Notes from a withdrawal episode March 16, 2023 on peregrinator's blog

I was reading Adrianna’s (or “Pop22"’s) last blog post ‘I Now Have an Attention Span’ after they asked for new blog feeds they could follow on the fediverse and I realised I wasn’t following their blog anywhere — I’ve since added it everywhere, including in my openring configuration — and got thinking about a thing or two about my own progress with ADHD over the last four-odd years since my diagnosis. I do see something of an arc in my capacity for regular work and keeping at doing different kinds of work, similar to what they describe, but I’m not nearly there yet.

I find that there are some things I can stay focused on and work through. Sadly these have minimal overlap with what I’ve chosen for my career. I like working with computers — fooling around with R, trying to learn e-lisp an figure out Emacs, and well, setting up this blog too — and it’s startling to see how little there is in terms of job opportunities that involve any of these within ecology or wildlife science. I realise I’m digressing but the point I’m trying to make here is that I find that my attention span having improved applies only to a very limited kind of thing.

It’s been roughly two weeks since I ran out of my medication (Methylphenidate — commonly known as Ritalin or Concerta) and I’ve been experiencing some withdrawal symptoms. This is the longest I’ve been off this since I got started some six months back. I’ve had disturbed sleep (I’m writing this at midnight!), heightened anxiety that often manifests as anxiety attacks, and in general rapid mood changes and more but I’ve also seen some things that were surprising.

The same kinds of work I thought I could do better has become a whole lot easier to do now, while I’m in this withdrawal state, for the most part. I also find my thoughts to be clearer and that I no longer miss out on important cues of various kinds. This is quite irregular but is in no way sustainable in the long term for myriad reasons.