At university, I medicated heavily with “the hard stuff” - stimulant medications. These took a heavy toll on my body; I had nervous tics and twitches galore. The meds gave me enough focus to develop good study habits and after 2-3 years I ceased them.
Once I joined the workforce, I focused on doing things that I was passionate about. For me, ADHD doesn’t always mean lack of focus; I can hyper focus when I’m motivated by something. Having a job that I liked to do turned me into a low grade workaholic (too much hyper focus!) but I became successful in my career.
For the past few years, I’ve been medicating with a non stimulant that I tolerate very well. I still do what I love, at work, and Strattera helps me stay focused on doing the things that are most important to my employer and myself, but my days of being a workaholic are over.
If you are like me, then doing what you love is essential, and finding the right medication is a big help, though not strictly essential.
Well, now it's surrounded by Azerbaijan -- not so much before 2020, though!
You could try 25mg for a month and see if it’s in the sweet spot, if the 40mg provokes side effects you dislike.
40mg is a good starting dose but you may want to go lower.
The right med depends on your brain chemistry. For some, the stimulants do wonders. For me they had horrific side effects. Strattera has been a big help, not perfect, but with no side effects other than the beneficial ones.
Everyome’s brain is different. No shame in asking to try stimulants for contrast, if your doctor is willing.
What’s your dose? I had some issues with a higher dose (40mg) and settled on 25mg as enough to mitigate my symptoms without causing insurmountable issues.
I started at 40mg some years ago; I did indeed feel superhuman, but my sleep suffered periodically and I had some other side effects -- morning nausea sometimes, especially when combined with coffee.
I found ways to cope: reduce coffee intake, have some plain yogurt in the morning, as the protein seems to help buffer the stomach, medicate early in the morning (6:30am) and exercise hard after work to promote better sleep. Still, it was a drag, and too easy to miss a beat in my routine.
I had to quit taking Strattera for two years while attempting to become a pilot, but it turns out the FAA hates ADHD kids and once that fell through, I resumed at a much lower dosage of 25mg. While I don't feel quite as capable at the lower dose, the side effects are significantly more mild and I generally don't notice them. I still make sure to medicate no later than 7am, as a precaution, but there's no correlation between being medicated and having poor sleep.
TL;DR stick with it for a few days and don't hesitate to ask for a lower dose if you can't hack it. The drug does a world of good for me, and it promotes habits that persist even when I go unmedicated for awhile (e.g. on weekends and often while on vacation).
It’s the same thing; I was just being sloppy with terminology.
I switched my Android assistant to a man's voice; a woman's voice serving as my digital assistant has always felt mildly sexist to me.
I switched my Android assistant to a man's voice. A woman serving as my digital assistant has always felt mildly sexist to me.
Anything Svelte-based will be zippy and small. Super efficient and future-forward.
I’ve switched to using wefwef/voyager for everything except mod/admin duties. It’s intrinsically more bloat-prone, being a React app, but has been carefully written for performance and has a wider contributor base (due to React being far more popular than other web frameworks). Its UX, cloned from Apollo, is a consideration for many. Can voyager be self hosted, though? Should it be?
Dunno how robustly the other FEs support admin schtuff but it’s a consideration. As is, the default UI is always available to fall back on when voyager can’t handle something.
My personal rubric, developed with much insight from my husband:
- If queer peoples' behavior is criminalized, the place is a strict no-go.
- If violence against local queer people significantly exceeds levels in my home state the place is a firm no-go.
- If the place is under autocratic/junta rule, it's a firm no-go.
There's a whole tranche of countries I'll probably never set foot in due to rule 1, e.g. virtually all of the middle east and Africa, but more recently, also US states such as Florida.
There are countries like Belize that I greatly enjoyed visiting, but, once I became aware of the rate of violence against queer Belizeans, I decided I couldn't support with my tourist dollar. Perhaps if I took great care only to patronize LGBTQ-friendly establishments -- and how would we even identify those when sexuality is largely a taboo subject, in country? -- I might visit these places again in the future.
Rule 3 is of more recent provenance. It's a hypothetical at this point, as every place I've visited has been under some sort of healthy parliamentary rule. I greatly want to visit Turkey some day, but supporting a profoundly broken system by forking over money to hoteliers and airlines who are more likely than not aligned with AKP, seems like a bad precedent. As under rule 2, I might identify businesses whose values agree with mine, but it would be problematic.
Ethics and human rights: where do you draw the line when traveling?
There are a number of countries in the world where many queer people can travel safely, but queer locals experience interpersonal discrimination or government oppression.
As someone who enjoys international travel, how do you evaluate potential destinations? Which factors are important to you and which can be dealt with? Is there any chance that we, as tourists, can change attitudes in the long run and if so, is that part of your decision-making calculus?
Let's assume as a precondition that you've deemed that your personal security as a tourist won't be seriously at risk, so that we can confine our discussion to ethics: how our actions affect other people, even when we ourselves are unaffected.
Let's further humbly admit that many of us are living in a country that could easily be on someone's list of no-go countries. My goal here is not to judge other cultures or endorse certain destinations over others, but to learn from others' decision-making process -- potentially for domestic travel as well.
I began to question my sexuality early -- somewhere around age 10. That process continued for a full decade until, at age 20, I admitted to myself that I was 100% gay with no qualifications.
One factor acting against me in my search for self knowledge was my limited vocabulary; society -- or at least the part of it I was attuned to -- didn't have expressive language beyond "gay, straight or bi" and it was hard to decide whether I could wear any of those unsubtle labels. I also had to deal with some internalized homophobia and a lack of queer role models or acquaintances in my life.
If it's any help, I can see, in retrospect, that I spent too much time considering how to label myself and not enough time considering how I felt and how I wanted to act on those feelings. It is only by knowing our feelings and acting on them, repeatedly, that we truly come to understand who are are; how we identify is, in some ways, secondary to those concerns.