Blog: Forced Back To The Start

A couple of days back I posted an update on myself & that things that I’ve been dealing with lately on my social platforms. I got a lot of interaction on those posts, specifically from folks who were curious about what specifically it was that I was feeling & dealing with. I gave those that reached out a bit more insight into the afflictions I’ve been dealing with, but I wanted to dive into them further here seeing as I can get more in-depth & really lay out a full timeline of events as they happened & where we are now.

If you’re someone who is unfamiliar with the process around medication for mental health, there is often a lot of trial & error before you find the proper medication for you. The thing that really sucks about that is that sometimes that process can take years. Additionally, sometimes the drug you’ve been on for a long period of time can suddenly take a turn & make you sicker than if you hadn’t been on any medication at all. The latter is basically what has been happening to me & the road I’ve been traveling for the last couple of years.

I was diagnosed with ADHD about five years ago now. It was something that I’d gone all my life without getting a diagnosis for & when I finally went in & got tested, we found that I was in the 87th percentile of those who have it. That’s pretty high up on the list, I feel. With this newly uncovered affliction, we then started trying different medications to try & ease the symptoms of my neurodivergence.

The first route I took was a non-stimulant called Strattera. I had previously been put on a round of immediate release Adderall by a psychologist that suspected I had ADHD, but never went through & put me through the testing. Well, that’s not entirely true. We tried to do the testing one afternoon, but the system crashed & she never had me try & retake the test. The problem with Adderall came with my lack there of, it gave me horrible mood swings & withdrawal symptoms. Any time I’d go without doses for extended periods of time I would essentially crash out for weeks at a time. So, when my formal diagnosis came in I had decided to go the non-stimulant route, because I was afraid of similar things happening.

Strattera ended up being even worse for me than Adderall. When I came home for one of the holidays while on the drug my mother described me as having had all of the joy & life sucked out of me. In addition to the depressive drain, it also didn’t make me feel good physically, so the trial of Strattera was short lived.

After Strattera we quickly abandoned my desires to stay off a stimulant & moved onto Ritalin. I was really great on Ritalin for a time; it helped my focus, brought my energy levels up, helped with my productivity, until it started to shift. It began to give me headaches & made everything taste & smell like iron. This made me immediately thing that I was having some form of micro vascular ruptures happening within my nose & mouth as the taste & smell was not entirely dissimilar from that of blood. So we shifted away from Ritalin as well.

The next attempt worked for a very long time, 2-3 years to be exact! That was Vyvanse. I loved Vyvanse, no lie. Vyvanse worked wonders for me. It helped me get things done, gave me energy, & didn’t seem to have any adverse side effects, at least not until about a year & a half ago.

I think I wrote on it in a blog that I now can’t find, but in the late autumn of 2024 I began to have very bad stomach issues. I’d be nauseous for days to the point where I was barely eating & what I was eating was bland or ultra health. I consumed a lot of fermented foods; kombucha, miso, kimchi, etc.. The ailment got so bad that I went to several urgent cares & even a gastroenterologist, but we never ended up finding the culprit for my problem.

I initially thought that the problem was the US food system as any time I would go abroad my symptoms would magically disappear & I could eat whatever. My other thought was that it was stress related with the 2024 election concluding the way it did & the rise of fascism in the US. Honestly, still haven’t fully ruled out either of these options as contributors. And so it went. For the last year & a half, off & on I’ve had this stomach problem that comes & goes & that we never found a solution for despite many visits to the doctor. Then it clicked for me.

Majority of the time when I go abroad I don’t take my Vyvanse. It’s illegal in a lot of the countries around the world as a controlled substance & if it’s not outright banned, you have to get clearance to bring it in through the government months in advance. It’s honestly a major hassle & something that will spring up again when we reach a more recent portion of this story.

I don’t know when exactly the dots connected in my mind that my Vyvanse was the thing that was making me sick, but it must have been around early May after having returned home from Malaysia & Singapore where I hadn’t taken the drug with me. I then expressed to my current psych that I had this concern, but told her that I planned to stay on it for the time being. I then took about a month & a half off of the medication entirely cold turkey.

