Two weeks ago I spent a couple of hours talking to a consultant psychiatrist who diagnosed me with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and prescribed Ritalin. Long story short, this was the culmination of a long process of realising that laziness didn’t seem to work for me like it seemed to do for everyone else, and that at 31 years old something has destroyed the best half of my life and that maybe that thing had a name.
After a rather frustrating process of trying to get taken seriously by the NHS psychiatrist but with a lot of support from my GP we eventually ended up paying to see an expert. I’ve had the prescription for a few days now and had put off starting it until this morning and things have not gone how I was expecting at all.
I was expecting to feel energetic because I know that the drug is a stimulant and I was expecting to get things done because there are so many things that I want to do in my life that, and I have built this day up enough in my mind I was expecting that some of them would have to happen today even if the drugs didn’t do a damn thing.
So I took the tablets and an hour later wasn’t really feeling any different at all and I was starting to think that nothing would happen today anyway just like it always doesn’t because despite the tablets I didn’t want to start on sorting my papers I wanted to read my book, but I watched myself sort the papers anyway (and leave the papers that need attention individually in plastic pockets in a single file, which is a tiny detail but it’s important to me because it seem to suggest to me that I can still be creative when I’m taking the pills).
The house is now very tidy, and all the things that I wanted to do today are done and then some, and I know that things are different because of little things like my seeing that I need a bin liner for rubbish in my room and going down to get one instead of thinking “I’ll do that later” and actually taking the full bin liner to the bin outside rather than leaving it in the hall to take down later and that the other things that I have done are actually all done instead of “just done enough” and that I saw the box of cakes on the side and didn’t have one because I just wasn’t hungry.
And I know that I should feel ecstatically happy because the tablets seem to be working better than I dared hope that they would but instead I feel dull because I’m watching me doing all the jobs and the tidying and it doesn’t feel like me, it feels like the cuckoo, the other one, that the fairies leave behind in the stories. And I’m scared that the tablets won’t work tomorrow. And I’m scared that the tablets will work tomorrow and I’ll have to keep taking them now for the rest of my life. And I’m scared that they do nothing and that I’m fooling myself like I was worried I might and that all the effort will come to nothing in a few days like all the other times “this week is going to be different”. And I’m irrationally afraid that I will go back to the doctor and he will say “aha we tricked you, those were sugar pills and you really were lazy all along” and that then I will be.
So now I’m waiting for my Mom to come home to a tidy house and I know that she will make a big fuss about that which I’m really not sure I can cope with right now. And I feel that I should apologise for all the times that the house hasn’t been tidy when she got home, because tiding it today was so easy even if it felt like the cuckoo was doing all the work, but I can’t because then there’ll be an even bigger fuss. So now I’m sitting typing his because I really need to tell all this to someone and get my mind off things which is so obviously not working because typing this means that I have to have my mind on things, so I’m very sorry if this doesn’t make much sense because, y’know, the tablets.
Why don’t I feel happy dammit?