Me too man. It's a drag. It doesn't make me feel like a loser, though, I just hate the effects on testosterone, and overall energy level, and just the simple fact of being a slave to a drug. I'm down to 5mg. I started crushing up 5 8mg pills at a time and weighing it, it generally works out to 48 or 49mg/1mg of bupe with the brand I have. I've been reducing by 1mg per day of pill powder per dose (I dose 9am and 9pm to reduce interdose withdrawals). I notice absolutely no difference with such a small reduction, but every 24-ish days, that's 1mg less per day.
I want to get switched to the 2mg pills when I get lower, so I can have more accuracy for when I'm at like 0.1mg, since I want to reduce to even lower, like 0.05 or even maybe 0.02 before jumping off.
You can try, and I wish you luck, but bupe's withdrawal lasts a long time, like a month of acute withdrawals from what I understand. For me, I just don't believe I'd be able to deal with it that long. Opiate withdrawal, after so many years of addiction, has gotten worse for me, a lot worse. I remember my first time, it was very unpleasant, sure, don't get me wrong. But I laid in bed mostly, I skipped classes the first day, but even the second day I felt better enough to go to class. By day 4, I was pretty much fine and it was never anywhere remotely approaching what it feels like now. Now, even kratom withdrawal lasts like 10-12 days, and it's unbearable the RLS (akathisia is more accurately. especially since it's not just my legs, my arms are at least as bad which is even worse than the legs) is so bad I want to stab myself in the eyeball or cut my legs and arms off. I start to lose my mind after zero sleep for 5 days and then my emotions get really wild and I start to lose my shit. Usually I give in around day 6, after night 5 during which I find myself contemplating suicide and/or accepting that the only possible solution if I want to survive is to score and use "just enough to be able to sleep tomorrow night". And then.... you know.
Tapering sucks and takes a long time, but IME, and in the experience of research, it gives the best chance of success.
However if you do jump, gabapentin helps a lot with withdrawals. I don't know what dose you're on, though. It can only do so much for heavy withdrawals, but for lower dose withdrawals, it can be a godsend. That's why I'm bothering to taper to such a miniscule amount. I want the jump to be as painless as possible because I know myself... faced with opiate withdrawal, especially long lasting opiate withdrawal, I have very little faith in my ability to ignore the part of my brain trying to convince me to cheat "just a little bit" indefinitely.
If you decide not to jump, you might try my method of crushing pills and weighing the total amount and then you can weigh very precise amounts. If you mix the powder well you can ensure more or less homogenous distribution (though I rather assume it's already homogenized throughout the pill, but you can be 100% sure a whole pill contains 8mg. So if 5 pills weigh, say, 400mg (they don't but it's easy math), if you crush them all up and blend them together, you can be sure 10mg of pill powder contains 1mg of bupe.
I actually am going to have to tell my bupe doctor soon about the crushing/milligram scale weighting thing, because he's been trying to get me to switch to the strips for 2 months now, saying that trying to cut pill with a pill cutting is inaccurate. Which is true, but I hate the strips for various reasons, and anyway, I guarantee weighing the pill powder on a milligram scale is way more accurate. I think I'm gonna tell him that the therapist I'm seeing (I say I'm seeing one, even though I actually want to but just haven't yet) told me that another client of hers does it and found it an amazing method. It really is a great idea, reduce by 2mg of pill powder per day... about 1mg of bupe tapered down each month. You couldn't possibly notice a difference with that microscopic amount, and you have a chance to be re-normalizing steadily as you go. Pretty sure with this I'll be able to get down faster, and without any janglyness on drop days
Yeah, 2006-2007 was the peak for me here.
All the younger generations (not all obviously,
@arrall posts on the forums for example, but it seems like most) prefer Discord. Discord is fine but I don't use it the same way. I use it for a crypto discussion group I'm in, just because it's there. Live chat can be fun, but the forum is a far superior format for a place like this, because all of the information is easy to find and stored forever. You can also continue conversations from years earlier easily.
In live chat, well, Discord anyway has channels, which is an improvement, but still, it's ephemeral. Good luck finding some tidbit from last year. An admin can pin posts in a channel, but the interface for accessing them isn't amazing.
Also, forums, IMO, encourage more in-depth conversations more. In live chat, people are firing off short bursts of text, rapid fire. In a forum, the focus is more, or at least it more easily and readily is for most people, to take your time and compose something thoughtful. Sometimes a forum post takes me 20, 30, 40 minutes, I've even had them take me an hour to compose. But those are always there then, forever. People will guaranteed come across it and the information I took the time to write next year, the year after that, the year after that... hopefully forever, or until human civilization collapses.
Oh wow that's cool your friend is in Dark Star. I love that band! Me and some friends used to have a yearly August tradition of going at a great venue outside of town. I've had some great times there. They're a really good band. Been going for a long time, too.
There are just some weird math quirks. Usually someone has used them to prove something (as in mathematical proofs). The first one I learned was from my dad a very long time ago. If you add the digits of any number (integer) together, and they're a multiple of 3, then that number is divisible by 3.
91: 9 + 1 = 10 (nope)
93: 9 + 3 = 12 (yep)
564: 5 + 6 + 4 = 15 (yep)
734089612431: 7+3+4+0+8+9+6+1+2+4+3+1 = 48 (yep)
734089612
331: 7+3+4+0+8+9+6+1+2+4+3+1 = 47 (NOPE) (picked a random digit to decrement by 1, which I knew would make ti not divisible by 3. In fact I randomly choose any of the digits (excepy the 0 obviously) to subtract 1 from one more time ad it would not be, but then any of them another time, and it would be. Super weurd, but you can verify with a calculator. I don't believe it works with any other number, except 1, trivially, since everything is divisible by 1. I could be wrong though but if it works again somewhere it's not 2 or 4-9)
EDIT: My last example I meant to indicate added to 47 and was a NOPE
