I’m finally sober now after over six years of having half my will held captive by drugs. I’m also back in school (and just finished my first semester this week!) after being unemployed since dropping out of university at the end of 2014 except for some freelance and temp work and one “real” job in at a call centre handling billing disputes which I quit after two months because the company treated its employees almost as badly as it made us treat the customers.

It’s only two-year college (“community college” if I was American), but I’m so out of practice when it comes to everything from meeting deadlines to not sleeping in until noon that I thought it would be wise to start with something a bit humbler and either go into a bridging program after so I can get a BA with 5 total years of study or, more likely, just go straight into the workforce and eventually study something I’m passionate about but would never get a job with a BA in like philosophy or literature.

Also, this doesn’t count as an achievement, but I recently got formally (re)diagnosed with ADHD and started meds for it after years of knowing I had it but not doing anything about it because I didn’t trust myself with a steady supply of legal amphetamine. Thankfully, I ended up getting prescribed a prodrug which slowly takes effect over ~2 hours starting ~2 hours after you take it, so between that and the fact that abusing it would fuck me over between running out and coming up for a prescription refill I’m not too worried about slipping into addiction. If anything, it’s helped me stay sober, since I realized that part of the reason I took so long to get sober despite the fact that my drug of choice was expensive, had nasty withdrawal symptoms, and wasn’t even reliably fun after the first couple of years is that it cancelled out a lot of my ADHD symptoms.