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This was, originally, a blog entry about something else, but I like to recycle, so it's being purged and rewritten.

I got a raise this week. Not a big raise, but it was still a raise. This is both good, and a huge deal, because I haven't had a raise in over three years.

It's not an economy thing; my company is financially healthy and reasonably well managed. No, the problem is me, and my brain. It's a repeating pattern of failure that pretty much defined my 20's; get a job, learn fast, impress bosses, lose interest, ADHD sets in, fuck up too many times, get written up or worse, and eventually leave the job before they get the chance to fire me for incompetence or insubordination or whatever. I saw the same god damn pattern starting up again, so I finally went to a competent shrink, figured out that I have ADHD, got on meds, etc, etc.

That's all been in the last four months. Those were a rough handful of months too, between getting doses right, rethinking my sense of identity, neurotically reviewing my entire past from the framework of my new knowledge, and just general life stress of work and animal rescue and trying to keep my shit together.

So when it came time for my annual review I went in braced for bad shit, just like always. I had some hope and some feedback that I was doing better, but you never really know. But it was good, and my bosses were impressed. Not just impressed, but actually really shocked and happy at the sudden cessation of me being a terminal fuckup.

They had to take the whole year into account, which is fair, so the review wasn't great, but the end of the year improvement was so dramatic that they pushed to get me a raise, even if I probably didn't warrant one all things considered.

So that was cool, and I was sort of happy, but there's always that little voice back there in your brain (asshole) that says shit like 'well, it should have been like this all along, loser. Try harder.'

So I was thinking I should be happy and stuff, but still felt shitty and weird and sort of shell shocked, and then it just hit me: this ridiculous, raging ball of emotion, like right in the pit of my stomach, and I started to cry at my desk.

"What... what the fuck, holy shit! WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME!!" I said to myself, as I scurried off to the bathroom to hid my nervous breakdown and, possibly, drown myself in the toilet to save face. It took about fifteen minutes for me to get a grip.

It's worth describing myself physically at this point: I look like a skinny viking. My nickname among my friends (well, one of the nicknames) is, I shit you not, 'Walking Swedish Murder Machine', in reference to Brock Samson, and it's not ironic either. I say that not to brag about being Swedish, or way taller than this world is built for, or a Murder Machine (of what? I don't know. My own sperm, I guess). I say it to illustrate how ball-crushingly ridiculous my blubbering all the way to the cripple bathroom must have looked.

Fortunately, no one saw me (I hope?), so I was able to fake having some dignity once I dried my eyes and composed myself.

That was some heavy shit. That was some seriously repressed stress and fear and worry and anxiety and all that after this ADHD mess, that just spilled right the fuck out without so much as a friendly acknowledgement of my social anxiety and sense of shame.

The last four months of finally being able to think clearly, to keep track of things, to stay interested or at least fake being interested in something for longer than five minutes... has been stressful. Really, really stressful.

I realize that after ten years of fail, I had pretty much stopped trying anymore. I mean, why bother? Although as I type this, it occurs to me that this has gone all the way back to my childhood, with my D+ average grades and three years of summer school to barely get out of high school on time and with a diploma.

So really, this is more like... 25 years of fail. I mean, I've had some successes in spite of it, but that's the pattern. It sucks.

For the past four months of actually doing things well, of not fucking up, I built up a bowling ball sized know of stress I didn't even know was there. So bad that I've got neck pain and I sleep like shit, and maybe it's the meds, who knows... But a big part of it is that I have no fucking idea how to handle success. This isn't even big success, this is tiny every day shit, like holding down a job or remembering to take out the trash. I am actually overwhelmed by being less of a screw up. It's a lot of pressure. I'm so used to being a disappointment to family and authority figures that I don't know how to handle being something different.

I'm going to try to just roll with it, because I don't know what the hell else to do.

That mini melt down was good though. I needed it. I feel like an asshole, but it still had to happen. I've barely drawn in months, been withdrawing from everyone I know, just trying to keep it together and sort out shit in my head.

So after crying like a wuss for a while I feel better. I know that bottling up emotions is a bad thing, and we're supposed to express ourselves, and it's okay for men to cry in this day and age and all that, but there's a big difference between knowing these things conceptually and going through it for real. It feels bloody emasculating, whether it should be or not.

Well, I have a bunch of puppy-drunk women yelling at me to get food, so I'll end this for now. Next up: New Years Resolution Bullshit, or maybe more mental issues. Or maybe both.

43 days.

That’s how long I’ve been getting treatment for my ADHD. In case this is the first blog entry of mine you’re reading, I’ll recap: At the ripe old age of 32 I finally figured out that I have ADHD. The shrink put me on a low dose of Adderall, and the rest is history. Ok, so it’s only like a month and a couple days worth of history, but you know what I mean.

