Part 3 - 'I'

This final letter I wrote earlier this week as I prepared to leave treatment after 30 days of inpatient. Time for the next phase of this journey, wish me luck.

Part 3 – ‘I’

I met you when I knew no better, walk out my life, yes I let her, you helped me then now I’m your debtor, with sadness I write you this letter.

My mind seems forever tainted by you, disease. I know not how to leave you. You are everything negative in my life. Will positive choices put distance between us? This ongoing duel, a chess match in my subconscious, seems a forgone conclusion. You possess control of what I think, intuitively knowing what lies ahead as I plan each attack. I try to make positive choices, but you cloud my judgement and pollute all moves forward with fear. Contradictions, like a cancer, multiply, confusing all reason.

I thought my decision to move away from where we met would help, with fewer reminders of you around the place. But you tell me we came here with other motives – cheap dope, warmer climes if homeless, freedom from isolation if we use.

I thought I wanted to be happy, I thought I despised this life of misery. But you tell me to hope for misfortune, loss and death in my life, as this will excuse my return to you.

I thought I wanted to love those in my life, as I would want to be loved back. But you tell me the only love I need is yours, fuck the lot of them, all they’ve done is interfered in our relationship and tried to control me.

You and them are one and the same, conspiring against me to determine the direction of my life. But they are the white blood cells attacking you, their intentions are good, but allowed to run riot they can be a disease of their own. As your presence subsides, these cells form growing resentments inside of me. These fuel your regeneration.

For the first time now things feel different. I’ve run away from both of you. That freedom I’ve sought since young is beginning to fill the gaping wound inside my chest. This feeling drives me forward seeking new opportunities, friendships with those who support me, those who pick me up when I feel down, those who bring me joy, things that take me out of myself.

I see now that you will haunt me forever, and to move forward we cannot be together. So from myself I must escape, alone with you we isolate. Your voice grows louder and louder until I can take no more. When in times gone by I might concede defeat, follow your instructions to bring relief, I will now choose a different path, I will suffer you whispers only so long before I seek distraction. Music, friendships, writing, laughing, even just talking silences you. All I need do is repeat your whispers out loud to weaken their grasp of me.

Loneliness and boredom, I know you cling to these knowing that I cannot tolerate these feelings, thinking these will always find a way to reunite us. I have some news for you, milady, I laugh at your pathetic attempts steer me off course.

Boredeom, a bore no more. Lonely, not a feeling, but a choice. Check, mate.

....

Restore my life I’ve tried before, but this times different there are no more,

Things I value, you’ve taken all, I break your shackles and halt my fall.

Only in my dreams do we still meet, you drip-feed drama and deceit.

From scratch I now begin again, with freedom fueling fires within.

_________________________________________

Why?

I got side-tracked the other day. What I wanted to write about was my journals. They’re bullshit. I write in them, 90% of the time, in the hope that one day I’ll have been someone important so people will go back through my journals and give me bucket loads of posthumous sympathy. A journal is not a journal if it is dishonest. Just like this blog is ineffective in its purpose if I cannot write with complete honesty.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since that first post. Why am I writing this stuff? What’s the purpose? What’s the meaning!?

On the positive side, it helps me a bit, I suppose. It certainly gives me something to do. I enjoy writing. Every second I spend writing is one less second I spend trying to score. Double thumbs up.

But admittedly it’s hard to write an honest account of my feelings and actions when I know my words are certain to inflict pain on others. Surely, I’ve caused enough pain for one lifetime? Maybe I owe it to those close to me to just zip it, zip it good. Keep my sharing to meetings, behind closed doors, as so many others do.

Does it help others? Probably not. I’m not exactly in recovery (although I am clean just for today whoopdidoo!) and as such I don’t have magic answers for anyone seeking them.

Finally, what employer doing basic due diligence will overlook these posts? I, like many addicts, find myself completely broke and in need of work. Who’s going to hire the author of these posts who so clearly lacks the commitment required to achieve long term sobriety.

Therefore, at the crux is one question: why go public? And I think I know why. Pride, arrogance, showing off. I still think it’s cool. The junkie subculture. It sucks me in. And it’s completely insane. When you spend time with career junkies, in their late 50s, shitting their pants every other day when they can’t get together the money for a fix (honestly I’ve given away 3 pairs of undies in the past month to those in need, junkies you get what I mean), clucking out on the streets, in the freezing cold. 

