It’s been a while. I totally forgot about this, and at this point in time these blog posts aren’t even on my website. This time I wanna tell a story that is not over yet. Little bit of backstory, I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 5, that was 11 years ago. Ever since then I’ve been taking meds every day.

Roughly 4 months ago, I stopped taking them, at first I just forgot to take them with me on vacation (which happens more often than I’d like to admit). When I don’t take my pills, instead of becoming all hyperactive, I just cannot focus on anything anymore, which leads to me sitting in my bed all day long, consuming one show after the other and sleeping. I hate myself when I am like that, I never thought that I was strong enough to overcome it. But this vacation was different. On my last day, I managed to sit on my computer, and do something. I installed emacs, and got a basic config going (I wanted to try it out). It was nothing really worth mentioning, but it was far beyond everything I had ever done without taking my pills. This gave me enough power to decide that I will no longer be taking them I was convinced that this time I will pull through, I will never take those goddamn pills again, and I will learn to live without them.

Month No. 1

Fuck me, honestly, this was the pure horror. 6/7 days I would just do nothing, I used to work on computer-related projects 18h a day without even feeling tired. But I noticed that I started to enjoy walking (not jogging!) around the school building. At the beginning of the month I also decided that I was gonna drop this year of school and go do an apprenticeship, therefor I didn’t really have any interest to participate in schoolwork, which would also lead to me just going out of the classroom (after talking to my cool teachers) and going for a walk around the town. Other than those walks and a lot of talking to one guy I started talking to on the internet, I did pretty much nothing.

Month No. 2

Steady progress, more often than not I managed to get something productive done everyday, it was mostly just one 1 hour at a time. Other than that, just walking, talking and thinking.

Month No. 3

Getting more and more back into my normal cycle, been able to work around 5-6 hours a day, apart from a few days with major fallbacks to just sitting and watching YouTube. During this month I ditched my smartphone because I noticed that it would distract me from doing something productive and drag me down. This was not that big of a deal for me, because I usually spent most of my day at my computer anyways, so I would receive messages anyways. But it was a hassle trying to explain it to my parents, one week prior I had already deleted WhatsApp and they thought that now they wouldn’t be able to message me at all, but my messenger of choice at that time worked without a phone so it was fine. I had also moved all my YouTube subscriptions to my RSS Feed Reader where I had everything nicely categorized. But I soon noticed that the “Entertainment” section of my RSS feed reader was sucking up all my time again, so I just.. I just deleted all of it. And to be quite honest, I haven’t missed it since.

Month No. 4 - Today

Whereas previously I usually had to force myself to start working on something, now, for the first time since very long, I had a spark of inspiration, and everything seemed to get better and better. Since now there is a lockdown I can no longer just go for a walk in town during classes, I was sitting in my room 24/7. Eventually I just couldn’t bear staring at my screen all day long so I went on a walk, I started walking and exploring the area around my fathers house (my parents are divorced, I am currently staying at my fathers place) and I really liked it. So that’s what I’ve been doing for a few days now. Every day, before I go start working, I go and take a walk (usually for at least 1 hour), after that I feel refreshed and can get cracking on making some FOSS :)

I’m not over the hill yet and I still feel some resistance, but I’m feeling better almost every day. I don’t know if I’ll make more blog posts but I definitely wanted to put this story out there

Have a nice day everyone