“People can’t keep getting treated in their 20s or 30s—people should actually be diagnosed when they’re little kids in order to minimize the damage.”
Sorry for the period of no publications—I’m doing fine but had some temporary depression due to a medication adjustment.
I’m about to trial some ADHD medications—the months ahead will certainly be the most fateful period of my entire life because my life will have one trajectory if the medications work and another totally different trajectory if the medications don’t work. I previously wrote about self-regulation and my “Miracle Week”:
“Is This the BIGGEST Thing?” (1 January 2022)
Right now I’m about to try to get back what I experienced during the Miracle Week—I had a taste of self-regulation during that Miracle Week before the reversion to my impaired state. It’ll be a heck of story if the medications work—I’ll be able to function qualitatively better, including when it comes to Substack.
People with self-regulation impairment face punishment in every domain of human life—I hope to interview these people about their struggles, but someone told me this:
The reason you may not find their stories anywhere is that they are unable to put into words their sense of desperation. Their struggles and their shame.
I can understand this disorder producing an indescribable desperation. And I can also understand an inability to talk about this disorder—I rely on metaphor, since I can’t find the appropriate words.
The good news is that I’ve created a bunch of psychological mechanisms that have fortified me against the disorder’s pain. So instead of thinking about how sad my life is, I think: “Of course your life is sad. Look at how broken your brain is—what would you expect?” For some reason this reframes things—I quickly shift my brain to thinking about how wonderful life can be when you have a healthy brain.
In a future piece, I’ll go into detail about the psychological tricks that I’ve come up with—maybe others will find these tricks useful too.
My psychology is an impenetrable fortress—no amount of humiliation and shame and torture and loss and suffering can cause my mind’s inner fortress to collapse. So that’s good. And this fortress that I’ve constructed will keep me strong even if the trajectory ahead is the bad one instead of the good one.
I was on the phone with a friend the other day and they said: “I’m desperate—I need to get treated now. I’m 25 years old—my life is slipping away. I can’t continue to be this impaired—I’m running out of time.” My friend described a nightmare vision of where they might end up if treatment were delayed. And there was an interesting moment—I pointed out the obvious truth that my friend’s nightmare vision was exactly my own circumstance.
So there’s a lot of pain—I should definitely do a piece on the need to get people diagnosed. People can’t keep getting treated in their 20s or 30s—people should actually be diagnosed when they’re little kids in order to minimize the damage.
As always, my psychological defense mechanisms give me hope—one trick is to think about a future in which diagnosis and treatment are so much better; awareness is so much better; understanding is so much better; people treat others better; and people are able to look at other people through the nonjudgmental lens of self-regulation.