Please someone tell me – where is the appeal?  What is so attractive about that?

Good times fellas...

It’s disgusting, degrading, demoralising and yet so damn deceptive. How can you package up one of the most lonely, miserable existences into something so appealing? I want it. Now.

It’s this heroin chic shit, Kurt Kobain, the troubled soul, misunderstood, turned to substances when life got unbearable. I bought into that a long time ago. But my life has been great. Yes, I’m a seriously troubled soul now, but that is a consequence of my using, and not the other way around. I find it so easy to understand why people turn to heroin if they have had difficult upbringings, experienced traumas, rape, domestic violence. I cannot imagine how those sorts of events impact the developing adolescent mind, but I do know that no matter what that feels like, heroin is probably an excellent solution, it will make you forget the pain, and it will work. Temporarily.

Then you have the people like me. I’m just an asshole, I manufactured the circumstances in which I would be able to use and simultaneously receive sympathy for doing so. The truth is - I like to get high, it was fun for a long time! The euphoric recall, those are the good times I remember and hold on to. Since trying to put drugs down, I’ve also noticed this complete emptiness inside of me. This hole in the soul. It’s been there forever, but drugs fill it up. Love fills it up. Without either of those things, life becomes unmanageable very quickly, for me.

A spiritual solution – that’s what I believe in. Maybe writing some of this stuff down will help.

When I see people with good recovery I don’t see arrogance, I see gratitude, humility and above all, serenity. 

I don’t think I am going to make it out of this alive.

Periodically throughout my adolescent years I kept a journal - rarely with real conviction or consistency. Reading back through some of this now I get the impression that little has changed throughout the 15 years elapsed from my first entry at 13 and my most recent at 28.

The key theme I note throughout the years – this is the writing of a spoiled child. He wants more. Often, he thinks he knows what he wants, but when he gets it, it is not enough. He is trying to fill a hole. He tries material matters, emotional experiences, friendships, substances, a career, love. Unfortunately for him, these brief encounters are but a trap, as for a fleeting moment they provide the answer to life, that missing piece of the jigsaw that completes the puzzle. Harmony. It never lasts.

I spent 6 months travelling in 2010 - where I picked up my habit - but only remember it as the best time of my life. 

I find study of the brain fascinating. My mind struggles immensely with euphoric recall. My interpretation of this phenomenon is simply an unconscious trick my mind plays whereby it holds on to these moments of happiness like a mother to her new-born child. There is no letting go.

In some senses, I suppose it is a form of misguided nostalgia. If I look back on my early childhood, some of my fondest memories are attached to spending hours upon hours immersing myself in video games. Nintendo have built a business on this nostalgia. For me personally, Zelda, Mario and Pokémon franchises defined the years leading up to my adolescence.

Every few years, Nintendo release a new console with updated versions of those original franchises and I buy into that as it evokes the memories of joy I had playing those games as a child. There have been a small minority of games within these new franchises that have captivated my imagination in such a way as those early games, but the memories are overpowering, they defy the reason centre in my brain so that I act against all logic, buying into each new franchise, often to be disappointed. I think this has less to do with the games themselves, which are in all honesty fantastic, but more to do with the fact that I cling to the hope that by beginning a new Zelda quest it will bring me back to a happier time in my life. Perhaps this is just me, but I challenge anyone who played through Zelda: Ocarina of Time to watch the new trailer for Breath of the Wild and see what emotions this brings up for you. For me, the excitement watching this gameplay trailer was on a level with the rush and excitement I feel when I have finally found a quiet bathroom to sit down in, cook up my shot and then finally see the blood ooze out into the needle as I have registered in a vein.

Bliss.

It is this feeling that my mind remembers. Not the running around for hours on end before that moment trying to get together money to score, the sickness, the pain I have so carelessly inflicted on parents, partners, friends, myself. The paranoia, the insanity. Yes, my rational brain is aware that these are all consequences of my using. But do I feel them? Do I connect with them emotionally? Not one bit. I simply connect with the perceived feeling of euphoria, painlessness and satisfaction that comes when the drugs enter my system. I feel the good feelings. I don’t feel the bad feelings. Intellectually I know they exist, but when the mind feels so strongly the anticipation of a reward, those good feelings, and cannot connect with the negatives, it is no surprise that the behaviour loop repeats time and time again, despite those negative consequences getting worse, and worse, and worse. Last week I sold my Nintendo collection, my childhood happiness, the false nostalgia. I sold those lies to get money to buy more lies. All to fill a void, all in the search for happiness.

