I’ve used email addresses as an example. You can have an @gmail address, and an @yahoo address. They can both send and receive emails from each other, despite running on different email servers, because the communication protocol between them is standardized.
Eerily enough, I would have checked six of these off the list in the past day alone… I banged my wife, cut some fresh chives from our balcony garden for our omelettes, made some pu’erh tea with breakfast, then got a slushie on my way into work at the opera, where I wore my favorite shoes.
That was probably because it was prescribed to you. For people without ADHD, it’s like capsulized motivation, combined with the best caffeine buzz they’ve ever had.
It’s a scheduled drug specifically because the neurotypicals treat it like cocaine’s little brother. People with ADHD go through hell to get their meds because the neurotypicals just can’t fucking help themselves.
It’s not even the addiction that gets you; It’s the withdrawal symptoms after you quit.
Mine was, oddly enough, LSD. It’s not even physically addictive. I didn’t even particularly enjoyed tripping, but in my day-to-day life I have aphantasia; I can’t visualize anything.
If I asked you to close your eyes and picture an apple, then rate 1-5 how realistic you could make it look, most people would probably land somewhere around a 3 or a 4. Not photorealistic, but it would at least be recognizable as an apple and convey the important parts. A few artists or particularly visual people may land on a photorealistic 5. The people who are more biased towards speech (like an internal monologue) may land closer to a 2, like a rushed sketch, or even a 1 where it’s just a coarse outline and some color.
I land on a 0. I just see the backs of my eyelids. I can describe an apple to you. I can tell you what it smells like, what it tastes like, what color I would want it to be, how big it is, how heavy it is, what it feels like to crunch into it and get a little bit of the peel stuck between your teeth, et cetera… But I can’t visualize it.
I always thought the “picture yourself doing/going/working/etc {x}” types of things were just a figure of speech. Like if I was in elementary school and an art teacher said to picture a thing then draw it, I would just skip the first part. I’d still use my imagination before putting anything on paper, but it wouldn’t be visual.
But with LSD, that’s different. I can actually visualize things. Not particularly well, because everything is wobbling around like it’s made of tiny ocean waves… But I can do it. I quickly found that creative outlets were much easier when I could actually plan things out visually before putting them on paper. It was like I had been stuck using black and white paints my entire life, and then someone handed me some red, green, and blue for the first time. I also quickly realized how boring life was when I couldn’t just conjure images out of the ether at will.
Sadly, shrooms (which is commonly compared to “like doing LSD then smoking a blunt” in terms of feeling) doesn’t do it for me. I guess it doesn’t activate the same parts of my brain. But for whatever reason, LSD specifically allows me to overcome my aphantasia. I haven’t done it in years now, but I occasionally get the whim to try it again. Not enough to actually bother tracking down a new plug, but enough to muse about it while I type out shit like this.
Whenever my wife says anything along the lines of “I’ve been thinking”, my go-to response is always “do I need to call the church?”