> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # ADHD Relief and Grief, and other Odds and Ends - URL: https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/adhd-relief-and-grief-and-other-odds-and-ends/ - Published: 2026-09-27T17:12:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-27T19:23:50.000Z - Author: Alex Steed Okay, Happy Sunday. Below are a number a stories and other odds and ends that have caught my eye lately, and below that is meaty meditation on being medicated for ADHD after having not been for quite some time. It’s about the experience of having ADHD generally, about how that experience is shaped by public attitudes about neurodivergence and about the disaster that is the American healthcare system. It’s about relief and it’s about grief. **Stories and Odds and Ends:** *The New York Times* released their [list of the 100 best television shows of the 21st century](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/arts/television/print-best-tv-shows-21st-century.html?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io), which sparked a great deal of discourse regarding what they missed. I had a near heart attack when I couldn't find The Leftovers on the list, but it's there at number 25 and I'm just a bad looker. No Adventure Time and no Tim and Eric, which is wild considering the impact and influence of both. No GLOW, which is a bummer based on that one abortion episode that makes me cry every time I watch it. As I say on *You Are Good*, the best way to stoke engagement is to be confidently wrong about something. Speaking of *You Are Good*, I covered the movie Girls Trip this week with my great friend [Leslie Gray Streeter](https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/girls-trip-w-leslie-gray-streeter/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io). Unrelated to nothing I typically cover here, but related to my belief that pro-wrestling can kinda explain a whole lot of things about American politics—veteran professional wrestler Christy Hemme [released a white paper about the occupational risk to pro wrestlers](https://www.postwrestling.com/2026/09/25/christy-hemme-releases-white-paper-on-occupational-risk-to-pro-wrestlers-and-questions-worker-classification/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io): > Christy Hemme spent more than two decades in professional wrestling as a performer in WWE and TNA and also as a producer and department head with TNA. Her new white paper, “Wrestlers Are Wrestling: Occupational Risk and the Structure of Professional Wrestling,” (viewable here) argues that — despite the presumptive decline in substance abuse in the industry that contributed to many deaths a generation ago — wrestlers still carry a concerning health risk that is disproportionate to that of the general population. Speaking of pro-wrestling being a Rosetta stone of the intersection of American politics and popular culture, Josie Reisman wrote a remarkable book called [Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America](https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/children-of-men-w-josephine-riesman/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io) a few years back. She recently joined me to talk *Children of Men* on *You Are Good* and an excerpt from her forthcoming book [The Last Temptation of Beck](https://josie.zone/hollywood-freaks?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io) just [ran in Vulture](https://www.vulture.com/article/beck-scientology-leigh-limon-sea-change.html?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io)! My friend and O.C., Again cohost Niko Stratis says of the book: > “An amazing read, both for longtime obsessive fans and wild-eyed newcomers… The beauty of Beck is how he defies the trappings of genre and style, just as readily showing you his scars as he does all his favorite tricks. How lucky for us then that Josephine Riesman’s book manages to reveal all his carefully hidden truths, while never fully ruining what pleasure comes of bearing witness to Beck’s legendary oeuvre.” Also, [Niko's newsletter *Anxiety Shark*](https://www.anxietyshark.ca/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io) is a revelation. [](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Ringmaster/Abraham-Josephine-Riesman/9781982169459?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io)Since linking their meditations on Hellraiser recently, I've been tearing through Morbid Zoo's back catalogue of video essays. This [recent meditation on their distaste for the new Spiderman movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVKOTf6ZbEU&ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io) because of its mismanagement of the use of the Punisher in the context of his present iconography is excellent. Variety ran this perplexing headline about a computer program: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f9/84/f984f580-9ef3-40f2-b295-4c6cf3f5af50/content/images/2026/09/Screenshot-2026-09-27-at-9.53.24---AM.png) In related coverage, X users added this community note: > Tilly Norwood is a fictional AI-generated character created by Particle6 founder Eline van der Velden, not a real or independent actress. Statements attributed to her are generated or scripted by its human creators for promotional events. This time last year, Lyz Lenz posted [They want to replace women with AI](https://lyz.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-real-women): > It’s not likely Norwood’s career will extend much beyond the horny imaginations of AI slop creators and the libidinal minds of sweaty economics professors. But it matters that one of the first AI bots forced upon us as a new vision of the future is a woman. It matters that in the cultural imaginings of men, she’s a pliable virgin. > Society doesn’t want real human women. The ALEX Project (no relation) [rightly asks](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdWRpgeiPmP/?