As most of you know, having ADD/ADHD is some people's golden ticket to free access to prescription medication that helps them crank out some extra assignments or stay awake longer. Once you cut through all the young adults that ask to buy our medication from us, you'll reach the people who have to take this to even achieve a somewhat normal day. In this article I plan to shed some light on what it is like for someone with ADD/ADHD to function with their medication and what it's like without it.

Day 1- With Medication

I wake up just a little bit later than usual and take my medicine at 10 a.m. on the dot.

During this time I go through my normal morning routine of getting ready by picking out what I'm going to wear, brush my teeth (2 minutes exactly), and getting dressed. At this point, my medicine has already started taking its normal effect on me. Whereas anyone sound could distract me from one thing I was focusing on, I can hold my focus on that one thing. While this is great here is what I continue to experience throughout the rest of the day:

Dry Mouth- no matter how much water I drink, it's never enough to make the dry mouth feeling go away.

Loss of appetite- throughout the entire day the only thing I had to eat was an ice cream cone from when my roommate took me, other than that I had no desire to eat at all.

Heavily deepened depression- I have struggled with depression the majority of my life and unfortunately, when I take my medicine, it takes control of my body. I become a zombie to my emotions and feel number even after the medicine has worn off. I don't really even talk to or interact with people as I do normally.

While I was able to accomplish all of the tasks I had to do for the day and had what some people would consider a "normal" day, I feel like I'm not even in my own body. I feel as though what makes me "me" takes a back seat and something else takes over. It truly makes me feel like a totally different person.

All of this JUST to help reign my focus in to get daily tasks done.

Day 2- No Medication

I wake up in time to get ready for class, it takes me a little bit longer to get ready this day. As I'm going through my normal routine I forget what I was meaning to move on to next, where I placed the shoes I wanted to wear, and even that I put my keys in my purse. I forget my backpack even though I had just told myself to make sure to grab it. I now have 30 minutes to drive to campus and walk to class. When I park on campus I turn my car off and get out, forgetting to unlock the back passenger door, I try to open it to get my backpack. I grab my keys, close the doors, lock them 5 times because I get distracted and can't remember if I locked them.

At this point I'm walking to class, thinking about what I have to do for the rest of the day, I get a social media notification and quickly forget my last thought.

I make it to class, math of course, and struggle the entire time with constant small distractions. Clicks of pencils, people moving in their seats, the sound of people whispering to one another about the problem being discussed. To me, there was so much noise I was trying to filter out just to even hear the professor explain a simple percents problem.

After a grueling day of class, trying to focus, I go home to get ready for work. As I'm getting ready I tell myself I need to pack my dinner for when I take a break, I forget about it until I am halfway to work. As I'm driving I tell myself that I need to check my assignment due dates when I get out of the car for me to work on when I get home, I forget. The entire time at work I am constantly mind juggling the tuning out of music over customer questions. I hear the beeps of the scanner from an associate ringing up a transaction plus the music plus customers talking plus the visual distractions from how bright the store it plus the traffic from the customers in the mall.

By the time I get home and get in bed I realize that I have an assignment due in 45 minutes and frantically try to focus long enough to try to pull out at least a B on the assignment.

There are people who will say that they have to take an Adderall or a Focalin for them to do good on a paper (or crank one out because they procrastinated for too long). Some people will even say that my medication isn't even necessary. While I wish I could say I like who I am without medication, my life really and truly is so much harder without it. While I know that this article really won't change some people's minds about taking it necessarily, I at least ask that you think twice when you go up to someone you actually know who needs it to function to buy their pills from them.