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!

Just Another Maniac Monday...

MONDAYS ARE NOT EASY DAYS! I associate Mondays with blitzing out as much as possible. Finally I (should) get to an NA meeting tonight... just as long as I can double-confirm what time it starts and that it is indeed still on there...

... I've not been to NA in years, never did the programme but did "keep coming back" enough and get genuinely serious enough quite some time ago to actually sort myself out with a sponsor.

The sponsor was more enthusiastic than me about my getting clean and somehow the tide turned, a powerful and inexorable feeling, if you ever have fought an actual physical tide that's just how irresistible it felt in the end... then he fled every meeting he felt likely to meet ME in and has never been seen since! His number is somewhere in a long-defunct old mobile-SIM so I've no idea whatsoever how he is. I just hope he still is clean as he had a year's clean-time when I knew him and that must be two-and-a-half years ago now!

Something I realized during my "awakening", and what got me the all-time worst was just how intensely dead so much of me had become. "Spiritually bankrupt" is another way of feeling towards the same meaning. It's not easy to explain as most of what I succeeded in posting here described in glass-half-full type terms what I'd succeeded in saving of myself from the grinding spiritual death of such intensely powerful and all-encompassing addiction...

Death does not speak, does not feel to reach out and even try. Death, being a state of utter unknowing could not say much even when the living portion wakes up enough to realize just how dire things have become. What is there to say about death. Death is nothing and (I know, anyhow) ~ as the Bible says: "the dead know nothing"...

Slowly I'm trying to get back in touch with people but that is not easy in small tranches of time so please don't be offended when I don't get back to you. It's just because I'm spiritually dead... OK excuses excuses but... y'know~??!?

PS: in response to 2 of yesterday's comments, 1: the trotterij is still fine (I think that is Dutch for "trottery"; at least it sounds that way... & 2: I cannot be sure which bridge features in the Coldplay video but the view somehow reminds me of looking due South from the one nearest the Tate (oldschool) Gallery near Pimlico tube...

Surviving (still-!)

I'M GOING TO TRY posting before doing anything else, even looking at my blog. (You can log in via someone else's then get direct into your own blog(s) without bringing up any of your pages... something worth remembering if you ever blog from work (because it means that, unless you do bring up your blog(s) by name, their urls won't be stored in your boss's computer!!) I don't want to spend half an hour stuck in a between-sites void and little to do but repeatedly try logging in and out. Lots of bad connexions these days!

Yesterday was a very long day. I did not buy any drugs though I had the money. A lot of the desire to use has just (somehow) gone. Today I did, but even then had it for surely a good half an hour or more before I bothered even to cook it up. Again, the desire to use has somehow gone sour. And it wasn't that brilliant at all. I have had a few drinks today and I must admit I feel a hell of a lot better for THAT!!

Everyone seems to be down down down I am not sure why. Mother Hubbard was in pits today, + 2 or 3 days ago when I last saw her. She thinks it is "psych" and says she was bipolar before opiates let her switch from lithium to heroin! I have googled this and though drs seem intent on ignoring it, heroin/methadone/morphine/etc DO seem to have some mood-stabilizing effect. I was not at all depressed for my 1st 2 yrs on heroin. Though even then I'm not sure I was happy. I do remember that when the drug was there, it was like Christmas every day. And it was there every day, back then... Even now I find my moods far less liable to swing (though this means barely EVER waking up feeling "happy") or having even a few up days at all now so you takes your choices and you takes your chance...

Not a lot more to say now, because what change? I've wanted to go to an NA meeting for days now and don't know of any I can easily get to at weekends, though Monday to Friday and especially Thurs/Fri I do. The Thurs/Fri meetings are very easy to get to and I've not been literally in years. I have the big "blue book" in hardback, it's quite a good read; I like the personal accounts that fill the second part... plus I've been to loads of meetings and even got a prospective sponsor at one point. Then the desire to stop using just fled me, I knew the tide had changed and what use fighting my feelings. I've always been totally incorrigable when the desire to use has seized me so the situation was totally hopeless then...

Somehow the tide does seem to be turning back. I'm not even sure exactly why!

I hope everyone had a good weekend. It was solstice a couple of days ago and everywhere golden sunlight till late, late into the evenings...

Spiritually Bankrupt

OK. FINALLY IT HAS got to the all-time pits. I am so exhausted, I have so much had enough that all of yesterday and all today up to this point (and that is all I can truthfully of course say) I honestly have not only not "wanted" to use but for most of the time felt so physically repelled by heroin I want to be sick. No more do I ever ever EVER want to be sticking a needle in my left foot, right foot, anywhere else. Finally finally SOMEHOW (how-?? I don't know how I honestly don't) I have come to some sort of turning point. I know I have got there because, as with anything important in life you don't "need" anyone to point it out. You just know.

I'm ever so sorry not to have kept in touch. As I said before I don't want to wind people up or make anybody worry about or be sorry for me. I am just utterly exhausted, so bad I had to stop those antidepressants (they were only making it WORSE and actually, might I say CAUSING most if not all of those weird "alcohol"-related effects I tried to describe...) literally last Monday I was hanging onto the walls so as not to fall. I have had had had had had HAD HAD HAD HAD ENOUGH

ps re the drink i don't want to give wrong impressions. those pills really made things a whole lot worse yet still there remains some residual thing, not exhaustion but something that comes with it (when really bad) they call "brain fog". only drink seems to clear this

pps the hamsters are all alive and fine! i barely have seen them as they've all been in a cupboard (not cruelty: they ARE nocturnal burrowing animals so giving them the peace and dark they like can hardly be called cruel even if it is in a way shutting them out) I have to remember constantly to make sure their water supply does not get in any way messed up (so many silly ways this can happen including the bottle just fuzzing up from exceptionally "hard" London water and just breaking) everything's ok in that respect