Even writing this now puts me in an extremely dangerous, vulnerable headspace. In 30 seconds, I have gone from fondly writing about video games to planning an escape from my current situation. Complete disregard for my family, their feelings. It’s Christmas? So what. I want a fix. I don’t care what gets in my way, who I hurt, I want what I want and I will do what I must in order to get that. Flashback to the 13 year old writing his first diary entry, spoiled child. If you get in my way, I’ll hurt your feelings with complete disregard of any consequences.

This is a habit loop. An animal instinct which resides deep in the core of our brains. To ignore what has over millions of years become a survival instinct: trigger à routine à reward, as I have found out over the past few years, is beyond challenging. But millions of people across the world who have suffered from mental health issues including addictions to both substances and behaviours have found ways to overcome this.

My rational mind knows that using drugs brings with it misery, poverty, homelessness, disease, ultimately death, and those are just the affects to myself. For those loved ones who still cling on to hope that their addict may one day recover, I argue that they suffer even worse. All the same feelings of hopelessness, despair, fear, wide ranging mental health issues, but unlike the addict or alcoholic they suffer these feelings without the substance to numb the pain. At least the addict finds temporary relief with each fix, no matter what pain they may have endured to get there.

I have read many inspiring accounts of addiction and recovery, and many of these have been truly gut wrenching. I do not use gut wrenching simply as a generic expression that I’ve heard used time and time again to describe the actions of alcoholics and addicts, because I do hear the term thrown around frequently in meetings and in first-hand accounts of others who struggle with problems like these. I chose these two words carefully as they describe exactly the physical sensations experienced by myself when reading some of these harrowing accounts of active addiction. First comes the nausea, a sinking feeling in the abdomen, physical symptoms in my stomach, tightening, increased heart rate, anxiety escalating to full on panic when certain passages really hit home. For me, the most painful part of this that I live with every day is the simple fact of how my actions have devastated the lives of those around me. Unfortunately, in my experience, and I’m sure many can relate, it is those that we love most who get dragged through the shit, deeper and longer than anyone else.

It is through reading memoirs, blogs, first-hand accounts written by addicts that can dig beneath the euphoric recall and expose the life of an addict for what it truly is. It is so incredibly painful, I think, because I can relate. I know that the actions being described are identical to those I have carried out myself, and if I haven’t quite gotten that far yet, I see the reality of the situation and know that, although I may not have sunk to such depths yet, I know that the path leads one way only. We continue to decline, we cheat, rob, sell our bodies, sell our souls and ultimately take our own lives when we have sunk so far down the rabbit hole, in our isolation we can see no way out.

There is always a way out. Recovery is not easy, it is not natural, it doesn’t happen overnight and to be honest, I don’t think I fucking want it enough. I see my younger siblings getting their lives back on track, my best friends around me getting 6 months sober, throwing themselves into the program, or doing it their own way, it doesn't matter how they do it, just that they're doing it! And they're happy. It makes me so fucking proud of them, so happy for them. It also makes me so upset that I can't be there on that journey with them.

I want to want it. I've tried doing it for girlfriends, family, and sometimes I think I've wanted it for myself. But it doesn't last, and what good is that?

I find myself in a situation now where I have but two choices, recover, or give up. The alternative to recovery at this stage is to dive head first into the rabbit hole. But I know it’s there, I know what I need to do to get there, and I know that I can do it. For me, it is not a matter of how to do it, because the solution is simple. It does, however, require hard work, determination, and an absolute desire above all else to fight for your recovery.

Summer 2014 - think this might have been the last time I was actually happy and clean from opiates at the same time. Love, happiness, its never enough. I relapsed a matter of days later.

I am grateful for those who have managed to capture the insanity, depravity, and unparalleled selfishness of active addiction. Those who have been brave enough to put honest accounts of their stories out there. They help me see through my euphoric recall, and they may ultimately help with my recovery.