So there's my confession, I've been deluding myself for weeks thinking I was controlling everything but no, I'm not. I'm pathetic and I failed once again.
I really don't want to go to NA again. I've been seeing both a therapist and a psychiatrist for months but I can't tell them about it. I mentioned it vaguely to my therapist a couple months ago and she said if I started using on a regular basis she wouldn't be able to see me anymore because 'I want to be having conversations with you, not the drug'. That made me feel horrible, like I was some sort of outcast. I don't have anyone in my life I can talk to about this either and I think if anyone here knew about it they wouldn't ever talk to me again.
Have you really failed? You can still turn back
right now and start attending classes, submitting work, attempting to catch up on stuff you've missed out on, etc. You're still in the game, you've just maybe lost interest in it because not only are you depressed, but the chem's are starting to mess with your mind and negatively affect your outlook and perspective! 'Heroin' is a great anti-depressant, along with almost all opiates or opioids, but after a while you grow used to feeling the euphoria and joy and without the chemical in your blood, you literally
stop being able to feel positive or happy for a potentially ruinously long time!
Pagey said:
I want it to end so bad and 'Heroin' is the only thing keeping me going and giving me a reason to get up in the mornings, something which I haven't even been doing in the past few weeks. I've been forcing myself to go out in the evenings and interact with people, 'have fun', or at least pretend to, but truth is it just feels like shit because I know how fake it is. I hate being with them and the whole time I'm just telling myself I can't wait to get back to my room and do more h. I hate how much I've let myself go physically but I don't have the strength to change it so I just snort more. I've stopped going to my classes or doing any of my work. I'm going home for a few weeks in a week and I'm dreading it so much. There are horrible memories there and I don't know how I'll handle it. I'm terrified.
Do you want to die? You don't strike me as such. I don't want you to die, but I know that I'm mostly just living a silly routine that I consider to be a mockery against life itself, walking the inexorable path from cradle to grave.
Then again, it can be so much more than that:
change something.
Do something. Do you know when I was most happy? It was when I was
working.
When you're at a job, whether it's at some bug-infested fast food restaurant or a very nice, pleasant corporate office building, you're surrounded by your peers and you basically integrate yourself into society, learning how to talk to people; they'll chat to you and you'll have laughs whether you intend to or even feel like it or not, and that's one thing I'd suggest either picking (back?) up on or covering by heading to class to be with similarly-minded people - I'm sure you're all studying something that you want to study, right?
You get lost in either scrubbing dishes and running a dish-washer, clearing up plates, standing behind a bar pouring pints and fetching ice, typing up faxes and e-mails, entering data into some black-hole-esque database that seems to be both ridiculously difficult to use and also an utter waste of time when none of the staff who'd use it use computers (!@#$...) but, ah, my point is that it
keeps you occupied and busy and you end up lightening up!
It may be true that, from certain perspectives, one can come to the conclusion that there exists no real point to living life, but that in itself is
no bad thing. Think about your goals, as
parachuteantics rightfully mentioned.
What is one of your ultimate goals or dreams? I was in a huge rut with drugs and in a terrible relationship - then I was broken up with and left to the curb, failing school, gained a lot of weight, depressed, unhappy. I told my important family members everything and they helped me and encouraged me, friends and family can be very helpful and supportive of a new transition in your life.
Anyway, I already had anxiety and I found something that changed my outlook on everything - I wanted to be a dj/producer. I saved my money for DJing equipment instead of drugs and bought one of my first pieces of equipment. It was a such an acomplishment! I took money from what could have been used for drugs and used it to head towards a personal goal. Sure, I understand I might not ever make it in music but it's a hell of a lot better feeling like crap, doing drugs, wasting money etc. I guess my advice is follow something you are passionate about - and it helps elevate some of that anxiety/use of drugs.
