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Hi all,
I'm looking for some advice/opinions/thought/whatever on how best to get my life back on track. The tl;dr version of this thread is: I started using drugs a few years ago to escape from clinical depression, low self-esteem and never-ending overthinking. Eventually I forgot how to deal with sadness properly and the new aim of drug use was to escape pain at all costs and create chemical happiness. Characterisic of people like me, my drug use isn’t limited to one or two substances but near-daily experience with about a dozen drugs over the course of a few years (including BZP, MDMA, codeine, tramadol, oxycodone, mephedrone, speed and MPA). At this point, I do have a specific stimulant addiction (MPA) and despite breaking free of dependence on tobacco, caffeine and MDAI so far this year, I’m completely unable to handle the stimulant withdrawal without being basically bed-bound (something I really can’t afford for any amount of time). I see my current state of depersonalisation and depressed malaise as a messy combination of depression, excessive philosophising which always ends in the conclusion that life is pointless, my physical dependence on MPA, my psychological addiction to avoiding unhappiness at all costs, my shitty self-esteem, the constant and very unhealthy body load from the stress and anxiety and the things obviously directly related to stimulant use: addiction to “doing things”, previously non-existent perfectionism and very slight obsessive-compulsive tendencies, depersonalisation and a total inability to switch off my brain and relax.
I feel I should mention the fact that, although the problems I faced leading up to the start of my drug use weren’t exactly “stop whining and get over it” material, they were also not “holy shit, that fucking sucks” bad either – then again, I think the weight of a problem can only be meaningfully compared in the context of the person facing the problem so maybe it doesn’t matter! I should also mention that while the drugs, quantities and durations seem like a lot to me personally because of the huge effect they’ve had on my life, they’re likely dwarfed by what some people here have done. Hopefully that should give my topic some scope.
Basically, I had severe clinical depression about 4 years ago now. I don’t think I could’ve killed myself but, like many people in that position, the idea entered my mind a couple of times. I never took anti-depressants but had the standard weekly counseling sessions and occasional appointments with a psychiatrist. I’m still not really sure why it started but I do know that my self-esteem had been pretty shit for a long time beforehand and that I couldn’t stop doing the constant overanalysis of everything thing. “What’s wrong with me?”, “What’s the meaning of life?”, “What is the deeper meaning of this?” and “Why did that person ignore me?” That sort of stuff. I mean, I still do that now – maybe worse than ever - but the questions are often more metaphysical than interpersonal. One thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that my mind is almost constantly busy comparing where I am right now to where I want to be and exaggerating the difference; although, as I understand it, a lot of people waste their entire lives doing that with or without depression.
To summarise the problems I had which probably contributed to my mental state as I went into depression (without going into boring detail): life-threatening childhood illness, dad who visibly struggled with heavy alcoholism and depression during my late pre-teen and early teenage years, harsh public school life spent as a bit of an outcast (I took many a beatdown in my time, although it’s only the words which hurt now – sticks and stones indeed!) and I also wet the bed until I was about 14 or 15 (just imagine the fun they had at school the day it got out
). Anyway, as I said before, other people have had far worse but my problems were more than enough for me personally. To put a timescale on this: I’m 20 now, 16 when I was diagnosed with depression.
The first drugs I tried were MDMA and BZP. I largely skipped cannabis even to this day and I’d already long since decided that I didn’t like the feeling of being drunk. Those drugs, however, I fucking loved. I tried them (not at the same time I emphasise!) shortly after being diagnosed with depression -- although there’s no real correlation because I would’ve tried them anyway. And it was like skyrocketing back up to baseline and way beyond (even with the BZP which, I now realise, had notoriously mixed reviews!) I actually enjoyed the BZP more (I don’t remember why unfortunately) and quickly went on a rampage, using ~10g of the stuff in about 2 weeks, day in day out. I probably should’ve seen the red flag of an addictive personality and, more importantly, an addiction to getting fucked up as soon as I started doing it before college in the morning. But the supply ran out, the vendor had coincidentally closed down and I forgot all about it.
