In my early 20s (the late nineties) I was already a successful self-made man, not quite finished with undergrad but already proud of building and selling my own software company. I had survived a traumatic childhood and adolescence, and as a high school senior I knew I would have to work hard to pay the tuition to educate myself, and I saved enough money to buy a used bucket and a new Pentium computer and one semester of state school. I was was a skilled picture framer, and found a job easily the next town over in my first week as a college freshman. When I finished a spreadsheet showing I would be able to pay for a second semester and still have money to eat and time to study, I put my nose to the grindstone. Near the end of that first semester, someone stole that bucket and used it to rob a Mervyn’s; when the police couldn’t find the car I was forced to resign that job and I was quite distraught. A dreadlocked dude from my computer science class had asked me to tutor him, and as we wrapped up a session he wrapped up some reefer, passed me the joint to spark, and asked me to tell him what was wrong. “Chris” had a solution. “Everyone on this campus likes the Mary Jane, you are a great salesman, and you’d make some good quick cash dealing it in these dorms.” He confided to me that his tuition was being paid by a notorious biker gang he was affiliated with, and in gratitude for tutoring him he would hook me up with a pound of weed to get my business up and running. He delivered it, and as all I had smoked in high school was Mexican dirtweed, I preceded to begin selling eigths of it for $40. The first three days as a drug dealer was thus pretty interesting, as my alums smoked various grades of sinsemilla, so I had some people come back after seeing the product and giving me the money, but I was chill and made the customer happy by either dumping a second 3.5g or giving them a refund. I was using one of those scales you hang off the table with a baggy attached.) By the third day I started to understand what was going on. My shit had seeds and didn’t get you very high for very long. I went to a dorm to see some kids I didn't really know, but who had been happy to smoke me out at 4:20 and asked about their herb and how they bought it. I had enough money for a zip of something stanky and went back to work. My friend was right, pretty soon I had become a pretty popular freshman.
My cousing brought a kid I had gotten into a fight with in fourth grade to a party I was throwing and we became fast friends. “Jake” lived in the next town over, and where I was a stoner at a hippie college he was an urban guy selling pot to wannabe gangsters who didn’t know what to do after high school. He needed supply so we shared my guy at first, but Jake was moving twice as fast as I was and when my guy got promoted and soon we were combining our money and buying half pounds and breaking those up every few days. Growing my business meant I could pay next semester’s tuition, but there were other expenses. I had also become a popular tutor, and the school hired me and it was a pretty good deal, they would match whatever rate I could get the student to pay me, doubling my income from that basically. By my sophomore year I had caught the attention of my professor and dean, who were a married couple, and they connected me and another student with a couple of businessmen looking for cheap programming work for a business they were starting up. Between those two incomes and my marijuana scholarship I had all the money I needed and didn’t need any student loans. My school encouraged entrepreneurship, and I was able to finagle school credits for the programming contract, and I felt I was “winning” for the first time in my life. For the next couple of years, I smoked a lot of dank weed and I drank a lot of kind beers and then I turned 21.
I had discovered the joys of my college town’s bar scene, and used my above average looks and big bankroll and overconfidence and abundant leisure time to hop from bar to bar, slaying tons of pussy and making tons more friends and blacking out here and there. Some of those friends introduced me to powder cocaine, and after two lines I had a new mission for me and my cohort: find me a large amount of this fantastic stuff.
Jake was not too pleased with my move to hard drugs. He had cystic fibrosis and he only drank alcohol in moderation. But it wasn't jealousy. He said I wasn't myself when I drank. I was a whole different person on cocaine. I told him I would lay off the stuff and be careful to only do it once in awhile. I meant it and meant to. He was satisfied with my proposal.
