Last year, I took "drawing intensive"– a difficult, heavily compressed, very technical, and often frustrating drawing class required for my BFA for a career rea

Last year, I took "drawing intensive"– a difficult, heavily compressed, very technical, and often frustrating drawing class required for my BFA for a career realignment. I signed up for the night section because I'm a night owl and it fit with my schedule. Unfortunately, my afternoon dose of short-acting Ritalin would wear off right before the class started, but I did a lot of art for pleasure at night, and figured that wouldn't be a problem. I always had plenty of energy, but my focus was shit, so I wouldn't expect myself to be able to focus on algebra or dense reading. 4 weeks of class pass by and I was struggling. I could feel a near complete disconnect between looking at a scene and making marks on the paper. At first I thought it was my inexperience with drawing that precisely, but realized that this disconnect felt an awful lot like some other things I had trouble with before my diagnosis. The next week, I split my afternoon dose up and took half right before class. It was like an entirely different activity. My working memory now held enough data to reason about making the marks on the page after looking and before drawing. A fellow student who I'd never spoken to approached me after class and said "I was watching you work today and it was like something opened up inside of you." I went on to become one of the only students in the class to get an A, and another professor from the fine arts drawing program saw a portrait I did hanging in the hall and told my teacher "make sure you tell whoever drew that they're really, really good." Don't glibly talk about people treating attention deficits like people downing Dexadrine so they can work all night long. My dose is so small I can take it two hours before bed and still sleep— while I haven't been able to have coffee after 2pm for years— but it completely transforms how my brain functions in some very specific and important ways. tl/dr: you have no idea what you're talking about so stop being a jackass.