About 5 months later, in early 2009, I discovered the method for CWEing co-codamol and quickly set to work demolishing the stockpile of over a thousand tablets I’d accidentally accumulated through years of unused and unchecked repeat prescriptions. Once again, it was all day every day. That summer, I got my hands on a large amount of tramadol pills (probably 800) and settled into a new routine of daily use which continued far into the new year. At my worst with the tramadol, I was using >1g a day, and was sometimes munching through 800mg in a single sitting. Looking back I feel extremely lucky not to have had a seizure but at the time I was still in “trial and error” mode and if you’d have asked me, I’d probably have said “I don’t care”. When I quit tramadol (through lack of supply, not by choice), I had my first brush with withdrawal symptoms. I got really lazy and really depressed for a while.
Looking for other ways to get fucked up, I experimented with myristicin (nutmeg), mephedrone, speed and even piriton (fucks sake!) for varying lengths of time throughout 2010. I smoked weed on occasion, drank on occasion and went back to opiates a few times (trying DHC and oxy instead of codeine but ending up consistently disappointed with all 3). I also took up smoking properly (tobacco, to some!) and somewhere along the line (summer 2009, I think) got massively into caffeine because of its stupidly high availability and stupidly low price (pound store caffeine tablets, fuck). By 2011 I was consistently taking 900mg of caffeine tablets at a time and surprisingly I think it actually fucked me up more in the long run than any single other drug. I was also a 20 a day man by that point.
2011 was marked further by experimentation with various RCs. By this stage, I had learnt some responsibility. I had drug scales, at least, and I understood the importance of allergy testing, proper research and other HR techniques. I’d learnt the basic roles of the various neurotransmitters, their receptors and the effects that drugs could have on both. Proper drug addict essentials, I’d say. At any rate, I managed to avoid serotonin syndrome despite a heroic binge on MDAI at the start of the year. I ended up with SSRI discontinuation syndrome instead. Heh. Brain zaps are horrible. I didn’t see that one coming because I hadn’t even heard of it before. But I sobered up for a while afterwards. Despite using drugs of some description every day for years with few breaks, I only ended up in real short-term danger a handful of times. Mostly luck. But my almost clean record of not mixing drugs of any description probably didn’t hurt.
While I was sober after that, I was depressed, irritable and very fatigued. I also started to notice what I’ve now come to know as depersonalisation following a protracted period of stress symptoms. Although my doctor was insistent on his stress diagnosis, because I was high on stimulants I wasn’t feeling the stress on a conscious emotional level; instead my body was footing the bill for the exam/uni application stress that I’d been intentionally blocking out with more stressors. I was convinced he was wrong until a self-experiment with cutting out caffeine and lessening other stimulant use produced a significant improvement in the symptoms. But they didn’t go away, and I still felt like shit. The depersonalisation caused depression and anxiety beyond even the withdrawal period. I lasted about 6 weeks, I think, spent almost exclusively in my room, but progress was so slow as to be virtually unnoticeable and I began to feel like I’d permanently fucked myself so I might as well not bother (I also got sick of feeling like that, I won’t lie).
In September, I tried the RC MPA and loved it, especially combined with MDAI (which I still believe to be a reasonably safe combination when done responsibly – certainly I never came to any standout harm from it, compared to my actual fuck ups). I hammered that combination well into this year and to this day still use MPA on a daily basis. Unfortunately I’m now well and truly addicted to it. When I stop, I can barely stay out of bed for more than an hour or two and that time is characterised by misery and anger.
I understand that I’ve just painted the picture of someone who is stupid, immature, irresponsible, ungrateful, selfish, undisciplined and maybe even deserving of horrible consequences but I also understand that I have been those things and I hate myself for having done it. Over the last 3 months, I’ve been really trying to defuck myself. I managed to give up smoking and my caffeine intake is long since a thing of the past. A few weeks ago I finally dropped MDAI from my life and I’ve probably halved my daily MPA intake since the worst point at the start of this year.
