“When will this stop?” I was exasperated.

My therapist at the Hersencentrum in Amsterdam looked at me.

“You said you did not want medication. Do you want to talk about medication?”

*

The exasperation on my part was due to my growing acceptance and understanding of the difficulties that I was experiencing just trying to navigate life, trailing the footsteps of a “normal” person and hopefully checking off tasks as I supposedly met my own and society’s expectations. 

*

Mid-therapy for late diagnosis autism while an active situation involving family trauma was at hand, I decided to take up the challenge to access better suited job openings.  Everytime I turned around a recruiter was trying to sell me a job as an office manager in the heart of an open spaced office filled with over a hundred people. “You’ll be the soul of the company!” I felt I had landed in a living nightmare.  Where to start on this issue?

When I signed up for the salary administration course my therapist said, “You’re being very brave.” She had heard me describe how I managed to get through elementary education and high school to end up with a handful of diplomas and then finally a BA in Music.  For my part I didn’t think that I was being brave, I was trying to survive.

*

Overriding any ducking and dodging inclinations, I completed the salary administration course. It cost me a lot of sweat and many tears. I never in my life imagined that I would be crawling through a five hundred page Payroll Tax Book. In Dutch let alone in English. I never took a Dutch language course in my life either. Over the last thirty years I had slowly picked Dutch up and I speak like an immigrant. I am reasonably competent, consistently making mistakes and have a funny little accent. 

With the four month administration course nearly completed, I sat across from my therapist and considered her question. I did not want medication. I had grown up witnessing my father’s addiction to drugs. I did not want medication. Did I say that already? I did not want medication and I was fifty-seven years old. A vision flashed through my mind: I was living in an old folk’s home and the staff was asking “What’s wrong with that lady?” and then they doped me up with whatever was left over on the cart. 

*

I reassessed the matter. It would be better to figure out now what medication I reacted well to and have that officially noted in my medical file. I agreed to a discussion. I badgered everyone I knew about the medication that was proposed to me on a trial period and was told that the pills were well documented. In my case, the medication proved highly efficient. 

“We find people sometimes opt to suspend medication on the weekend or during a vacation,” the woman who wrote me the prescription said. “It’s not a problem.”

*

Except that the few times that I did not ingest the medication, I found that I was in physical pain and extremely tired. Not unbearable pain. No, just a pain that I could imagine is similar to an arthritic ache, dull and pulsing and creakily pushing against boundaries and bones inside the skin. On one of the medication-free days I finally took two aspirin and went to bed at eight. 

I was disappointed in myself. It was clear that the choice to skip a day was not wholly in my power to decide. I thought about my father.

*

During the trip to the states this past summer I visited the archives in Bellingham and read my father’s manuscript (the only one that is in the archives) in which he describes his life when he was running around with the LSD crowd and dealing LSD.  By the end of the nineteen sixties, to my knowledge, my father avoided LSD entirely and was habitually using other substances. 

Remembering my father’s physical unease, his shifting and discomfort (let it be said that for most of his life he didn’t live a terribly healthy lifestyle), I can be led to believe that he might have been somewhere on the spectrum. It is not unrealistic to say that ADHD and autism are present on both sides of my family. 

*

“Just what is it that am I taking? Is there any connection with LSD?” I asked myself and punched in a google search. The medication that I am taking, of course, isn’t LSD at all but I quickly came across this item, dated 2024. 

“Recent clinical and preclinical research demonstrates that psychedelics may hold therapeutic value in the treatment of some of ASD’s core features.”

And there were other recent articles on the subject.

“Hmmm,” I thought, “while back in the day this meant you could end up living in a junkie house in Seattle with people who were descending into madness and depravity. You might pick up a hammer in anger one day, you might somehow lose the money, you might get into trouble.”