After a year on prescription stimulants, I started to unravel. Would a desperate experiment with street narcotics make me see things differently? A t first being diagnosed with ADHD came as a relief. Dexamphetamine felt like a silver bullet.
Suddenly I could plan ahead, follow entire meetings, and pack a bag without having a nervous breakdown. Gone was the constantly harried feeling that had bullied me into perpetual motion for most of my 34 years. There seemed to be more time in each second to listen, absorb and think.
I no longer wanted to punch people in the back of the head when they were blocking my way in the supermarket. But after a year on stimulants, things began to unravel.
I had constant migraine-like headaches, and was anxious and impatient. Had I always felt this foggy before the drugs? Or was it the drugs? I had been a restless child. The first night I slept in a bed rather than a cot, I rolled on to the floor nine times. Even before I could walk, I was constantly wriggling, fidgeting, climbing things. My parents nicknamed me Tigger, after the perpetually bouncy Winnie-the-Pooh character.
In the UK in the 90s, it was cast as a disorder of naughty boys who struggled at school. I was socially adept and academically successful β gifted, even. I drove myself regularly to exhaustion as a teenager, but it was only once I left home to go to university in London that things really began to fall apart.