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ%3D%3D&ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io): > "Aren't we all 'selling our bodies' under capitalism? Why is the concept of 'selling your body' for money only controversial when sex workers do it?" Did you know I am [an extra in this MGMT music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX5NIs8bV54&ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io)? We got sprayed down with 55 gallons of Nickelodeon style slime (the late 90s / 2000s era formula, not the chunky *You Can't Do That On Television* style of slime). The header image to this post is pulled from the video, which was directed by my friends Tom Scharpling and Julia Vickerman. Finally, if you'll be in Los Angels on October 7th, [I am producing this event for my friend Siri Dahl](https://calendar.elysiantheater.com/shows/siri-dahl-presents-first-thirst-live-october-07-2026-752793/?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io). **Stuff I covered here earlier this week:** - [Articles of Interest: Sex Dolls, Sex Arms, Sex Bots, Sex Gods, Sex Movies and Pivotal Trash](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/articles-of-interest-sex-dolls-sex-arms-sex-bots-and-sex-gods/) - [Ask Alex: How do I get along with my difficult parent?](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/ask-alex-how-do-i-get-along-with-my-difficult-parent/) - [Ask Alex: Why do I keep dreaming about my ex? ](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/alex-alex-why-do-i-keep-dreaming-about-my-ex/) - [Articles of Interest: Empathy Entropy](https://it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io/articles-of-interest-empathy-entropy/) **Relief and Grief:** I am newly back on a regular prescription of ADHD medication and therapy. As I've described elsewhere, this comes with a very quick and large hit of relief. I'll explain why shortly. But it also comes with a substantial feeling of grief. That grief is tied to my overall experience with ADHD and a later-in-life diagnosis, and to a number of feelings about those experiences. I'll touch on some of them here. I've tried to get these thoughts down a few times this week, now that I'm medicated enough to do so but each time I’ve become overwhelmed by recalling just how stupid the reasons for this gap has been. But I want to talk about what this process is like for two reasons. One, as validation for people who experience similar struggles. Two, as an explanation for people who may not be aware of the process, how it manifests, and the struggles that come from it. Whenever I say something like "I've been unmedicated for months now," or mention trouble with my medication and my provider, I get one of two reactions. Some people very knowingly acknowledge the experience. Others seem caught off guard by a severity they assumed was minor. To be fair, there are a lot of reasons for that. At least one is general attitudes about ADHD. I don't think people arrive at those attitudes on their own. They're largely propagandized through how we think about laziness, progress, labor, productivity, will, and choice, particularly in the United States. On top of that, "discourse" about ADHD and neuroatypicality is a huge driver of shallow engagement. It especially rewards people who are skeptical from an uncritical standpoint, because that skepticism generates attention and traffic. These are all avenues I'll touch on eventually. If not now, then in a future meditation. I saw a tweet the other day that read “[T*he way people talk about ADHD on here is a psyop to trick you into not doing things and being a loser. You can read books. You can show up on time. You can work a job. You can do the dishes. You can do anything.”*](https://x.com/saturnalreturn/status/2103366086607749489?ref=it-can-only-get-stranger.ghost.io) A number of people replied, essentially saying that people with ADHD are faking it or blowing their experience out of proportion. I realize that's engagement bait. But I can say this for sure. For whatever it's worth, I'm an incredibly curious person who loves learning. Until I was diagnosed, I had read maybe 10 books cover to cover in my entire life. Not for lack of wanting to. Since my diagnosis, I've read hundreds. I'd feel too bold saying over a thousand, but honestly, I don't know. I haven't kept a list. Treatment fundamentally changed what I was able to do. That suggests there was a disability standing between me and those books. The real psyop is believing that disability can be surmounted by will alone. Do I think social media enables some degree of over-identification with diagnosis? For some people, possibly. Do I think that tendency exists across the board? No. Does the allure of over-identifying exist because many of us were told we struggled because we were stupid and lazy? Because we were told will alone would get us out of it? Because that was an extraordinarily alienating experience, and it's still being doubled and tripled down on in the form of cheap engagement bait? Yes. Yes, it does. It doesn't exist just because it can. It exists because something drives it. And lot of people are just trying to make up for the times they felt alone in that alienation. And of course, there are parts of algorithmic capitalism that look to sell fulfillment wherever we feel unfulfilled, with offers and promises that require some form of identification. We can't ignore that. It absolutely happens. But none of that means the driving force, the disability itself, isn't real. Especially when the argument comes from people who don't experience it. People who think those of us who do are, on some level, imagining it. And if we're not imagining it, we're just not trying hard enough. I was first prescribed medication for ADHD when I was 23\. The story of that diagnosis is for another time. But here is what I've learned. When you're medicated and have access to a provider who will write a script and a therapist, it's best not to disrupt either relationship, because reestablishing them is hard. It's harder to reestablish a relationship with a prescriber than