What Ritalin Means to Me.

I’d like to illuminate, here, a series of seemingly mundane events that communicate what the addition of Ritalin; after having lived 46 years not knowing I had ADHD, suspecting giftedness but frustratingly unsure because nobody would ever appropriately assess me, and living with toxic stress and traumas that span all the way back to year one on this planet which contributed to anxiety, depression, and complex PTSD, now having worked very diligently on unconditional self-love in the year since my Mom died from COVID and I extricated myself from her husband, my step-father and primary source of external gaslighting; means to me.

A content warning of sorts first.  The following words are intended as neither an endorsement nor a rejection of Ritalin or any particular therapeutic choice in the experiences of human beings.  Perhaps including you.  This is, rather, as I’ve described above, an illumination of what Ritalin, set in the complete context of me, means to me.  Should these words trigger traumas or cause harm, I encourage you to respond, engage, and allow me the opportunity to communicate more clearly and with less uninspected aspects of myself which cause others harm.  Or, perhaps you simply choose to pass on these words.  In any case, I encourage you to take care of yourself and exist in the emotions you feel, and trust yourself should your self tell you to engage with other sensory inputs.  Okay.

I would like to drop you into the scene.

A man, in fact the person described in paragraph one, above, is standing at an ironing board in a small basement.  In front of him?  A cherished white hoodie with a set-in stain upon it.  The clothes of this man very often have set-in stains upon them.  The man turns, expecting to see a bottle of stain-remover spray.  It is not there.  A gentle, non-judgmental, jog of the memory reminds him that he’d left it upstairs on the countertop closest the basement door.  The man must go upstairs if the man wishes to treat the stain, and the man wishes to treat the stain.  This will take some time away from the next task the man wishes to complete.  But it is 1:00 p.m. on a Sunday.  The day, in many ways, is his and no time constraints compel him in any way.  So he goes.  He walks toward the staircase, and there is the laundry basket, now full of cleaned, folded, and organized-by-owner clothes, that he’d set there to take all the way to the second floor after he’d treated the stain on the white hoodie.  The man begins the short ascent to the kitchen counter on which the stain-spray sits, but stops. Turns.  It would make most sense to carry the laundry basket to the kitchen, return to the basement with the stain-spray, and then grab the basket on the way up to the subsequent floor where the clean clothes would need to be distributed.  The man turns and takes the basket, smiling to himself at the immediately preceding unfolding of events.  Basket now awaiting at the top of the steps, the man returns to treat the white hoodie.  Before making any decisions, the man reads the label, and is instructed to saturate the stain and then, depending upon how set-in the stain (in this case, very), allow the garment to sit for up to a week.  He decides ‘a week it is,’ and folds the hoodie in such a way to make it compact and allow the cleaning agent to do its work.  The man walks upstairs, satisfied, grabs the previously-left laundry basket, and proceeds to the second floor to distribute clean and folded clothes to their ultimate destinations.

I would like to now pull you from the scene.

I just reread the narrated paragraph and it brings me great joy.  There is absolutely no way that the scene would have transpired the way it did had I not the addition of Ritalin to my daily regimen of healing and self-care.

Just the executive function required to make a plan, attempt to execute the plan, and then modify movements and decisions along the way as the inconsistencies and unpredictable world encroach upon any human-laid plan, would have proved impossible for me.

And with every mistake?  Every additional trip up and down the stairs that I could have avoided? Every subsequent task requiring attention, intention, and deliberateness?  I would have experienced fires of rage and self-loathing as the conditional regard and gaslighting I’d received across my life intensified the executive dysfunction and rejection sensitive dysphoria that I’ve persevered, masked, and improvised through for forty-plus years.  Everything would have fallen apart and I would have sought Twitter to yell at strangers and/or alcohol to make my self a stranger from its own suffering, or any way to bury all of the overwhelming emotion.  And jobs would have been left undone, poorly done, or even seemingly (…to a spouse, say…) intentionally sabotaged.  This then would inform interactions with loved ones and anyone moving immediately forward.  And so on, and so on.

An intense year of psychotherapy and self-work, layered on top of the work I’d done in the decades preceding without, often, my conscious knowledge, but with the guidance and support of a precious few who I will always cherish, along with the final, pharmaceutical addition of Ritalin…allowed for that tiny scene described to unfold in the way it did.  Allowed me to record that experience here.  Allowed me to proceed with my life experiencing each moment and find a more planful, deliberate, but also flexible and self-loving path forward.

This, at moment you read my words, is what Ritalin means to me.

-G