I scored an ounce very late that night and went to sleep around 3am feeling very content with my life. That night I had what I call an “anxiety dream”, the theme of which was frantically trying to find “Dave”, the guy I had just dealt the oh zee with. Dave always seemed to be right around the corner, but that dream went on like that all night and when I woke up guess what? I didn’t find Dave and my first waking thought was accompanied by a sinking feeling: “Oh. Shit. this is what addiction is going to FEEL like.” That sense of doom was intolerable so I broke out that ounce and chopped up my first plate of lines and sighed with relief, and that feeling in contentment returned.
Jake and I had made quite a pile of cash working together but he was sick of the hustle and he asked me to buy him out. It was perfect. CF takes a man's life in their mid to late twenties so an early retirement made sense, and I had just started working for a salary that basically covered me and my brothers expenses on its own, so the tax-free marijuana money was just gravy to me. My mother's financial anxieties when I was growing up informed me on what kind of man I wanted to be, and that was one who never stressed about his finances. Somehow, to this day, I have been able to live very comfortably on that philosophy.
I was very precocious when it comes to pornography. One of my earliest memories is toddler me plopping down in front of my grandmother’s TV at prime time with an open magazine I had brought from my uncle’s room. The grownups laughed behind me and someone asked me what I was looking at. “Ladies.” More laughter and “Don’t you think they would be cold without their clothes on?”
"No. Look they are all smiling."
I remember beginning to bawl and throwing a temper tantrum when someone took it away. I got my first computer in 1984 and at the age of seven took two programming classes at the community college, so needless to say I was an early consumer of Internet pornography, stitching files I had downloaded from USENET and then automating that process on AOL so I didn’t have to sit at the computer to create a massive collection of photos and videos. My first name means a lot of gigs of porn according to Urban Dictionary, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because some network admins were wondering what user account was using all that bandwidth and all that storage and for what purpose and I am in fact that term’s namesake. (Maybe not but let a tweaker tweak, would ya?)
One Friday night I came home from a bar where I had snorted some bathroom lines and was pretty high. I had started taking care of my eleven year old brother by then, but him and my roommate were at an out of town party, so I reflexively dropped my pants and fired up my computer. That threesome with porn and coke was entirely coincidental and escalated quickly. Even though I had noticed it was fun to fuck coked up women when I was coked up, I didn’t do the algebra and land at coke enhancing a fap. Twenty minutes later I I had this amazing ejaculation that threw my head back, and as I waited for my spine to unlock, I calculated how many hours I had until anyone came home, six, which would be twelve lines perhaps? When I could move again I went to my stash and started chopping. I lost track of how many times I came that night, but I think every twenty minutes for the next six hours and I was exhausted and content again. I got into the shower, turned on the water, and felt the sting of a friction burn for the first time when the water hit it.
A couple months later, while my sex life had been much enhanced by adding cocaine, my bankroll had shrunk instead of grown for the first time in years. I wasn’t hanging out with my big circle of drinking buddies and cannabis customers quite as often. My social circle had expanded to include “Max”, who was my age but lived in Seattle and traveled down to my college to sell “exotics”. I had wiped out Dave’s inventory of Peruvian flake. The only other coke dealer selling halves and ounces of cocaine that smelled like gasoline didn’t believe I was buying stash, and cut me off. “If it is your stash I don’t want you dying from my product, I don’t need you selling it to my customers, and I am still not sure you aren’t a cop.” Max stopped by my apartment to drop off a few balls of stepped on coke for my personal use and picking up a few zips of my best sinsemilla and a jar of MDMA. He then flipped me the smallest ziploc baggie I had ever seen and I said “What’s this?”. I forget what he called it but he told me it was like blow, that I was going to love it, and that he could get me more of those bags for $50 each if I wanted. I reflexively probed the idea of dealing whatever it was myself and asked Max about bulk pricing. He told me I might not want to tell anyone he had it. It was very illegal and dangerous to deal with, and best not to let people know I used it. He described the “V” foil method. I had done something similar with coke and felt that excitement to try it. As he was leaving he told me I might want to call my girlfriend or try watching some porn after inhaling 1/4 of the baggie.
