On high doses of DXM, I've experienced psychosis. I would see people that aren't there, but they would look completely real except that they moved so fast that they walk off into the horizon and disappear. Sometimes I would black out.
On really high doses of DXM, if I didn't see people, I'd get these awful feelings in my head like I had to move my body in a certain way or else something bad would happen. I would sit on the pavement and raise my arms over my head, sometimes with the fists clenched together, sometimes without, and it came to my head that God was making me do these things. So I got it in my head that it was a form of prayer, and one of my favorite trips is to take so much DXM that the crazy head feelings happen and I end up clenching and twisting my body in strange ways as a form of prayer.
I've been taken to the hospital a few times when I was basically just unconscious from taking so much DXM. I had a breathing tube and catheter put in on more than one occasion. But now I can usually stay awake during the DXM, but my dad drives me to my clinic when I'm high and the clinic measures my blood pressure, and DXM causes high blood pressure, so they would take me to the ER where I would be given fluids and basically have to sit there a whole day before I got discharged.
My parents make it very hard for me to get high, and I love them for it. It wouldn't be odd if they just got rid of me instead, but they help me. Been a DXM addict for 10 years, spent the last two years trying to quit, but I kept changing my mind and getting high again. Now I'm at a point where the other me, the bad wolf, is the lesser voice rather than the greater voice, and I can be sober. I had 3 months sober before my last relapse, and now have nearly 4 weeks clean and sober.
No matter how pathetic your situation is, you have to own up to it and love yourself to do better. I'm where I'm at and its a good place for me to be.
The realization that I was part of a social continuum, a social organism, you will, helped me overcome my urge to do drugs. The realization that I did not exist in a vacuum and that my bad behaviors were harming my family and the community at large. It really sunk in to me the last time I went to the mental hospital. I hadn't been taking care of myself and stunk like piss when I checked in, and the other tenants there smelled it and were rightfully bothered. It was at that moment that I realized that, like it or not, I'm part of society, and I didn't like the part I was playing. The part of a crazed, smelly, addict. Now my role is that of a recovering addict, and college student, and though I'm not as euphoric as I was before the rational side of me is appreciative of smaller, simpler things like a good bed at night and efforts to improve myself.
When I was thieving and getting high, I would think things like, "I'm never getting a job. I'm not willing to pay taxes to a broken system." Now, I realize that while the 'system' might not be perfect its filled with well-meaning individuals (and not) who want a better world, and before, as an addict, I was directly harming their efforts. I seek to get a job and pay taxes again someday. The idea of a job fills me with dread, and that's why I'm going to college, to get a job that isn't all awful all the time. Sometimes I think to myself, I'm just going to college to delay getting a job, and I do worse at my schoolwork because of it. Or, I think, I'm just going for fun, which is also but not exclusively true.
I'm anxious about whether or not I'm smart enough to complete a program of study, and that's normal. That's healthy anxiety and I can live with it. It doesn't need to go away. It reminds me to work hard. I was so used to feeling no bad feelings while I was an addict that the normal stresses of life were uncope-able for me. I literally had no worries when I was a thieving dxm addict. I thought I had my life made. I lived like a sociopath for so long.
Today, it's enough for me to hold onto my responsibility as a citizen of the world not to make it worse than how I found it.
I have a craving for DXM and I consider that an ugly feeling now. It's the bad wolf, which I no longer feed.
