Yes, I can relate to a lot of what you said. I'm currently in the 'crippled with depression/social-anxiety' phase as my mind and body is healing itself after I decided to sober up while awaiting to see my GP to get a referral to a mental health professional to work out once and for all what exactly it is that's wrong with me.
I strongly suspect I probably just need to stay away from the opioids long enough to afford my neurochemistry the necessary time to self-regulate.
How long have you been living through these cycles (as in from what age) if you dont mind me asking?
Yes of course, I kind of regret my description of these cycles now. I’ve had s change of headspace, I can see it as me romanticizing them a little but damn do they make it so much say to go on autopilot and not have to worry.
so my opioid usage cycles started 12 years ago where opiates started playing into the emotional/mental “relief” of the cycle. I had dabbled before that but wasn’t in the honeymoon yet. So I think I was 25/26.
The opiates probably exacerbated the cycles to a more dramatic point but also awareness of my functioning relative to other people my age made the cycles way worse. Age increased the relief when using and also the stakes to perform at a higher level and the self judgement so I just stayed high. Like “fuck I’m an idiot” because I did this action that makes zero sense or had an accident where I broke something I was supposed to be careful with, or pissed someone off unintentionally with my words or had a rage episode. Opiates meant I didn’t need another person to bitch to. I could just be fine by myself because another person is just going to criticize me anyways.
And for me it was like someone flipped a switch at 16 years of age, depression, suicidal thoughts, and no sense of self, plus the tired feelings started and the tired feelings have continued to build and build without a clear cause and only opiates brought me relief. I suspect that feeling is what happens when you don’t acknowledge your bad feelings.
That no sense of self is the biggest and worst of the bunch to me and still is, no sense of self means you don’t care about things you are supposed to and you have to comprehend them intellectually, but if the goal post shifts you forget that you were supposed to comprehend them at all and are already caring about something else. It’s not like memory issues either, you remember what you are supposed to do, you just have no reference point until the more emotionally capable or motivated version of you rolls back around. You also don’t give a damn about longterm survival lol so basically I was/am stuck as a perpetual immature person with less life skills than most but maybe there are more out there like me? I don’t think I have autism.
I suspect I had underlying issues much sooner because I remember grinding my teeth as a child, freaking out whenever someone would touch me on the leg, not being able to make conversation or only very brief eye contact due to nerves, I had a couple very hard disassociation episodes where I wasn’t even me at a young age, it felt exactly like DXM/ketamine where you become someone else(might not happen to everyone with dissos)minus the sloppy drugged feeling. I don’t think most people have had that experience awake without drugs, unless someone drugged a child with one of those? I still can’t explain those fully. I was just a little overly sensitive bitch that wasn’t made for this world.
I’m 38 and feel like I’m stuck at 15-16 maturity wise, meaning I’ve always been too sensitive and that’s what I heard growing up, from friends, cousins, relatives, etc… like what the fuck is wrong with him? My paranoia developed out of that and feeling unsafe around 98% of people and not being able to take criticism or rather I get exhausted processing criticism because my self criticism makes a mountain out of a molehill.
I can take it but I hate myself and add it to the pile. It’s funny looking back on it but the internet trolls really scarred me and made me even more distrustful of people, but then I became one and now I understand why people troll. Then I had no clue, i was taking it so seriously LOL but I know most don’t mean to cause anything other than annoyance to others or were just lashing out because they were lonely. I don’t know if you can tell from my typing but I’m more at peace today.
I had a big pity party yesterday/this morning with actual tears(can’t remember the last time I cried real tears I think it’s been 10 years) and now the pendulum has swung back in my favor.
I think opiates and poor emotional coping in my case had me shut the door on my own feelings. Feels like I dissociated without drugs first, not wanting to be sensitive anymore and then with drugs so hard I was completely cocooning from most of the good and bad. I would have said that idea of good/bad emotions being connected is completely foo foo pseudo science garbage last week but it seems you can’t block the bad without blocking the good.
Anyways I’m talking so much about my shit.
I feel like if you were ok before opioids, you should be able to land ok assuming they haven’t left a big scar and trauma. It definitely won’t be pleasant and I have no room to talk about being able to land. I think the social anxiety but is related to how much you relief you got out of them and the absence will be more acutely painful until you get to a couple months.
What’s your story and thoughts on why you used?
