I’ve been pretty crazy. I want to say I’ve been pretty crazy lately, but that implies that there were other times when I wasn’t. That is inaccurate.
I’ve been reaching out, digitally to anyone I can because i feel like a lost child, and I crave human connection. There is one girl I went to high school with named Jessica, and we weren’t tight friends or anything, but I think we both enjoyed each other’s personalities whenever she did interact. She told me that she read my stories, and I was as honored and humbled as I am any time someone tells me that.
She told me that I’m a good writer, but that she didn’t like that I had to hurt myself to tell a story. It reminded me of a lyric from the always brilliant Ben Folds, in his song “Phone in a Pool”:
“What’s been good for the music hasn’t always been so good for the life.”
My life, right now, is shaping up to be another story. There is hurt. There is a pervasive sense that things aren’t going to go well. There are promising things, though. There is perhaps enough reason to be hopeful as there is to be doubtful. I am not without support.
I went to Metropolitan Hospital to get an evaluation to supplement my supportive housing documents. I met with a psychiatrist who looked at my medication chart. He expressed deep concern about the combination of drugs I’m on and how it was very much a recipe for a hypomanic event, given the combination of stimulants and antidepressants, and the lack of any mood stabilizers. He advised me to stop taking Zoloft immediately and told me that I could schedule an appointment to be under his care. It seems like a good idea, but first, I have to talk to this absolute malpracticing quack here at the facility I live in. This man hands out Adderall prescriptions to every addict who walks in the door, even if they had a history with Adderall’s evil sister Tina (crystal methamphetamine).
I’m bouncing back and forth about how candid I should be about the state of things in my world. I think I’ll be vague right now.
I am fully addicted to stimulants. 100% active amphetamine habit. Full stop.
I have lived the pharma meth story so many times. Adderall was the drug that introduced me to altered states of consciousness when I didn’t even understand why people did drugs in the first place. 20mg Adderall XR at age 14 came to me, and I thought, “Oh, that’s why.” I’m not saying I wouldn’t have figured out how to be a drug addict some other way; I’m just explaining how it went.
It always starts out so peachy. You’re energetic, focused, personable, functional. There is a dark side. There is something in me that never wants to go back down. I’m not a physicist, but I think I have a firm grip on the laws of gravity. Everything that goes up must come down. I absolutely tweak and horribly crash. I perpetually flood my dopamine receptors with every maladaptive internet feedback loop to suppliment any pleasure i can squeeze out of my brain.
Amphetamines are not the problem; it’s the lack of amphetamines that creates the most issues. If you abruptly stop amphetamines, there is a darkness that goes to your core. I’m talking about deep existential pain.
“It’s a little more than enough, to make a man throw himself away” — Jimi Hendrix.
I’m on the edge. I step to the line. I warm my clammy hands in close proximity to the fire that gave me all of my scars.
I don’t write fiction. I’ve never tried or had an interest in it. Besides, you couldn’t make this stuff up, anyway. I’m trying to ring alarms with professionals in a wholehearted attempt to stay out of the fire.
“For every chemical, you trade a piece of your soul, with no return” — Billy Corgan.
This was not an easy thing for me to write, and I really loved my little façade of doing well. If you are at all familiar with my personality through the things I write, you’ll know how much I hate falsehood.
I don’t think I hurt myself for the stories; I think the stories heal me from the hurt it took to construct them.