I got a surprising amount of feedback on the whole ADHD thing, including a few people asking me if it affected my ability to come up with novel ideas. There seems to be a lot of creative types out there who are holding off on getting treatment because they don’t want to turn into a mentally blunted zombie. I get that; I had those fears too. Continuing on the same blundering path would be kind of shitty though, so I read up on all the available meds, edified myself, and took the plunge.

The Good: Adderall is Kind of Awesome

All advice is autobiographical. There are no exceptions to this statement. Keep that in mind when you hear my take on this whole ADHD thing. Everyone has different genetic and epigenetic variations and combinations that affect the levels of neurotransmitters in their brains. Never trust someone who tells you they have ‘the answer’ to anything; they are, without fail, going to be full of shit. Maybe not entirely full of shit, but anyone who can put aside rational doubts and uncertainties is not to be trusted. I could write a whole book on this topic, but that’s a tangent for another time.

What I’m getting at is that this treatment is working for me, but it may not work for everyone. Some of the ‘new and shiny’ aspect has worn off, and my brain has acclimated to a little bit to the stimulants, but they’re still remarkably effective at clearing out the sludge and cobwebs and getting my neurons back in line.

I have a funny habit that my shrink observed, where I’ll stop in the middle of a conversation when I’ve been trying to explain some complex topic and ask ‘does that make sense?’ I no longer need to do that. I never even realized it, but I will lose track of my own topic of discussion if I go on for more than a few minutes. I can also code things now. Since I work in IT, this is incredibly useful. I’m actually not sure how I coded anything prior to this, but seeing the volume of comments I put in my code before I can hazard a guess. It’s like having a damaged short term memory, where you’ve only got so much space to work with. Ever see the movie Memento? It feels a little like that, only without the gaping plot holes or Joe Pantoliano.

Post-it notes are my friends. I need less of them now, but the number of reminders and notes and personal instructions I have to record have been cut in half. This stuff has cut down my stress levels tremendously. There’s a natural sort of uncertainty and anxiety with ADHD, where you can’t tell if you’ve forgotten about something or lost track of something, and you’re always worried you’re going to fuck something up. Keeping on any sort of task is exhausting, and even the thought of certain tasks is panic inducing. Dumb stuff, like scheduling appointments, planning trips, cleaning the house, walking the dogs, etc. These are things that are no longer new and shiny, so your brain knows it’s not going to get the dopamine fix it desperately needs. Somewhere in the back of your mind the spine-crawling anxiety of being trapped doing something un-stimulating for fifteen minutes feels like hell on earth. Some of the animal rescue work my wife and I do requires us to call people and interview them for fostering or adoption; doing that filled me with a level of dread I can’t properly express. It was so damn easy to forget key questions that you need to ask people, and I did it all the time. The constant threat of failure for even simple, mundane tasks like that is awful.

There are a lot of things that I do, and I think a lot of ADHD people do, that make them come across as complete assholes. Obstinate, stubborn, argumentative, difficult, inattentive, etc. It ain’t deliberate. Things that used to make me insane are now tolerable. Sort of… normal. I don’t mind making those calls, or planning stuff that takes more than a few minutes.

ADD/ADHD is kind of a dumb name for this disorder, if I may interject some more random only vaguely related opinions. Something more serious sounding like “Dopamine Deficiency Syndrome” would be better. ADD has such cultural baggage as being a non-condition or an excuse, but this shit will seriously fuck up your life if you’re not aware of it. Ok, tangent over. Well, this tangent. There’ll be more.

But the answer to the big question that people asked me is that this stuff doesn’t mess with your creativity. I still have no problem coming up with ideas. Dextroamphetamines are kind of weird; they’re not like long term meds like anti-depressants; they don’t really cause any major brain rewiring, there are no withdrawal symptoms if you go off of them. The human body is so good at processing them that the problem is actually keeping enough of them in your system to be effective.

I’ve gone a few days or a weekend here and there without the Adderall, and I went back to my normal disoriented self. In theory I think if someone did find that their creativity was impacted by these types of meds, you could just pick a day or two and go off of them and let your scattered brain go berserk. Record your ideas, and then go back on the stuff so you can focus and work on them. I don’t need to do that, personally, but it’s a viable option.

It’s not all unicorns farting rainbows and shitting daisies though.

The Bad: Welcome to the Exciting World of Drug Interactions!

Many years ago I was diagnosed with PTSD and clinical depression. I was put on a very low dose of an SSRI: Zoloft. Tiny dose; only 5mg. That’s a barely therapeutically effective dose.

Recently I bumped up to 10mg, after I really came to the conclusion that my brain was just not working right. This was a few months before the ADHD revelation. No side effects; I felt a little less miserable about failing at all of my life projects and being in a constant state of mild confusion, so that was good.

