also Ritalin, Vyvans, and benzo's to keep me from freaking out.
My thinking sped up in exciting ways for a long time, but one day I realized that all I felt anymore was a hideous buzz gnawing at my very vitality, a physical feeling all but devoid of thought. So I started combining weed and stimulants just to feel the way either of the two had previously made me feel by itself.
My stim use waned and I picked up a nasty benzo habit because I was left with panic attacks, social terror, and paranoia that people and institutions were trying to kill me. I got Xanax prescribed on a few occasions and stole benzo's from friends and even a boyfriend to whom they'd been prescribed. I also bought them in enormous quantities.
So, where am I now, after two years of consistent pill-popping? I lack motivation (surprise, surprise). Reading is a lot harder than it was before I ever popped a pill to get high; I used to be able to read hundreds of pages in a sitting with a clear and vibrant reel of imagery in my head as I read, along with commentary and analysis. Now I have to ponderously read and re-read each page because I tend to inadvertently skim through whole paragraphs at a time with glazed eyes, even while reading a compelling novel.
Writing doesn't come naturally, or at least not as naturally as it used to. I wrote an average of a thousand words of fiction per day from age 13 to age 16, but starting at age 17 with my discovery of drugs, I lost my discipline, even as I wasted my reserves of creative energy on useless and disorganized stimulated thought, burning the candle of my mind at both ends. After about a year I had killed both my discipline and my creativity. I don't really have ideas anymore, much less the motivation to implement them.
I miss reading so much. I never valued my mind when it was intact, so now I've reduced it to a ruin bordering on a carcass. :'-( I'm 19 years old and, absent amphetamines or methylphenidate, I need several hundred milligrams of caffeine per day to hold at bay the feeling of inhabiting an eighty-year-old body: exhausted, foggy, creaky.
Caffeine wears off mentally within an hour and a half regardless of dose (and doesn't even bring me up to my pre-drug baseline during that time, though a lot closer than I am while sober), yet if I have any caffeine in a day I can't sleep for a minimum of 16 hours after the time of last ingestion. My eye sockets are black and hollow behind my eyes, my skin stretched across them to form dark circles that never fade.
I'm trying to cut out caffeine and stronger stimulants so that I can sleep more than five hours a night, which is what I've averaged the past several months owing to heavy caffeine consumption. No caffeine or anything else today, yet here I am wide awake at 3am, and completely unable to read anything substantive. So, my questions:
1) How long after quitting daily stimulant intake must I wait before I can focus as well as I used to be able to, before I ever assaulted my mind with stims and benzo's? Am I forever damaged, even if only to a subtle yet permanent degree?
2) How long until sleep returns to normal?
3) Would a drug like Welbutrin be a viable mid- to long-term solution, or would it deepen the damage and hollow me out even more thoroughly?
I understand nobody can answer these questions with any certainty, but I'm hoping other people have come out of similar abuse patterns and recovered their full faculties ...
A chart of my use pattern would show an exponential curve. I began spending all my money copping not only Adderall, but also Ritalin, Vyvans, and benzo's to keep me from freaking out.
My thinking sped up in exciting ways for a long time, but one day I realized that all I felt anymore was a hideous buzz gnawing at my very vitality, a physical feeling all but devoid of thought. So I started combining weed and stimulants just to feel the way either of the two had previously made me feel by itself.
My stim use waned and I picked up a nasty benzo habit because I was left with panic attacks, social terror, and paranoia that people and institutions were trying to kill me. I got Xanax prescribed on a few occasions and stole benzo's from friends and even a boyfriend to whom they'd been prescribed. I also bought them in enormous quantities.
So, where am I now, after two years of consistent pill-popping? I lack motivation (surprise, surprise). Reading is a lot harder than it was before I ever popped a pill to get high; I used to be able to read hundreds of pages in a sitting with a clear and vibrant reel of imagery in my head as I read, along with commentary and analysis. Now I have to ponderously read and re-read each page because I tend to inadvertently skim through whole paragraphs at a time with glazed eyes, even while reading a compelling novel.
Writing doesn't come naturally, or at least not as naturally as it used to. I wrote an average of a thousand words of fiction per day from age 13 to age 16, but starting at age 17 with my discovery of drugs, I lost my discipline, even as I wasted my reserves of creative energy on useless and disorganized stimulated thought, burning the candle of my mind at both ends. After about a year I had killed both my discipline and my creativity. I don't really have ideas anymore, much less the motivation to implement them.
I miss reading so much. I never valued my mind when it was intact, so now I've reduced it to a ruin bordering on a carcass. :'-( I'm 19 years old and, absent amphetamines or methylphenidate, I need several hundred milligrams of caffeine per day to hold at bay the feeling of inhabiting an eighty-year-old body: exhausted, foggy, creaky.
Caffeine wears off mentally within an hour and a half regardless of dose (and doesn't even bring me up to my pre-drug baseline during that time, though a lot closer than I am while sober), yet if I have any caffeine in a day I can't sleep for a minimum of 16 hours after the time of last ingestion. My eye sockets are black and hollow behind my eyes, my skin stretched across them to form dark circles that never fade.
I'm trying to cut out caffeine and stronger stimulants so that I can sleep more than five hours a night, which is what I've averaged the past several months owing to heavy caffeine consumption. No caffeine or anything else today, yet here I am wide awake at 3am, and completely unable to read anything substantive. So, my questions:
1) How long after quitting daily stimulant intake must I wait before I can focus as well as I used to be able to, before I ever assaulted my mind with stims and benzo's? Am I forever damaged, even if only to a subtle yet permanent degree?
2) How long until sleep returns to normal?
3) Would a drug like Welbutrin be a viable mid- to long-term solution, or would it deepen the damage and hollow me out even more thoroughly?
I understand nobody can answer these questions with any certainty, but I'm hoping other people have come out of similar abuse patterns and recovered their full faculties ...
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
