Mine isn’t this bad, but I can relate to the first-day-on-Adderall thing. It was wild when I walked into my messy bathroom an hour after that first dose and my brain just went: “It is possible, even reasonable for you to clean this bathroom, in a finite amount of time, without every moment filling you with dread. This task will not consume your whole life day.” My brain had simply never done that before. I could just choose to do something and–perhaps more importantly–to stop doing something. I remember I was hyperfixating working on a hobby project at 11 PM on a work night and my brain went: “If you stop working now, brush your teeth and go to bed, this fun project will still be here for you to work on tomorrow. You don’t have to keep at it until 6 AM and then go to work without sleeping.” That seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. It was weird to hear that from my own brain, not in a “you’re being bad” way, but in a “it’s going to be okay” way. There was a lot of happy crying those first few weeks.
Just wish I’d been diagnosed in college instead of in my mid-30s. I might have graduated.
People like to throw around the word ‘lazy’ but it’s more like I can’t turn it on OR off unless I’m medicated. Once I’m in the zone I will work until I grow a beard, then wither away, then my crumbling skeleton grows a beard. It would be a powerful thing if I could aim it.
Looking back, I understand it. At the time, it was devastating. I was depressed, had lost my job, and hadn’t learned to enjoy my own company yet, so I hung around constantly needing his attention. He didn’t sign up to be a therapist. He was as gentle as he could be about it, but it still hurt to be abandoned at my lowest point. I needed the wake up call though. I’m doing much better now.
There is a shocking lack of Star Control 2 in here. Easily the best game I have ever played, period. It frequently gets name dropped in lists of game developers’ favorite games of all time. Later space epics like Mass Effect stood on Star Control 2’s shoulders to reach the heights they did.
Good news! The devs released it to the open source community under the name The Ur-Quan Masters. You can play it now for free! And they’re developing a sequel as we speak over at Pistol Shrimp Games
This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It’s gonna be wild.