About a week into taking the Adderall I started getting side effects. These were not fun. Tolerable, but not fun. I was hot all the time, and I was sweaty. My heart would race from time to time, and it felt like it was beating harder than normal. I started flinching at things that startled me way more than I really should. My fight or flight reflex was in complete overdrive, to the point that playing video games would get me so amped up that I’d start to get tremors and muscle spasms.

But then the tremors stayed… and the random muscle twitches were pretty constant. An average person could probably accept a certain degree of trembling hands, but for an artist? That’s really shitty. It got to the point where it did impact my ability to draw, and I was starting to get worried that the side effects would force me off of the stuff.

But I’m a little OCD, so I’d been reading up on all sorts of interesting things about brain biochemistry, the history of pharmaceuticals, neurotransmitters, etc. I’m a nerd, so I get into that kind of stuff. Part of it is probably that it’s novel, so it makes my brain light up and triggers the whole dopamine release thing.

So in my research, I stumbled upon something really interesting: Adderall is really not supposed to be mixed with SSRI’s. SSRI’s are Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors. I know how they work, but to put it simple, it keeps the serotonin hanging around longer in your brain to do its job better. Adderall does a similar thing with Dopamine, in addition to making your body produce more.

But Adderall also makes your body make more serotonin too, and that’s the problem.

Serotonin Toxicity: The Fun Never Starts

Too much serotonin is bad. In fact, it causes those exact symptoms I outlined above, among other things. Adderall side effects overlap with a lot of those symptoms, so it’s very easy to overlook. But a few of the symptoms, like the weird muscle spasms and tremors, are nearly unique indicators of Serotonin Syndrome. The severity varies, as with anything, and I believe I had a mild case of it. Severe cases can just outright kill you though, so this is shit to take seriously.

Interestingly, it only took a minor dose of each of these meds to trigger those symptoms. It’s like a combination of menopause hot flashes and roid rage. I mean, I don’t know what either of those things are like, but you know what I mean.

So the obvious solution was to stop the Zoloft, so that my Serotonin levels, which are rather clearly at or near a normal level, could calm down a bit. So I did, and the next day they were gone.

Oh but if only it were that easy…

The Ugly: Brain Zaps.

I’ve never written about this before, but I know these fuckers all too well.

A few years into taking Zoloft I went cold turkey for a bit, to see how it was affecting me, and see if I still needed it. A few days later my head started to explode.

I didn’t register what it was at first, but soon I put two and two together.

When you go cold turkey off of an SSRI, your brain goes a little ape shit. SSRI’s do make long term changes to your brain, unlike plain old stimulants. The human brain is very malleable and adaptive, and it responds and adjusts itself to whatever chemicals are in your body. Food, drugs, etc. The brain undergoes clear changes when you get an SSRI in your system, and it takes some time for your brain to finish the rewiring. Most of these types of things are of a risk for young kids, but there’s some evidence that even an adult brain will have some permanent or at least very long lasting brain changes from it.

So, of course, if you go off of the stuff it takes a while for your brain to un-wire itself.

That’s where the zaps come in. It sounds like a dumb name, but that’s the best term for it. It’s got a whole formal name of SSRI Discontinuation Syndrome. Brain Zaps sounds more interesting though.

It feels like you’ve hit your funny bone; a really bad hit, the kind you feel in your toes and belly button or even under your tongue. Only it starts in your brain. For me it seems to be related to the balance system, as it’s tied in to vision. Turn your head too fast? ZAP! Look left or right with your eyes too quickly? ZAP! Stand up too fast? ZAP!!

Sometimes they just hit you out of the blue for no clear reason too. And boy do they feel shitty. Some of the big ones can hit so hard that your hearing cuts out for a second and your vision closes in a bit, like if you get up too fast after playing a marathon game of Tetris or an average Warcraft raid and go all light headed. It clearly sends some kind of insane signal through all of your nerves, because the really strong ones will make your tongue, belly button, toes, and the head of your wiener go all pins and needles. Pretty much anyplace in your body with a shit load of nerves gets blasted with unfiltered nerve signals.

Yeah, that’s right; I said the head of my wiener. It’s over-sharing day today, didn’t you know?

It takes almost a month for SSRI’s to take effect on most people. And it takes the same amount of time, or longer, to wean yourself off of them. I can only hypothesize that the drugs themselves don’t directly curb depression, but it’s more to do with the neurological changes they induce. I don’t know though, I’m just some random game geek on the internet, so don’t take any of my rambling speculations seriously. My symptoms and side effects are about as accurate as I can report them though.

And After the Ugly: the holding pattern of moderate annoyance:

So that’s where I’m at now. I’m walking an annoyingly fine line between brain zaps and hand tremors, while trying to get a better handle on how long the Adderall lasts in my system.

Take the Zoloft too infrequently or cut the doses back too far, and my brain starts trying to give itself electroshock therapy to punish my poor decision making. Take it too close to the Adderall and I start doing involuntary jazz hands.

