stillkickin
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2015
- Messages
- 199
Thank you Herby for stopping by about a week ago on my thread. Very much appreciated. You are a very wise lady! This was the perfect time for me to login and see your particular message. My head was already in that place when I decided to check my own thread today and reading your suggestion was almost eerily inline with my current train of thought.
I'm going to try to do a recap here of the past couple weeks. There's been so much work (internal and physical) going on inside me for the past month. I feel as though I'm starting to get a grasp on a few things though while going through this whole process.
Firstly, I haven't been perfect on opiates this month. I have been maintaining much lower than normal amounts with the exception of a 4 day lapse. That 4 day lapse occurred due to getting my refill earlier than I was expecting. I clearly wasn't quite ready to manage that yet. The silver lining is that I had my prescription lowered so that I'd only get 50 pills instead of 150. Granted the 50 was 10mg oxy vs 150 x 5mg oxy. It's still a very big drop from what I was getting filled. The other part is that I've cut off nearly all of my outside "semi-reliable" hookups. So if there was a comparison of what I've had available to me last month versus this month, there's a great boost in the opiate availability deficiency quadrant. That said, I took about 100-150mg/day for about 4 days and then started rapidly getting myself back down to nil (where I am now after the past 24 hours). My last heavy dose would have been 5 days ago. Looking forward though, I have no opiates in my home and the only expected ones would be 10x10mg oxy but 6 of those are owed out to my sister for payback since she helped with my subsequent rapid taper out of her own prescription of hydro after my lapse. I will have 3+ weeks before I can get anything filled again and I've resolved to decrease that "available" amount again for this upcoming month.
Ok, now that the opiate talk is out of the way (yes, still dealing with some w/d issues such as heart pounding, increased anxiety, feeling a lot more than usual emotion, stomach issues, and insomnia to name the most prevalent ones).
The breakthrough thoughts I've had are all in line with trying to identify and address the underlying condition that is causing this self-medication behavior that's lasted for so long.
I believe I mentioned in my previous posts that I was going to be trying Ketamine infusion therapy for treatment resistant depression. Today was my 4th out of 6 infusions. Today was probably the best day as I was losing hope that it would be effective at all for me. I think today's treatment in combination with all the work I've been putting in on myself might be the start of new thought patterns, in a good direction. Op w/d's aren't quite as bad today as they've been the past few days. That along with my anxiety being at a more manageable level today I think greatly increased my opportunity to see and recognize relief.
Sooooo .... The general "breakthrough" type thoughts are coming from here. I was given a cognitive test at my first appointment about 2 weeks ago at the clinic I'm receiving infusions at before the first infusion. I was a wreck that day. Could not focus, heart was pounding, and I generally just felt like trash. I was a fraction of myself. I was administered the cognitive tests which has about 8 various memory, attention, and general brain function tests that take between 30-60 minutes depending on how quickly you get through them. They are timed and very calculated. I didn't even want to see my results after that. When I lifted my hands off the desk, there were pools of sweat under my palms on it. I was not doing well. Today I was administered the same tests with different content for analysis. As I mentioned above, I felt more relaxed today than I did 2 weeks ago so when the psychologist asked me if I'd want to see my results, I was all like "yeah, they've got to be better than last time, so let's see how I stack up against what's considered "normal"".
Before I could look at the results, I could get a read from the psych that she was smirking for a reason. She's a very nice lady and quite bright, so it wasn't anything nefarious. My lowest scores only dipped into the upper echelon of "normal", whereas nearly all of my results were scattered in the realm of "above-average", with a great number breaking out of the "above-average" line, but there was no classification beyond "above-average". It just looked like I capped the threshold on a considerable amount of the sub-tests. So that was nice to see because there was the comparison of when I was just "wrecked" versus when I was closer to "normal" feeling wise. Even on the week when I was running on nothing, my test results were still astoundingly above average according to the software. The psych verified that most people due fall in the "normal" range and that it wasn't a test someone could "cheat" from her 20 years of experience.
