Drugs Course

YESTERDAY I WOKE UP feeling like a block of ice. I had two hours until I was due at my antidrugs appointment. This is an intuitive recovery course that'ssuposed to teach you a way of changing your thinking to dump drugs for good.

I drank my methadone, saved from the previous day so I had it when I needed it, namely first thing in the morning when craving is at its strongest. It took me over an hour to thaw out.

Since the "hot weather" ~ since it's been sunny ~ whoever lives in the room with the boiler has decided to turn off our heating. Well thanks very much. Our house is now icy.

All the normal thoughts went through my head re this course. Not today, please. Not right now. Some other day. I do want to do it, just not right this minute.

My landlord was messing around in another room. The mere sight of his van outside was doing my head in, so I left a half hour early and went down to the Shoplifting Therapy office where the course is held, grabbing a Cherry Fizz cyder on the way.

When I got there a crowd of druggielooking people was clustered by the gate. I skulked in through the other entrance, gave my name and left. I was 25 minutes early. So I went down the park and smoked three Sterling Superkings (I love long ciggies: you break the ends off and roll them separately when the main smokes have gone.)

Then we did the course. The lady in charge was letting a trainee commandeer most of the instruction and he was reading the guidebook aloud. I could have read it myself in a fifth of the time.

The other people were OK but full of swagger and shit and there was me at the back with barely any life in me, fighting to stay awake because I'd had barely any sleep.

Rather than making me more resolved to stay clean, all the drug talk just made me want to use. Trust me I came in there with all the best intentions. I was more excited about this course than I've been about anything and I was so disappointed. I couldn't snap out of my own sour mood, I just wanted to get out of there.

And I couldn't help noticing I almost certainly had the longest drug history of anyone in that room. See: feeling like an old junkie again. Doesn't do much for the self esteem.

I got home exhausted. Gave someone money to score. Someone I knew and should have known better and he ripped me off. So now I have to torture him. I popped a Valium and slept from late afternoon through to four thirty am. And I woke up feeling dire. The drugs I had paid for would have been all gone by now anyhow so I'm not bitter about that. When I see this guy I'm going to be real nicey nicey. I'll say "Was that shit as good as you said it was? I got stop and searched, threw it on the ground and couldn't find it again." And I'll reel him in that way. And I will get my refund.

My problem now is the same problem I had yesterday, the day before and every day since my mood levels crashed. I'm down and nothing will raise me up. Heroin makes an OK antidepressant while it works. Crack is out of the question. It makes me jagged, wiry, paranoid and in bipolar terms manic and depressed at the same time. I don't need a substance that does that to me. But heroin is a different matter. Heroin was my medicine for years, and it did what I paid for. Took the edge, and often a lot more than the edge off my despair. It's for that reason that I found methadone days unbearable. On methadone I had nothing insultating me from brain-numbing despair.

Now I have to find something that's going to help me but what? Mood stabilizers will prevent me being manic ever again. Despite the chaos I miss that high. The manic high I was on at the beginning of the year took me higher than any drug has ever done. That's how I want to live. I don't care whether I'm crazy. This world is crazier than I've ever been. Anyone who wants to live in this world straight is in my opinion crazier even than the world.

Don't misread me, I'm not saying I want a high off drugs. I'm saying I want my own natural high back. The name of that high is mania. So I'm bipolar, so what? Schizoaffective if you prefer. Bipolar and schizoaffective are different flavours of the same thing. Schizoaffective just means you're whackier than bipolar. I'm off my antipsychotics because I thought they were bringing me down, and I'm not psychotic again am I? I'm just depressed. Depressed like I have been, to a greater or lesser extent, for nearly all of my adult life. When I wasn't depressed I was high: on a drug high or (during my drug holidays) the natural high when your mind cycles between high and low.

All my mood swings say to me is that I'm more of a person than somebody without such extremes. The narrower your emotional range, the narrower you are as a person. So I'm a very wide person. Heaven and hell are inside me. Why should I medicate myself away on toxic metal (lithium) that will only make me less of a person?

I don't care any more for other people's standards. All I need to do is come off methadone because that is the State's control over me. Without that I can turn into who I truly am. I don't know where this story is going. But before you judge me, ask yourself, where are you going? We think we know. We would like to know. But we don't know really. We don't know nothing.