I, like everyone and their dog, or perhaps more accurately like everyone and their seven year old son, have recently been diagnosed with ADHD.

This has been good! Suddenly my people-pleasing tendencies have neurological underpinnings! The anxiety that besieges me at night has a logical explanation and predictable solutions. Ultimately I’m doing less guess-and-check with medicinal remedies that have been both fleeting and incorrect.

I have, for the last five or so months, felt myself at a marvelous equilibrium. I cannot understate this: equilibrium has never happened for me.

The problem is, I haven’t trained myself to write without access to a vast pool of emotion that I have otherwise been swimming in for 35+ years. Now, it’s like I’m standing a little to the left of a capacious pond of feeling. I can see it’s deep, I know there’s something mysterious and perhaps grim lurking beneath, but rather than jumping in feet first, all I can do these days is throw a little pebble in and see if it hits the bottom.

“Hello depth,” I say to the deep. “I know you’re there. Did you appreciate my pebble?”

And then, my new medicine starts humming the tune of complacency and production, and I bid a cheery farewell to depth and an exuberant hello to productivity.

And yet. And yet.

Much of life feels like this right now– like the careful seeking we used to do with an old radio knob, for the right happiness frequency. Finding that little sliver where the pop music blares garishly and tunes out all the static. But knowing, always knowing, that the static still surrounds you on either side.

I have made a bargain. I have traded in my empathy for sanity.

I do not think I am alone in this. It is the balancing act of the privileged and the bullshit of the guilty. Of the instagram scroll that pauses on Taylor Swift and scrolls past genocide. We are the citizens of Omelas.

As I write this —safe— in my backyard, night descending, crickets chirping, Jeremy is playing a mournful, improvised tune on the piano. He’s been doing this more and more lately. It feels like his way of accessing the depths, when we’re both stumbling to bed, lacking words to articulate the emotions that have previously consumed us.

Moments like these remind me of the tradeoff. The bargain we’re making. The human parts of us that still contain sadness even when medicine is otherwise righting the ship across the pond.

Is it ungrateful of me to to admit that part of me misses my pebble? That part of me wants to tiptoe, nay, leap back into the deep and let myself be swallowed up in unregulated emotion? Is it unhinged for me to miss my overactive amygdala?

I’m a little sad that I’m a little less sad.

And that’s my pebble for the evening.