Why I Quit Meds. Part I.

How ADHD meds made my Autism worse.

I’ve been agonizing about how to organize this piece because it’s a bit like moving a futon mattress up a flight of stairs by myself but I’ve decided it will follow the classic modality of a 12-Step share.

What it was like.

What happened.

And what it’s like now.

two part question: should I get smaller bangs and should I get my septum pierced again?

But this first preamble bit is mostly a rant about AI. I am still in Switzerland. These two things are unrelated but here are some cows I saw on my walk today.

You know what I find most irksome about ChatGPT? It’s how profoundly ableist all the writing is that comes out of it. Like, that whole M Dash thing being a sign of ChatGPT-ing is whatever—I’ll use M Dashes forever since to me, it’s mostly a sign that you came up with Choire Sicha as your editor at one point, or that you did magazines so long you had to migrate from Quark (not a dairy product) to InDesign.

Jesus, do magazines still even use InDesign?

Do magazines…?

Anyway, the part that actually irritates me about AI and how The Culture is so dominated by tech and all the stultifying anodyne-ass optimization bullshit is the bullet points. Jesus fucking Christ. Tell me you’re neurotypical without saying one more thing because holy fuck boooooooooooooring. I loathe the way you talk and think and need me to pick up what you’re putting down. I hate it. Get out. Stop trying to persuade me or trick me into learning things in this pre-chewed didactic way. It feels like LinkedIn and I don’t even go there.

I know that I need an editor for this stack—we all need more editors let’s be serious—but I resent the ethnographic fan dance of performing neurocompliant legibility to the point that all writing and thought is reduced to bite-sized popcorn chicken dusted with more protein yum yum yum just so every input that’s ever consumed is nutrient dense and educational. I hate that sucking feeling, that undertow of conversion. Of being thought-led. That mildly hypnotic minor recursion of additive lessons. It’s creepy as fuck.

Some of it might be AI, some of it might be humans putting in sincere effort to be coherent and helpful but it also feels sus AF that AI is essentially training us to mimic them.

Which is all to say, this *gestures wildly to the above* is why I quit my ADHD meds. As an insurrection against the machines.

source

Yes and no.