Adderall

 The Fall of 2016 I started to feel terrible. I wasn't myself. I had no interest in my former passions, like working out and writing, I was feeling listless and anxious all the time, and what was weirder than all of that- I was constantly feeling angry. 

I couldn't focus at work, I really hated the principal I worked with at the time, a toxic English department, and lack of real resources. The school I taught at was slowly becoming a Title I school, with increasingly more fights, drugs, and drama. At home I could feel my marriage was falling apart. My husband was never home, deep down I think even then I knew he was cheating. I was hours away from my family, and I was alone all the time.

I don't know how I came to this idea, probably from my sorority days, but I thought I could really help get myself motivated if I could get prescribed Adderall. I had taken it once in college and remembered the incredible high I got- I studied, cleaned my room, scrubbed my bathroom, and wrote on a bunch of peoples Facebook walls. It was awesome! But that night, crashing off of it, was miserable and I never took it again.

But now, I was feeling everything slip from my control, and Adderall was the answer. I went to a doctor by my house, listed the symptoms for Adult ADHD I memorized from WebMD, and left with a prescription. 

Adderall made me incredible. I was zipping through work. I was creating my own assessments. I was answering emails the moment they hit my inbox. I was animated and charismatic! I felt like the dormant parts of my brain has reopened, and it was such a rush.

But at night, as the amphetamines wore off, I would feel irritable. My head would ache and my jaw hurt from clenching it all day.

One evening, I opened a bottle of red wine, poured a glass, and sat down to watch tv. As I sipped, the Adderall headache eased up. Sip more, eased up more. Next thing I knew, the bottle was gone and I was stumbling off to bed, fully clothed, belly empty except for a bottle of cab. 

The next morning, waking up hung over, I immediately downed my Adderall dose, plus another half. In a matter a minutes, it was in my blood stream and had me moving. I won't say it completely cured my headache, but some coffee and ibuprofen would help. I slumped through the day, taking my beloved pill intermittently for a burst of a high, then trudged home. 

I felt so exhausted when I got home, all I wanted to do was go to bed. But the medicine was working against me. My heart was pounding, my jaw was tightening, my dry mouth driving me insane. I just wanted to go to sleep, I needed to balance out. So I ran a bath, poured some wine, and tried to undo the day of overdosing. 

Adderall is the kind of drug where the more you take, the more you need. I would take more than I was prescribed, and would run out before I could refill my prescription. Those days of crashing were the absolute worst. I would ask friends for some of theirs, I even found my husbands old Vyvanse RX and took those, I was so disgusting, but I didn't care. It made me high functioning and I had to have it.