with a therapist, but both can be difficult to maintain. This is especially true for me. Every time I've been diagnosed, it hasn't just been ADHD. It's been severe, multi-type ADHD. I don’t know what that range looks like in lived experience, but I know that no provider has looked at my case and described it as subtle. So consider how many steps even a minor blip requires. You have to find a doctor. You have to find a doctor who works with your insurance. There will almost certainly be issues with your insurance covering the medication. You have to get the prescription to the pharmacy. It's a controlled substance, so there are stricter protocols around getting it to and from the pharmacy. Several times a year, the insurance provider interrupts the process with additional steps, and you have to ask your doctor to re-substantiate why they're prescribing it. Everything requires new and different steps. Assume, for a moment, that you believe ADHD is real and comes in levels of severity. For someone whose ADHD has been described as severe, each of these interruptions can lead to a long disconnect from the treatment I need. It interrupts my whole life. Unmedicated, any task takes five times as long. One productive day medicated equals five unproductive days. My ability to process dopamine normally is greatly limited. Small bouts of what feel like depression recur unexpectedly. Then I spiral out of the ability to get back on track, because of all these interruptions, and so on. Invisible disability is... I have so much internalized ablism that I've only recently started using the word disability. Like the critics, I for a long time could not see this thing that's affecting me. If it were physical, people could picture how it interrupts life and makes things difficult. I experience it, but I still can't see it. It has long been hard to accept that this is what it is. But it interrupts my life, and it has greatly interrupted my life. The minute there's a substantial interruption, it spirals in magnitude. Then it becomes a norm I have to live with until I can get it together enough to fix things. All of this is why I used to drive to Stockton. Starting in 2022, I was living half time in Stockton and half time in Los Angeles, and I had a doctor in Stockton who would write my prescription. Even after I moved to LA full time, I kept driving there. That's a 650-mile round trip to get my medication. This doctor was great, by the way. He seemed about 100 years old but like weirdly strong. His office was all wood paneling. Every sign on the wall was taped up with yellowed Scotch tape. Nothing looked like it had changed since the 1980s. The whole interior was cardboard file boxes, stacked on stacks on stacks. It was a truly remarkable place. And when he looked at my chart, there were no questions about my prescription. He checked in on it regularly, but he honored my medical history. That matters. I move a good deal, for work and for life. Every time you move, you have to reestablish this relationship. You have to hope your new doctor has a competent or driven enough staff to get your medical history and honor it. Knowing this, when I moved to LA full time, I thought: I have a good thing going. It cost me a couple hundred dollars to fill a prescription. But I knew what it was like to make this transition and have it interrupted. So I kept going. Eventually, my insurance provider interrupted things for administrative reasons. I needed to establish my address in Los Angeles, and I could no longer see a doctor so far out of network. So I had to find a doctor in LA. This is where things got very funny. **One.** My insurance provider connected me with a primary care physician. I was supposed to get a physical there so they could refer me to a specialist, who could then prescribe my medication. I called and called and called that doctor to set up an appointment. No answer. I called the insurance company. The back and forth went on for a couple of weeks. Keep in mind, I was a couple of weeks from running out, because I only had a month's supply from my prior doctor. All of that time went to trying to get an appointment but even with medication on my side it was a series of dead ends. The insurance company was dismissive. Then a friend, listening in on one of the calls, suggested I have the insurance company call the doctor with me on the line. I did. The line was disconnected. I poked around and searched the doctor's name. It turned out the doctor they had so confidently assigned as my primary care physician had been in the news for Medicaid fraud, going back to the year before. This doctor had been out of commission for that long, and the insurance provider assigned them to me anyway. That's the beginning of the journey. **Two.** I was finally connected with a doctor's office that would see me, and they referred me to their mental health department. It's worth noting that in California, at least, providers require a monthly check-in to keep a prescription going, especially for controlled substances. These tend to be five-minute telehealth meetings, billed to your insurance at somewhere between $200 and $300\. So my new doctor referred me to someone within their own medical group to start that relationship. They didn't make the appointment for me. All the doctor did was give me a physical to confirm I was in shape for the year, for the insurance provider. And they gave me a phone number to call. I called the number. It went nowhere. I called my doctor back and asked why, as my primary care physician, they couldn't prescribe a medication I had a history with. They said they had no records of my diagnosis. I pointed them to my past provider. I called the past provider. They said they had received the request and sent my records. This went back and forth for at least month. Finally my doctor said that without records, I'd need to be re-diagnosed by their mental health department for which no number appeared to work. **Three.