After being diagnosed with ADHD, my psychiatrist outlined my options: therapy, long-acting medication, or immediate-release medication. Given my need to be sharp in the mornings for work, he recommended the latter. The side effects concerned me, but I needed something that would help right away, so I agreed. 

The morning that changed my life started like every other. I woke up, fed my dogs, made a cup of coffee, and then headed to my office upstairs. The only difference in routine was that upon sitting down at my desk, I took the prescribed dosage of dextroamphetamine and started up my computer. 

Thirty minutes into my work day, I noticed that I felt really awake, like I had gotten a particularly good night’s sleep. An hour in, I realized I had taken a sip of my coffee, so I gulped it down. 

I looked down at the time and realized another hour had passed. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t opened up a browser window or taken a break to look at my phone. 

Three hours into my previous day, I had interrupted my workday three times—twice to find the name of songs whose lyrics were playing on a constant loop in my mind and once to look up how many comedy specials Eddie Murphy had released in the 1980s. The latter led me down a rabbit hole of scanning through his filmography as well, which led to me not working for nearly forty minutes. 

I leaned back in my chair, trying to really take in if I noticed anything different within myself. 

If you have ADHD, you probably have a go-to metaphor to describe what it’s like inside your mind. 

Mine’s a word cloud. A collection of singular words in different sizes, colors, and orientations in a clustered pattern. My word cloud has a couple of extra layers; it’s blurry, and the words overlap. The word that I want is almost always buried under a pile of words that appear out of nowhere. I exhaust myself trying to find the word and set it on top. Even if I do manage to get it to the top, it is almost immediately being buried again, like the first grain of sand through an hourglass. 

The jumbled word cloud was gone. The words were still there, but instead of being in a shapeless heap, they were stacked in perfect columns. They were crystal clear and ordered by relevance. 

As I finished my work day, it was as though the columns were getting shorter. As tasks in each column were completed, they faded away, revealing the next word at the top. And because they were all legible and ordered, my mind was constantly scrambling. 

That evening, I sat on the couch in our living room. My wife was out, so it was just me and the dogs. I didn’t turn on the TV. I didn’t play music. I didn’t even scroll my phone.

I just sat.

And it was quiet.

Not just the house, but for the first time I could ever recall, it was quiet in my mind.

What about you?

• Ever had a moment when your brain just… went quiet? What was that like?
• Got your own metaphor for how your ADHD brain works? (I’m a word cloud. You?)
• If you’ve tried meds or therapy—what pushed you to make the call?
• Or if you don’t have ADHD: What’s your version of a scattered mind?