I’ll get over it, of course, but it’s going to take some time. Hopefully not too much longer than a month, but we’ll see.

The real crazy thing is that the doses I’m on are pretty small. There are people on ten to twenty times as much Zoloft as I was on. There are people taking five times as much Adderall as me. There are people on both of those drugs, at the same time, along with other shit to control other symptoms or side effects.

I’m scientifically literate, financially stable, and reasonably intelligent and well informed on matters of medical importance. And in spite of that, I can just barely navigate all of this madness to get myself correctly diagnosed after twenty five years of symptoms starting when I was a kid. I can’t even wrap my head around how hard it must be for people with less means and less information to navigate these types of issues.

I don’t mean to end this by going all bleeding-heart-liberal-commie-socialist whatever on you guys, but this is heavy shit. What I’m dealing with is insignificant compared to what others have to deal with, and my issues have half fucked up my entire adult life.

That’s one of the pernicious things about names and labels. I wrote earlier that I thought ADD and ADHD had too much cultural bias attached to them, and I’m dead serious. Screwy levels of one or two chemicals in my brain, cause by one or more dysfunctional and all too common variants of a gene, have caused me to get fired from jobs, nearly fail out of school, screw up one opportunity after another, and lead to depression, self destructive behaviors, and an impressive collection of idiotic decisions over the years.

And I got really lucky. Even with my late diagnosis, I’m doing pretty well, and avoided all of the worst ADHD pitfalls.

I ain’t saying none of this is my fault. It’s all my fault, and I’m ok with that. I don’t like it, but it’s my bullshit and baggage to own. But bloody hell, our system isn’t well suited to help people with mental issues, is it?

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that mental issues like depression or ADD or mood disorders or what have you are moral failings, a character flaw if you will. Just a result of laziness, indifference, weak will, or whatever dismissive term you want to write on a label and slap on someone’s forehead. I’ve met a lot of people like that. They exist; there are a lot of lazy assholes out there, both physically and intellectually. But not everyone with trouble getting by is like that. I doubt that even a majority of people with issues like that are malingering exploiters.

I’ve gone my entire life, except for the last couple of months, assuming that my problems with work and life in general were because of something that was wrong with me. I bought in to the idea that I had motivation issues, or perhaps my screwed up childhood damaged me and made it harder to get shit done. That’s the kind of thing a person should be able to get over. Strong people are able to overcome crap like that, persevere, and be successful. So for my entire adult life I’ve thought I was a lazy shithead. I’m smart, I can figure stuff out, and yet I can’t finish a damn thing and sometimes just holding down a job has been an unbelievable struggle. I’ve never once blamed an outside source for my shortcomings. I’ve always turned it inwards. Try harder, think harder, concentrate, don’t be so scattered, stop wasting time, don’t fixate on useless stuff, don’t be such a failure.

That’s some rough shit. It’s no wonder my previous shrink thought I was depressed; I fucking WAS depressed, but for legitimate reasons. Treating the symptoms wasn’t going to help; the root cause needed to be identified and treated.

But that blame, that accusation that you’re just another lazy fuck who’s blaming their laziness on ADD or depression or bipolar disorder or whatever… that can be some seriously debilitating shit. Even if most of it is coming from you, yourself, it eats at you.

And like I said, I’m one of the lucky ones.

My disorder is simple, if hard to pin down and complicated by other issues at first. It responds well to treatment, and now I can focus my energy on getting my shit together.

…

But I still think about people with worse problems and less resources. How the hell would anyone expect them to excel in the face of that kind of adversity? Even in countries with medical systems that are less hindered by infantile ideologies than ours it’s tough.

…

I’ve got no solutions for this. I could think up plenty of stuff, sure, but I doubt any of it would be useful. I don’t know enough about it to come up with a plan that would be worth taking seriously. But I will say this:

Everyone has their demons. Never dismiss someone out of hand, because you never can tell what’s going on in their head.

Hell, even they may not know.

This is sort of a 'proof of progress' piece.

By that I mean it's related to the whole ADHD thing. As in, now that I'm on meds, I can work on things like this. I just worked on this thing for hours, until my knuckles cramped up, and here I am putting it up on the web and all that on top of all the drawing.

Not much of an achievement, but compared to how bloody difficult it's been for me to stick to any one task in the past, this was epic. I'll admit; it's not quite done. I may still go back and add a proper background and clean up the robot alien thing a bit, but even if I don't, this is ok. Done is better than perfect.

This was a good one to break my hand back in on. I did some of the work out in the hybrid after the hurricane hit and took out our power. Let me tell you; hanging out alone in a car in a pitch black area with the interior lights on while drawing on a tablet starts off as uncomfortable, rapidly reaches full blown paranoia, and finally descends into the squealing heebie jeebies once your imagination gets the better of you.

