My wild Hunter S. Thompson ride through ADHD meds

It started with a strange pink pill and a leap of faith – a small, unassuming capsule that promised to tame the chaos in my skull but carried the whispers of horror stories from every corner of the internet. The first two weeks on ADHD meds were a wild, untamed circus of symptoms. Some settled down like weary travellers; others vanished entirely, leaving only faint echoes of their mayhem.

By day three, I’d already hit my first train wreck. It’s 2:38pm, and a cheerful little alert pings: “Are you caught up in something?” Caught up? I was drowning in PowerPoint. Turns out, I was eight minutes late to a 30-minute Zoom call, utterly consumed by a slide deck for a presentation the next day. My focus was so sharp it had tunnelled into the task, shutting out the rest of reality like a locked vault door.

This was the new frontier, brain chaos rebranded. It wasn’t pretty, but it was mine. Like a half-tamed beast, it came with its own quirks and wild side effects, each more absurd than the last:

1. Espresso Exorcism: the headaches eventually went, but those first few days were a relentless symphony of pain, pounding like a drumline on a bad acid trip. In hindsight, it was probably the ghost of espresso past, clawing at my skull for abandoning it cold turkey. A brutal caffeine rebellion – withdrawal with all the grace of a car crash in slow motion.
2. Brainwaves on a bender: during the first four days, I was staring off into space quite a lot, caught in the haze of my own private Twilight Zone. My concentration felt like it had been hijacked by Rod Serling himself – words blurred, sentences twisted, and meaning evaporated like smoke. I tried to read a book once; it took four passes at the same sentence before the words lined up and saluted me. Pure interdimensional chaos.
3. REM riptide: around ten days in, my sleep was more shattered than a cheap bottle of whiskey dropped on concrete. The top of the night was fine – I’d fall asleep fast but somewhere in the dead of night, I’d drift into that eerie purgatory between sleep and consciousness. Hours stretched like warped rubber bands as I floated in a blurry, restless twilight – too awake to rest, too exhausted to escape. By dawn, I was crawling out of bed, haunted by a night that didn’t quite happen.
4. Mandible Mayhem: Since upping to 40mg, every bite feels like my jaw has turned into a rusty hinge on the gates of hell. The left side clicks with the precision of a snare drum, each pop echoing through my skull like a foghorn in a cave. Jaw clicking isn’t a listed side effect, but it’s got all the hallmarks of bruxism – teeth grinding, jaw clenching, and the kind of gnawing sensation that quietly drives you insane. It doesn’t just distract me; it haunts me, a phantom noise I can’t unhear.
5. Parched Apocalypse: the first two weeks left me with an unrelenting dryness. My mouth felt like the Mojave Desert after a three-day bender – parched, cracked, and abandoned by every drop of moisture it once knew. Each word scraped its way out like a reluctant prisoner digging through sand with a spoon. Water? Useless. Gum? A joke. I was chasing hydration like a gambler doubling down in Vegas—desperate, reckless, and out of luck.

The chaos eventually retreated, slinking into the shadows – only to roar back for a few days when I cranked the dose to 40mg. But next week, I’ll turn my sights to the aftermath: the dust settling, the side effects fading, and the sharp edges of clarity cutting through. The real question is – what’s waiting on the other side?