Dear Reader,

You are about take on one of the great challenges of your young life. It will change you forever. For a while you will have to give up many of the qualities you cherish most in yourself. It will take an excruciatingly long time, but in the end you will be no less than 100 times the person you are today.

You are going to quit Adderall.

Adderall takes all of your best productive qualities: your passion, your drive, your work-ethic, your confidence, your focus — and amplifies them tenfold. It makes you love any task in front of you. Tasks that you’d normally hate suddenly become incredibly enjoyable and you commit yourself fully to them. And then you start to depend on it.

And that is the evil of the thing. By giving you instant motivation, passion, drive, focus and love for the task in front of you, it prevents you from developing those qualities naturally. By making you passionate about EVERYTHING it pulls you away from the process of finding the true passions of your heart and cripples your natural development as a person.

Your mind and your life have grown dependant on having this crutch as a part of your daily routine. Wake up. Pop pill. Be Superman.

Your challenge will be finding out how to wake up and be Superman without popping a pill.

Make no mistake, this process will involve nothing less than you rebuilding yourself anew from scratch. You are going to willingly sacrifice many of your best qualities to a purifying fire. You are sacrificing them to a vision of the man you know that you can be. You are sacrificing them because you know with all your heart that you have to; that this is the next step that your journey requires; this is the only way for you to achieve the true passion and genuine happiness and deep fulfillment and incredible mastery over life that you crave. The pills have allowed you to fake those things. Now you want them for real. Because you know that when they are real they are infinitely more powerful; when they are real they are invincible.

You will notice the bad changes almost immediately. You will be lazy, depressed. You will have no drive, no ambition; You will have no fire nor passion nor spine; no confidence, no courage, no discipline — none of the qualities you had so much of for so long.

Remember: the confident, brilliant, driven person you have been on Adderrall — that is who you are; not the desolate wretch you’re going to seem like (to others) over the next several months (or more). Those qualities you are going to miss so much are qualities you will have again and many times over, but you will have to work your way back to them ever so gradually.

It will take many months before you start to see some noticeable progress, because most of your progress will be internal for the first phase. You and many of the people closest to you will be frustrated with it. They will want the old you back. And you will be so tempted to give it to them, because you want it too.

But you won’t go back. Because for all the struggles and stresses that will weigh on you, you will feel the current of destiny pushing you along at all times…the current that you couldn’t feel during your time on Adderall….a force that makes you feel like every mistake you make somehow moves you ahead…a feeling of constant, unyielding forward motion underlying all your actions, for better or worse. Pay attention to this feeling; draw faith and strength from it.

Little by little you will build yourself back, stronger than ever, out of brick and mortar instead of glass. It will take a long time for you to find and rebuild your confidence and drive again. But from day 1 onward you will feel yourself drifting towards your true passions, your true abilities, and your true destiny.

Within 6 months you will have an idea of what you want to do next…an idea of where your heart wants you to go now that you can finally hear its voice clearly.

If you are dating somebody, you will have to lean on them heavily during this period. He/she will be the only thing you have going for you. Your life outside of them will be a complete mess.

Show them this page. Warn them first. Give them an idea of what they’re in for. Tell them what they can expect. Then tell them how much they mean to you. Tell them that when you come out of this, you want them by your side. Tell them that, as an act of respect for the love you share, you want to give them the greatest gift you can: you as you were meant to be. Tell them that your love for them has helped inspire you to make this change…assuming all of that is true. Short-term this may be incredibly difficult, but long-term it is the only way to be true to them.

But know that there’s a chance your relationship won’t make it through this. Your significant other may reach their limit at some point. Or in your weakness you may make some mistakes you can’t take back. If that happens do not be afraid. Remember how easy and self-indulgent and goal-focused your life was when you were single and on Adderall? Well, it’s doubly so off Adderall. You will have this fear that if your relationship ends you will be even more lost because you won’t have your pills to keep you busy. But the opposite is true. Your recovery will almost certainly require you to go it alone for a bit. It is not as bad as you think it’s going to be. In fact, it’s pretty sweet in a lot of ways.

Remember who you are going to be at the end of this battle. Never lose faith in that vision. It is true and pure and absolutely real, no matter how low you may feel on a given day.

This decision to give in to truth, this final act of courage you’ve summoned to murder your false self and take your chances with what’s underneath — this will be your glory, and will lead you back to all those dreams you’ve been mourning. Godspeed, dear reader…Godspeed.

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