"there's a national adderall shortage"

-the guy at my CVS

As you can tell from the fact that this newsletter never comes out on the same day or at the same time, I struggle with a little disorder called ADHD. My erratic use of punctuation might have also been a dead-giveaway. And if you’ve watched my videos or listened to my podcast, you’ve probably noticed that I tend to have a lot of verbal tics or that I occasionally stutter. When my stutter was really bad as a kid or when I was teased by other kids my mom would lovingly lie to me and say that I stuttered because my brain was too fast for my lips. I wish more kids with speech or learning disabilities could enjoy the same reframing of their most frustrating flaws, not as evidence of an incurable weakness, but as proof of a magic superpower.

But it’s not just my mom. Like many other wonderful people in my life, the copyeditor of this newsletter, is very patient with me too. When we worked at Vox together making 2016ish and Consider It, he would review my scripts and take on many of the detail-oriented tasks so that I could focus on big picture and creative tasks which are much easier for me. He will do edits for this newsletter at 1am to make sure that I don’t write “pubic” instead of “public” which is totally a made-up example that has definitely never happened.

Like plenty of other women who got a late diagnosis of ADHD, I was labelled “distracted,” “inconsistent,” and as a “careless girl.” I didn’t just think something was wrong with me, I knew something was wrong with me. No matter how hard I studied or how much I prepared, I couldn’t get straight A’s. I concluded that I was stupid, a limiting belief that I am still working painstakingly hard to unlearn about myself.

As is common with girls, I had the mix of both inattentive and hyperactive-impulsive symptoms, which made my symptoms easier to chalk up to a ditzy personality. My speech was loud, pacey and clumsy. I hated reading because I couldn’t sustain the attention required to retain much. Audiobooks didn’t exist yet, so I would pay my best friend a portion of my allowance to read me assigned Balzac readings out-loud while I lied down in bed so that I could pass the comprehension exam. So what I lacked in attention, I definitely was lucky to have made up with incredible friends. When we got older, the same friend would also help me locate various lost items I would leave like a Hansel and Gretel trail behind me after any night out.

It’s not often talked about, but children with ADHD are 4.6 times more likely to be involved in accidents. I would get injured a lot, falling into or off various surfaces. I spent three winters in a row in crutches in college because I kept breaking and spraining my left foot. Today, there is plenty of research showing the higher likelihood of accidents and injuries for children and adults with ADHD, but back then, I just concluded that clumsiness was another thing I just couldn’t get right. When I was 19-years-old I came home with two giant bloody scabs on my knees because I had accidentally fallen into a hole on the street and my dad just starting yelling at me. “You’re just unbelievable!” he shouted wide-eyed and aghast that I could do something so thoughtless. I know he was trying to protect me but it only drilled down the idea that I was defective even more.

Having undiagnosed ADHD is continually being embarrassed by behaviors that you’re told to control, but that you simply cannot help. It’s like gasping for air to stay afloat with a pair of deflated floaties while everyone around you seems to naturally float with ease. It’s the embarrassment that can sting the most.

I cried when read Dr Gabor Maté’s book Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Disorder when he wrote that one of the biggest injuries of being undiagnosed with ADHD is the humiliation. I could deal with wasting hundreds of dollars on replacing lost items, missed flights and doctors appointments for accidents, but it was the judgement I would feel from others which I internalized as my own voice, that was the most ruinous. The most lasting ADHD tax wasn’t to my wallet, it was to my psyche. Even though I have lost or broken every phone, pair of keys and every pair of sunglasses I had ever owned, those objects were replaceable. The punctured self-esteem and the coping mechanisms I developed as a result of it, I’m still working hard to free myself from.

Maté is one of the few physicians who talks about attention deficit in a way that makes me feel like recovery is possible. He says that ADHD “is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment” He believes that it’s not as a result of permanent unchangeable neurological issues, but rather often as a result of trauma, which means it can healed. Children learn to tune out to survive. It creates delays in emotional self-regulation but it can be reversed.

While medication isn’t for everybody, adderall has been helpful as a resource I can use on days when I’m especially disregulated, but yesterday I went to my local CVS and was told my prescription couldn’t be filled, indeterminably. “There’s a national shortage,” the pharmacist told me with the tone of a barista who just announced they’re run out of almond milk but still have oat. When I asked if he could help me get my prescription filed at another pharmacy he added “there’s no more adderall in Williamsburg,” which felt like the first line in a true crime podcast where under-medicated women who are already experiencing a tampon shortage and are on the brink of losing their most fundamental human right to bodily autonomy finally lose it and start breaking stuff. When I Googled to learn more about this adderall shortage I was shocked to find a huge zero articles about it. So naturally, like any millennial with an attention deficit disorder, I turned to TikTok. I posted a video asking people to tell me if they had been experiencing this and was shocked to find that I wasn’t alone.

@lizplanklet’s go #adhd tik tok

Tiktok failed to load.

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I didn’t just hear from people who couldn’t access their ADHD medication in New York City boroughs in the comments, I also heard from people in Albany, Dallas, Phoenix, Denver, St-Louis, Miami, Salt Lake City, Des Moines, New Orleans, Orlando, Charleston, Philly, Albany, Chicago, Houston and Lincoln, Nebraska. “LA been out for over a month I’m raw dogging it,” said one user. “Between the tampons and ADHD medication—I’m not sure the country is prepared for the chaos of unmedicated ADHD women with out access to tampons,” said another. Other users commented that telehealth apps were to blame for taking advantage of lax pandemic rules and over-prescribing adderall, something I did find reported in the Wall Street Journal.

So let’s do our thing Airplane Mode! Have you had trouble accessing your medication recently? Do you or your family members want to talk to me about it? Leave a comment and let’s crack this case!

Liz-