The thing is that I’m really ready to stop now; I want my life back and I want to feel proper emotions prompted by proper stimuli again. The decision to finally give up completely is one I’ve only just made in the last week or so as I’ve been feeling especially depressed, lazy, anxious, paranoid and depersonalised in various combinations/intensities no matter what I do and how much or how little MPA I use. Low self-esteem is still a problem for me (albeit often buried beneath a flood of dopamine) but not quite as much as it used to be; I think these days I confuse feelings of anxiety and paranoia, probably rooted to a large degree in my stimulant use, with self-doubt and other characteristics of low self-esteem. Depression is also still an underlying issue but not as much as it used to be (except this past week actually), although I still get weighed down by big philosophical questions more than ever. I get feelings of depersonalisation of various intensities on a daily basis and that’s probably my number one reason to kick the stimulant bucket: I don’t want it to become a permanent and pervasive part of my life because it’s horrible. On the rare occasions when I’m not very high and I’m out of bed and functional, I get glimpses of how things used to be and feel very much rooted back in the real world (though very depressed, tired and angry). The moments are few and far between because it’s an anxiety-based condition (if you didn’t know
) and stimulant usage has made me forget how to relax and turn off my brain and also how to properly identify my feelings and recognise my body’s signals – after all, it’s taken this long to even get close to understanding what’s wrong with me. Lastly, it’s made me a tunnel-visioned perfectionist which has had a negative impact on various areas of my life and it’s intensified my previously rather mild OCD tendencies (nothing like actual OCD, I rush to emphasise, that’s just the best way I can think of describing it) – these are problems I’m pretty confident will naturally resolve themselves after quitting however (I never thought I’d be saying that I wanted to go back to the days when I was lazy and average!)
The problem is that I don’t know the practical steps I should be taking to undo the fucking up. Should I be concentrating on resolving emotional issues like the depression, low self-esteem and addiction to not being sober first? Should I cut down or go cold turkey? Can I manage it in a way that won’t fuck up my degree? Should I be looking at something like mindfulness to help with the depression and constant internal monologue and the depersonalisation (I haven’t seen any studies that have used it for DP but I reckon it could be extremely useful)? How should I be looking at overcoming my non-specific psychological addiction to getting fucked up? How should someone in my position start learning to relax and is it something I should be considering? What is the meaning of life? And what sort of order should I be doing these things in?
Anyway, massive thanks for bearing with me if you managed to get this far, I’d really appreciate any advice, answers, partial answers, comments, suggestions or anything really. I apologise for your wasted time but it became very important to me after I started writing. Sure, some people I know know about my drug use, some even know about my addiction and psychological issues to a limited extent but I’ve never told anyone anything close to the whole story before.
I'm looking for some advice/opinions/thought/whatever on how best to get my life back on track. The tl;dr version of this thread is: I started using drugs a few years ago to escape from clinical depression, low self-esteem and never-ending overthinking. Eventually I forgot how to deal with sadness properly and the new aim of drug use was to escape pain at all costs and create chemical happiness. Characterisic of people like me, my drug use isn’t limited to one or two substances but near-daily experience with about a dozen drugs over the course of a few years (including BZP, MDMA, codeine, tramadol, oxycodone, mephedrone, speed and MPA). At this point, I do have a specific stimulant addiction (MPA) and despite breaking free of dependence on tobacco, caffeine and MDAI so far this year, I’m completely unable to handle the stimulant withdrawal without being basically bed-bound (something I really can’t afford for any amount of time). I see my current state of depersonalisation and depressed malaise as a messy combination of depression, excessive philosophising which always ends in the conclusion that life is pointless, my physical dependence on MPA, my psychological addiction to avoiding unhappiness at all costs, my shitty self-esteem, the constant and very unhealthy body load from the stress and anxiety and the things obviously directly related to stimulant use: addiction to “doing things”, previously non-existent perfectionism and very slight obsessive-compulsive tendencies, depersonalisation and a total inability to switch off my brain and relax.
I feel I should mention the fact that, although the problems I faced leading up to the start of my drug use weren’t exactly “stop whining and get over it” material, they were also not “holy shit, that fucking sucks” bad either – then again, I think the weight of a problem can only be meaningfully compared in the context of the person facing the problem so maybe it doesn’t matter! I should also mention that while the drugs, quantities and durations seem like a lot to me personally because of the huge effect they’ve had on my life, they’re likely dwarfed by what some people here have done. Hopefully that should give my topic some scope.