As I still do today, I poured out what I thought would be a nice big hit, a pile a smidgen short of an overdose for the naive. I hit the foil with some heat and heard it go sprecrackle-zz-zz-zz! What a rush. I had poured so much on I took three more hits to try to clear the foil and my straw was shaking wildly on the the third and fourth. I was pretty sure I was levitating about six inches off the ground and that convinced me I might pause and take in my high before continuing to dose myself. There was an echo of the foil sizzling at too many decibels in my head, not my ears, and it was not diminishing. I had experienced auditory hallucinations at age twelve when I huffed gas listening to Easy-E and I was terrified then, but not now. With regard to my ears, they could hear EVERYTHING and the echo was not obscuring any of it. When I looked at my hands they were clearly shaking violently but I could not feel it. The arteries in my forearms were popping out of the muscles. I felt too amazing to worry about me. I turned my head and saw myself in the mirror, I thought I looked gorgeous, as were the angel and demon standing in the same place I was. I still felt no fear.
I had first experienced body euphoria in what I considered my first drug experience, LSD-25, which I took four times when I was 14. I only took one tab each time but I fried hard. Those “trips” were my first visual hallucinations. Soon after I would try smoking pot, which did nothing on tries one and two but on the third time the sky split into three and spun like a slot machine for awhile. Those hallucinations had been part of the trip but at the time seemed real, but as I met Crystal Methamphetamine for the first time I knew I would never be fooled like that again. I knew I could will the unreal to be real or not, so I willed the angel and demon away, grounded myself, willed my hands to stop shaking, and for the echo to stop. Control. This was what I wanted. I would never again be so satisfied with contentment. I thought of the last time I felt content and that reminded me what Max had said about porn. I am sure I was wearing a wicked grin as I used my new super powers to scan the house. I was alone.
I was shocked when I took off my jeans. My cock was raging and enormous. The porn was unusually interesting. I was truly shocked when I realized the sun had begun to rise for the next day, but then I realized I had many very involved fantasies play out already, but had I even came? I hadn’t and I closed my eyes to focus on something particularly deviant. I had never heard the term “edging” before, but as I finally climaxed I felt like a god. I could think very clearly now and the first thought was that Crystal could visit three more times from that one small bag. I dipped Crystal and gave her a passionate kiss and thanked her for coming into my life. The fact that it was taboo did nothing to diminish my desire to do it again, soon. It was like I was granted a super power, a secret identity, and the most beautiful loving and caring and exciting mistress and I knew we would never part. A newbie tweaker goon was born.
I had experienced exquisite pleasure, and I did not foresee the balance of exquisite pain a seasoned tweaker should know is inevitable. That is meth most powerful offense IME. It gives such a powerful illusion of control in the beginning, backs that up with very real super human powers and something similar to a parent or lover’s comfort and love, suggests a new and improved model of self respect, then slowly takes those away, then all joy, lastly piling on heaps of discomfort and misery and pain and very real damage and consequences, but all the while providing that perfect illusion of control. You don’t need anything but meth.
It was in the nick of time, in a sense. I wouldn’t realize it until a decade later, but my alcohol consumption was no longer a fun past-time. My frequent blackouts had gotten me eighty sixed from a local tavern, I woke up one morning with someone else’s blood on me, at the house of a guy I barely knew, who said I showed up there blind drunk and passed out on his couch. I never solved that mystery. My insatiable fiending for coke had already alienated me from a few good friends and lovers. Cocaine use had been social and I loved to share that and my booze with my sex partners. Dealing bud and MDMA had been social as well. Max’s warnings were taken to heart and I didn’t want to share my methamphetamine with anyone. I was much less interested in alcohol, which seemed to bring less of the oblivion I ask of it, or made my euphoria fade a bit, or both. I pretty much stopped drinking, and I enjoyed my secret methamp and porn habit. My coke addiction was cured too. All you need is meth. Booze wouldn’t get to put anything on its kill sheet for awhile.
