I've been on lamotrigine for a while now. If you don't know what that is, it's a mood stabilizer. I take it because I have BPD (borderline personality disorder), and without it, my emotional regulation is roughly equivalent to a cat on a ceiling fan. With it, I'm still chaotic, but it's controlled chaos. The kind that makes art instead of destroying relationships.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about psych meds: getting the prescription isn't the hard part. Taking the damn pill every single day is the hard part.
Not because I don't want to. Not because I don't know it helps. But because I also have ADHD, and ADHD means that a task I've done successfully 400 times can just... not exist in my brain on day 401, especially when it comes to something so chalky and disgusting. It's not rebellion. It's not laziness. It's a neurological game of "will my brain acknowledge this task exists today?" and the answer is sometimes just no.
I've tried everything. Phone alarms. Pill organizers. Habit trackers. Apps with streaks. Apps with check marks. Apps that send passive-aggressive notifications. One of them literally said "You forgot again!" and I uninstalled it so fast I think I pulled a muscle.
The problem isn't that I need to be reminded. The problem is that reminders don't create motivation in an ADHD brain. We know what we're supposed to do. We can see the pill bottle sitting right there. We can hear the alarm going off. And somewhere between "I should take that" and actually picking up the bottle, our brain has already left the building to think about whether ravens can recognize human faces. (They can. It's called individual facial recognition. I looked it up instead of taking my meds.)
Enter Trash Quest
So I did the most neurodivergent thing possible: I built an entire gamified productivity app because none of the existing ones understood how my brain works.
Trash Quest is named after Scrap the Raccoon, the mascot of my laser engraving shop who lives in the Trash Dimension and has strong opinions about everything. At its core, it's a to-do list that treats tasks like quests. You complete quests, you earn points. You earn enough points, you hatch an egg. The egg becomes a creature. The creature grows as you keep completing tasks. Miss too many days, and your creatures get hungry.
That's it. That's the whole system. Quests, points, creatures.
And somehow, against every statistical probability and personal precedent, it has worked for 27 consecutive days.
Twenty-seven days.
That doesn't sound like much if your brain works normally. But if you're neurodivergent, you know. You know what 27 consecutive days of anything means. You know what it means to open an app on day 14 and not have abandoned it yet. You know what it means on day 21 when you realize you haven't missed a single dose and you're not even white-knuckling it.
I'm not white-knuckling it. I'm feeding a possum named Goblin.
Why This Works When Nothing Else Did
I've thought about this a lot (probably during time I should have been doing something else, but that's on brand) and I think it comes down to three things that most productivity apps get catastrophically wrong for ADHD brains:
1. The stakes are emotional, not logical.
Every habit tracker I've ever used shows you a streak number. Miss a day, the number resets to zero. And here's what happens in my brain when a streak resets: "Well, that's ruined. Might as well not try for a while. Maybe I'll start over Monday." Classic all-or-nothing BPD thinking, meet ADHD's allergy to re-starting things.
Trash Quest doesn't have a reset button on your creatures. Goblin the Possum doesn't disappear if I miss a day. He just gets a little hungry. And the difference between "your streak is broken, start over" and "your creature is hungry, feed it" is the difference between shame and responsibility. I can handle responsibility. I cannot handle shame. Not as fuel, anyway. Shame makes me crawl into bed. Responsibility for a tiny pixel possum makes me take my lamotrigine.
2. The reward is immediate and dumb and perfect.
ADHD brains need dopamine now, not in 30 days when you've "built a habit." Trash Quest gives me points the instant I check something off. Those points visibly stack toward the next egg hatch. When the egg hatches, there's a creature I've never seen before. What kind? What rarity? Is it common or uncommon? The not-knowing is the hit.
Neurotypical productivity apps reward you with a green checkmark and maybe a motivational quote. You know what a green checkmark does for my ADHD? Absolutely nothing. You know what a baby bat named Sonar does? Everything.
3. It doesn't moralize about what counts as a "task."
Trash Quest doesn't care if my quest for the day is "file taxes" or "eat a vegetable" or "take lamotrigine." All quests are equal. All quests earn points. There's no hierarchy of worthiness. No "Great job being productive!" when I do something hard and silence when I do something basic.
"Take meds" sits right next to "engrave 10 coasters" and "remember to drink water" and the app treats all of them like they matter. Because they do. The world might rank "file taxes" above "take your psych meds," but I promise you, the meds are more important. And any system that makes me feel weird about logging basic survival tasks as accomplishments can go directly in the trash. (Scrap will find it there and judge it.)
The Numbers
Because my brain also loves data:
- 27-day streak (the longest unbroken run I've ever had with lamotrigine or any daily medication)
- 132 completed quests (that's tasks finished. Real things that got done because a pixel raccoon believed in me.)
- 5 adult creatures, 2 growing (Gutter the Rat, Talon the Owl, Cloud the Skunk, Sonar the Bat, Brush the Fox, all fully grown. Goblin the Possum is a juvenile and still needs me.)
- 639 points pending (that's 12 more eggs I could hatch. But I'm saving them because apparently I hoard digital currency the same way I hoard craft supplies.)
What I'm Not Saying
I'm not saying Trash Quest cures ADHD. I'm not saying gamification is the answer for everyone. I'm definitely not saying "just find the right app and you'll be fine!" That's toxic productivity culture wearing a pixel costume and I want no part of it.
What I'm saying is: I needed something that worked with my brain instead of against it. Something that understood that shame is not a motivator. Something that gave me a tiny, stupid, beautiful reason to do the thing I already know I need to do.
And right now, that reason is a possum named Goblin who is common rarity and juvenile growth stage and cost me 190 points to grow and I would protect him with my life.
If you're sitting there reading this and thinking "I haven't taken my meds in three days and I feel bad about it" then stop feeling bad. Feeling bad has never once in the history of mental health caused someone to consistently take their medication. Find the thing that makes the taking feel like yours. Not a chore. Not a failure you're fixing. Yours.
Mine lives in a den with a bat and an owl and a very smug fox.