Did I feel better? Yes. But to be real, the cost of that trial was pretty steep. My productivity ground to a near complete stop & the executive dysfunction aspect of my ADHD took ahold of the wheel entirely. You may notice how the entirety of June only features a singular blog. There were a handful of days where I couldn’t even get out of bed.

In addition to the executive dysfunction my body went in search of other quick dopamine hits, most of which I am still trying to detach myself from. Sugar, carbs, doom scrolling, all of it became all consuming to me. Working out became hopelessly hard for me. I was slacking in my workouts because I neither had the energy to get through them, nor the desire. I had to drop down drastically in the weights I was lifting as well as my ability to do cardio.

After about a month & a half, I decided enough was enough & that it was time to try again. The nausea was near immediate. The first day back on Vyvanse it tricked in a little bit, but was what I expected after taking a medication again for the first time after essentially weening off of it. The second day it was much worse, to the point where I actually felt so sick that I threw up. I continued on with the trial, despite my issues, for around a week or two after that just to make sure I wasn’t just dealing with the side effects of a ‘new’ drug interacting with my system. After that I concluded that the Vyvanse must be the culprit for it.

The type of nausea that I feel from it is a little hard to describe, but with a bit more distance from it now, I feel actually leans more into the lane of vertigo than it does outright nausea. The symptoms aren't overly physical, most of the time I don’t feel like I’m on the verge of throwing up & antacids, anti-nausea meds, & other relief medications & tinctures don’t seem to have any affect on the feeling. It feels mostly mental, like it’s living in my brain. It’s lightheadedness & vertigo when I turn my head. It’s more of a motion sick feeling than an illness I would say. Either way, it wasn’t something I found that I could live with so I went back to my doctor.

She agreed that we should try something else & immediately ordered me two things. The first was a very low dose script of Focalin which I could take & step up in as I saw fit til I got to a dose that I felt was right for my needs. The second thing that she ordered was a genetic cheek swab that takes your DNA markers & shows you what mental health medications are more likely, less likely, & not likely at all to metabolize well & have not be riddled with side effects.

The Focalin seemed to be doing great. I took the smallest dosage possible for around a week & a half before I double up. Once I doubled up all of my symptoms immediately returned, the nausea came flooding back in. So, I went back down to the lowest dose once more to see if more adjustment was needed. Even on the lowest dosage, my nausea came through swinging, so I once again booked an appointment to talk it out & try something new.

That appointment was yesterday, during which time we went over my cheek swab results & laid out all of the options for me to try & help ease life for me as someone with ADHD living in a very nuerotypically angled society. This is where the travel issue once again came in.

Since I travel abroad so often & since a lot of the places that I travel to are very hot climates, it greatly limits the angles at which we can come at altering my ADHD. SSRIs, SNRIs, & the like all have very lengthy onboarding & off boarding processes. They also make you much less heat tolerant & make it so you are much more likely to run into heat related problems such as heat stroke. This basically knocks out most of the non-stimulant treatment options for me.

On the other side of that coin, we have tried a lot of the main stimulant options on the market for me, many of which are variants or derivatives of one another. According to my cheek results, the two drugs that should work best for me in the stimulant family are Focalin & Ritalin, though there are no available genetic markets for Adderall, Vyvanse, or, what we ended up trying, Dexedrine.

So we’re honestly a bit stumped. If the Dexedrine doesn’t end up working then our options are basically returning to the other & trying to come at them from different points of administration. This could be the new form of Ritalin that is taken at night & releases much slower than the extended release does. It could also mean trying a topical version of on of these medications like a patch. We aren’t quite sure, but we’re back to the beginning of trial & error once again & in the meantime I’m back to living in the world of rampant untreated ADHD that does everything it can to sniff out quick dopamine fixes & sink me into executive dysfunction.

Naturally, I really hope this is resolved soon. I hope we come up with a solution that works wonderfully & allows me to get back to a place of productivity & growth instead of feeling like I’m stuck buffering for days or weeks on end. I’ll do my best to keep you all posted along the way as well!

As always, much love to you all,

-C

Blog: Hello Seasonal Depression, Welcome Back I Guess...

TW: Depression

I honestly can’t recall what my original plan was for today’s blog. I’m certain I had it burning in the back of my mind all day until I had this prompt come zipping in. I know a lot of you who read these weekly installments of my life & thoughts also suffer from mental maladies like myself but for those of you who don’t understand seasonal depression & the way if informs your life I wanted to share this simple story.