Your own goal of becoming an author is not going to be easy, but it'd be hard to provoke passion in people if credit and respect amongst critics and fame and adulation from fans forming a ring of individuals across the entire globe were that easy to achieve, we'd all be bloody famous! So,
what are you writing? I thought as you appear to do: "drugs help me to write". But do they? I've noticed my productivity when under the influence and, yeah, I get some stuff down, but it vastly alters my perception of the world around to a point where certain characters end up written whilst high and other, more
grounded characters are written without that chemical aide taking the leash off of my morality for some spectacularly useless diatribe on the truth about drugs and how they're so much greater than anything else in the world...
Write more.
Read more, even: I thought that to become a critically-acclaimed author, I'd have to read as much as I could, and I did just that; spent hundreds on 'Classics' and pieces of literature I could never hope to come up against, simply because my imagination may be powerful, but I've had different experiences: men like Vonnegut wrote after seeing the most vile and depraved horrors of war, and Dostoevsky was expecting to be shot before being pardoned by a particular
bastard of a Tsar, and I
still don't fully understand what that weirdo Kafka was on about.
But I
did learn to write what I know, and so I write about addiction and the sorts of problems that plague the kinds of addict one encounters these days, who've managed to remain middle-class and haven't fallen entirely into poverty, but still need a drink or a shot before they'll even consider their day 'begun'. I try to write a few thousand words each and every day, and you ought to do that, too, although I'm sure you've accomplished far more than I ever will!
Just, it's a tough world and people who can word things perfectly are the sort of people who'd be great in a variety of situations, as we rely heavily upon written and verbal communication, so good luck with it all.
What sort of career do you think you'd like to have?
Sounds very familiar, especially that issue with your therapist, I have had the same problem. You know, opiates especially are the kind of drugs that freeze your emotions and psychological growth for the time being, which is the reason why most therapist refuse to deal with people that turn in to drugs. It's up to the therapists patience whether your sessions will end if you bring that up again, I would suggest not because it's just pushing it. The therapists feel that his/her work with you goes down the drain when you do that, that's why they tend to be very sensitive regarding drug use (especially opioids). And of course you take yourself down the drain also, as you already know. But I think it is a very personal offense for the therapist also when you do that, not only professionally. You have other issues besides your addiction, and the other issues cannot be treated when the addiction is masking them. That's just the way it is, unfortunately. This is all based my personal experience with long term psychotherapy and opiate addiction.
I'd feel insulted if someone whose job description was "help me" turned to me and told me to piss off because I was wasting their time. I know that it's out of context, but it just sounds rather unpleasant: "there are
real people I can help instead of drug-powered robots under the guise of human form!" Should a therapist say that without offering some sort of relief or aid for the person who's addicted?
Hell, I wonder if many can tell the difference. Certainly, I'm more talkative under the influence, and 'Heroin' (along with other opiates) is great for making you sociable, 'cause suddenly you don't really give a fuck what you say or who you're talking to, 'cause you feel good, not even a punch to the face could unseat you from the delightfully-euphoric throne of 'King of Cannot Be Arsed'.
You've posted at the perfect time and you're not too far gone to receive help and you've not been abusing the 'Heroin' for too long for it to have completely "re-wired" (if you'll excuse the clumsy metaphor) your brain so that you can't feel
any joy. Certainly, you're depressed right now, but perhaps looking at other means of remaining sane, your therapist could suggest the likes of anti-depressants, which are probably getting better and better at avoiding random neurotransmitters and just focusing upon the ones that have maximum mood-elevating potential! Still, if I could, I'd mostly stay away from other pills and drugs and try to do something new and go somewhere exciting.
Have a holiday, or walk up to a stranger and start talking; ask a pretty girl out and take her somewhere you've never been before or do something fun, just for the sake of having a laugh, whether you're bowling in those silly-looking shoes or throwing your savings away on a horse or a roulette wheel. My point is: variety is the spice of life, and routine may be necessary for our sanity, in that we become incredibly comfortable with the familiar.
However, the opposite of variety is more like just plain rice than, say, cinnamon or paprika, and you're not going to be able to swallow it all of your life before getting fed up.