Speaking of drawing in odd places, I cannot wait to get a hold of the new wacom Inkling when it comes out. Go out and google it; there's plenty out there. It's a regular ball point pen that also happens to track every line and stroke and store them digitally. and then you export them, and you have true vector art of what you just drew. SO AWESOME

Anyway, it's late, I'm stoned on ambien, and it's time to crash. before this post gets REALLY weird.

Yes, yes, I am in fact alive. Shocking, I know.

A few things before I launch into my... whatever stream of conscience madness I'm preparing to unleash.

COMMENTS: I believe that I have fixed the comment issue that was screwing up registered users; I finally set it so they can just straight up bypass the spam filter.

So that's good. Also, I've now disabled anonymous user registrations. If you want an account, or I inadvertently delete your account when I finish purging FIVE THOUSAND #$*&ING SPAM BOT ACCOUNTS just go right ahead and leave me a human-sounding comment and I'll manually make you a new one. Anyone can leave a comment, but it will be going into the spam moderation queue. Can't be helped; just too much spam. Try to compose your comments to look as non-spammy as possible and we should be good.

Ok, well, for the other stuff. Ummm... yeah, ok, where to begin...

I have ADHD.

Yeah, I know, big deal, right?

Well, I didn't figure this out until this month, August 2011. Note that, next month, I turn THIRTY-FUCKING-THREE. This is, to put it mildly, something that should have been figured out decades ago. At least two would have been nice. Earlier would have been fantastic.

But no, no such luck. I won't try to be one of those insufferable high-road pricks and say that I'm not bitter and annoyed about the whole thing. I'm bitter, and annoyed. Really bitter, and really annoyed, actually.

I didn't know shit about ADHD until recently. It's one of those mental conditions that a lot of people think is just laziness and a lack of discipline and motivation. I admit, I once thought that as well. Let's just chalk that one up to ignorance. As it turns out, it's a brain chemistry thing. It's not laziness or any sort of moral failing... it's tough giving every last ounce of energy your brain can muster to focus on the simplest task, like drawing for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Hell, sometimes more than five minutes.

It's like having hundreds of little mini anxiety attacks every day. I never really knew what boredom was because I always kept my brain engaged thinking about stuff. For me, and other people with ADHD, I assume, boredom is like death. You've got to do anything you possibly can to keep the dopamine levels high, to get that little burst to keep your mental gears churning.

There's plenty of literature on it and a ton of information on the internet. I won't bore you with more details about what it is, just a quick overview. It's a dopamine dysfunction, plain and simple. Some combination of screwy genes making screwy proteins making your brain permanently short on dopamine.

It's a huge part of why my artistic productivity is so inconsistent. I love art. It's what I want to do, it's what I think about all the time. And yet, I hit patches where I just can't do it. It's not a traditional art block; it's something else.

Imagine if there was something you loved, that you were good at, that you wanted desperately to work on all the time, that everyone told you you should be working on.

Now imagine that you have a mini anxiety attack after five minutes of doing it. That you have to go and do something else or it feels like your spine is going to crawl out of the back of your neck to go do something else, dragging your brain with it.

It's exhausting and miserable. Especially when you think it's just some kind of motivational failure on your part. Imagine beating yourself up for being a lazy fuck for twenty years, of thinking you're destined to be a failure because you can't get off your ass and even start new projects. You develop a real love/hate relationship with whatever it is you're good at. I certainly have.

I have had some really dark moments where I've completed some awesome epic picture, and felt nothing afterwards. Maybe a minute of happiness, but that creeping little anxiety doesn't go away. Nothing makes it go away except intense mental stimulation; video games, complicated science articles, taking apart machines, puzzles, etc. That quiets the little bastard, as long as you keep doing it. Once you stop, it's back again. And if you keep at it for too long that itchy brain feeling comes back anyway.

Well, you get what I mean. It sucks. Certainly not the worst thing in the world, but when you think that the problem is a matter of your own personal weakness and laziness, it can turn you into a miserable, self loathing douche.

This whole thing was a long time coming. There was a slow build up of awareness that something was seriously off. It actually started in earnest with the art commissions. Or rather, the fact that I just couldn't fucking do them. Just finishing one commission became a mini psychological trauma; an exhausting exercise in self contempt.

For a while I thought it was just that old saying: if you turn a beloved hobby into a job, you'll hate it. I've gone through this cycle many times before... trying to do pen and ink work for a gallery, different aborted comic ideas, web comics, game designs, etc. I never finish them. I burn out after a few months, and then go inactive for for a few more before I can will myself to get back to it.

But that wasn't it. I stopped even working on my own art, once I hit that threshold where the internal dopamine reward diminished. You do something interesting long enough and it stops being novel and interesting. Art is hard work; many hours just putting down lines and colors. It's fun, but it has some seriously monotonous moments.

