Waking Up on ADHD Drugs...

Is the Very Best Way to Wake Up.

The untidyness of moring. Desi, me, Nemo the cat.

The morning is a street fight. Ugly and brutal.

This is the way I like to describe it.

I have to get up, I don’t want to get up. I want to sleep more, I really shouldn't sleep more. How do I sleep more? Five more minutes is what I say to myself and I don’t mean it. Because five minutes is short-as-fuck. A stupid and unsatisfying amount of sleep time. It’s a grift I give myself. There are often regrets from the night before, the extra edible that knocked me out, in my past drinking times, when I downed the forth or fifth glass of tequila over the sink, loving the sound of ice cracking up against other ice. Other times, I should’ve just gone to bed, but I stayed up too late with the binging, watched another hour when I should’ve packed it in. Before I forced myself blurry to the bed.

Regrets, for sure. Five more minutes.

The mornings. I trudge the familiar places. In slippers. Across cold floors. I mumble. Pick my nose, searching nostril depths for half-dried boogers. Another desert thing. Snot dessicates inside the nose. I brush my teeth, as I should. Hair in a messy bun. Big grey holey sweater wrapped around me. The daylight stings when I pull back the black-out curtains. Morning is afterbirth. A shock of light and living. Our blankets and bedsheets are blown out placenta. They once held us, sweet family. David, me, our nine-year-old, Desi, in between, still.

But we leave it all behind. Straighten it so as not to be like slobs. Move from the underbelly rooms (bed and bath), to the bowels, the kitchen. I take my Diet Coke in the backyard, in the sun, because I live inVegas, where it is sunny 294 days out of the year. That is an exact count, by the way. I googled it. The best time in the desert is this special time, usually in the spring or fall, but sometimes happens in the winter too, when the morning sun is hot enough to burn through my skin and warm me down to the core, but the air and wind around is cool and dry. I lay out a blanket in the backyard, bring my cold can. I am warm and cool all the same.

It’s magic.

Desi, as a baby.

But mornings are different when I take my ADHD drugs…

I take them at 5:30 or 6am. Right around the time of my early morning menopause-inspired piss. I take it, wash it back with a glug from a can of warm seltzer that has been sitting on the nightstand all night. I go back to sleep. It’s a good sleep, one with no guilt. Because this mother fucker is going to jolt me awake in about two hours. No paltry five minutes of irrtiated semi-consciousness. No. This morning is going to spray me with the light of day like beautiful floresecent strobes.

From the inside out.

David calls it my “Meth” and he isn’t wrong. I take Vyvanse (Lisdexamfetamine) which is a second cousin to the street drug, meth. A few molecule tweaks and they say all the danger is gone. I take it a couple times a week. I say for focus. But I also love that kick, that jolt, that propulsion into the day. I am, on the three days a week I take them, always aware that I am on uppers. That I am alert and that my alertness is tin foil and wire. A string of hot, white Christmas lights.

I am bright, very bright.

He can tell when I’m on the meds. When David moves behind me in the kitchen, hand on my back or fingers running over my ass, I do not melt into his touch like I do on the days when I am off the meth. I do not seek out the long oxytocin-laden kisses that I normally would. On the meth days, I am moving, accomplishing, checking boxes, Pac Man eating through through lists gobble gobble gobble. I do not have the bendy-ness to kiss my husband for too long. Or to sit and idle over my daughter’s drawings. I have to gourge myself on completing all the things. I trick myself: I add “kiss husband for eight seconds” to my list.

Check. What’s next?

On Meth days, I am a crackling river, cold and ferocious, cutting through stone. Non-Meth days, I am a long embrace, a face buried in a shoulder, an extra episode of Walking Dead with our zombie-loving son, Raffi. A hand deep inside the back pocket of David’s jeans.

Sometimes warm to the core, sometimes cold to the touch. Like the desert, I am.

This reminds me of an episode of Hidden Brain that I heard in the car and can no longer find the episode, where they talk about efficiency and warmth and how hard it is for the people to exude both efficiency and warmth simultaneously. They did a lot of indepth brain research talk and I wish I could’ve jotted notes. But the remnants stayed with me.

Efficient people aren’t known for being warm. Warm people aren’t known for getting shit done at all costs. One is about doing, acting on the urge to make something, create something, scratch the itch of inertia, move yourself, propel yourself and the other is about the slowing down to listen, to understand, to make small connections.

To be.

Both are vital.

Desi, at present.

I look forward to the mornings where the meth wakes me up. The way I bust into the world. The way I don’t stumble and belch into it akwardly and have to force myself into the day.

I know I need both. I need to linger over the drawings of my children and hear their stories and kiss my husband as if the kiss means everything and time has stood still.

I need to move my world. I need to live in it, too.

________________

END NOTES:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Every year I throw this essay out there for folks looking to cut back on drinking alcohol. Dry January is a good place to start. You can read it here.

For me, giving up regular drinking has been life changing, relationship changing, writing changing, everything changing. I still drink occasionally. But only on date nights with David, where I have two tequilas, on the rocks, wedge of lime. He mostly drinks non-alcoholic beers now. It’s been working for us since 2020.

Wishing you the best 2025. Buckle up butter cup. We are in this together.

Thank you, as always, for reading. Kim xo