There’s no such thing as “unmedicated” ADHD

You may not take prescriptions, but you’re medicating your ADHD somehow.

Addiction runs in my family—primarily alcoholism, with a sprinkling of narcotics in the younger generations. Growing up, I was terrified of the prospects of becoming an addict, so I avoided any hard drugs, even though they were the pastime of choice for my friend group.

I drank a little, mostly whiskey and vodka, and I smoked some weed, but I stuck hard to my “just say no” campaign when it came to anything harder. Smoking weed was good enough for me. It helped quiet the noise in my head, and it was so plentiful that I never had to buy it.

After high school, for a couple of years, I got heavy into smoking and drinking. I was high or drunk at least half the time until I hit 19. That’s when I met the woman who is now my wife and mother of my children.

My wife has never done a drug in her life. Where I have found no end to the enjoyment that I can find from getting high, my wife has found no end to the enjoyment that she can find from staying sober. I found my wife to be the most intoxicating drug I’d ever encountered, and for years was sober with her.

Sure, we’re adults now, and we sometimes partake in a glass of wine or bottle of beer, but never to excess. I hadn’t smoked weed in over ten years after she and I got together, and trying it as a 30-something changed my perspective on it. It just wasn’t as fun to zone out anymore.

So I’ve stopped smoking weed. And, for the most part, I don’t drink.

I’ve found a new drug

As I get older, and as the pandemic has piled on me, my ADHD has gotten worse. For 16 years, I went unmedicated for my ADHD and did remarkably well for someone with bees in his brain.

That was until November of 2020. In November, my ADHD came to a head, and I shut down entirely for a week. I would show up to work, stare at my monitor for 8 hours, and leave.

If my hands touched the keyboard, it was for the comforting feeling of keys under fingers, not to be productive.

If my eyes graced the ticketing system, it was because I was tabbing through my open browser windows for the hundredth time, not because I was fixing a bug.

I was spiraling, and I knew that I needed help. So I reached out to a doctor. It took until February of 2021 before the doctor could see me, but I made it through, even landing a new job in the meantime. Gradually I had pulled myself out of the tailspin and was getting back to productivity.

I started taking pills

I don’t think I’ll ever forget my very first dose of stimulant medication. I’d never taken one before, so I took it the minute I got home with my pills.

At 3 pm.

I could feel my body flooding with endorphins. As the medication hit my brain, it felt as though rain was flowing over me, and anything it touched paused for half a second and looked around. As though my brain were a desperate farmer investing his entire life on a plot of land, only to be hit by the worst drought the country had ever seen. But here comes rain, and the seeds begin to sprout.

It was an adrenaline rush as I had never felt before, and while my body felt like I should be running, my brain slowed down.

The buzzing in my brain quieted to a low chatter, like a wedding reception quieting down as the bride and groom enter.

I stayed awake that night until 3 in the morning, partly because I could not get over how immediate the reaction was and partly because taking a prescription stimulant at 3 pm is a bad idea.

I swapped my schedule to take my pills at 8 in the morning, right as I sit down at my desk to start my workday. By the time I go to bed, the stimulation is wearing off, and I’m able to relax.

They make me a better father

I love three things in this world strong enough to die for them. Those three things are my wife and two children.

My ADHD, however, isn’t fond of children — or talkative wives who want to vent about their day. My ADHD gets overstimulated by excessive noise and presents that overstimulation as irrational anger.

In short: I’m a yeller. I have traditionally yelled about any small problem that piles on for no reason other than it just happened to be the one that flicked the yell switch.

My kids and my wife know I’m not going to hit them, but that’s not good enough, and I have spent years trying to find ways to stop this from being my default reaction — with mixed results but improvements.

But the day that I knew I would never stop taking drugs was the day that my children were flying off the handle. They were playing a game together, and my son was stuck doing something in the game, and my daughter — who, consequently, likely has ADHD as well — was getting bored waiting for him, so she walked off in her little digital world to play with someone else while she waited.

This caused real-world screaming, which caused my wife to boil over and demand they shut everything down and go outside.

Me? I sat on the couch, completely unfazed. Not just that, but as my children came down the stairs, tears barely holding back, I told them to sit on the couch. We needed to talk.

My wife looked on, her irritation taking some time to dissipate, as I quietly explained to my children that what just happened was simply a misunderstanding and that my son had perceived his sister’s actions one way. In contrast, my daughter had thought she was still just waiting.

They calmed down, they apologized, and we all agreed that it made sense for them to go outside and step away from the digital world for a while.

In the moment, I thought absolutely nothing about this exchange. It seemed like the logical thing to do, and it was evident to me the root of their problem.

To my wife, however, this was magic.

She told me later that she can see how much the drugs are helping. That she loves how much progress I’m making. Our relationship has never been better, and I have never been more productive.

But most of all, most important to me, and the number one reason why I will never stop taking drugs…

Drugs make me a better dad, and I’ll never go back.