So all of that said, the breakthrough helped me realize (I think at least) is that I'm not like most people I come into contact with. I've been a very sociable person my whole life because I have very real emotional needs and they need to be met, but I don't have many people in my life that I can truly communicate with on my level. I think of lot of my dissatisfaction with life is that I've been trying to force myself to cohabitate (at least be in close contact with) people who don't think like myself. This has made me feel very ostracized over the years because I rarely get to be the "real me". For simpler terms, I've been a circle trying to fit into a square mold for so long I've forgotten what shape I actually am and couldn't realize why I always felt so uncomfortable.
I very much loved my ex. Very very much so. I "feel" very deeply when I've grown attached to someone. The biggest problem was that I was always trying to get her to "understand" my point of view. In her failure to do that, I was taking as that she just didn't care to. I'm now starting to feel very much that she just cannot grasp the concepts I was trying to convey. She understands how her emotions make her feel and that in turn is her compass in life. No amount of discussion or dissection is going to change her mind on that. That is where her and I are very different. I know she sees I'm not like most other people, but she just cannot comprehend why I behave the way I do or think the things that I think. Why I ruminate on certain things so long before I make a decision, and in contrast how I can make such quick decisions on other affairs. I compare her to seeing things more 2 dimensional whereas I'm living more on the 3 dimensional plane. You cannot understand things that you do not know exist. I'm hoping this is coming out right and people are following my train of thought, if you even dared to read this far. So the moral of this paragraph is that while I believe she saw something great in me, she couldn't understand it and it didn't align with her and this is where the bad friction in our relationship stemmed from. I felt I understood her well, but she did not understand me. Since she couldn't understand me, she just couldn't see a future with me because she couldn't predict my behavior.
A word that constantly is in my head of late is "acceptance". I very much so want to be accepted for who I am. I don't want to have to constantly mold myself (all the time) to be who someone else wants me to be. I've taken a long deep look at my own soul and I'm happy with who that person is. I'm just not happy with how I feel. I think the feelings are coming from a place of pursuing very intimate relationships with non like-minded people. So I'm trying to "accept" that now and try to start anew.
I realize this was a lot of text, but that's how my messages work it seems. When talking about myself, I have to think for quite a while before I'm willing to profess any "revelations". That reminds me, pardon all of the quotations in this post. It's done for effect to help convey my tone. The quotes are condescending the terms, just pointing out the general society accepted terminology.
I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone that would like to stop in. I'm still in contact with a few people on the board even though my thread hasn't been updated in a while.
-SK
I'm going to try to do a recap here of the past couple weeks. There's been so much work (internal and physical) going on inside me for the past month. I feel as though I'm starting to get a grasp on a few things though while going through this whole process.
Firstly, I haven't been perfect on opiates this month. I have been maintaining much lower than normal amounts with the exception of a 4 day lapse. That 4 day lapse occurred due to getting my refill earlier than I was expecting. I clearly wasn't quite ready to manage that yet. The silver lining is that I had my prescription lowered so that I'd only get 50 pills instead of 150. Granted the 50 was 10mg oxy vs 150 x 5mg oxy. It's still a very big drop from what I was getting filled. The other part is that I've cut off nearly all of my outside "semi-reliable" hookups. So if there was a comparison of what I've had available to me last month versus this month, there's a great boost in the opiate availability deficiency quadrant. That said, I took about 100-150mg/day for about 4 days and then started rapidly getting myself back down to nil (where I am now after the past 24 hours). My last heavy dose would have been 5 days ago. Looking forward though, I have no opiates in my home and the only expected ones would be 10x10mg oxy but 6 of those are owed out to my sister for payback since she helped with my subsequent rapid taper out of her own prescription of hydro after my lapse. I will have 3+ weeks before I can get anything filled again and I've resolved to decrease that "available" amount again for this upcoming month.
Ok, now that the opiate talk is out of the way (yes, still dealing with some w/d issues such as heart pounding, increased anxiety, feeling a lot more than usual emotion, stomach issues, and insomnia to name the most prevalent ones).
The breakthrough thoughts I've had are all in line with trying to identify and address the underlying condition that is causing this self-medication behavior that's lasted for so long.
I believe I mentioned in my previous posts that I was going to be trying Ketamine infusion therapy for treatment resistant depression. Today was my 4th out of 6 infusions. Today was probably the best day as I was losing hope that it would be effective at all for me. I think today's treatment in combination with all the work I've been putting in on myself might be the start of new thought patterns, in a good direction. Op w/d's aren't quite as bad today as they've been the past few days. That along with my anxiety being at a more manageable level today I think greatly increased my opportunity to see and recognize relief.
