Ritalin Diaries - Week 2, Days 3-4
Lately, the biggest thing for me is that I'm spending a lot of time reeling and being vaguely frustrated that my ability/need to multitask is drying up.
It's long been a habit of mine to create quasi-workable environments for myself by putting on, say, low music or other visual/audio media with low attention requirement in the background while I try to do other things but now...
Now that's becoming a lot more difficult. Things which require focus now require MOTHERLOVING FOCUS. All-caps, bold, and italic. The Ritalin's doing its work, is the thing. My executive functions are kicking into gear, shored up by their chemical crutch... which means that since there is now a central executive in here and it's very, very, very single-minded. Distractions are not tolerated and when I make a plan or set an alarm, that shit becomes a LAW.
It's been kinda fascinating, actually, to feel my thought-patterns changing.
Like, I know that reads as if I've turned this whole thing into some kind of epistolary body horror which is, I admit, not a thing that would be wholly unexpected of someone who relates to the world through a massive chunky wall of fiction and, now that I mention it, not a terrible way to do a short horror piece... but at the same time, that would be a tremendously disrespectful thing which would only add to the low-level stigma surrounding psychiatric medication.
But seriously, how cool would it be, reading this thing about someone whose mind is slowly taken over and becoming not-their-own? It's been done before, I'm sure, but...
Well, I'm clearly still capable of digression, anyway, so THAT's a thought-habit that's not changing.
But what IS changing is a lot of my relation to low-stakes, self-imposed obligations. Normally, I'd be able to write them off but I'm really finding them becoming things that I need to do. It's not quite compulsion but much in the same way I feel trouble getting started with writing, I find it frightfully easy to almost take a back seat to my conscious mind which is preparing all these excuses for why I'm not following through on a thing while the rest of me just does the thing, leaving the excuses-generating parts sorta dressed for a costume party while everyone else is hangin' in casual wear.
If that makes sense. Having a more active executive function is not, I think, making my wordplay better.
I dunno, it's just the number of tasks which have felt really complex before and required a lot of energy to start have become disturbingly streamlined. Still don't much care for a lot of them but that distaste feels less important and the need to get them done feels more so. Which, no lie, is why I started this stuff in the first place.
On the downside, I'm noticing that I'm dehydrating faster and am thinking of setting some other alarm to make sure I'm drinking water more regularly as the urge to drink water or eat for stimulation's sake has died out, leaving me quite unsure how to keep the need to do those things in mind. Also, still noticing the very very occasional brief surge in heartrate and I'll be speaking about it with the nurse I'm meeting on Monday. It's nothing painful but it seems a thing to keep my medical people apprised of, just in case.
So at the moment, I'm trying to systematize myself a bit more, which is difficult because I haven't much experience at it and all of my coping mechanisms up until this point are no longer that helpful now that my brain is working a bit closer to spec.
It's long been a habit of mine to create quasi-workable environments for myself by putting on, say, low music or other visual/audio media with low attention requirement in the background while I try to do other things but now...
Now that's becoming a lot more difficult. Things which require focus now require MOTHERLOVING FOCUS. All-caps, bold, and italic. The Ritalin's doing its work, is the thing. My executive functions are kicking into gear, shored up by their chemical crutch... which means that since there is now a central executive in here and it's very, very, very single-minded. Distractions are not tolerated and when I make a plan or set an alarm, that shit becomes a LAW.
It's been kinda fascinating, actually, to feel my thought-patterns changing.
Like, I know that reads as if I've turned this whole thing into some kind of epistolary body horror which is, I admit, not a thing that would be wholly unexpected of someone who relates to the world through a massive chunky wall of fiction and, now that I mention it, not a terrible way to do a short horror piece... but at the same time, that would be a tremendously disrespectful thing which would only add to the low-level stigma surrounding psychiatric medication.
But seriously, how cool would it be, reading this thing about someone whose mind is slowly taken over and becoming not-their-own? It's been done before, I'm sure, but...
Well, I'm clearly still capable of digression, anyway, so THAT's a thought-habit that's not changing.
But what IS changing is a lot of my relation to low-stakes, self-imposed obligations. Normally, I'd be able to write them off but I'm really finding them becoming things that I need to do. It's not quite compulsion but much in the same way I feel trouble getting started with writing, I find it frightfully easy to almost take a back seat to my conscious mind which is preparing all these excuses for why I'm not following through on a thing while the rest of me just does the thing, leaving the excuses-generating parts sorta dressed for a costume party while everyone else is hangin' in casual wear.
If that makes sense. Having a more active executive function is not, I think, making my wordplay better.
I dunno, it's just the number of tasks which have felt really complex before and required a lot of energy to start have become disturbingly streamlined. Still don't much care for a lot of them but that distaste feels less important and the need to get them done feels more so. Which, no lie, is why I started this stuff in the first place.
On the downside, I'm noticing that I'm dehydrating faster and am thinking of setting some other alarm to make sure I'm drinking water more regularly as the urge to drink water or eat for stimulation's sake has died out, leaving me quite unsure how to keep the need to do those things in mind. Also, still noticing the very very occasional brief surge in heartrate and I'll be speaking about it with the nurse I'm meeting on Monday. It's nothing painful but it seems a thing to keep my medical people apprised of, just in case.
So at the moment, I'm trying to systematize myself a bit more, which is difficult because I haven't much experience at it and all of my coping mechanisms up until this point are no longer that helpful now that my brain is working a bit closer to spec.