as small as a world and as large as alone, A good way to explain meds to people is tell them...

3:29am June 1, 2014

Anonymous asked: A good way to explain meds to people is tell them that they are glasses for your brain.

neurodiversitysci:

Wow, that is completely accurate in a literal sense. When I first started taking stimulants they gave me a feeling of mental clarity like I get after yoga. And I could see better, too. Normally the background around whatever I looked at then was flat and meaningless, but starting the first day I took the stimulant, it started resolving into meaningful objects.

It makes sense that I would see better on a stimulant because, as any vision researcher will tell you, a huge determiner of what we see, and how well we see it, is whether we’re paying attention to it.

I don’t take stimulants on a regular basis any more, largely because of side effects, but my peripheral vision is still a bit better than it used to be.

Lorazepam had a similar effect on me when I first took it. Of course, it was treating seizures and we didn’t know it. But it was like the whole world flattened out and I felt more grounded and connected, and the weird TLE stuff and distortions quit happening. Minus the side-effects of heavier-duty seizure drugs. I still need to take it sometimes for nausea and anxiety, and it still has that effect of clarity that always surprises me in a depressant.

When I took kava instead, that created an entirely different kind and level of clarity – it actually is known for, unlike many other anxiety meds, making people think more clearly and perform better on standardized testing. Even when taking enough (because I was taking it for untreated pain, not just anxiety, so I was taking huge huge doses) to mess up the rest of my body, it still left my mind so clear that even words wouldn’t form, it was like perfect mental clarity, perfect focus, like it stilled down all the mental chatter.

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