I mentioned I was already a bit cocky, well, a lot of that had been a mask. But not anymore. Gone was the the subconscious feelings of inferiority and a victim mentality that was greatly exacerbated when I was drunk. The generally normal neurosis most of us have, I was impervious. I was perfectly in control. Of my life. Of my career. Of my future. I didn’t have to use meth all the time, just once a week I would use it. To binge. A small hit every morning. That seemed quite sustainable.
Jake noticed the change. "Its that fucking methamphetamine. Since you started using that you are really not the same. Can you even smile anymore?" I wish I had listened. I was ashamed and I acted like it, and by that I mean I avoided him. It would be a sour note at the end of an amazing friendship. Cystic fibrosis killed him around the time I landed on the East Coast. I would get a call from my cousin, who told me that just before Jake died he frantically tried to find me. He wouldn't have liked what he saw if he had been successful.
After my first gram of sweet shards and night of filth, it only took about a year for that combo to take my large circle of friends and lovers, my flashy career, my bank account, my personal values, guardianship of my half-brother and half-sister (of which I was justifiably proud), my self respect, my God given dopamine system which had been so fair and just with me, and my meth supply itself. I left my luxury apartment and Washington state under the cover of night. I would leave Sacramento in just one year, but a much wiser and more effective tweaker with a brand new career. Surely the won't have meth in rural New Mexico! My mother and siblings lived there and I had visited Silver City four times. This was circa 2002 (the same time as Breaking Bad) and I got an accelerated advanced degree in tweaking. I lasted two years before my life and my families was in danger.
In Sac I learned a lot of important HRs disciplines. By six months in I had programmed timers telling me to eat bathe and hydrate. I still got an obsolete disease called scurvy and became an expert on ascorbic acid, supplements and nutrition. Periodically I would get clean from sheer force of will and disdain for other tweakers I saw, but strange things kept happening. My first month selling cars I became the dealer's top salesman and I tried to call in sick. My boss stopped by concerned and asked me just to try having a coffee. Halfway through the coffee I was 100% sure he dropped a shard in it as I was starting to zoom quite a bit. I couldn't help it and smiled at him and met my first plug in town. He wouldn't take my money though and my habit got pretty crazy. I tried changing dealerships and one of my salesman asked me if I wanted to smoke a bowl at lunch. He was so casual about it I was sure we were gonna smoke some kind bud but he whips out a pickle and loads my first taste of pure biker P2P and I left six weeks of AA behind me. It turns out meth isn’t too taboo in the retail auto industry.
I still couldn't put the pipe down and had utter disdain for sleep hygiene, so even after it held no joy, porn had no luster, I still rolled a bowl about every half hour. Various psychosis and stereotypy occurred, such as spending 48 hours scraping dry taste buds with razor blades because they looked like shards recrystallizing on my tongue from what was now teener a day habit. The fact that this medical side effect was not well known, and evaded my formidable research skills, and not suffered by other tweakers AFAIK was proof itself of some conspiracy, or hinted that perhaps methamphetamine itself was not of this world, perhaps playing with different rules as do aliens or demons! Once the disciplines were mastered and a stereotypy retired, I would always go back to the base case. Twirling hot oil over hot glass and blowing fat clouds of methamphetamine into my Super Sploof never harmed anyone. I would finish a bowl and think "That was fun and I feel like having one more". Get clean for awhile in a new state? My mechanic would lean over and I would see a pookie in his shirt pocket. A humble and simple guy, he could get me a bag. It was filled with cartel ice, which I don't know if you know, but it is quite nice.