It’s incredibly hard to explain but I can feel when autumn starts to slip in, the air & sunlight shift from the bright warmth of summer to the almost artificial feeling of the late summer/early autumn sun. Again, hard to explain, but the tinge of sunlight shifts from a bright, clear all encompassing hot to an oddly indirect yellowed glow. There’s something different in the way the air smells too, it gains a mustiness & a stuffiness.

If you have seasonal depression you know exactly what I’m talking about because it exacts a sense of overwhelming dread. You try to ignore it, but you can feel it in your bones. You can feel the sun slipping farther away & feel the days begin to shrink.

I imagine it’s a lot like how plants feel. They follow the sun from Spring into Summer & then are forced to put a pause on all of the progress & growth they’ve made with the abundance of light & retreat into themselves to winterize.

If you don’t have seasonal depression I imagine you read the above three paragraphs with a “WTF” kind of expression on your face or images of lunacy in your head but those I know with the same affliction as me can attest to this.

Anyway, I felt the sun start to slip away about a week ago, at least that’s when it became noticeable to me internally. I remember I was running errands & was outside & it just hit me out of the blue. I managed to push past the sense of dread for the time being but then it hit me again a few days later, & again this afternoon.

The dread isn’t the depression part, the sense of foreboding does not automatically equate “seasonally depressed” that’s where the next step comes in.

I was walking through the freezer section of Sprouts today, picking up some Paleo hot pockets when my Depression Kitty came walking down the aisle (Big Mouth reference, if you get it, you get it). She strolled right up to my wrapped around my shoulders & dissolved into my body & immediately I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed & not exist.

That’s more language that I’m sure is alarming to those with those blessed by the Serotonin Gods. When I say “crawl into bed & not exist” it has nothing to do with my will or lack of will to live, at least to me. I have no intentions of self harm, I just want to not exist, to dig a dark hole & lay in it for however long it takes. Again, I’m sure to a lot of you that sounds morbid but it’s the honest truth of how depression feels to me.

During depressive states I can lay wrapped up in bed doing absolutely nothing for hours. I don’t get bored or cry or anything, I simply lay & stare at the wall. I know it sounds SOOOOO productive to our Capitalist minds but existing in the void for a little while is what it is.

Do I wish I were different? That I wasn’t afflicted by it? Of course, but so do all who have to watch “normal” people live out there lives free of the hinderances of mental illness. It’s debilitating & the reason I write about it today is to help those of you who don’t understand to have a glimpse of what it’s like & for those of you that do, to know you have a kindred spirit in me who does understand.

One of the hardest things as someone who is both neuro-divergent & afflicted by SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is trying to make people who don’t have either understand what it’s like to be one of us. I have been blessed with the knowledge of words & the ability to convey things through them that I feel helps to put most of this in layman’s terms.

Being someone with SAD (so delicately named) can make you feel like an outsider, it can make you feel crazy, or truly detached from the world around you especially in Autumn & Early Winter. You are faced with a constant barrage of people who are so excited for the Fall or the Holidays; wearing sweaters, making soup, cozying up & you have to do your best not to let it hurt your feelings because to me & those like me, the colder months are a constant fight to keep your head above the surface, to not appear like a downer or an outsider. To people like me it often feels like celebrating the fall or winter is in some way celebrating the hardest time of the year from us & then rubbing it in our faces. Just like so many of you can’t relate to not loving all things autumn, we can’t relate to the feeling of liking it.

Let me be clear, this is not a “piss off, I don’t wanna hear about the things you like because they make me want to dissolve into a vapor,” type of post. I’m just trying to help you understand. I’m trying to help you see how your friends & loved ones who have SAD feel & maybe offer them a break or a little bit of patience.

Before I close out I know what the next line of this conversation will be; why don’t you get help? A lot of us do, myself included. During the cooler months my script for Bupropion switches from a base 150mg to 300 & that’s just to keep my head above water. There’s no simple answer to depression & what causes it & not every solution works for all of us. We still have days where just the act of getting out of bed is literally like hauling a piano up a flight of stairs even if you are medicated & at a healthy base line. Please be patient with us & know that even if we refuse your help, we always appreciate the ask. If you find yourself as someone who also finds the Earth’s gravity turned up to eleven during the cold, I see you & understand your pain. Help is out there & available, there are a ton of resources on line & many free clinics offered by civil services around the world. Don’t be afraid to ask for help, though I know how hard it can be at times.

