This update includes some pretty revealing personal information, but: RADICAL CONDOR.

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I’ve been medicated for ADHD since November 2020, and it’s been (mostly) great and life-changing. It never offered much of a difference in focus, concentration, or attention, but it did create a gigantic shift in emotional dysregulation – an often-overlooked but extremely common symptom of ADHD, and my biggest and most disruptive lifelong symptom.

For me, ADHD medication quickly replaced antidepressants (which I was on for 20 years), emergency anxiety medications, and a lot of self-medication – and did the job of all of these ten times better.

In early 2021 (around March?) my psychiatrist encouraged me to increase my dosage to see if we could get it to help with focus. So I did.

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From March to August, I very slowly became more emotionally volatile again. The things I describe in the original post are still true. But the volume on everything – stress, anxiety, sadness – was turned up to an unbearable level.

Sometime in mid-August, due to a slip-up with my medication alarms, I accidentally cut my dosage by about a third. That afternoon, I felt different. I felt like myself again. I had two stressful things happen, and didn’t react in the way I’d been reacting for months.

So the next day, I tried taking two thirds of the usual dosage again… same result.

I did this for a week, and yep: it was my medication dosage.

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On the fifth or sixth day of this – of me smiling and laughing, cracking jokes, taking things in my stride instead of crying and breaking down multiple times a day – my partner stopped me in the kitchen to hug me, and said “it feels like you’re back.”

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I’ve stayed on the lower dosage since then, and things have been (despite world events) pretty fucking great.

Everything in the original blog post – about my background, holding boundaries, conditioning, and self-esteem – still holds true. But I’m no longer in a place of intense, constant distress when dealing with those things. I’m managing them, and successfully working on them in therapy.

I’m happy, and I’m able to self-regulate again.

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I said at the bottom of the original post: “I really hope that one day I’ll be able to write an honest follow up post to this one that says “hey everyone, guess what? I’m all good now, thanks for your patience, haha all good TOTES CHILLAXIN’ BRAH” or whatever”

Well… yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m about as close as I can be to totes chillaxin, brah.