What now?

Part I
GOOD AFTERNOON ALL. The druggie part of today's post lies herebelow in italics. {CORRECTION: IT WILL BE ADDED TOMORROW}... I would strongly advise caution ~ or simply not to read it ~ to anyone in recovery whose poisons were heroin or crack or the so-called speedballing mixture of the two...

I never know quite what to say or what not to say when it comes to my drugs but they are, for better (hey what am I saying: for WORSE!), still the central axis of my life and despite what steps I may have taken away from the most intense times now past, the obsession is very much still there (under, perhaps, an occasional virginally pure-seeming layer of thin snowfall)... very much still my addiction.

Recently I feel I've hardly discussed anything else.

I feel I've come close to, and perhaps have been circling, some kind of turning point or crux.

Remember when I described a day things got so bad I actually felt REVULSION and AVERSION in place of what ordinarily plagues me:~ a near-constant magnetic attraction (for ever there, only to be activated by a simple suggestion, or an image, or a thought. (Hence my warning hereabove to those walking the thorny path to freedom: be careful of part II!)

Looking back over my life ~ the recent years of shadow ~ a shameful near-relentless emotional carcrash of a life plays out before me. Interviews by those who have put out memoirs of their own drinking and/or drugging or the books themselves, have freaked me out. I know it's hardly a competition, but I've reached the stage now where my own experiences are so much darker and more sordid and more despairing than anything these people have seen fit to reveal. Most of them seemed to hit a supposed "rock bottom" (I use inverted commas for I never felt any solidity below my feet there, merely the unbearable crush of the mega-gravity of an emotional black hole where everything's so intense it's become unbearable. I have come time and time again to such states where I just cannot go on. Just want to die. And yet on I have dragged myself ~ on and on in the dark. On despite teh soul-destroying gravity and depravity. And I've carried on using. Barely ever have I denied myself when I really "wanted" to use. I do methadone days now because I cannot bear returning to the chaos of hitting up morning, noon and night, hitting up for breakfast, to eat and to sleep... never feeling any confidence my raging need was going to be fulfilled, never knowing for sure where my next hit was coming from and yet knowing beyond any shadow of doubt that within little more than eight hours of the last one I'd start to need it. I crossed so many barriers and bridges on the Way Down, gave up so completely the remaining semblences of dignity ~ that I just do not know how I can do whatever it takes to fight out of this, get out of this. Break free. I ahd so very many aversions, self-warnings, self-cautions to break down to get here, that once the transgression's accomplished, my only refuge from the shame of knowing how polluted I am has been drugs, more drugs and more of them. I still hate myself even when I'm high. But when I'm low I can't live at all. And I don't live. I barely survive. I need to learn so desperately how...

I need coping mechanisms so bad. One at a time, as I cast the old echoes of my former life off, as I slithered ever lower down the pit, so I lost nearly everything.

Now I just want it back.

What do I do?
I'm asking: does anyone really know?
What ~ please ~ what on earth do I do now?
Somebody help me, please!


Video:
Thorn Birds the love theme as played out on "the beach scene"...

The book was a massive international hit when it came out in the late 1970s. The only romantic novel I have ever managed to read to the end...

Then the TV adaptation starring Richard Chamberlain as the Priestley Lover, was a huge success when broadcast in the early 80s.

How many of you remember this, the Love Theme music...?

All these years later and still it has not gone out of my mind!