Sooooo .... The general "breakthrough" type thoughts are coming from here. I was given a cognitive test at my first appointment about 2 weeks ago at the clinic I'm receiving infusions at before the first infusion. I was a wreck that day. Could not focus, heart was pounding, and I generally just felt like trash. I was a fraction of myself. I was administered the cognitive tests which has about 8 various memory, attention, and general brain function tests that take between 30-60 minutes depending on how quickly you get through them. They are timed and very calculated. I didn't even want to see my results after that. When I lifted my hands off the desk, there were pools of sweat under my palms on it. I was not doing well. Today I was administered the same tests with different content for analysis. As I mentioned above, I felt more relaxed today than I did 2 weeks ago so when the psychologist asked me if I'd want to see my results, I was all like "yeah, they've got to be better than last time, so let's see how I stack up against what's considered "normal"".
Before I could look at the results, I could get a read from the psych that she was smirking for a reason. She's a very nice lady and quite bright, so it wasn't anything nefarious. My lowest scores only dipped into the upper echelon of "normal", whereas nearly all of my results were scattered in the realm of "above-average", with a great number breaking out of the "above-average" line, but there was no classification beyond "above-average". It just looked like I capped the threshold on a considerable amount of the sub-tests. So that was nice to see because there was the comparison of when I was just "wrecked" versus when I was closer to "normal" feeling wise. Even on the week when I was running on nothing, my test results were still astoundingly above average according to the software. The psych verified that most people due fall in the "normal" range and that it wasn't a test someone could "cheat" from her 20 years of experience.
So all of that said, the breakthrough helped me realize (I think at least) is that I'm not like most people I come into contact with. I've been a very sociable person my whole life because I have very real emotional needs and they need to be met, but I don't have many people in my life that I can truly communicate with on my level. I think of lot of my dissatisfaction with life is that I've been trying to force myself to cohabitate (at least be in close contact with) people who don't think like myself. This has made me feel very ostracized over the years because I rarely get to be the "real me". For simpler terms, I've been a circle trying to fit into a square mold for so long I've forgotten what shape I actually am and couldn't realize why I always felt so uncomfortable.
I very much loved my ex. Very very much so. I "feel" very deeply when I've grown attached to someone. The biggest problem was that I was always trying to get her to "understand" my point of view. In her failure to do that, I was taking as that she just didn't care to. I'm now starting to feel very much that she just cannot grasp the concepts I was trying to convey. She understands how her emotions make her feel and that in turn is her compass in life. No amount of discussion or dissection is going to change her mind on that. That is where her and I are very different. I know she sees I'm not like most other people, but she just cannot comprehend why I behave the way I do or think the things that I think. Why I ruminate on certain things so long before I make a decision, and in contrast how I can make such quick decisions on other affairs. I compare her to seeing things more 2 dimensional whereas I'm living more on the 3 dimensional plane. You cannot understand things that you do not know exist. I'm hoping this is coming out right and people are following my train of thought, if you even dared to read this far. So the moral of this paragraph is that while I believe she saw something great in me, she couldn't understand it and it didn't align with her and this is where the bad friction in our relationship stemmed from. I felt I understood her well, but she did not understand me. Since she couldn't understand me, she just couldn't see a future with me because she couldn't predict my behavior.
A word that constantly is in my head of late is "acceptance". I very much so want to be accepted for who I am. I don't want to have to constantly mold myself (all the time) to be who someone else wants me to be. I've taken a long deep look at my own soul and I'm happy with who that person is. I'm just not happy with how I feel. I think the feelings are coming from a place of pursuing very intimate relationships with non like-minded people. So I'm trying to "accept" that now and try to start anew.
I realize this was a lot of text, but that's how my messages work it seems. When talking about myself, I have to think for quite a while before I'm willing to profess any "revelations". That reminds me, pardon all of the quotations in this post. It's done for effect to help convey my tone. The quotes are condescending the terms, just pointing out the general society accepted terminology.
I'd love to hear thoughts from anyone that would like to stop in. I'm still in contact with a few people on the board even though my thread hasn't been updated in a while.
-SK
