High Without Drugs!

SOMETHING REALLY WEIRD HAS BEEN HAPPENING to me recently. First I get ill with, face it, not even a common cold. It was just a cough that's all. But man! It knocked me sideways like you would not believe. Tired. Dizzy. Wuzzy. Quite seriously depressed (with suicidal inclinations) and at the very depths my brain flipped like a pancake and I really went ga-ga for a while. Paranoid. I don't know whether I was hallucinating but I had daleks in my head. Thoughts blizzarded randomly about my brains like scatterings from a torn-up dictionary. It was like being unpleasantly stoned on uncalled-for cannabis-spliff. And I hate that stuff so much I've not voluntarily smoked it for the best part of five years (last time I did I was hearing voices on half a spliff: nasty). I haven't bought myself any for nearly 16 years.

Now I'm OK. I did make a serious attempt (yet again) at "no heroin" but was so very miserable it was ridiculous. Life felt so utterly valueless and meaningless once I'd gone a couple of days and let the heroin level (but I was taking methadone in compensation) slid out of me. I don't need to take much heroin at all (as I say I'm on a methadone script and have been for ages) but the little bits I do have (not even every day) compensate for what methadone does not do. Lots of people complain of a flat mood on methadone, but with me I feel depressed out of my mind. I'm starting to think I really need to get some proper "help" ie of the "psychiatric" sort (not just counsellors' interferences either. I need someone who knows what they're doing. Because if something is actually "wrong" with me, and I've had periods of crushing low mood since I was about 10, it's never properly been diagnosed.

Now suddenly I'm coasting up high. I feel lovely. No it's not just because I had heroin yesterday. I've had heroin on thousands of days and it never did this to me. This is the old high I used to get when drugs weren't in my system. Though it feels like a sparkle of ecstasy/cocaine/speed in my system I'm not sweating or heartbeating or anything like that. I think it's what doctors label that rare state: being happy..!

If you want to look at it another way, one of the popular science type books I used to have on depression and mood probs used to say lots of people have a pre-disposing temperament to depression. There were three such temperaments: 1. dysthymic ~ miserable all the time 2. hyperthymic ~ energetic, "hyper" and bubbly (can also be irritable) and 3. cyclothymic ~ constantly yoyoing between the two extremes, just like the tides of the sea. Of course everyone has good days and bad days and fluctuating energies but this is more extreme than "normal" but milder than "bipolar". This last one would be me.

Big big big irony of ironies. When I found heroin I was so "happy" I had no heavy depression for about two years. I noticed straight away opiates had a flattening effect on mood. But isn't it typical that what they did most effectively of all was to block the natural waking up on cloud 9 highs. And eventually depression did creep back.

Well whatever. I don't require a label to validate my existence and I've become increasingly cynical over the years that some psychiatry is merely medicalizing normality. But today I'm happy¬! And it's great!!

PS: ASHFORD CASTLE, Co Mayo, Ireland ~ they say an Englishman's home is his castle, well that's my ideal home ...

NOBODY TOLD ME...
I like this old Lennon tune...



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