I didn't fit in well in New Mexico, and I didn't like having gangbangers I had to talk to for a teener flex on me, brandishing pistols or telling me how they killed someones babies. It turns out in my longest meth free period there I had a drunken Sunday talk with a fellow employee and told him an anecdote about consulting with the Sacramento police on some Internet crime that was way over their heads. From that day on I was probably a CI if not a narc, white, and someone to be hassled or robbed but I had no idea at first what was going on. I didn't like sleeping with my Winchester Magnum rifle shotgun too much either, but the interruptions to my sources kept happening so at least I was occasionally sleeping. The pressure taught me what legit paranoia was and I leveled up again. I chose the sleep hygiene and benzos skill trees, and I overcame for good most of my acute psychosis issues to this day. Then they closed the border to those script free blister packs of valium and xanax and I was fucked. I couldn't afford to go back to thinking there were shadow people following me, because I had to watch my back for the real thing which meant regular sleeping. I had experimented with drinking while consuming huge amounts of scante on the daily and thought it a waste of good booze and good scante. Still, I don't have a substance abuse problem, those are my solutions! I turned to alcohol but only to use it in place of the benzos, and I discovered that oral ROA of a point plus a point five every pint seemed to prevent blackouts without interfering with whiskey's soporific effects. Still, an explanation of how a rat's family dies before the rat does, at midnight, through my front door with someone I didn’t know but knew me only ended when I racked that slide on the twelve gauge and I fled town quick.
My father lived near Boston and I headed there and started out spending my August living in a tent for awhile. Here the worst thing happened up to that point. That pint a night idea was still a good one right? Not so much. It only took two weeks for me to hit a major alky jackpot. It turns out the algebra doesn’t compute when you remove powerful stimulants from the equation. I would wish another “strange thing” would happen and she would come back into my life, but fifteen years ago the mafia and mobs in New England had kept the bikers and cartels at bay and I didn't bump into another user let alone a supplier of methamphetamine for fifteen years.
I self-sabotaged with alcohol every two to five months on average. I did get one year totally clean from all my demons and was rewarded for that with a return to my career as a software engineer. I tried to play Evan Williams and George DIckel the way I did Tina but that is some other kind of psychosis for me. Booze just beats the crap out of me and whenever I land a punch I think, booze was just playing possum and I am KO'd right away. I found a great old-school psychiatrist who put me on dex and clonazepam at pretty high levels. This was twelve years ago and that started my longest stretch of utter abstinence of 37 months. I never abused the dex and I looked at porn once in a blue moon, find myself bored, wish Crystal lived nearby me and that would be the whole of my fantasy. Around the time I connected with the shrink I developed a relationship with an amazing AA sponsor. I hope you don't hope I am going to tell you about even more time in a paragraph below because there is none. Out of forty three, I have four years in which I was able to stand being illicit drug free and make my life flourish.The same time frame as shrink, sponsor and legal medications I started pursuing an amazing woman quite different from all the ones that came before her. After two years together I dropped to one knee and she said yes provided we go to one new country every year, no excuses.
We eloped in a civil ceremony with only my father, hers, and her mother attending in Spring 2012, and planned a wedding ceremony with friends and family for the Fall. One week before that day I let some victimese thoughts run through my brain. I speak it quite well: sodomized at four years old, neglected and abused by mother, psychologically abused by step father, caretaker of his own half brother since said brother's infancy, said half brother dies of self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head - despite me defeating that fate three times since he was twelve years old. The last trauma was still pretty fresh for me. I am a slow griever and eight years I guess wasn't enough. That night my wife's friends took her out for a bachelorette party and I felt very lonely. I couldn't have the best man I wanted since he was no longer with us and I had to ask two former lovers as they were as close to good friends as I had in my life. At three years sober I knew some people from work and AA but I was only close with my wife, no one was going to throw me a party, I realized. I whined about it to God but heard knew there would be no answers about this from there and I would need to be self sufficient about it. So I looked within. I wanted to watch some porn while really spun. Like having a best man or a party, that just wasn't happening, and I was stuck in a psychological morass. A pint of Johnny Walker and then I'll try to edge with some porn on because even though it has never worked before, fuck it, to the head and I drained that pint and ruined my life again.
