The Stimulated

Short Story Fiction

(Author’s Note: This one’s about my greatest fear.)

There’s a Reaping, a universal test we all go through - and this is where many end their journey. This evolutionary checkpoint wrings spirits of the childish, squeezes out idealism, and shakes off fanciful notions to keep the System going. Some call it the 27 Club, others call it a Saturn Return, and most call it Growing Pains. It’s not like we are taught about it, no. It’s not really acknowledged - but if you’re over the age of 30 you know that during the ages of 27-29 no matter how on-paper-perfect your life seemed you were losing parts of yourself and you were scared as hell about it.

Like everything else, there’s consequences or rewards for how you transition from childhood idealism to adult resignation. Obviously, it’s a pass-or-fail system - no it’s not gonna be spelled out for you but you’ll know which side you land on. The rewards? Not really worth mentioning - they kinda suck anyhow. The main thing of it is - this is how it works. You’re not crazy. Life really is rigged and the best you can do is hang on. In spite.

The Reaping is the System’s way of clearing out its threats - but not everyone who dies was some big threat, in fact, they might have tried hard to give the System what it wanted but destroyed themselves in that process. The point is - this is just how it goes. It’s unfair but it’s inescapable - no need to shut your eyes to it. Their pain is your roadmap. So keep reading, maybe you’ll learn something.

“Babe, you’re biting your nails again,” Roan grabs my hand and guides it away from my face. I feel like such an infant when he does this shit. This stupid feeling of getting caught doing something I should have better control over.

“Yeah, I always zone out during movies and it just happens without me realizing it, it’s so annoying.” It’s the same response I always give. A bad habit I’ve had since three and haven’t been able to break - nail biting, skin picking, hair pulling.

I’m not extreme about it with open sores or bald spots - but I am habitual and do leave minor evidential marks sometimes. It was worse the more free time and angst I had as a teenager - mom would warn me, “You’re gonna get lip cancer if you don’t stop that Ariel”, but the need to peel and prod outweighed the fear she tried to strike in me.

This default urge exists in stillness and silence - both of which I make sure are rare. My body-focused behaviors aren’t so bad that strangers notice - but anyone who lives with me eventually notices my stack of bad habits and it becomes their cross to bear - the job of trying to save me from myself.

Some are cursed with the kind of broken mind that demands constant dopamine and stimulation.

We were warned against drugs at every turn. Lucky me, attending elementary school during the D.A.R.E. Campaign era, and then in middle school, it was suddenly punk to be StraightxEdge. Even if half my friends did drugs anyway, there was a respect and reference I felt from them for staying totally clean. It’s not like they wanted to get caught up in something crazy and be the next Florida Man high on bath salts ripping someone’s face off. They had their limits and they stuck with the safer stuff. I stuck with what felt safe too - so at ninth-grade parties and concerts, while they were sneaking alcohol, weed, and the occasional 8-ball, I was downing Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar.

That first Red Bull coded into my brain as a peak experience.

Filed in there along with Warped Tour days, senior class trip, hang-gliding in Brazil, my steamy first date with Roan that ended in floor sex by the fireplace, Paris, holding our baby - the caffeine substances have meaning, and the meaning is monumental. There’s no letting go now.

Not only a means of euphoria and nostalgia, caffeine is a safety net that cradles sad minds without attracting judgment. Even when the judgment comes, it can easily be wafted away with all of the strong opinion pieces and scientific reviews out there that declare their health and productivity benefits in moderation. Moderation being up to 400mg or 2 daily energy drinks. Easy. I don’t need three- but I have to have one.

Whether the reviews are good or bad, I couldn’t live without caffeine anymore, but it’s nice that the guilt and shame are only occasional, not constant, due to its wide acceptance.

Another thing is - I had what you call maladaptive daydreaming my whole life until that first sip of caffeine. Nothing in real life felt stimulating enough for me to focus on and my brain worked overtime to spin crazy fantasies and adventures in my head while teachers droned on. I still got As, but I had to layer on extra noise and words and chaos just to keep myself in that damn chair. It must’ve been why I went to over 300 concerts while in high school - many times on school nights. Overstimulating environments felt like heaven to me. Eventually, my need for chaotic environments tampered down as my caffeine intake went up and when dopamine could be siphoned by plugging into the black hole of the iPhone.

The problem is, nothing can stop a brain hell-bent on 24/7 stimulation.

Tolerance builds, society demands, and the flag pole moves.

“I don’t know how you do it, Ariel. Seeing 20 patients?! I’m drowning in paperwork with my six,” Beth had knocked on my door to ask about the patients’ lunch menu, and our conversation devolved into gripes about the stressful work environment.

“They told me I’d be maxed at 15 and now they’re saying there is no actual max and our location can take on more clients since we have two interns right now,” I add, fuming.

“Jesus Christ - the two interns who can’t even do a proper vitals check or set the dining area? As if that helps anything - we gotta constantly babysit them - it’s just more work!”, Beth stokes the fire of our shared fury, “We don’t need interns, we need another dietitian. How is that we have three therapists and only one of you to handle all of the nutrition - a pretty damn critical part of eating disorder treatment.”

“I can’t even believe that we, as therapists and dietitians, not only have to handle the usual patient care. They also make us take vitals, do dishes, assemble meals, order food, and run art therapy groups. We’re overworked and underpaid.” It’s the first of many times Beth and I would bitch and moan in each others’ offices when we needed a reprieve from our ever-piling patient documentation.

