Failure to Launch - R.A. Young - July 16, 2024
Six months! It’s now been over six months since I started writing this newsletter. Going back and reading through those first newsletters really punches home a decision I’m currently struggling to make. At the time, I desperately wanted to start writing my book, but couldn’t find my footing due to trying out various antidepressants for my then-recently diagnosed General Anxiety Disorder. A month after that, the Nurse Practitioner who diagnosed me dropped me because I asked for a second opinion and a psychiatrist picked me up and stamped me on the head with ADHD. It’s now been four months of trying ADHD treatments and, as this newsletter has documented, I feel no closer to having my head straight. As for the book, I’ve given it endless thought, but there’s still no single page written. I’d never call this period of my life wasted time. I’m happy and I’m doing things I want to do instead of slaving for a gamer content farm. But I’m otherwise in limbo, still trying to launch the next chapter of my life.
Hold onto your seats. We’re doing a mental health newsletter.
Stimulantastic
I am currently on stimulants. Specifically, I’m on Adderall XR. I started three months ago on a relatively low dosage and have stepped it up twice now hoping to see improvement in my ADHD symptoms. While Adderall XR has done one thing exceptionally well, which is make me enjoy being on Adderall XR, my most burdensome symptoms have not improved. Frankly, they’re worse than ever.
I have abysmal short-term memory. I’ll forget what I’m doing when I walk out to the kitchen or get distracted with something else and never come back around to what I initially planned to do. I’ll also struggle to think of a word in the middle of writing or speaking a sentence. It’s like having a library of a vocabulary but sometimes certain shelves go missing. My memory issues aren’t constant, at least, but they’re always there. I struggle to maintain basic day-to-day functionality. Things like waking up or going to bed at a regular time, remembering to put away my dishes or general cleaning up, maintaining a healthy diet over an extended period, regularly exercising, and doing the small things necessary to maintain healthy long-term relationships. I’ve developed anxiety as a coping mechanism. I managed to write articles daily for over 15 years because of the stress of being fired or not being able to afford rent or food. I attend appointments and meetings with ease because I stress over missing them. Absent that anxiety, that pressure, I struggle to work or even to be minimally productive. It leads to procrastination, another coping mechanism, where I let stress build up until it forces me to act. When I was much younger, I struggled with a lot of fear, guilt, and shame. I’ve grown so much since then and don’t struggle with them at all anymore. But the underlying behavioral anxiety remains. Just to clarify — these issues have been present all my life. They’ve just become more obvious and understandable to me as I’ve grown older.
How do I survive with these kinds of behaviors? A bit of codependence on family. A lot of years-trained ritualizing of tasks, like hygiene and notetaking. Otherwise, I binge on things. I’ll binge on exercise when I feel unhealthy, which routinely leads to sprains, strains, and exhaustion. But otherwise keeps me in relatively good health. I’ll binge a game, a book, food, or any given interest my ADHD brain fixates on at a given moment. And through that, I largely feel fulfilled and happy. I’ll binge-write a massive article on wrestling, putting to page more than I’ve ever done for my book now six months going in one sitting, because my brain allows for things that won’t stress me out if they don’t work out. It’s a sort of productivity? I’ll binge-organize a comic recommendation poll for a friend group, but I won’t have read any comics for ages. And I’ll exhaustingly remind my friends how much they mean to me. I know I’ll forget something important or go emotionally missing from time to time. You’ve got to get the important things in during windows of your braining running. The Adderall XR has not helped me fix these issues or improve on my behavior. I do them harder.
Destimulating
I talk with my psychiatrist this Thursday about what comes next. He’s typically very receptive to what I want to do. He’ll ask what I feel is the right direction, what I believe would help, and he takes those feelings and puts them into a plan for me. My feelings right now are that Adderall XR is not the correct path forward. But I’m not sure if I should ask him to start by stepping down to a lower dosage or if I should give into those errant thoughts and pull the plug on this whole damn fiasco.
I’ve been trying different drugs for 8 months, half of it doing antidepressants that I didn’t need and didn’t want. And now I’m on these incredibly addicting ADHD pills that make me feel great but have only made my symptoms stand out. But I don’t want to feel high on stimulants, I want to remember what I went to the kitchen for. I don’t think they make a drug that’s going to help me with that. My brain’s either too broken or I’ve got deep-rooted behavioral issues that can’t be solved with drugs.
When I put it like that, pulling the plug on the pills makes more sense right? But again, I can’t tell if that’s just frustration and stress or not. And in the other direction, I can’t tell if it’s just that good feeling and early addiction making me want to stay on. I’ve been on all of these meds for so long now that I can’t tell whether being on or off of them is the best path forward.
There’s also one other possibility. This is coming from a voice in my head that I don’t agree with but that I can’t ignore. It says there’s a possibility I actually am better or improving on my current dosage of Adderall XR. I just can’t tell because of the aforementioned brain and/or behavioral issues.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe what matters most is just what makes me feel the most like myself, symptoms or not.
Lightning Round
That’s enough mental health stuff. Let’s talk a bit about video games, wrestling, and sumo.
Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail — I’m likely just hours away from completing the main campaign of Dawntrail, which I delayed to level up my Gladiator role. While I’m very much enjoying the ending compared to the rest of the expansion’s story, I’m confident in saying it’s my least favorite story of all Final Fantasy 14’s expansions. It’s too often contrived or even silly, and structured in a format that desperately needs radical changes to reinvigorate storytelling.
July Sumo Basho — Around a year ago I started watching sumo via a Twitch restream of Japan’s live coverage. I was obsessed immediately, for reasons that deserve more space to explain. I’m not as obsessed as I had been, but it makes for stream to passively watch on a second monitor. Two of my favorite sumo wrestlers, Enho and Kawazoe, returned for this tournament. They’re smaller and more technically-minded and can throw around the big boys with ease.
PC Game Pass — Three great games launch on PC Game Pass later this week. Dungeons of Hinterberg is a 3D dungeon-delving action-RPG with some Gen-Z flair. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is an experimental Capcom strategy game that’s beautiful, weird, and really needs to succeed so we get more weird Capcom AA games in the future. Third is Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, a high-movement 3D Souls-like from the developers of a game I love — Ashen. I want to play all three, but Flintlock will probably be my focus to start.
Concord — I’m a big Overwatch 2 player so of course I wanted to try out Concord during its Closed Beta on PC. Instead, it had a major screen boundaries issue and my mouse was constantly clicking on my desktop every time I fired my gun. Shit was broke. So I refunded. It’s an interesting game, but after a bad first impression and general public sentiment being apathetic I might just keep looking forward to Marvel Rivals.
Hangman Adam Page — On last week’s episode, I wrote confidently about why I was sure Hangman Adam Page would win a match against Bryan Danielson and main event All In. Hangman lost. It’s a bewildering booking decision, but exactly what Tony Khan would decide if he was still the man I thought he’d grown out of. I won’t deny I’m disappointed, nor that my positivity on AEW overall took a dive. Just gotta enjoy it for what it is. And wait for Kenny.
Love and Solidarity — This one’s for all my people going through challenging times right now. This one’s for all my LGBT people. This one’s for minorities of all kind. Nothing but endless love and solidarity here from me. Let’s be strong for one another to help those when they’re weak.
Starbucks — White Chocolate Mochas are so tasty, y‘all. Just pure fucking sugar, but so tasty.
Politics — Fuck this shit.
Thanks, as always, for checking out my overly personal newsletter. It means a lot that you’d take the time to check it out, to check up on me. I’ll be back soon with more. <3 Rory