I managed to hide my drinking for three months but in that time I fucked up here and there. I covered my tracks by feigning some kind of fugue state, but kept varying my behavior to avoid anything but an unspecified diagnosis by my psychiatrist. Around Christmas a lifelong friend of my wife's came to stay with us and he and I were hanging out while he smoked a joint. I hadn't smelled marijuana in maybe five or six years. I was a little lit on vodka, which I had learned was the only way to avoid detection of a certain chemical smell my wife was very sensitive and aware of, and I am not quite sure why I thought I was owed his loyalty and I asked for a toke. "Please don't tell the wife." Fifteen minutes later I was busted and the next day went to a detox.
Over the next eight years I tried and tried not to drink. I really did. I got sober enough for a honeymoon in Africa but I was drunk again soon after. A few weeks later I AMA'd from a hospital, walked home through a blizzard with no shoes on, and broke into my own house when no one was home. I scared the shit out of the family who lived below us who called the police and I was sent right back to the ER. They discharged me right away so I could meet with my shrink in the AM. We spoke briefly by phone and by his tone I was pretty sure he was going to fire me or something. My wife wrote him a letter asking him not to have me committed, I gave it to him when I walked in. After he read it he asked me to go over the day before. I don't know, I thought he would be impressed with my blizzard walking skills or the way I knew how to break and enter so well for some reason. He pointed out I was out of control with my behavior and drinking and gave me an ultimatum: go to a thirty day program or he couldn't be my doctor anymore. My stepfather's abuse when I was a child was related to confinement, and at the point I had no capacity to recover in any way in a locked unit. The longest I would stay in a detox at that point was about four days. I walked away and lost that doctor and those medications rather than face a thirty day stay.
That meant no dextroamphetamine or clonazapam! I now found life to be twice as hard and often felt I owed myself a suicide. I didn’t want my mother to have to live with two sons dying by their own hand and sometimes felt cheated by my brother. My drinking intensified to shocking levels. I hit my first ICU with a BAC around 400. I would do that eleven more times, go above 400. I know no one is going to believe this but one time the BAC hit 650 and the bloodwork was reordered an it was legit. No one can explain it. Proof of God? Most people are comatose somewhere 400. Everyone is dead at 500. I can tell you that the pain of these poisonings and the subsequent withdrawals were otherworldly. Somehow I have survived all of that physical trauma.
All this time my career had a most unusual profile. Sometimes I would land at a job and stay sober enough weeks to really kill a project and make myself a critical asset. They would forgive relapse after relapse, each time putting me on short term disability, and at this point I had grown my skill set to take positions that are among the highest paid in the industry. Other times I would land at a job and jackpot before I could make myself indispensable. I’ve been fired quite a few times now. Still, I stacked bills enough to buy a few beautiful acres just outside the city with the home I dreamed of having as if it was custom built for me. I built a boxing gym and a movie theater in it and enjoyed a beautiful pool and a fortune in landscaping and flowers. I had a barn and a chicken coop built so well you could live in them. If no one was visiting four different beds to sleep in. I don’t sleep very long at this point though, so in a night I would try to get comfortable in each one for an hour or two. I never used all of these luxuries very much though, its hard to when you prefer to down pint after pint of vodka whenever you are left alone.
If this was my dream home it became my wife’s nightmare. Not long after moving in, I blacked out and became a monstrous man, screaming and threatening her until she was frightened quite badly. That assault was forgiven by her and we conspired to keep it a secret so she wouldn’t be forced to leave me. Amnesia is quite disruptive, and guilt more complicated in this case. When you do something terrible you feel terrible, guilt works like that so you won’t do it again. When you do something without the direct experience of guilt, the guilty has to rely on his victims to tell him how guilty he should feel. The first time it happened and she told me I felt suicidal but kept that in, but the next day she forgave me and we added another defensive construct: I would never hurt her, only Mr. Hyde would. And that is so true, to me, I feel it in my bones. I am not a violent man and I couldn’t hurt her or anyone. It stopped connecting for me that the reason not to drink was to not allow that violence to come through me. Addicted to alcohol and wanting to drink my thoughts would distort and that violence was a total anomaly, usually I would just pass out and no one else got hurt. Drink. See nothing happened this time.