DeviantArt helped too. There are so many incredibly productive and talented people on that site... and I realized that I just wasn't one of them. Sure, I have a screwed up imagination (a plus if you're a fantasy artist or cartoonist), but I couldn't put in the time needed. Couldn't beat my brain hard enough to make it let me do the work.

So one day I joke to my shrink (yes, I see a shrink) about how I wish I could take some ADHD meds sometimes to help me focus, even though I don't have ADHD. I had read an article about people abusing Adderall and Ritalin in college to help them study, and thought it was fucked up but interesting.

So my shrink says "well, maybe you have ADHD." And I says "No doc, there's no way. I'm not hyper or anything like that." and she says "Well, let's do a quick test and see."

So I take the little anecdotal test, and score a couple on the hyperactivity scale, which anyone can hit. But then I went nine for nine on the inattentive scale.

At that moment, my mind was blown. A little. There was more to come. You go through that reflection phase, where you try to evaluate your past in light of new information. I think we all do that when we learn something sort of heavy. I read books about it, rampaged across the internet digging up info, and came to a startling conclusion: My brain was messed up.

It all fit. The big one was reading Delivered from Distraction; a hell of a good book on the topic. It 'resonated' with me, as my shrink phrased it. I didn't have a word for it, at the time. I've known I was sort of fucked in the head for decades now; lots of mental illness in my family, and I've always thought it was OCD or PTSD or depression or dysthymia or maybe some borderline personality disorder or somehting. Nothing ever quite fit right, and I never even considered ADHD.

I'm not a religious person. Anyone who's been following my art or website for whatever reason should be pretty aware of that by now. But reading a book about ADHD, by someone with ADHD, was the closest thing I've ever come to having a religious epiphany. A dawning awareness of something profound that hits you like a wave. A mixture of hope and fear sadness and happiness and just overwhelming emotional shit. Buckets of it. Hitting you in the brain. Monkeys throwing buckets of emotional shit at your brain, while laughing at you for being so idiotically unaware for so long. Yeah, like that.

Long story short, I had to find a psychiatrist. Psychologists are a dime a dozen. MD's who specialize in mental stuff? Harder to find. Harder still to get an appointment with. But I did, and I got me some amphetamines. And even that's hard, because that shit is a schedule two controlled substance. You need authorizations on top of authorizations and signatures and insurance approval and a nightmare of red tape to get it.

So I annoyed my wife to the point that she nearly stabbed me in the neck with a butter knife for talking about it incessantly. It turns out that once the depression and self loathing go away, the hyperactivity comes back. Sometimes a lot. But she didn't slay me for aggravating her, which is more a testament to her tolerance than anything else. I finally got the stuff, and, well, ok, time to try it out.

That's a scary god damn moment. What if it didn't work? What if I was destined to be a scatter brained, unproductive schmuck for life? Fuck. Then there's the idea of being on another stupid pill to function, and the condemnation a lot of people give to anyone who needs any kind of chemical crutch. It's hard to drop that kind of shit. Rationally I know better; I know that there are a billion things that can go awry with the brain or body and that there is absolutely no guarantee that you're going to be ok. There's no ideal state of humanity that we can all achieve if we just try hard enough. But still, you just can't shake that idea that it's a moral failure to need this stuff. 'You don't have ADHD, you're just being lazy and whiny, and your parents didn't discipline you enough, blah blah judgmental drek blah blah blah'.

...

So I took the pill. I was sitting at work, waiting to see what would happen.

Yep, waited a while.

Felt like an eternity. That's another thing with ADHD; we don't track the passage of time very well. Humans are bad at it in general; people like me are even worse.

And then, quiet.

I never really understood how loud the inside of my head is. I knew that I had racing thoughts; hell, it's kept me from sleep as long as I can remember. But the quiet... was not what I expected. The idea of taking an amphetamine (technically dextroamphetamine) is sort of nuts in general, and the idea that it would lead to such quiet and calm is even more so.

But it did. Just quiet, and calm. No racing sounds and images, no anxiety from every little thing going on, no exhausting fight to keep things focused in my head.

I admit I actually got a little emotional at work there, what with my new found super powers of normal concentration. I never even realized all of the mental tricks and the little techniques I have for managing my job. Dozens of post-it notes with little processes and reminders, saved files with lists of steps and procedures for even simple things that shouldn't be hard to remember. No more triple checking numbers and information and names and dates. I've been written up for poor job performance over this stuff before. Hell, I've been fired from jobs for being careless and inattentive before.

It's like having a computer with too little memory. In order to move on to the next task or set of steps in the process you have to unload everything from the last thing you did. Only the computer is your brain. I probably didn't need to spell out that analogy, but what the hell.