Much love to you all as always,

Welcome to autumn I guess haha,

I’ll see you back here next week!

-C

Blog: I’m Neurodivergent & You Can Too!

Yesterday I received confirmation in the form a diagnosis for something that I’ve been fairly certain of for a while now. I truly hope this wasn’t something that I manifested into my life by believing it to be true, nor do I think it defines me, but it is what it is. No, I’m not dying, no, it’s not a physical ailment. In terms of physicality, with the exception of a hyperactive allergic response system, my body is a-okay! Yesterday, after several months of formal testing, interviews, & the like, I was diagnosed with ADHD.

At first I was over the moon about this information, I finally had factual evidence to back up the thing that I have a strong feeling was there all along. It felt a tad like an “I told you so” moment, where I got to sit back & show the truth to those who had doubted me for years & years, including those in the medical field. I wanted to email or call up everyone that denied me & show them the extent of how wrong they were (I scored an 87/100, the threshold for ADHD being 65), but that’s just being spiteful. Then that feeling began to shift. You see, in addition to my newly minted neuro-divergence I was also diagnosed with consistent moderate depression, but we already knew that didn’t we? (See the plethora of blogs I’ve written in regards to mental health.) However, depression does this lovely little thing where it likes to seep into everything you do, for the most part I’ve gotten pretty good at blocking it out, but last night was different.

As it began to permeate my thoughts I began to think about my past, to think about all of the years I asked psychologists or therapists if I could get formally tested & they denied me. All of the sudden all of the symptoms in my life that I had jokingly brushed off as a part of my assumed ADHD became very real & cemented themselves as fact, not just a feeling I had. I suddenly found myself starring into a valley of grief & regret that I could not for the life of me escape.

I thought about school, how it could have been different if I’d been diagnosed &/or treated. I thought about my career & all of the times I knew I should have been doing things but could not for the life of me bring myself to do them, sometimes these blogs included. When it comes to ADHD it all boils down to one thing, following the dopamine.

So why wasn’t this caught earlier? Why did it take me til the 2nd half of my 29th year to uncover a truth I’d always known? That boils down to masking.

In addition to the ADHD, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, bipolar, etc. panel they also had me do an IQ test. Much to my ego’s delight, I scored in the “highly intelligent” section which is a lot of the reason my neurological nature went unnoticed. People who are different, those of us who grew up queer, depressed, social awkward, have attention variability dysfunctions, etc. learn to mask. We learn to camouflage our differences because we feel it either helps us to fit into society better or we don’t want to burden people with having to cater a response unique to each of us. My intellect got in the way of a lot of my symptoms because I overcompensated for my differences or didn’t voice my struggled or misunderstandings. I also lacked the physical hyperactivity of the traditionally stereotypical ADHD kid so I guess I can’t blame those in my childhood for not noticing.

All of this led to my grief; I mourned for the “could have been, would have beens” even though they may never existed anyway. I went through the spectrum of emotions until I could process them no longer & my brain felt fried. I called my parents & my mother reminded me that lingering on the past is a lost cause, what’s written is done & moving forward into brighter things is the only option.

I have begun believing more & more in divine timing. I think successful relationships happen only when we’ve put in the time & the work to be ready for them. I think advances in career do the same thing, so maybe there was a reason I wasn’t meant to have confirmation of this information until now. Maybe it’s a reason that I have yet to see or understand but in hindsight will appear perfect. I don’t know. All I know is that’s what I’m choosing to believe, I’m choosing to create a new start going forward further understanding who I am as a person & what makes me tick under the hood.

Far be it from me to think ADHD is a death sentence or like there’s something wrong with me, I actually think down the line we will all progress towards neurodivergent brains especially as technology advances & our focus continues to divide. I think it’s a natural part of our evolution, society just hasn’t caught up yet which then sends those of us who think differently spiraling into depression as we fail time & time again to fit in.

