Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Day Two - First Day with the New Feet

When I was little, I thought it was a hilarious joke when a person would trip or stumble, and someone would say, "What's wrong - first day with the new feet?" That would just make me laugh and laugh. Truth be told, it still makes me chuckle, and I love it when one of my kids trips (without injury, of course) and I get to say it to them. (Dr. K., you might want to modify your notes to reflect that, while good, my sense of humor is woefully dorky.)

Well, yesterday - my first full Adderall XR day - felt a bit like my first day with the new brain. I continued to feel relaxed and happy, but a little awkward and "wobbly." Walking around with my inhibitory receptors now awake was strange, and all day long I kept noticing weird things. Things that I'm sure normal people with normal brains find perfectly normal. But for me, they were strange.

Like when I got to my desk and found that I had a voicemail. Instead of staring at my phone and agonizing over whether to take the message; and then taking the message and debating over when to call the person back; and then deciding to wait until some unspecified more-convenient time in the future (the technical term for which is "later") to call the person back; and then losing the note where I jotted down the message; and then not ever returning the call because I either forgot to or never wanted to in the first place; and then getting another call--this time an angry one--following up on the first one that I never returned. . . instead of all that, I simply took note of the red message-indicator light on my phone. And without even giving it a moment's thought, I picked up the phone, took my message, called the person back. Done.

People with normal brains won't get why this is a big deal. You're supposed to return calls. It's a given. But the sleepy-receptor people know exactly what I'm talking about. All of us sleepy heads have agonized in the middle of the night over those phone calls--the phone calls you wouldn't return for no other reason than because you just didn't feel like it, regardless of what consequence might ensue.

It's not just about the phone calls. It's about the daily business of living. If you're an adult who suffers from ADD/ADHD, your life has been turned into unmanagable chaos at one time or another just because you couldn't bring yourself to pay that bill (even though you had the money in the bank and the check was already written out), or fill out that application form in time, or open an important certified letter marked "URGENT."

To us sleepy-receptor people, seeing a task before us and just doing it is, in fact, a very huge deal. The hugest. And being able to check something off of a to-do list can feel like winning a gold medal.

This is some good shit, man. . .

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