The meds shouldn't have worked this well. It's too simple an explanation. It feels too easy, to obvious in hindsight. My shrink even asked me how the hell this was missed when I was a kid, given how glaringly obvious it was once we knew what to look for. I'm still not sure myself; the signs were all there, and it wasn't like I wasn't a pain in the ass kid in school. I had shitty grades and behavior problems and was constantly distracted, drawing when I should be paying attention. I guess there's not much use in dwelling on what might have been, but we all do it anyway.

The real moment of truth was sitting down to draw. There have been times, usually after a long hiatus, where I can feel myself getting into the flow of drawing. It's not just drawing; it can be sculpting or programming or carpentry or anything... just making stuff. You hit a zone where you just go, you know what to do and just work on it, and it feels fucking great. It's not euphoric, just deeply satisfying. Maybe it's a zen sort of thing, I don't know.

But I sat down to work on some art, and just got lost in it again. I haven't had that in so long, just a memory of what it was like. Even the monotonous parts of it feel... good, I guess. I'm not used to that. I can get caught up in my work without every little tick or noise or itch or distraction intruding and breaking me from the flow. I can work without that brain itch trying to claw out of the back of my head after five minutes. No more fighting my own biochemistry just to do fifteen minutes of art a day.

So that's where I'm at. It's been six days on this stuff, and I've already done more art than I was able to will myself to do in the last month. Yeah, really, six days, that's all.

I can't make any promises about where this is going, really. I'm awesome at doubting my own thoughts, so maybe this is just some early crazy phase where everything feels wonderful and shiny and new, and it's bound to wear off. But I don't think so.

So now that I've gotten all this long winded self indulgent crap out of my system, I think it's time to pick up the pen and go draw. I'll let you know how it goes.

This is a tough bastard of a blog entry to write. Most of these, when I update them, are pretty meaningless and not well thought out. Hell, half of them are stream-of-consciousness, so there's no forethought in them at all.

This one's gonna be different. I've been thinking about this one for weeks now.

I'm going to stop doing commissions.

I still have a few on the deck that I'm going to finish up, and there are a handful of people that have been excellent to me, and I will always be willing to whip up some work for them.

But this commission phase of my life, for now, is over.

I've been oddly successful with the commission work, which is great. The problem is me. That sounds like a "It's not you, it's me" breakup line, and I guess it is, sort of. You see, I need to be very very selfish with my art. I don't have it in me to make art for other people, to bring their vision to life. I can do it, but it's not what I need.

My art needs to be my own stuff, my own vision, my own whatever.

Because if it's not for just me, then I'm going to lose my shit and wind up in a straight jacket somewhere, drawing stuff with crayons on my padded cell wall, because that's all they give to the patients there. Crayons. It's hard to hurt anyone with a crayon. Not impossible, but difficult.

See, I had one of those things that people refer to as a "completely fucked up childhood". I don't talk about it much on here, because a few years back I decided to work towards becoming a professional artist. Professional meant that I had to censor myself; can't offend potential clients or anything, since who knows when the next job would come in. I had this lofty goal of quitting my day job and becoming some kind of freelance renegade artist type. It sounded so exciting on paper!

The reality of it is that it is, in fact... work. Lots and lots of work. I'm not opposed to work; I've been working for most of my adult life and quite a bit of my teenage years too. But that's different from turning your cherished pastime into a regular day job.

I had been warned that this might happen. By multiple people too; but this is one of those things that you've just gotta go and try for yourself, even if other people can tell it's probably a shitty idea for you. Sort of like that friend who's going to get married to a complete fucking lunatic, and you just have to let them go through it and be there when the dust settles. Maybe not quite that severe, but you see what I'm getting at.

So I turned my hobby into a job. Works for some; not for me. I killed the joy in it. No more therapeutic outlet, just a second night job after my day job. No more diving into my own brain to escape the other bad shit in my brain. No more creative juices flowing, just a meager trickle to get the jobs done.

As a person with a "completely fucked up childhood" I need to put my coping mechanisms back in place. Turning a hobby into a job is fine. Turning a coping mechanism into a job is a recipe for a nervous breakdown.

So that's what I'm going to do.

I know this is probably getting way too emo at this point, so let me lay it out: No more commissions. but I am going to work on my personal art again. And lucky for some of you, Steamvolt is among my personal art. Steamvolt makes me feel good. The little monsters I draw, the pretty girls, the creatures I now sculpt... all that's my personal stuff. Keeps me grounded.

My goals are simple: I just want to make stuff that I think is interesting and cool. If someone wants to pay me for that; awesome. If not, that's fine too. I'll just keep doing my thing either way.

I am so busy.

No, really. This isn't like 'busy getting top tier gear through raidng in warcraft' busy, or 'I took a second job scrubbing shitters for cash desperation' busy.

