Quick braindump on recent things in my life.

September is upon us, and I have new updates!

Vyvanse

After 2 months, I’ve now been bumped up to 40 mg of Vyvanse, and hooboy is it nice. Everytime I bump up the dose by 10 mg, I feel that “first day” feeling all over again, which I can only summarize with one word: quiet. My journey into medicating my (undiagnosed) ADHD (ADD?) has been one of the best things that I’ve gone through, and it’s completely flipped my life for the better. The areas I’ve seen big improvements with:

  1. Clean: I had the hardest time cleaning up after myself before medication, essentially requiring someone coming over in order to clean my place up. My poor partner lived with me for a full year before I could actually contribute to cleaning our home; god bless her heart. I make sure to try to keep the place extra clean now, as a sort of overcompensation and a silent “sorry” to her.
  2. Sleep: Getting insomnia is a very common symptom for people on Vyvanse, but I’ve found the exact opposite. I basically wake up at 8am to take my pills every morning, and will either just get up if I’m still tired, or will go back to sleep for an hour to get a little “stim-nap” in.
  3. Think: My GOD, I didn’t realize how god damn noisy my head was before Vyvanse. This is pretty much my indicator that it’s time to up the doseage when my brain starts getting all noisy again. I don’t have to listen to loud, hectic music anymore to drown out all of the thoughts!
  4. Diet: I’ve kind of always binge-eaten; it’s honestly a habit I’ve probably picked up from a mix of my parents’ eating habits. My mom is an almond mom, and my dad is a vacuum, so you basically get me: someone who doesn’t eat for hours, and then eats like there’s no tomorrow. Vyvanse has indirectly fixed that, since I don’t really get hungry until 2-4pm now, and when I do eat, I don’t super overeat. This is resulting in some healthy weightloss, now I can finally cut down from the 40 lbs I’ve put on over the last few years!
  5. Exercise: Now that I don’t crash right at 5pm each day from copious amounts of energy drinks / coffee, I actually feel like going to the gym again. How crazy is that? They let me take this stuff for FREE?

I think I know why ADHD isn’t considered a disability: it’s a super-ability. Think about it, you’re telling me I can only pursue things I’m passionate about, and then when it gets boring I get to take diet meth? I’ve honestly gotten this far in my career BECAUSE of ADHD, if I’m being honest.

Fitness

In no small part influenced by Vyvanse, I’ve started going back to the gym consistently after years. I got a new (super cheap?) membership at the gym next door, and have been doing the push-pull-legs split for 2 weeks now, which is a record for me in terms of consistency. Another large factor is that a bunch of my friends are all-of-a-sudden getting super fit; I guess we’re just in that phase of our lives: get fit, get rich, or get kids. I also started running a bit, after a 13 year hiatus. Turns out Strava is pretty motivating, and going for a run is pretty rewarding! I’ve been saying to myself that I’m going to go for a run if I don’t go to the gym, and it’s working almost as a punishment, and is keeping me consistent :P

Work

They always say that you’ll stop coding as much when you hit senior engineer, but I didn’t expect it to be so sudden and so true. I spend the majority of my days at work now mentoring interns, researching tech docs for tickets, in meetings, or doing non-coding tickets (like cap-planning, verifications, etc). Getting medicated has helped that immensely, especially since I’m not the biggest fan of it (but I don’t hate it, it’s still rewarding and important). One big thing that really helped me start having fun at work again was seeking technical mentorship from a super-senior. Right now we’re working through courses on Coursera together, and he’s really been motivating me to fill technical gaps, and pursue becoming a technical god.

AI

I go back and forth on my stance on using AI, but it could probably be summed up as:

  1. DO use it for things you want to get worse at
  2. DON’T use it for things you want to get better at
  3. Treat it as a chatbot, and another search engine
  4. It’s just another tool in your belt as a software engineer, don’t make it your identity
  5. Get really good with it, so that you can minimize use of it

Big Event

Something big is going to happen this week… Will update after ;) Wish me luck!