Another Artist Lost to Zoloft

One week ago, my ADHD doctor decided that, along with the instant release ADHD stimulant I’m already getting, I might want to try a regimen of low-dose Zoloft. Since I’m game for anything, I decided to give it a go.

The results have been something of a mixed blessing, but overall there have been more downsides than upsides to the result. The biggest thing to understand here is that I have two ADHD symptoms that go together like open flames and kerosene; they’re both the source of my superpowers and the cause of much of the friction in my life. I have hyperfocus, which is the tendency to get seriously into something that interests me to the exclusion of everything around me, and I have hypercontextuality, in which given a single idea my brain spiders out and considers all the ramifications of it, which often leads to my generating some very good follow-on ideas that, in turn, lead to successful projects. Both of these are also problems that can be difficult to manage.

Pulling me out of hyperfocus is literally, physically painful. It can spike a nasty, acute headache. It can also lead me to neglect my own well-being, as I can sustain hyperfocus for hours when the problem is dense and engaging. It’s the sort of thing where so much of my brain is dedicated to maintaining the context of the problem and the proposed solution that losing that just hurts, and the human animal wants to avoid that sort of pain.

Hypercontextuality is a failure of judgement; I can’t tell what’s relevant to think about, and I have no instinct to discard some ideas as nonsensical, so I sometimes reach conclusions that are valid via paths that most people would never use… and so would never reach those conclusions. The success of this is wild, but it means that I often can’t tell what’s relevant to other people, so I tend to dump the entire hypercontext and hope other people can figure out what’s valuable.

Living with me when I’m in hyperfocus can be a little annoying, since I get a bit pissy when I’m avoiding pain or in pain. Living with me when I’m in hypercontextuality can be horribly confusing; the ideas all make sense in my head, but I can’t pick a path through the ideas to communicate them clearly, so I tend to seem a little garbled.

So, here’s what Zoloft has achieved:

• It’s a little easier to enter hyperfocus.


• But it no longer hurts to leave hyperfocus. I don’t get headaches.


• I’m less distractable.


• I’m a little more affable and easier-going.

Lovely. So those are the wins. The price, however, has been very high.

My subconscious has never been “murky.” It’s deep, and like the ocean the deeper you go the darker it is and the harder it is to make things out, but I could see down into it for quite a while. It was often crowded and chaotic, but never mysterious. Partly, I think this is why I have hypercontextuality; it’s all just part of the same interesting ocean that is my mind.

Now, it’s opaque. Sometimes, much more slowly than usual, things bubble up to the surface, but I no longer understand what’s going on in my own head. I have no access to the hypercontextuality.

In a way, you might say that the voices in my head have gone completely silent. No, I’ve never been schizophrenic, but as Omaha is fond of reminding me, I do sometimes argue with myself and sometimes I even lose the argument. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that we contain multitudes, and I’ve worked over the years to build mental alternative points of view, so that the angels and demons sitting on my shoulders have names and identities and personas. Some of them are even characters in the stories I write.

This, in turn, makes one of my most precious and hard-won tools, the default-mode meditation practice, utterly worthless. I’ve spent twenty years building up a meditative practice that allows me to take that “default mode” of neuroscience and turn it into a tool. In the silence of a meditation I can run my hands through the water and pick up ideas, look at them, contemplate them, slow down. Now I can’t even see those ideas.

The loss of all my alternative inner voices has collided with another common side effect of anti-depressants: I’ve completely lost all my sexuality. Between those two, I just can’t write a story. I have no cathexis anymore, and what’s the point of writing a story when the page is just a stage and the characters are merely puppets? I’m not telling truths about myself and the way I see the world anymore, I’m not delving into a character and asking myself how they would feel, because I literally don’t care that much.

I have had more trouble falling asleep than I used to. And I’ve been getting up in the middle of the night, uncomfortable about my temperature and a general sense that something is wrong about my body, and I’m quite sure that is the Zoloft talking. I’m more tired throughout the day.

I’m still a good programmer, but I have no passion for the work anymore. I don’t get disappointed when my work goes unappreciated. I’m just a knowledge worker full of experience about React and CSS and Programming Language Theory, and I get to deploy those, and while it’s fun, there are no highs from it. I’ve had good reason for a couple of highs recently, but they just don’t happen.

• Zoloft: Be the best possible drone you could be.


• Zoloft: You will no longer contain multitudes


• Zoloft: You’ll still have insomnia, you just won’t care.


• Zoloft: Your libido would probably just have gotten you into trouble anyway.


• Zoloft: It doesn’t matter if you liked your demons. Capitalism needs you!


• Zoloft: Because disruption is for oligarchs, not laborers.