Since the Ritalin revelation, life has intervened in several critical ways, providing painful but important insight.
The first several weeks with Ritalin in my system provided an experience very similar to the first several hours when I finally got corrective vision lenses as a pre-teen. I had been, for a decade, experiencing the world through unaided eyes. A general lack of distance clarity and overall strain had become my acclimated “normal.” An educator spotted my self-created accommodations and behaviors that obviously communicated to her that my vision required assistance.
I recall walking into Sears to pick up the glasses. The optician warned me that the world would look and feel very different for some amount of time until my brain acclimated.
I recall walking out of the vision center and into the larger department store in what I now know was a state of fight-or-flight, or sympathetic nervous system engagement. I experienced such a novel and unpredictable existence, a visual system sensing the world, as an 11 or 12 year old, in a starkly different manner. It was overwhelming. And eventually, exciting. As my nervous system settled, I looked around as if having been given new eyes.
Which, in a sense, I had been.
New eyes.
And Ritalin? For several days, if not weeks? Seemed to provide me with a new brain. Just several months after my 47th birthday. It was…intoxicating. Superficially ironically, I felt convinced that I was cured.
It’s ironic because my entire life’s journey has become focused on trauma-informed, impact-regarding social-and-emotional interpersonal praxis. The term “cure” isn’t even in my professional or interpersonal vocabulary, because such endeavors are generally impact-disregarding, behaviorist, and harm-increasing.
It’s superficially ironic because I still, of course, travel with my traumas, life-experiences, temperament, exceptionalities and disabilities…but my reflexes remain self-harmful in critical ways. Just below the surface, it’s not ironic at all. Is rather entirely apropos.
After those first few weeks of riding the Ritalin high, multiple life-events and a cyclical depression occurred as my brain acclimated to the absolute newness of a pharmaceutical aid.
See, I had convinced myself that I was fixed…and life conspired to remind me that I am not broken. That I am a human, existing as the accumulation of genetics, biology, and the myriad experiences and contexts that inform the me that is currently communicating with you. And there I was, staring in the mirror with the insight that I am still on a path of self-discovery, healing, growth, and discovery. Which is really beautiful. And also painful.
Self-love and authentic, empathetic, unconditional self-acceptance is a massively challenging endeavor for me. If you’ve read other essays here or engaged with me in any manner over the past several years or more, that is all transparently illuminated throughout.
This addendum is simply to further communicate the message of, “What Ritalin Means to Me.” Which is this. It is a tool. And it is a tool that worked, in collaboration with the contexts around me and the ways my nervous system processed and responded, in a manner that I had not anticipated.
I’m still taking the Ritalin. And the Prozak. I still feel that the combination has provided some breathing room for me to avoid tumbling over the cliff of uncontrollable rage, anxiety, and ultimately self-loathing.
My spouse very recently said to me, “It’s not your job to make people proud of you,” which points a very compassionate but unyielding finger at a critical thing. The pharmaceuticals, plus a combination of other physical, spiritual, meditative, and medicinal practices, and regular participation in counseling sessions, are allowing me to move beyond a logical understanding of that insight and toward a truly person-centered embrace of me.
Take care of yourself and know that you are unconditionally loved.
-G
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