My grad school friends would tell me to quit my toxic job, “You’re worth so much more - you have a damn MBA!” A healthcare degree, a professional license, and the business acumen to take over the world - but my time was already up. My loved ones were sick of my shit, tired of the last decade of trying on different careers as flippantly as one would try on a different pair of jeans. Out of grad school, my friends were entering the corporate workforce in Chicago making double what I was making as a specialized dietitian in Florida. While they were signing up to be another talking piece and a small but well-compensated cog in the Kellogg’s cereal line machine, I had already run through dozens of experiences, internships, side hustles, and self-starter projects—one of which landed me a top spot in a startup incubator. Each promising path would shatter beneath me and I couldn’t understand why I kept walking away. Kept searching. Before the dietitian license, it was a private pilot’s license. Before the private pilot license, it was a personal trainer’s license. My decade-long eating disorder and fascination with food led me to go after the license (while trying out lots of other paths simultaneously), but once I healed my relationship with food I was ready to move on. Close to 30, thousands of dollars sunk into a bullshit license - I couldn’t try on another career. I had to preserve in the pit.

A dopamine-lacking brain makes you run from what’s mundane and predictable. If too much of your time gets slogged down with repetitive tasks, phrases, people, and problems, your fight or flight gets activated. Without enough lulls on the job in which to escape and recharge with the go-to stimulators that give your brain the dopamine dumps it needs - it’s like your brain starts dying.

Working as an eating disorder dietitian is when the awful brain fog started. A deep panic set in about having early-onset Alzheimer’s. Lab work would always be normal, ‘you’re healthy as a horse’ they’d say. I knew there was something wrong with my brain - something they couldn’t just run a test for and find. I was up to three energy drinks a day.

“I’m burnt out, I‘m stuck. I can’t do anything after work. At work - I can’t think anymore. I can’t remember anything,” I said as the alternative medicine nurse practitioner nodded empathetically while typing down notes.

Wellbutrin, Vyvanse, Ritalin, Phentermine, Adderall. We worked me up to the daddy of all stimulants - the last resort due to overprescription and shortage issues.

I felt no different on Wellbutrin, Vyvanse, or Ritalin. Phentermine gave me night sweats, hot flashes, bad breath, dry mouth, and nausea. Adderall gave me hope again.

With Adderall, the energy drinks cut down to once a day again. Roan wanted me to quit drinking them altogether - not because of their content but because of their price. “$100 a month on drinks - can’t you just use our coffee maker or boil tea? It’d be so much cheaper?”, Roan would grumble. “Not if you want me to be a contributing member to society and your wallet - those aren’t strong enough for me.”, I’d argue back. The only time I had enough willpower to stop energy drinks was while I was pregnant and during those nine months, my only responsibility was to attend some MBA classes. Learning new subjects of interest I’d chosen to engage with was stimulating enough to power through. Outside of the classes, I was like a narcoleptic vegetable. I’d nap constantly. I didn’t want to see friends. I didn’t so much as go for walks. I would just lay in bed, feeling parasitic. The experiences with and without stimulants further evidenced the enormity of the boulder I had to roll up the hill each day to achieve normal adult expectations. To survive.

The Adderall is supposed to override your brain’s constant search for distractions (dopamine). Since your brain can’t manage its own dopamine and reward system like brains are supposed to, what should be autonomic like breathing air and digesting food, is instead off-line, disconnected, M.I.A. I don’t really know what’s going on in there but the officer is not reporting for duty. Just like someone whose intestines stop digesting properly would need an external feeding tube, or whose lungs ain’t working properly needs a ventilator, some unlucky bastards need to develop a caffeine, stimulant, and dopamine addiction to be able to dedicate a sliver of the time they aren’t feeding their addiction toward making money so they can live another day. The way it goes with most things - what's stimulating is illegal, addictive, impractical, and unsustainable in the long term. How it also goes is that everything that’s stimulating will bring you to a place of numbness and ruin if you get addicted. The trick is to not get addicted to any one type of stimulant. Some are cursed to need it more than others, but you gotta figure out how to cheat the system.

My problem is that I never became a sex addict. I never got into video games. Gambling and lotto tickets seemed too irrational and improbable to me. A shopping addiction would be sweet if I had a sugar daddy but otherwise, I was tame with my spending. I didn’t have a smoking habit. I consciously put my love addiction days behind me once I got married. I couldn’t develop a proper work addiction since I hated subjecting myself to someone else’s mundane task list. I overcame my exercise and food addiction through rigorous education and self-reflection. I’d tire of drinking after two or three glasses and only cared to do it socially. I put all my eggs in a singular caffeine-amphetamine basket. Never go all in with one addiction. If you have to be an addict - and some of us are cursed to be, make sure you find a way to switch it up every couple of years. I know, I know, it’s not that easy to just replace one addiction with another. Sometimes you just can’t break the chain. The chain breaks you.

I went on, 27-29, washing my morning Adderall down with my morning Celsius - getting through work numb but capable, unsatisfied but sustained.

On one ordinary morning before work, as my alarm went off and I sat up to turn it off - my heart began racing rapidly. The beating was so wild that as I clutched my chest instinctively, I was horrified at feeling my heart vibrate and leap around so dramatically that it made me jump backward and then jump sideways off my bed as if trying to escape from the wild organ. The rapid beating only intensified with the feeling of an invisible hand tightening its grip and squeezing hard around the organ. My eyes rolled backward and above me, I saw a figure in a cloak as dark as the void, the Reaper, towering over me. Turning a scythe downward toward me, I raised my hand up to touch it - to be saved. The chain came down with the scythe, wrapping around my wrists and pulling me up.