Fighting With My Brain
I have been having a hard time recently.
I probably have a mild but undiagnosed and untreated case of ADHD. My father has a diagnosis and has been on and off of meds for years. I struggled against the H in ADHD for years. I've never been a hyper person, even when I was a little kid. I was quiet, reserved, and bookish, but never hyper. I found out relatively recently that there are two types of ADHD, inattentive and hyperactive type, and that the H actually refers to activity in the brain, not external behavior. I stopped fighting the H after that.
My case is undiagnosed and untreated for a few reasons. First is that I have coping mechanisms. Some of those coping mechanisms involve procrastinating until external pressure forces me to get off my ass and do the thing, which isn't great, but I also make lists, keep calendars, journal (sometimes. Actually a pretty good indicator of how my relationship with my brain is doing is how consistently I've been journaling.)
I'm also simply afraid of the meds. ADHD medication is basically speed. While I've read that the euphoric effects are muted for people who suffer from ADHD, I still worry about getting addicted. I've been addicted to alcohol, and I'm still struggling with addictive tendencies toward food, porn, and social media. I don't need to add a substance addiction to that mess while I am trying to raise two young boys.
All that to say: holy shit are shorts (or reels, TikToks, whatever we're calling them) just perfectly engineered to hijack my brain. I've never felt anything like it. I can feel myself glaze over as I swipe, swipe, swipe. Sitting down for five minutes of harmless social media then realizing that an hour and a half has passed is a grim feeling. I just feel completely out of control while I'm doing it.
I used to play poker a lot when I was younger. At my local casino the poker room is way in the back, so you have to walk past all the table games, the high roller room, all the restaurants, and all the rows and rows of slot machines to get to it. Making that walk as I have hundreds of times, I've seen the glazed over expressions of people, young and old, sitting at a slot machine and tapping buttons as they give their money to the casino for nothing but a little hit of dopamine. I used to really look down on those people. How could they be so stupid as to let the casino infect their minds like this? Now that I carry a Skinner box around with me everywhere and have to actively fight the urge to look at it, I don't judge them anymore. Turns out I just hadn't found my slot machine yet.
The fucked thing is that I know all this, I know it really well, yet I'll still lie to myself and say that 5 minutes of You-Tube shorts will be just a little harmless fun. No it fucking will not be. It'll be significant time that I steal from my job, my family, my life. Our time on this earth is short, and any time I spend scrolling this shit feels wasted. Like I'm just whiling away my time until the grave. But still my traitorous brain will beg, borrow, or steal that time just to keep swiping away at the dopamine machine trying to get its next fix. So I'm fighting with it, and right now the fight isn't going well.