Going cold turkey?
Let me have a go at this. I'll describe what it felt like when I went cold turkey
from a 2 gram a day of really good tar/powder habit of 5 uninterrupted years.
First it's anxiety. Feels like you did something wrong and need to escape - a little desperate.
If you know you can't or won't get any more H, the anxiety is slightly lessened.
But still you feel almost like there has been a threat to your life. Scared, even.
Then come the hot cold flashes, constantly, neverending.
then the chills, neverending, constant.
Hot, cold, chills, hot, sweat, cold, freeze, chills, hot, sweat, cold, freeze chills...
Then you start stretching and yawning because you can feel every muscle aching in your body
and you can never get enough oxygen, yawning, chest starts feeling heavy, dense, and full
like you cant breathe properly, breathing in ragged gasps, short of breath,
then you start feeling the trauma of it all, emotionally.
More time goes by and you're not better and just the fact that the human body
is not made to be dealing with this shit, nothing comes to mind, you don't know what
to do, your body is literally like WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING and you start getting emotional
mixed with the physical torture, everything starts getting worse and pain starts setting in,
very hypersensitive, edgy, sharp pain everywhere, if you're a puker then you start puking
compulsively (I don't but many do).
Sadness and a sort of grief starts coming over you,
emotionally you feel traumatized, straight up, like something horrible is happening to you.
Imagine that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach after being scolded severely by your dad or mom
and made to feel like the most horrible piece of fucking shit in your life..
ever felt that way? That feeling exists in your midsection the whole time.
A withering, sickening, pulsing, disgusting traumatized feeling, just radiating from your abdomen.
Anxiety like you are absolutely certain the world is fucking ending, starting with YOUR soul first.
Sadness unlike anything you've ever experienced. GRIEF. Horrible soul-crushing depression.
This may be arbitrary and chemical only, or you may start thinking about really sad things
in your life and start feeling really bad about yourself or what you've done, like some kind of
demented life-recap meant to torture you.
Again your body temperature is never okay - you get too hot, start pouring sweat, and then as
soon as the hot flash ends, you start freezing because you're soaked in sweat and get chills
like you've never had - chills that seem to almost be aware of themselves, and therefore add more
chills in reaction to the chills themselves, they crawl up your spine and even onto your scalp, these chills - and repeat and repeat.
You consider changing your shirt for a dry one but after the 3rd time you're so depressed and apathetic
you don't move and just do nothing instead and just lay there, roll around, and fucking suffer.
Your legs start feeling like someone plugged them into an electrical socket, they are energized and want to
go for a run for a few miles but you are exhausted and feel every atom of your exhaustion in every part of your body.
Legs are kicking around because they're energized and it is maddening, this feeling. Restless Leg Syndrome.
Lights are brighter and overwhelming.
Your sense of reality is shattered, everything is suddenly so fucking real it's scary. bright, sharp, and very real.
You didn't know that everything was *unreal* before - you thought that was all real - but no, this high-contrast,
hypersensitive reality you've now been thrust into is far more real and bright than you could have imagined.
People you knew seem foreign, everything seems foreign, your body feels foreign.
It would be nice to sleep but nope - you are not allowed to. You try but in your traumatized exhausted condition
you are also amped up at the same time, minus the physical resources to actually be amped up.
Like have you ever been really hungover from alcohol, feeling completely wrecked and useless and sick
and then you go and do some meth or adderall, that burnt-out twacked-out nonfunctional attempt at being amped
which fails miserably because you were already all fucking damaged from the night before and your body
cannot handle the speed, but you did it anyway and are now just hungover and twacked straight into the crash
like that - but constantly without end, you are amped and exhausted simultaneously, no sleep.
Your skin feels like it's missing a protective outer layer. Ever accidentally skinned
your finger or knee? it's like that - all over your body. Super sensitive and uncomfortable to the highest degree.
You can even feel the seemingly intense heat of your 98.6 degree urine when you pee, as if it's 1000 degrees now
but no it's normal temp, you're just hypersensitive and kicking heroin.
You can smell the smell of the skin on your fucking face.
probably the smell of your nose, which is doing the smelling lol it's terrible
you can smell everything and everything smells disgusting. even heroin.
Your heart is pounding. sometimes racing, but I mean pounding, like each heartbeat is
a fucking sledgehammer of a beat, BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM like the feeling of terror
when you think there's some burglar in the house and you get really quiet to listen for
their steps, and your heart is beating out of your chest
and you're stressed out constantly and can't change that
yet there may not even be anything on your mind.
nose is running the whole time, you may even cough, and if you do start coughing,
you will probably cough so hard you start puking. that just creates another cycle of shit.
no sleep.
Over time each of those things peaks in intensity, then slowly starts to fade, with sleep being the sign
that the peak has been overcome.
Writing this just now, gave me a gnarly flashback hahahahah my GOD