Try something new. That's all I'm saying.
That and keep up the writing, try to stave off the opiate-pangs and look at other options. You could detoxify your system (feels great for a short while when there's just clean water and good, healthy food, full of vitamins and minerals in your body) or take up a class like Yoga, where you're not going to be judged about your weight: you can always change that, regardless of how many drugs you take, and joining a gym is a perfectly normal social thing where you can choose whether or not to interact with strangers as you attempt to
not stare at the one guy inevitably sawing a towel between his thighs and o'er his balls and arse, 'cause why wouldn't he stand completely naked in the middle of a changing room as a heterosexual male, flossing himself dry with a towel? Aside from that, gyms are great. I don't even know why anyone would feel the need to dry that area for a good ten minutes lest they were bloody
Chewbacca, but what the hell, it's a free country...
How about a contest? There're many different writings contests and I expect you'd find it enjoyable to take part in those. The drugs, ultimately, will have as much of an influence on your life as you let them. People say that they're "evil" or even "insidious", but that's not describing the drug; you don't take your eyes off a line and then look back to find it crawling up your sleeve, do you? It's the human brain; our minds;
we are the insidious, evil ones who'll do anything. The drug is just an inanimate poor salt-replacement unless you're going to smoke, snort or inject it, but we shift our blame onto the chemical for obvious reasons: we don't want to think of ourselves as weak. There're probably loads of other reasons that I've so clumsily hopped right over, but it weakness and fear of it seems to be a big one.
Owning up to your mistakes and talking about them is part of the great thing about this forum: noone's going to judge you, although they might think I've been on the fucking meth when they see how long this post is. Christ: a couple of cups of strong, black coffee to help with an essay I'm writing and I've written you a book! I apologise for the lack of concision and a number of the points I've made rather tactlessly, but I just want you to stop using for a bit, drink more water, eat healthily, consider returning to class and work on your writing - your
dream - without a chemical crutch: you won't need it to make yourself funny or witty or clever or anything like that; it'll more often than not get in the way...
I think famous personalities who're known for their substance abuse often get away with a little too much in the name of being witty. Were they really using cunning, swiftian verbal attacks thought up on the spurr of the moment, or were they just drunk or too high to give a fuck and saying what they really thought, spun carefully with a bit of wit or innuendo? I'm sure somebody knows, but it was meant to be a bit on the rhetorical side...
Anyway, good luck, mate. That's all that I can give you, ultimately: I want you to continue living and to not get hooked as I was to all sorts of unpleasant things, 'cause it turns out those PSAs were bullshit and (arguably rather hilarious in many cases) afterall, but they
did have legitimate points. Not so much the one where the girls smashes up a kitchen like it's her first morning off the fags and there's an especially-loud mosquito hanging around nearby that's doing
nothing for her hangover, no, but a few of them...
^ i have to respectfully disagree.... suboxone or methadone maintenance will likely worsen the situation in the long run....
from my understanding she is not in a deep enough hole to warrant putting herself through that....
I agree here. It can be, at times, like trimming your rose bushes with a scythe, y'know? Or if you're just using codeine at the moment, maybe trimming houseplants with ballistic missiles! Try to stay as close to sober as you can, 'cause you'll get chained to the methadone (they're very eager to give it out before even asking you about your problems in detail, quite often) and then you will find yourself
unable to go on holiday with mates when they ask, or
trapped in the city over Christmas because the pharmacy that offers it is there, and then coming off it might as well be like river-dancing across a minefield drenched in shards of broken glass, not to forget that it can do serious damage to your teeth, and you don't want to be going to the dentist all of the time whilst complaining about pain and buying sensitive-toothpaste and all of that bollocks...
Take care. %)
hope you can nip this before hittng the bottom (where most seem to need to go before they'll turn around..fuck if i could have just truly understood that 4-5yrs ago, i'd have saved YEARS of my life and kept things i lost and can never get back :/ )
