I’ve always been a person who kinda, “does their own thing”. You could call it selfishness. You could call it eccentricity. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
I learned it’s called, “my dopamine regulators are just a teensy bit fucked up”.
I’ve never been a good student. According to my GPA, at least. In high school, I was constantly engaged, pretty funny, and all my teachers would always tell me I was one of their favorite students. But I seldom did homework, I skipped class all the time because I was bored, and my GPA was low. Like, in the low 3.0s weighted, which is nuts considering I took many Honors and AP classes. I did well on the standardized tests, which were my saving grace, but I never really cared to study for them. And why would I? I got 98 percentile scores. I ended up getting into an “elite” college which had a test-optional policy.
Had I studied, I would’ve gotten 99 percentile scores. And that’s the damn problem.
In college, I decided to reinvent myself. I would throw myself into the library for hours each day, refusing to do homework in my room. I tried every strategy I could, using pomodoro, forcing myself to take hand-written notes. My grades rapidly improved in college.
But my grades were not improving because I had become a better student, it was because the distribution of my homework had changed. I didn’t have busy work. At the time, I prided myself on my dedication and hustle. I knew that if I put my mind to anything, I could do anything.
But I was burnt out. So, so heavily burnt out. While I saw my friends take notes that would only take them a couple hours, it took me double that. And that’s not to say that the actual process of consuming information and writing notes was difficult, but hunkering down to take the notes was the actual problem. I would get distracted.
At the age of 21, I got diagnosed with ADHD from a psychiatrist. She remarked to me that “it’s incredible that I got so far with my level of hyperactivity and inattentiveness”. I think she was trying to make me feel better, but in all honesty, it made me feel like dogshit.
When I was a child, I had been misdiagnosed with ASD, which then corrected itself after some speech therapy. Turns out, they had identified there really was something fucky-wucky with my brain, but the wrong causality was attributed to it. I’m not the only one, nor will I be the first.
Sorry for all the swearing. You might be able to tell, but this whole topic makes me feel pretty emotional.
I started taking Vyvanse at the start of my senior fall semester, which cost me 50 bucks a month. I had to quit it later that semester since I had poor cardiovascular health that was being exacerbated by the drug, but for the first time in my entire life, I had focus. I could do things without expending mental effort. I wrote my entire thesis while on this amphetamines.
Like most brain disorders, ADHD is not well-understood. Anyone claiming they definitively know how ADHD works is an idiot or a grifter. The general consensus seems to be that people with ADHD have messed-up dopamine receptors. That is, their risk-reward functions are messed up. While I can logically conceptualize the advantages of risk-reward, my ADHD brain doesn’t agree with my logical processing. That was the source of my exhaustion, I was waging a war with my own brain, convincing it to believe the own things I reasoned myself to do. Amphetamines solve this by reversing the dopamine transmission inside the brain, enabling people with this so-called “dopamine deficiency” to have the same feelings of reasoning that other people do. It’s no longer a war, my body agrees with (or defers? to) my logic.
What could I have been if I were to be properly medicated? Could I be a quant making 500k? Whatever, I’m a software engineer in America, I make so much money relative to my peers and the entire world that complaining I’m not making quadruple that deserves a punch in the face.
Would I have done a better job developing meaningful relationships with other people instead of dropping in and out of their lives, treating them like our relationships are ephemeral? This is the thing that kills me the most. My whole life, I’ve treated relationships like they should always be there. I’ve had friends I haven’t talked to in months, and then expect them to be the exact same when I return. My logic being, “I’m gonna treat you the same way I always treated you, why would you change?” This is not how people work. I’ve lost many relationships by treating people like this.
And those aren’t things I can get back. No one cares or wants to listen to “sorry I treated you terribly, my dopamine receptors suckkkk bro”.
I feel embarrassed talking about this, in all honesty. I don’t want to be the person who blames my problems on something outside of me. But what exactly am I supposed to do? It’s disingenuous to say that my literal brain chemicals aren’t responsible, at least partially, for my behavior. The way I try to rationalize it is that the ADHD provides an explanation, but it doesn’t really provide an excuse. I’m ultimately responsible for my actions, regardless for why they happened. It doesn’t make me feel good to reach this conclusion, but it’s the only one that doesn’t run contrary to my own values.
I’m luckier than most. I got diagnosed when I was 21. I was high-performing before my diagnosis, and high-performing after. If you read this piece as “a smart, accomplished person complaining he’s in the 90th percentile not the 95 percentile.” you would be right. Comparison is the thief of joy. But in this case, the comparison is to myself.
Amphetamines aren’t considered addictive in the chemical sense. However, people without ADHD get psychologically hooked onto them because they unlock a higher level of cognition, and they find that they don’t acknowledge themselves outside their meds. Their better version is who they are. I can relate and understand. But to me, I don’t consider myself on my meds to be a better version of myself, I consider them to be who I am meant to be.
So what can I do? I can keep moving forward. I can try and not feel regret. But it’s damn hard. For the formative years of my life, I was working with a penalty. I accomplished so much, but I could’ve accomplished more. Instead of beating myself up every single night and feeling intense self-loathing, wondering why I simply can’t do things the way other people do, I could’ve had something else to blame.
I can’t take back my actions. All I can do is improve. I hope someday I will no longer feel regret. I think it will happen, some day in the future. But for now, all I can do is live with it.