The pill is small and white and it takes about forty minutes. I know this because I've started timing it. There's a moment, somewhere around minute thirty-eight, where the fog lifts and the world sharpens and I become the version of myself that can do things. Emails get answered. The document I've been avoiding for a week opens and words come out in order. I clean the kitchen. I return calls. I am, for a window of about four hours, a functioning person.

Then it wears off and I feel myself leaving. Not all at once. First the edges go soft. Then the motivation drains like water through a crack in the floor. By evening I'm sitting on the couch unable to choose between doing something and doing nothing, which is its own kind of paralysis. The contrast is what kills me. Without the pill I am formless. With it I am someone I recognize. The person I want to be only exists for four hours a day and requires a prescription.

I've started to wonder which one is the real me. The focused, capable, responsive version that shows up after the pill kicks in, or the one sitting here now at 9pm, unable to start a sentence, unable to care enough to try. People say the medication helps you be yourself. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like it builds a temporary person out of chemicals and then lets that person collapse when the window closes. I don't feel helped. I feel borrowed.

My doctor asked if it was working and I said yes because by every metric it is. I am more productive. I am more present. I am better. But better at what cost, and for whom, and what happens to the hours when the better version isn't home? I am two people now and one of them needs a pill to exist. Which one are you medicating — the one who can't focus, or the one who can't stop asking whether the focus is real?