Basically, I had severe clinical depression about 4 years ago now. I don’t think I could’ve killed myself but, like many people in that position, the idea entered my mind a couple of times. I never took anti-depressants but had the standard weekly counseling sessions and occasional appointments with a psychiatrist. I’m still not really sure why it started but I do know that my self-esteem had been pretty shit for a long time beforehand and that I couldn’t stop doing the constant overanalysis of everything thing. “What’s wrong with me?”, “What’s the meaning of life?”, “What is the deeper meaning of this?” and “Why did that person ignore me?” That sort of stuff. I mean, I still do that now – maybe worse than ever - but the questions are often more metaphysical than interpersonal. One thing that hasn’t changed is the fact that my mind is almost constantly busy comparing where I am right now to where I want to be and exaggerating the difference; although, as I understand it, a lot of people waste their entire lives doing that with or without depression.
To summarise the problems I had which probably contributed to my mental state as I went into depression (without going into boring detail): life-threatening childhood illness, dad who visibly struggled with heavy alcoholism and depression during my late pre-teen and early teenage years, harsh public school life spent as a bit of an outcast (I took many a beatdown in my time, although it’s only the words which hurt now – sticks and stones indeed!) and I also wet the bed until I was about 14 or 15 (just imagine the fun they had at school the day it got out
). Anyway, as I said before, other people have had far worse but my problems were more than enough for me personally. To put a timescale on this: I’m 20 now, 16 when I was diagnosed with depression.The first drugs I tried were MDMA and BZP. I largely skipped cannabis even to this day and I’d already long since decided that I didn’t like the feeling of being drunk. Those drugs, however, I fucking loved. I tried them (not at the same time I emphasise!) shortly after being diagnosed with depression -- although there’s no real correlation because I would’ve tried them anyway. And it was like skyrocketing back up to baseline and way beyond (even with the BZP which, I now realise, had notoriously mixed reviews!) I actually enjoyed the BZP more (I don’t remember why unfortunately) and quickly went on a rampage, using ~10g of the stuff in about 2 weeks, day in day out. I probably should’ve seen the red flag of an addictive personality and, more importantly, an addiction to getting fucked up as soon as I started doing it before college in the morning. But the supply ran out, the vendor had coincidentally closed down and I forgot all about it.
About 5 months later, in early 2009, I discovered the method for CWEing co-codamol and quickly set to work demolishing the stockpile of over a thousand tablets I’d accidentally accumulated through years of unused and unchecked repeat prescriptions. Once again, it was all day every day. That summer, I got my hands on a large amount of tramadol pills (probably 800) and settled into a new routine of daily use which continued far into the new year. At my worst with the tramadol, I was using >1g a day, and was sometimes munching through 800mg in a single sitting. Looking back I feel extremely lucky not to have had a seizure but at the time I was still in “trial and error” mode and if you’d have asked me, I’d probably have said “I don’t care”. When I quit tramadol (through lack of supply, not by choice), I had my first brush with withdrawal symptoms. I got really lazy and really depressed for a while.
Looking for other ways to get fucked up, I experimented with myristicin (nutmeg), mephedrone, speed and even piriton (fucks sake!) for varying lengths of time throughout 2010. I smoked weed on occasion, drank on occasion and went back to opiates a few times (trying DHC and oxy instead of codeine but ending up consistently disappointed with all 3). I also took up smoking properly (tobacco, to some!) and somewhere along the line (summer 2009, I think) got massively into caffeine because of its stupidly high availability and stupidly low price (pound store caffeine tablets, fuck). By 2011 I was consistently taking 900mg of caffeine tablets at a time and surprisingly I think it actually fucked me up more in the long run than any single other drug. I was also a 20 a day man by that point.
2011 was marked further by experimentation with various RCs. By this stage, I had learnt some responsibility. I had drug scales, at least, and I understood the importance of allergy testing, proper research and other HR techniques. I’d learnt the basic roles of the various neurotransmitters, their receptors and the effects that drugs could have on both. Proper drug addict essentials, I’d say. At any rate, I managed to avoid serotonin syndrome despite a heroic binge on MDAI at the start of the year. I ended up with SSRI discontinuation syndrome instead. Heh. Brain zaps are horrible. I didn’t see that one coming because I hadn’t even heard of it before. But I sobered up for a while afterwards. Despite using drugs of some description every day for years with few breaks, I only ended up in real short-term danger a handful of times. Mostly luck. But my almost clean record of not mixing drugs of any description probably didn’t hurt.