I would be in the hospital at least four times a year. One of my fifty plus stints in rehab netted me a one time script for dextroamp 3 x 10mg a day for anxiety. I left there with a blister pack of 25 10mg pills. I had never tried abusing Adderall before, and I can only guess why. I really only had eyes for Tina, what could possibly replace her. Psychologically my life had become very bleak and my self esteem really went down when I became an abusive husband. I really needed some time in another world. In reality I was no longer handsome and athletic. I had a double chin and a vodka belly. I needed to feel strong and handsome again. In reality I felt nothing, I needed to feel something, anything again. I had never snorted anything but cocaine before and I started crushing and chopping the pills up without much thought or excitement at all. That was how I had become. A slave to alcohol. Very broken. Not quite a man.
I snorted up a very big line. Nothing. An intense burning in my face is all. I wanted to die. I snorted all the lines, 100mg total, and was disappointed I didn’t feel even close to a stroke or heart attack. I started to plan my next bottle of vodka but as I did I started to feel something. A sense of well-being. Not a big rush but the part that comes after that. I looked at the blister pack and realized I could double this feeling and then half that again. Something told me to wait. I didn’t exactly feel horny, but I felt capable of getting horny. I thus began amp fapping again. It wasn’t Tina but you know what, it was at least as good if not better than cocaine! When it was all over I had no prospect or scheme to get more dextroamphetamine but still my outlook changed completely. Just knowing it was possible made me feel like my life was not yet over.
Unfortunately, the abuse would continue. I would rationalize. “It’s not like I hit her or anything.” But it would happen again. Many times, and each time I became more grotesque. My wife began to keep videos of me in that state to show me. Denial is the primary feature of addiction. Each time it happened for me, it was the only time it had happened, since anything in the past had already been forgiven. I was just a husband who had gotten too drunk and made a mistake. One time I was arrested and charged with domestic violence. I talked to the court psychiatrist from my holding cell. I had by this point, through therapy with my long gone psychiatrist overcome many of my PTSD issues, but not confinement, and as I talked to him I was shaking and having difficulty thinking. I didn’t want to be jailed but I told the psychiatrist I should be punished and severely. He suggested I submit to a civil commitment and I thought maybe a long stay in that kind of treatment would be what I needed to get an edge in this battle with ETOH.
I spent 21 days in the state’s facility. It wasn’t jail or prison but it was as close as you could get without going over. Most of the other patients were so happy to be there and had done plenty of jail or prison time. I had fallen a long way. I would console myself that I was still someone of merit because I drove a brand new Mercedes Benz roadster. Meanwhile my wife was so sick of my pattern of getting an even better job than the last one and dash her hope away by getting fired that she tried to have the government declare me permanently disabled. By the time I would finish my civil commitment, I had been approved immediately which is unheard of in most cases. Except the worst ones.
Many times along the way me or my wife would conspire to get me back on clonazepam, we thought that was the ticket to my sanity and freedom from alcohol. Every doctor but one wrote us off as drug seeking. When I finally did get a script it was only for 2mg a day. It helped but I still relapsed within two months and the doctor took the scrip away. Alcohol’s pull had become too strong, even Crystal might not match it. Alcohol gave me nothing back for my enslavement, either. I no longer felt anything when I drank, good or bad, and no longer had hangovers. Only extremely painful acute withdrawals accompanied by the madness of Delerium Tremens, where you visit other worlds for awhile. I believe I might one day confirm ETOH is giving me a sample of Eternal Hell. For more than a year we tried to have me drink in moderation. I wrote some software that would tell me when I could drink and how much. Finally my wife asked the psychiatrist I had walked away from about five years ago if he would take me again and he agreed. Fortunately he is my psychiatrist to this day. We resumed our therapy with a new commitment to openness and honesty. I was patient, and before long he had noted my ADHD behavior was pathological and suggested I resume Adderall therapy. I felt a lot of hope for myself when he did that. I thought it might be worth trying to escape from alcohol once and for all. I would just stimfap as often as I could with whatever he gave me. Of course, since I wasn’t actually taking them daily he kept seeing the same aberrant behavior so he would increase the dose, going as high as 120mg per day in total, half IR and half XR. I quickly learned how to defeat those puny XRs.
