Every morning, I wake up in withdrawal. It’s not something you think about. The psychiatrist doesn’t mention it. It’s not on the warning labels. But the chemical teaches you, day in and day out, just how it works:
Dex—dextroamphetamine, close cousin to meth—enters your bloodstream fast. You can feel your spine igniting by minute three. The back of your skull is engulfed in a blissful blaze by minute nine. By minute fifteen, color saturates. By minute twenty-five, you’re running on all cylinders.
After about three hours, you’ll start to feel it peeling out of you. Slowly at first, then all at once. The half-life is ten hours, but the active effects will wear off before then. Five hours in, your appetite returns with the thunderous hollow of a barrel drum, your body eases into an ache, your heart-beat escalates, and you know it’s time to take the second dose. Let’s call this early afternoon, at one. By the time the second dose wears off, you might as well shoulder the unpleasant symptoms until it’s time for sleep. It’s six, so just four hours until your day is done. If you took another dose at ten hours in, you wouldn’t get to sleep like normal. You’d lie awake in bed and stare at the ceiling, thinking very quickly about approximately nothing, wishing your brain would shut up and let you dream.
So you bear with the symptoms for the dwindling hours of your evening until you tuck yourself in. The problem is that the half-life keeps ticking away. By midnight it’s almost vanished from your system, and by the time you wake up the drug is in your bloodstream’s memory but not its membranes.
You do not return to “normal.” The point of dex is much the same as the point of meth, only Dex is more targeted and less socially disgraced. The idea is jacking up your brain’s levels of dopamine. People who have ADD, ADHD, narcolepsy, and certain types of depression have naturally lower dopamine production—though no one really knows why just yet. Dopamine makes us social, lets us resist pain, helps us focus, even helps us experience some of our most basic emotions. But when your body gets its extra dopamine from a drug, it starts to “down-regulate,” decreasing the amount of dopamine your brain produces on its own. You can call this building up a tolerance, but it also means a chain reaction. The drug exits your body: your body enters withdrawal.
Assuming your chemical shortfall was correctly diagnosed, the side effect of your cure is a new “base state” that’s even more dopamine deficient. Everything hurts more. It can feel impossible to move your body, just because of an overbearing sense of fatigue—pushing down on you, a new sort of gravity. Your heart-rate stays escalated. Life loses its sharp edges; the shutter speed on your brain just breaks. Motivation out of focus. Purpose blurred. Your body begs you to do the main thing it intuitively knows will increase dopamine levels: Sleep.
Every morning, getting up is a struggle. Your body feels thick, smudgeable as graphite, your heart-rate hammering, your only sense of hope coming from dreams, dreams, dreams. You push through it because you have to, because your rational mind knows you can take that little orange pill—that fire seedling—and feel better in just minutes.
When I talk to professors of my first classes, picking up homework for the days I didn’t show, I tell them, “I overslept.” My alarm went off but I didn’t wake up. I leave out the details.
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