Ninety Days

It has been 90 days since I last took a drink or a drug (a new record). I thought I would feel different than I do today. I am closer to using now than I have been in the past three months. The thought of using terrifies me, it excites me, it gives me butterflies in my stomach. Things have been going well. I’ve taken my foot off the gas, cruise control. Eyes off the road, so I can say I didn’t see it coming. But I do.

The seed was planted one week ago. I began experiencing some uncomfortable feelings. Perhaps, that’s an understatement, as I have dealt with many uncomfortable feelings since January 20^th, comes with the territory I suppose. This was stronger than uncomfortable. These feelings, I would describe, as an overwhelming, all-consuming hatred. My senses began to shut down, one by one, until all that was left was a burning fire inside my core. Rage. A volcano, ready to erupt.

My face turns red, hot. Small earthquakes course through my veins and my body tremors. Undying cigarettes pass between my lips and smoke begins to bellow out of my ears.

Just, breathe.

I express some of these feelings and get them out, but the majority I swallow, suppressing them deep inside of me for fear of an overreaction. I feel better, momentarily, but these feelings are simmering under the surface, they bubble away overnight and in the morning, begin to boil again, rising within me.

An hour passes. Two. I try the “just breathe” trick. Nada. The sensation grows and I begin to feel like I am losing control. Not that I had any control to begin with, but it was beginning to feel like I did. Back to reality Alex, this was just an illusion.

I consult my bag of tricks and decide it’s time to turn to a tried and tested favourite, distraction. I try to eat, not hungry. Couldn’t even get candy down. I think about exercising, this one sounds like a brilliant idea. My body is more than capable, but my mind refuses to give me the strength to get up and go, it wants me here, trapped. I so desperately want to talk to someone about this, ask for help and some sense of comfort, but shame prevents me. I am alone but surrounded by people. My last resort, sleep. Shutting down my mind, even if only a temporary solution I saw at this point as my only escape.

Sleep doesn’t come, clearly that was too good to be true. I toss, I turn, and in a few brief moments I surrender, unable to take a minute more of this existence. Where can I get the drugs I need to turn this off?

In previous attempts to get clean, I have always wanted to continue using. This sounds pretty basic, but during those times I felt I was trying to force myself to do something unnatural, that I did not want to do. This time around, I don’t want to use. Using feels somewhat foreign, strange, and unnatural, however, I sense a supernatural force driving me towards this oh-so-familiar unknown.

I think of the consequences and feel sick to my stomach. I think of rebuilding, again, and shudder. 

The shame I don’t think I could take. I feel lonely today and I still have people around me I call friends. What is it going to feel like when they, like shallow rivers streaming down my volcanic peaks evaporate into steam as lava begins to ooze from the surface?

It’s probably going to feel worse than in this present moment. I will try to keep reminding myself of that.

Contradictions I've Been Sold

A multi-faceted disease of conflict. At first there are the obvious internal dialogues, a never-ending stream of contradictory consciousness. I know something to be true, but I know this same thing to be false. I say one thing but do another.

Quite rightly this gives me a bad rep. I’m branded a liar, cheater, manipulative. It’s hard for me to argue I’ve been mislabelled when faced with such accusations, these things are true, I do them shamelessly and without second thought.

Fact: your addict, or you the addict, will have uttered the words “I want to get better, I want to stop, I am done, I never want to take a drink or a drug ever again”. Something to that effect is said or heard frequently. I mean, most normal people who’ve had one to many the night before wake up and say things like “shit I feel rough, I’m not drinking ever again”.

Swearing off alcohol the morning after can be taken with a pinch of salt, most people would admit they have no intention of going teetotal on such a whim. You might be seriously considering it though when you open your eyes, splitting headache, a trembling mess with no recollection of the previous night. So you come downstairs at midday announcing to your significant other that you’re getting too old for these hangovers. Last night will not happen again.

There is no such thing as too much Morpheus.

You chug some water, get an IV, greasy spoon brekkie, whatever your personal preference, and depending which, you start feeling better in a matter of hours to days. What’s certain is you do recover, you feel fit as a fiddle come Wednesday and despite remembering how awful you felt just a few days prior, you’re on the good side of hump day and decide you will attend your oh-so-important-social-or-work-related function of superficial surface encounters and you decide to drink to take the edge off how fucking terrible this party is. You’re not an alcoholic, you’re sensible, you drink less than the weekend before, still waking up with a hangover, just not quite of biblical standards like last time.

Liar. You broke my trust. You promised you wouldn’t do that again. Fair? Unfair? For me, somewhere in between.

We suffer from a disease from which there is no known cure. Clearly, there has been a paradigm shift in recent decades away from the idea of substance dependence as a moral failing towards its acceptance as a disease. It seems many people today generally accept addiction as a disease and addicts get better treatment and support than in days gone by, but I’m not sure how many people really believe this. Tons of addicts themselves refuse to accept addiction as a disease, so it’s understandable that normies might be skeptical too.

I accept addiction as a disease. Most diseases target specific areas of the body, this one targets the part of the brain that controls decision making. These days, I try to make rational, sensible choices in my daily life. In the past, I would wake up and wish I hadn’t. I wanted to die. At this juncture, merely taking some drugs to numb this pain seems a reasonably sensible choice when compared with the alternative. Today I do not want to die, but there is sometimes so much going on in my head, it might even be good stuff, but when it becomes overwhelming and I feel like I can no longer cope, my instinct is to shut it down.  

'Di.' Jeffrey Schaler - During masturbation one may get carried away, forget to aim, and accidentally take a jizzload in the eye, thereby blinding oneself. Medical hoax? I think not. 

In the depth of my despair, I say things I do truly mean and these things are a product of my current state of mind, environment, what I’m feeling in the here and now. Right now, I don’t feel like heroin would offer me much. I think I’ve now been on this merry-go-round long enough to accept that heroin is not the solution, it is merely a solution. A last resort in the event the plane goes down, it’s my parachute. 

I used to say this thing all the time, it went something like “I want to want it”. I don’t think anyone gets long-term sobriety if they don’t want it. For so long, I witnessed destruction happening in my life and was unfazed. I was so emotionally disconnected, I could see what was happening as if I was a bird watching from above. As I watched events unfold below, I could tell things were nasty, but my little bird brain wasn’t able to compute the feelings associated with the actions, and so I shrugged my shoulders and carried on about my business, accepting these events as simply a part of everyday existence. Destruction was normalized. My rational mind knew that something going on was abnormal, but with an inability to actually feel what was happening I was unable to connect the dots. I knew that I wanted change, but the underlying emotions which would be the catalyst to change were non-existent. Hence the phrase, I want to want it.

Do I want it today? I'm not sure I even know what it is. It’s hard to make good decisions when the irrational becomes rational. 

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Check out Dopey Podcast's exit music if you haven't heard it, Good So Bad, think it sums all this up.