I was able to reign in the drinking, at least in the sense of drinking again more as a self-medication, instead of always toxically. Life was still very hard, but we were both trying hard as well. My wife gently informed me she was no longer attracted to me sexually and who could blame her. I was open with her about my marathon fap sessions because by now all the rules had changed. Anything was mine for the asking if it might help me not drink. I eased her into the stimulant abuse. She was still kind and affectionate and seemed to love me dearly. She offered me other women if I wanted but would remain exclusively mine when I wanted. I declined her on the former. I was so sure she loved me more that any one had loved a man before, for how else could she put up with Mr. Hyde attacking her almost ten times now? We had both aged one decade which is enough to see, I could see the skin on her arms thinning, and I pictured her an old woman, the skin as thin as paper. I pictured us being buried side by side. I truly loved her. We only fought about my drinking and I have no direct experience of most of that. My memory is still like that today, we had a marriage people envied. If only they knew the dark side. I drew on my retirement accounts to fulfill my proposal vows and throughout our marriage we saw half the world.
My stimfapping became my daily routine. She would come into my lair, kiss me goodbye, and I loved it when she interrupted my fantasy that way. I would get pretty high by the time she got home from work and after I made her dinner I would devour her. Or so I did in my fantasy world. In reality by this time I had fetishized porn and the stimulants had taken most of my vigor away, so most of it was role play and costumes and a sometimes vivid intimacy. I had Viagra, but needed it to have an erection with her. My destruction as a man in this world was complete. No job. No purpose. A farce of a sex life. Voluntary dependence on drugs to provide a bit of comfort, and an involuntary dependence on alcohol to make sure my life would fall apart completely once again.
By the time Crystal Methamphetamine took my life the three times prior, I saw it coming and didn’t care as long as I could pump my lungs full of her instead of air. Not so with ETOH. You don’t see it coming, because you can’t remember the things you did to get there. I certainly cared about my wife and my home and my pets and my land when she told me she was divorcing me. She had been my sweetheart for ten years, I thought. Not quite. Only a kind of financial bondage had kept her for some portion of the latter years. The latter years when I was still a drunk, but now unable to work, abusing medications, impotent, delusional, and a compulsive wanker. I will never know at what point the part that resented me grew to dominance, because the part of her that still loves me needs to die and she has severed all contact with me to save her the pain of my misery. She knows only that I will torture myself with booze, tear off my skin with tina, and fight vigilantly against depression and suicide.
Believe it or not I am still trying to win these battles with my addictions. I am in recovery. Or I never get too far from it. I still have so much ahead of me and so many gifts to work with. I really have a wonderful mind and a huge heart. I try to take on one addiction now by allying myself with another for awhile, but I have become treacherous and each time I land a backstab on one I try to become wiser and stronger and get something useful done elsewhere in my life. I now love myself more than the substances and when the addictions gain any ground on me I don’t let them win. I love myself. I have amazing self awareness. I know myself. I know I will never completely vanquish alcohol in the end, but I no longer try to avoid that by getting myself lost on the battlefield with my other foes. They all need attention, and I conspire to kill one of them this year and another one the year after. I have a spiritual life like no other. My mind is divine just like yours. God is in us. We are God. Special, unique, and with an individual purpose. Mine is to survive and share the stories how with others. Like you. Thank you for reading my story of addiction and feel free to make me part of your recovery.
edit: no such thing as dextrometh
