Damn, this was an interesting thread to read through, had forgotten about a lot of my own experiences and the discussions here of the fine nuances between different substances, combinatorics and hypotheses about the neurochemical mechanisms behind them...
2 years later almost, I'll say I've cold turkeyed off everything probably 3 or 4 times, spending maybe... 1 or 2 months out of every 6 stone cold sober, with abstinence periods ranging from 30 to 90 days. That sounds kinda bad when I put it like that, but also, not too bad, I dunno. Longest stretch of complete sobriety followed 1 particularly harsh period of kratom withdrawal which essentially put me off it, seemingly forever. I did buy a bag of the stuff earlier this year bit didn't finish it, got spooked as soon as I noticed that creeping discomfort on the fade that got me in so much difficulty last time.
Benzos, damn, clonazepam has been a vice that has been difficult to consistently kick. Multiple stretches of 2mg/day-ish clonazepam usage litter the non-sober stretches of the past 2 years.
Dissos.. pretty much am still doing them although a lot more sparsely, maybe every month to 2 months for the last year or so I'll do a few grams of K - largely just because of the relative ease of acquiring it compared to better alternatives. Out of the vices I've listed, I'm not sure if this is actually the most harmful one but it definitely seems to be the one I fear most - my permatolerance is such that I can't really hole right now at all - it's also the only class where my usually contained inner turmoil has spilled over into the real world, in the form of some spangled voice notes to the girlfriend I somehow met around a year ago maybe, which did not go down well. Since then I haven't really tried to dissociate completely as was my habit prior to that event, so I guess that's a positive development.
Oh.. I've been prescribed methylphenidate for ADHD inattentive type for maybe 6 weeks now... it's... it does something. I can see why it's preferred over amphetamine as it is not really recreational... it's definitely a stimulant... but not massively helpful to my current possibly self-induced pathology which is, seemingly, just a massive deficit in my ability to take executive action in almost any area of my life.
i have a strong suspicion messing w glutamate signalling w racetams, and then turning it off w NMDAs etc especially when throwing in GABA agents and other polydrug abuse to smooth out the edges has a profoundly negative effect on glut/gab receptor densities
Believable, for sure. Despite the possibly less-than-completely controlled litany of polydrug use I just shared this has been a very tame last 6 months for me, the last few months especially, and a period in which, on paper, my life has never been less stressful. However - I seem to be in some ways just hopelessly squandering this golden opportunity to rest and reflect and maybe do something useful with my time, under my own rules, as my attention span and ability to organise myself appear to be almost nonexistent. I'm working on it, and I can point at real-life, nonpharmacological reasons for this, but... yeah, I doubt my gradual escalation in efforts to be my own doctor over the last 4 or 5 years especially, culminating in several complete self-enforced breaks just within the last 2 or 3 years, of an intensity and inner drama that definitely exceeded any such "tolerance breaks" (lol) that I've attempted before that... I mean, it's a concerning picture.
was an extremely scary experience. titrating off 12mg diazepam nearly did me in in that state.
12mg? Did you mean 120mg? I would have thought that 12mg would be a low enough dose to hardly require titration... although maybe this just says more about my own recklessness than anything.
I've never really taken more than 10-20mg diazepam for a particularly long period, but anything higher than 1mg clonazepam I will usually try to titrate, sometimes with progressively lower doses and jumping off maybe around 0.5mg, sometimes with gabapentin. That said, I think honestly I've maybe been lulled into a false sense of security with my yoyoing benzo usage and avoiding any really extreme (in my view) dosage escalations as well as any extreme discontinuation effects (seizure, tremors, etc) whereas it's possible that more subtle neurological "shocks" which are masked by rebound anxiety and kind of written off in relevance have still fucked something in my brain that could have been avoided by a more gradual taper... instead of just repeated "wtf am I doing, fuck this shit" moments, extremely rapid tapers and white knuckling the first few days to a week of discomfort and then thinking I'm in the clear... until a few weeks later slowly coming to the annoying and unsurprising realisation that the same issues I was trying to escape from are still present and need to be dealt with the hard way. Sigh, there are no true shortcuts it seems to the important things in life.
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fucked. Could not use doorknobs or pill bottles for several months, each 1mg Of diazepam I dropped was like