While I was sober after that, I was depressed, irritable and very fatigued. I also started to notice what I’ve now come to know as depersonalisation following a protracted period of stress symptoms. Although my doctor was insistent on his stress diagnosis, because I was high on stimulants I wasn’t feeling the stress on a conscious emotional level; instead my body was footing the bill for the exam/uni application stress that I’d been intentionally blocking out with more stressors. I was convinced he was wrong until a self-experiment with cutting out caffeine and lessening other stimulant use produced a significant improvement in the symptoms. But they didn’t go away, and I still felt like shit. The depersonalisation caused depression and anxiety beyond even the withdrawal period. I lasted about 6 weeks, I think, spent almost exclusively in my room, but progress was so slow as to be virtually unnoticeable and I began to feel like I’d permanently fucked myself so I might as well not bother (I also got sick of feeling like that, I won’t lie).
In September, I tried the RC MPA and loved it, especially combined with MDAI (which I still believe to be a reasonably safe combination when done responsibly – certainly I never came to any standout harm from it, compared to my actual fuck ups). I hammered that combination well into this year and to this day still use MPA on a daily basis. Unfortunately I’m now well and truly addicted to it. When I stop, I can barely stay out of bed for more than an hour or two and that time is characterised by misery and anger.
I understand that I’ve just painted the picture of someone who is stupid, immature, irresponsible, ungrateful, selfish, undisciplined and maybe even deserving of horrible consequences but I also understand that I have been those things and I hate myself for having done it. Over the last 3 months, I’ve been really trying to defuck myself. I managed to give up smoking and my caffeine intake is long since a thing of the past. A few weeks ago I finally dropped MDAI from my life and I’ve probably halved my daily MPA intake since the worst point at the start of this year.
The thing is that I’m really ready to stop now; I want my life back and I want to feel proper emotions prompted by proper stimuli again. The decision to finally give up completely is one I’ve only just made in the last week or so as I’ve been feeling especially depressed, lazy, anxious, paranoid and depersonalised in various combinations/intensities no matter what I do and how much or how little MPA I use. Low self-esteem is still a problem for me (albeit often buried beneath a flood of dopamine) but not quite as much as it used to be; I think these days I confuse feelings of anxiety and paranoia, probably rooted to a large degree in my stimulant use, with self-doubt and other characteristics of low self-esteem. Depression is also still an underlying issue but not as much as it used to be (except this past week actually), although I still get weighed down by big philosophical questions more than ever. I get feelings of depersonalisation of various intensities on a daily basis and that’s probably my number one reason to kick the stimulant bucket: I don’t want it to become a permanent and pervasive part of my life because it’s horrible. On the rare occasions when I’m not very high and I’m out of bed and functional, I get glimpses of how things used to be and feel very much rooted back in the real world (though very depressed, tired and angry). The moments are few and far between because it’s an anxiety-based condition (if you didn’t know
) and stimulant usage has made me forget how to relax and turn off my brain and also how to properly identify my feelings and recognise my body’s signals – after all, it’s taken this long to even get close to understanding what’s wrong with me. Lastly, it’s made me a tunnel-visioned perfectionist which has had a negative impact on various areas of my life and it’s intensified my previously rather mild OCD tendencies (nothing like actual OCD, I rush to emphasise, that’s just the best way I can think of describing it) – these are problems I’m pretty confident will naturally resolve themselves after quitting however (I never thought I’d be saying that I wanted to go back to the days when I was lazy and average!)The problem is that I don’t know the practical steps I should be taking to undo the fucking up. Should I be concentrating on resolving emotional issues like the depression, low self-esteem and addiction to not being sober first? Should I cut down or go cold turkey? Can I manage it in a way that won’t fuck up my degree? Should I be looking at something like mindfulness to help with the depression and constant internal monologue and the depersonalisation (I haven’t seen any studies that have used it for DP but I reckon it could be extremely useful)? How should I be looking at overcoming my non-specific psychological addiction to getting fucked up? How should someone in my position start learning to relax and is it something I should be considering? What is the meaning of life? And what sort of order should I be doing these things in?
Anyway, massive thanks for bearing with me if you managed to get this far, I’d really appreciate any advice, answers, partial answers, comments, suggestions or anything really. I apologise for your wasted time but it became very important to me after I started writing. Sure, some people I know know about my drug use, some even know about my addiction and psychological issues to a limited extent but I’ve never told anyone anything close to the whole story before.
