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So, what are you running from ?

faceplant

faceplant

Bluelighter
Joined
Apr 19, 2012
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turning to, tuning in, dropping out
I was thinking today, about me, my life, and you guys. Then I talked to the one friend who i can confide in about my drug taking behaviour. And a question arose, what are you running from? Maybe nothing, but Im off the opinion that somebody with no problems dosent take drugs.

For me, its mental illness, laziness prompted guilt and lonliness.

So what are you guys running from ?
 
Family, life, myself, society. The pain of others really gets me down sometimes and I run from that. More than anything i think i try to run from myself. Lately it's been boredom. Fear of failure is also another big one.

I try to face such things head on but sometimes get overwhelmed. I think the question is certainly worth consideration. It helps me to break down all these things like what am i afraid of, why am i trying to avoid this and other similar questions.
 
When I was using and drinking, I was running from a variety of things. General unhappiness, constant unpleasant thinking, insecurities, boredom, anxiety, fears, hopelessness, loneliness, etc. I'd say those are pretty familiar feelings for many of us. Now I'm choosing not to use or drink, and to deal with these things sober, because drugs and alcohol just worsened them and occasionally delayed their attack through the night.
 
I was running from the constant boring in my life. But then i got older and life seems to be catching up with me and i feel hurried so now i dont want to do drugs i want to be young forever and doing drugs passes time way to fast and before tou know it your an old junkie. I want life slow so i can enjoy and have more memories...
 
My own failures, mostly. Other things too, boredom, anxiety, other people.. but mostly I'm deeply unhappy with how my life has turned out, but of course, drugs have just made it much worse.
 
People use drugs for many reasons, and we're not all running from something. In fact, some people use drugs to run towards something, looking for meaning, although you could call that running away from futility and meaningless.
Personally, I use drugs just to escape. Whether it's to escape the perspective I have, the feelings I'm experiencing, the thoughts I'm having, irrelevant.
I don't care why, when you're trying to escape something it begins with you. Life just is, it's how you relate to it. Whether you're filling one desire, whether it be loneliness, or ennui, or unachieved goals, or what, all you're doing is replacing one desire with another. The desire to feel better, and when you achieve this through drugs, and this desire grows, addictions seep in.
It also depends on the drug really, when you lump drugs into one category it just muddles the lines.
I use drugs to escape really. To focus my attention from something negative to something different.
Drugs can't fill the void of being lonely, or not having meaning, or not having the person you once had in your life, or not having the childhood you wanted. Drugs won't change your past, they are able to change the way you perceive it.
Drugs can change the present. Drugs can take you from one polar to the converse polar.
Whatever it is you're trying to escape, the drug is redundant. *excludes w/d
Let's say you're feeling (insert emotion here), this emotion is transient, and you're going to feel something else very soon. The thing is, some emotions are reoccurring, you get stuck in the perpetual loop of suffering where you're no longer trying to escape just an emotion, you're trying to escape yourself.
The emotions you've experienced for so long become a part of you, they're no longer a mood, they're now an attribute.
You try to escape this, but you can't. You're stuck with yourself, as soon as you sober up you have to face yourself.
Maybe I'm just a really troubled, fucked up person. I know there are people who use drugs in benevolent ways. There are healthy, stable people with no problems to run from, who use drugs and learn and grow.
Then there's me. I'm just one festering crock pot of shitty emotion and broken destructive apathetic thoughts. I use drugs because they allow me to derive some form of pleasure from my otherwise meaningless life. I use drugs because they give me a break from myself. I use drugs to lift my mood. I use drugs because I don't like being myself, and they allow me to stop being myself.
 
I'm running from myself because I can see that the real "ME" has a problem and wants so badly to get better but on the other hand, the other ME of me just keeps going with the usual everyday routine. It's so easy to just give in. God I'd love to be sober.
 
sometimes i think im running from being an adult, getting my own place, getting a drivers liscence, a car, learning to drive, paying bills, etc. doing drugs keeps me too busy to do any of that stuff. also just running from being sick, i get sick, and i get depressed and that causes me to use. also the fear that im not going to know what to do when im sober, my life using drugs has so much routine.
 
I was running from responsibility. I was trying to run from the future and stay in the now, or in the past. I was afraid of what life would throw at me. I was afraid of having to learn and become accustomed to new things. A conservative for my own childhood if you will. Somehow, a bad first shroom trip changed that. It forced me to face the fearful child within. I administered MDMA and LSD to myself several times thereafter for the purpose pure recreation...but found something else...something much more substantial. Now I'm looking towards the future but living in the present. It still blows my mind how different you can become over the course of a few years.
 
Drugs in the beginning were a means of pleasure and enjoyment. It was never really anything I did to escape or run away from anything. It was simply for pleasure and enjoyment. Of course that switched around on me and I now run from myself, anxiety, depression, self loathing, all sorts of irrational fears.
 
nothing. it just never really worked as an escape for me, so you're high for 3 hours, then it's 3 hours later, you've come down, you feel shitter than before, and you still have the problems you had before. just didn't really work for me on that level, i can't afford to be strung out 24/7. when paranoia and depression from overdoing it, i stop. not to say i haven't become an addict, i just really like getting high, they are "recreational" drugs after all.
 
I was running from numbness. When I'm sober I'm numb, I have no emotions. When I take drugs such as ecstasy or oxy, it's like I'm opened up to a whole different world. I can emotionally feel when I'm high. I can understand people, understand life. I can feel compassion when I take drugs, even love, to a certain degree. When that door opens for a person like me, it's very hard to walk away from it, and go back to being emotionally blind.
 
I think I'm running more toward than from. I'm just not there yet.
 
OxycoDrone said:
My own failures, mostly. Other things too, boredom, anxiety, other people.. but mostly I'm deeply unhappy with how my life has turned out, but of course, drugs have just made it much worse.
Click to expand...

This one's pretty close for me. Honestly, right now I'd say that I'm running from the acceptence of a lot of things about my life. I'm only really using drugs these days in the sense of a binge every few Saturday nights, but I'm still exhibiting a lot of learned (unhealthy) behaviours - denial, addiction (to healthier things, but still...), emotional-detachment, etc.

Like stardust.hero mentioned, in the beginning it was all about the pretty colours and the deep thoughts. Not so much self-medication as supplementation. At some point this changed, probably when I experienced how much easier it was to digest bad news while I was on certain drugs. Then the physical addictions came, then the collateral damage and the traumatic events, then the mess that is trying to deal with it all on the other side.

I guess right now I'm still too scared to sit down and try and "properly" learn to accept the situations I find myself in and to work through the events that have developed my PTSD. It's not that I don't want to, but I know that there's a high risk of relapse if I take that on right now, and I have to be extremely calculating with what I use and when these days or else things could get significantly worse.

So ya, I'm running from acceptance and toward some imaginary future where I learn to effectively "black things out" and regain a lot of my old passions and interests, and where my looping mind does not become a dark theater playing horrible memories for me whenever I feel myself having too much fun.
 
@RedLeader: kind of OT but something that helps me deal with trauma (memories, images) is to re-imagine the memory, make the memory black and white in your mind and view it from a third person perspective and zoom out.
 
biblical plague, justice, cats & dogs, up & down, reality at large & mostly life itself
 
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