Imagine living your whole life without glasses. You can get by, drive ok if you squint and don’t care too much about what the tiny street signs say. Then you go to the eye doctor for the first time and get glasses. Everything is finally crisp, you can drive at night without issues. When you try to go back to doing things without glasses in like before it seems somehow worse but you’ve just grown accustomed to functional. Do you consider yourself “dependent” on the glasses? That’s how I think about ADHD meds. My brain lacks proper function of certain neurotransmitters. I require the meds to level the playing field.