** After playing phone tag with the mental health office, I finally tracked down their new number. For some reason it isn't in their phone tree. Every time someone at the group gave me a number, it was some version of the main line, and it didn't go through. Once I got through, they explained they’d been having “phone issues.” They put me through re-diagnosis, which cost $500 Again, I was shown to have severe ADHD. I finally got connected with a provider. She told me I really shouldn’t have gaps in my medication use if I can avoid it and I explained everything about my experience with their office to date and she changed the subject. Then that person left a few months in. Immediately, it became impossible to get prescriptions filled or book new sessions. The office was that backed up and that short on providers. **Four.** I called to make a new appointment. There was no voicemail set up anymore. **Five.** I called again. Now there was a voicemail, but it didn't say who it belonged to. I left a message. Ten days later, I got a message back saying I could set up an appointment in two months. **Six.** I got a bill from the medical provider indicating the insurance provider had denied all of this coverage. Now I had to prove to the insurance company that the mental health office was part of the medical group they cover in network. They said it wasn't, because the name on the bills didn't match the doctors who actually provided the services. This is true, but I can’t confirm this without being on the phone with the company for a few hours collectively. I looked up the name on the bills. It belonged to a telehealth provider listed online as practicing in a number of states and based outside California. I got in touch with her and explained what I was going through. I asked if she was still working with this medical group. She said she hadn't been working with them for the entire time they'd been billing under her name. **Seven.** When I put this all in writing to the medical group, they got in touch quickly and told me they were expediting fixing the billing issues with the insurance provider. It was a misunderstanding, a misclassification of bills. It was all the insurance company's fault. They said they'd take care of it immediately. **Eight.** While the mental health office was in disarray, which lasted months, they set me up with a telehealth provider who happened to be a local psychiatrist, contracted to help with their overflow. I told her everything I'd been through. She said, "I know. I'm aware of what's going on here.” It was so validating I got emotional. She said they has a psychiatric practice and her office is good at working with insurance companies and she told me to call them. By this point I was five months without a prescription. She couldn't prescribe me yet, because I hadn't had a new physical. And I hadn't had a new physical because everything was tangled up in the billing situation above. **Nine.** I called her office. Between our schedules, I got in the door a month later. I needed some tests. I went through the whole thing. And just about seven months after I went off my prescription, I was back on it. This is long already, but I want to underscore something for anyone who reads this and wants to ask about details. A lot of this has been consolidated for clarity. I haven't gone into the full volume of hurdles: the calls to quality control at the doctor's office, the calls to the insurance company, all of it. But I'd estimate that over seven months, I spent roughly 40 hours of work just trying to manage this. That's on top of the lost productivity in my own life. It's on top of more frequent depressive episodes. It's on top of the chemical interruptions the medication helps my brain untangle. Forty hours, just trying to get my shit taken care of. Just trying to get a prescription that helps me stay above water. Here's how I describe the difference. When I'm unmedicated, I feel waterlogged. I feel underwater. I feel daunted, and figuratively bloated. The medication creates a kind of dryness that makes a lot of things accessible that otherwise aren't. Otherwise I'm damp and chafed, as it were. So now I'm back. Being back is great. It's nice to be able to do things. But you're immediately able to account for everything you lost in that time. You reverse engineer everything that was lost along the way. Living with the thing itself is not always bad. There are things about ADHD I actually quite enjoy, and I'm happy to go into those some other time. It's the systemic brutality that is extraordinarily depressing. And then I think: I just have ADHD. It is severe, and it is life altering in some ways. People with ADHD have higher rates of substance use disorder, often from trying to self-medicate before they understand what's going on. They have more bouts of depression. I've experienced and lived with these things. But when I think about people who carry more than I do and face the same hurdles, it's horrifying. It is horrifying. So I wanted to share all of this as a look at what I've been going through lately. I hope it's validating for people who have dealt with similar issues to see laid out how absurd this is. When I'm in the middle of it, I wonder, is it truly this crazy? Then I lay it all out, and this is the truncated version, and I think, yes. It is this crazy. And I'm dealing with it with two arms tied behind my back, figuratively. I also want to be clear to anyone looking in. You may not be affected right now by how the medical system and the private insurance system work against us. But someday you will be. No one lives without disability for the whole of their life. At some point you'll have to reckon with this system. If it goes unchanged, I hope it is much kinder to you than it has been to me and to others. But that is not its natural tendency. So please be aware that this is what other people are going through. Anyway, I hope this has been entertaining at the very least, if not illuminating. I have grief and I have resentments. But I'm grateful to be back in some degree of working order, for now.