EPTFinally, I was able to sit back and laugh at all the other suckers who got in trouble while knowing that my own superhuman good-behavior skills would keep me out of hot water! And for the most part, they did (well, except for that time I spat my retainer at these two girls who laughed at me for the one time I was made to sit out, but that was a calculated maneuver, and totally worth it for the legendary screams it incited. Hey, I never said my behavior was perfect, after all I was an eleven-year-old boy).
Ever since that fateful morning, Adderall has helped me deal with the thorn in my side that is ADHD. Seriously, ADHD sucks. It is the WORST. Unmedicated, my mind spins like a redlining car in neutral. I can't get ANYTHING done. However, under the magical effects of Adderall, I was actually able to concentrate on complex tasks for an extended period of time.
During my freshman year of high school, I took an introductory programming course that used Visual Basic 5.8 (yeah, they didn't even have 6.0, which was itself obsolete at the time!), and I instantly fell in love with the craft.
The very next semester, I taught myself C++ (no, I didn't know what C++ was really like, I just chose that language because it was the first programming book I saw at Borders bookstore), and I actually managed to make a small (very buggy!) game that sort of worked (when it didn't crash due to heap corruption, that is). My Algebra 2 teacher allowed me to demonstrate it in front of the entire class, which was loaded with pretty girls! Proudest moment of my teenage life, right there! And no, the game didn't crash in front of all those pretty girls.
My life after high school is best described as a clusterfuck. I'm a typical case of "failed to launch". I failed almost all my classes in my first two semesters at college. Fortunately, I was able to take a medical leave due to many of my issues being attributed to my ADHD. I spent four years working in retail, attended a coding bootcamp that turned out to be a huge ripoff, drove for Lyft for a year and a half, and then went back to school taking a lighter course load and did better but still didn't pass all my courses.
However, throughout it all, I have managed to have some success at programming. No, not get-a-programming-job levels of success, but success nonetheless. Almost entirely self-taught, too! I've had pull requests accepted by Microsoft: several of the compiler warnings that shipped with .NET 6.0 were implemented by me. Unfortunately, I can't say which ones I implemented because my github profile uses my real name, and I don't want it associated with this account because my time on this site is wrought with some very bad decisions that I seriously regret making.
I've also written some in-game scripts for Space Engineers, a Minecraft-like game where you can build spacecraft out of blocks. The programmable block allows you to control parts of your ship using scripts written in a real programming language (C#).
All of these achievements were accomplished with the help of those magic pills that let me actually think. Without Adderall, my mind RACES. I can't think about one thing for more than about 10 seconds. The very thought of doing anything that requires multiple careful steps to accomplish makes me feel ill. I'm reduced to randomly clicking on youtube videos, or pacing back and forth like a cagey zoo animal, but definitely not doing anything productive like homework, and especially not programming.
This is a problem, because Adderall has a dark side: side effects. It messes with my sleep schedule. A LOT. So much, in fact, that every now and then I would have to skip an entire night of sleep just to get back on track. At times I was skipping as many as two to three nights of sleep per week! Oh, and on Adderall, my heart-rate rests at a speedy 90 beats per minute. Or more! This is a huge problem because I would like to live past the age of sixty.
However, all of these side effects are tolerable. I'll take a shortened lifespan and unhealthy sleep habits if it means I can concentrate on what I love. But there is one side effect that I cannot tolerate; a side-effect that, until recently, I didn't even realize existed. It wasn't even listed on the bottle!
It turns out that Adderall was cranking my sex drive up to eleven. While under the influence of Adderall, I was consuming three to eight hours of pornography per day. And that's only on weekdays! On weekends, the consumption time was basically unbounded. Three to eight hours per day is a serious addiction, and serious addictions do not just disappear without some effort. However, during two weeks when I was unable to get access to Adderall because of insurance issues, that is exactly what happened: my porn consumption quickly dropped by over 95%!
Here's the crazy thing: even with the loss of 3-8 hours per day, I'm still more productive on Adderall than off it. When I got the insurance sorted out, I went back on Adderall, and my productivity improved. I was ready to go through life with a crippling addiction if it meant I could actually be productive at doing what I love.
However, I came to realize that not only is losing 3-8 hours of your day ridiculous, having such an absurdly overclocked sex drive would make it difficult to have a healthy romantic relationship. How can you have a healthy relationship if your libedo is so outrageously higher than your partner's? I'm no relationship expert, but it seems like a relationship like that would be doomed from the start. And so, at the start of this summer, I made the decision to quit Adderall completely.
This was not an easy decision to make. At the time, I wasn't sure (and I'm still not sure) that I'd even be able to program or do homework at all without my Adderall. I got a summer job at a burger shop, and that's been going relatively well, but I haven't been able to do much else. Even playing Minecraft is challenging (granted, I'm a technical player, so "playing Minecraft" for me means designing something overcomplicated, but still). And I certainly wasn't doing any programming whatsoever.
Until this morning, that is.
Last night, I had a long chat with a friend of mine from school who's had similar issues. We were talking about our programming accomplishments when she commented that I might have enough to put together a resume that could get me hired without a college degree. I replied that many of my programming projects (in particular the in-game scripts for Space Engineers) weren't even on github. When she asked me why, I explained that they weren't in a state where I could really share them with people: if you've programmed, you'll know what I'm talking about: they were too messy, etc. She told me to just upload what I have to gitthub.
The idea of even touching those scripts again was completely daunting. What if a compiler or compiler-plugin update has broken my scripts in the past year? What if a Space Engineers update has broken my scripts? The scripts have to be compiled using a special plugin that one of the Space Engineers devs wrote in their free time. What if that's been broken in the meantime?
I know it sounds dumb, but these are all the fears that keep me from touching code I previously wrote: it's probably broken by now.
However, last night I decided to take the plunge. I decided to start with the easiest step, which of course was to simply play Space Engineers and see if the script still works. That was also daunting because Space Engineers has a lot of hotkeys and I can't remember most of them. Yes, I know I'm completely pathetic for making this excuse to not touch a video game I love. I don't know why, but these excuses seem way more daunting when I'm not on my Adderall.
Anyway, last night before I went to bed, I fired up Space Engineers. Had to wait for a longish update to download (ugh!), but when it finally did, I booted up the game, and...
...THE SCRIPT WORKED!
I couldn't believe it! I was SURE the script would be broken by one of the many pieces of software that's changed since I last touched it, but nope! It worked beautifully!
This morning, I decided to upload the script to github. Unfortunately, this didn't go as smoothly. For some reason, when I tried to run the unit tests for part of the script, I got a compiler error. Ugh! I KNOW those unit tests compiled last year! Why wouldn't they compile now?!?
I was about ready to give up in despair: it felt like the world was ending. However, somehow, I was able to force myself to stare at the screen and actually read the error message. It took everything I had to read that single succinct sentence of technical jargon and file names, but once I got through it...
...I REALIZED WHAT THE SOURCE OF THE ERROR WAS!
I created a single new file, with a single line of code in it:
partial class Program : MyGridProgram { }
No, I didn't omit any code. That's the entirety of it, and that fixed the compiler error. That, right there, is the single most difficult line of code I've ever written: it felt like climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen, but I did it.
While the line is literally only boilerplate in its most basic form, that line is imbued with hope: maybe, just maybe, I can achieve my dream of being a C# programmer while simultaneously having a normal sex drive.
Oh, and writing this blog was also an accomplishment, because writing English text is almost as hard as programming when I'm unmedicated.
![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/oxkPeLJ.jpg)