No, these are real, honest to goodness art commissions. I've got a bunch of them all rolling in at once. Hell, some of them are even paid for and just waiting for my ass to finish them up. I have a dozen Goblins to draw, Hip-hop themed and ethnically diverse angels, city skylines, men sitting on toilets with their laptop or rocking a kilt with attitude. And that's just the drawing shit I have to do, never mind my own slow suffering money-pit comic projects.

On top of that I started sculpting. I just sort of blundered into some awesome guys who make weirdo toys at www.HalfBadToyz.com. Sort of a happy accident really, so here I am setting up a sculpting station and trying to figure out what the fuck I'm doing with polymer clay; something I've really never worked with before. But man, it is interesting.

My shopping get a little sketchy when I have to set up for a new type of project. This latest round included 1500 and 600 grit sandpaper, neodymium magnets, a bar of steel, pin spreaders, a full set of dentist's picks, a heat gun, turpenoid mineral spirits, a wire brush, super glue, and all sorts of other crap that makes me look like I'm up to no good.

So, yeah... I'm busy.

...

It's a good busy though. A wise man once told me that a hard day spent drawing is better than a hard day doing almost anything else, and I think he's right. It's more than just drawing though, it's doing anything creative and interesting. Another wise man once said that you shouldn't worry too much about making money at your chosen craft. Just be awesome, and the rest will come inevitably. A little more optimistic than I prefer, but I think I agree with the sentiment. If you're just doing something to make cash, it'll probably suck. There has to be some heart behind it.

I actually collect little quotes and sayings like those all the time. Little motivational or inspirational sayings. I feel like a traitor to the cause of pessimistic cynicism when I do, but they keep me going, so fuck it.

...

In other news, I have hired a web master. He's a little slow, so I need to flog him with an electrical cord now and then to get him motivated. I can get away with this since he's living with us. I'm not very good at keeping my indentured servants in line though. I'm too soft. I think I'll go throw things at him until he starts working again. Later!

I had a request to add in some Cafepress junk based on my old raging code monkey pic, so I cleaned it up (a little; I'm lazy) and loaded it up there.

New store is: http://www.cafepress.com/raging_code_monkey

Which also sort of reminds me, what other images of mine do people want on shirts and other merch? (Hmm, merch is an odd word...) If there's something you want, I can probably be pretty easily motivated to add it. I'm a capitalist whore like that. :D

HEY! GUESS WHO'S SICK OF DRAWING LIQUOR BOTTLES???

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THAT'S RIGHT!! IT'S MEEEE!!

...

That'll make a lot more sense if you read the comic... really, it will.

Ok, in all seriousness, I'm gonna damn well try to get more of these out. I've tried for some really aggressive time schedules in the past, but it's bloody hard with a full time non-art related job and all the other bullshit that comes from being a grown up productive member of society *sigh*

So my plan is a bit more conservative this year, and I'm committing to one per month minimum, and more if I can squeeze them in. I'm trying to cut some superfluous production time by simplifying some work and taking a deep breath before I get sucked into meaningless details too. We'll see how it goes :)

Anyway, let me know if I missed anything. I hate it when I do that.

Click the picture to see the comic!

Stuff I'm obsessed with lately:

Music: Truth by Alexander Ebert

Game: Minecraft

and Robotic Snow Removal

...

Ok, so that's not an extensive list, but I hate when people are like, 'hey, here's my favorite music!' and spam five hundred links. So I shall give you one song, one game, and one miscellaneous thing I wish I had.

The machine above is... well, I dunno, some crazy sketch. I had a write up for it too:

Although originally built as a construction machine designed to lift heavy loads and aid in moving stone and beams, these machines later found good use as front line shock troops with a few modifications. Standing ten feet tall and weighing nearly two tons once fully armed and armored, they have a fearsome presence on the battlefield. They would often cause regular troops to break ranks and flee in the face of a war machine that's all but impervious to small arms fire.

The left arm is a mantis style cutter with hooked serrations for grabbing and tearing at larger foes. Against armored foes, it is used to pin and hold them.

The right arm is designed to latch onto armored targets and bore holes into them, with the intent of damaging vital internal parts. This is equally effective against armored or unarmored foes, although the results are rather horrifying in the former.

So I got a full copy of painter last month on sale, because I want to expand my digital art skills. Some of the work I see artists create using painter blows my mind; it seems to have a flow and organic feel to it that's lacking in more technical programs like Photoshop.

The only problem is, I have no idea how to use it.

It's not that it's hard, it's just that I'm having a bloody hard time getting the brushes to do what I want. It's pretty frustrating when you're coming from something you know like the back of your hand (photoshop, for me) and trying out a whole new software with a completely different kind of work flow.

I guess I need to go to youtube and start watching videos on it :P

That bunny is from a line sketch last year that I decided to color in painter... and just failed. So I wussed out and went back to photoshop to finish coloring it.