If you have a feeling about yourself please don’t hesitate to consult someone about it, especially if it’s medical. Be firm & insistent on getting the testing & treatment you need but also be aware your thoughts have power to them. Sometimes the things we dread become us but other times they were already there. This diagnosis does not define me, it doesn’t change who I am as a person, it just gives me more context into navigating the world going forward & for that I am grateful.

I love you all dearly, know that I see you & value you as a human being. Keep pushing on & remember to be kind to one another & yourself.

-C

Blog: Mental Health & The Mental Tolls of Being a Struggling Artist

Incase you didn’t know June is Mental Health Awareness Month.

I wanted to start this blog by saying a few things that I often have to reaffirm in my own life; you are worthy of your dreams, you are talented, you are worthy of love, you are worthy of people’s time, you are important. I know that can be a little hippie-dippie at times but these are the mantras we must keep. Recite them until you believe them in your soul. Make those words imprint upon your brain. You are worthy.

I also want to say that if you are struggling with your mental health & feel like you’re out here drowning on your own, that it’s okay to reach out for help. It’s okay to tell people how you feel. It is not weakness to want to get better. Fighting these fights has made you stronger than you know! If you do need help though there are a lot of great resources out there, I’ll attach a few to the bottom of the blog.

Now, onto my thoughts…

Some of you may have read the precious blog I did on mental health for Suicide Prevention Day, if not feel free to go back & give it a read, although I’ll probably end up touching on a lot of those points in it here as well. I wanted to take the time to write this blog but I didn’t want to do it at a time where I felt right as rain. I’ve been fairly candid in the past about my struggles with depression, a mental illness I struggled with for years. I remember being in high school & having sudden uncontrollable waves of depression hit me & not knowing how to deal with them, often resulting in me breaking down. And that’s how depression goes, like a flash flood. Some days it just consumes you out of nowhere & the fear, doubt, & shame take over. Well, full disclosure, that’s me today. Most of the time my waves of depression come from never feeling like I’m enough, not feeling like I’m good enough, talented enough, that I work hard enough, or that I’m doing enough. That’s the beauty of the music industry I suppose, every day you try your damnedest just to inch your way a little higher on the ladder & feel like all this work you’re doing matters. You work & you work & you get so excited just to be thrown by the wayside by the world & this industry. The projects you poured your heart into don’t connect, the email or phone call you’ve been praying will come never does, the people who claim to support you turn their backs on you. It's tough.

I’m not trying to discredit my fans at all or anyone out there working on my behalf or who believes in me, I am beyond grateful for you all. I wouldn’t be here without you. All I’m saying is this job is taxing & if you don’t take the time to stop & check yourself & your mental health along the way it’ll eat you alive. That being said I want this blog to be as raw & open as I can be.

I’m a bit too much of an envious person at times if I’m being honest. Don’t get me wrong, I am incredibly proud of all that my friends are accomplishing in the music industry, with all my heart I am so beyond proud of you all. But comparison is often the thief of my joy & I so long to join you on your pedestal.

I compare myself to the privileged. To those who have relatives in the industry or come from money. Those that can throw the appropriate marketing dollars are a project to have is launch where they want it to be. I envy them. I envy those whose bank account isn’t constantly on their mind, who don’t live day to day trying to make enough money to even buy the gas required to get to the gig they aren’t getting paid for much less fund their next single. Again comparison always seems to be the thief of my joy.

I look around & I don’t know what I’m doing wrong or even really what I’m doing right. I feel like I’m wondering in the dark praying something connects, that someone will reach out a hand & help pull me through it. I wake up & my brain says do something & I immediately panic because I have no idea what to do. I feel the things I have been doing haven’t been working so I’m forced to rethink it & try a different path.

I know I probably sound like I’m bitching or whining but I truly wanted to share this because I know so many artists that have these days but we never show it. We never break face or break character out of fear of freaking people out but that right there is the problem with our stigma of mental health as a society. Fear & shame. We’re afraid the people we care about won’t accept us or what we’re going through. We’re afraid that we’ll just get another person telling us to “shake it off” or tell us “it gets better.” Your emotions are valid, your feelings are valid, just as you are valid.

SAMHSA- Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration:

1-800-662-4357

National Association of Mental Illness:

www.nami.org

Mental Health Resources, Inc.

www.mhresources.org

National Suicide Prevention Hotline:

1-800-273-8255