I couldn’t tell the cause of my violent awakening. Both of the dogs were curled up at the foot of the children’s beds, still unaware that they weren’t the only ones awake. The cats purred in unison from opposite ends of the couch I found myself already seated in when the dream broke. The clock’s metronome brought me back, counting seconds solely for my benefit. Oh yeah, I’m an addict.
It’s been fifty days now and still catches me off guard at times. Mornings are the worst. My routine is anything but normal. It does serve to pass the hours of the day in a way that makes me forget that not even two months ago I couldn’t as much as use the bathroom unless it involved a tourniquet.
More frequently now I’m forgetting about my addiction. It doesn’t haunt my every waking moment as it did in the first month I was clean. This is the point where I actually am in a state of emergency, most likely to relapse. I’m far enough away now that it’s getting harder to remember the horrible state I found myself in at the end.
Even when I look through the horrible images I forced myself to take, my body ravaged and hollow, I don’t see myself. There is no way that I’d let myself be reduced in such a way. I know how it happens now, I won’t let it get that far. But it has happened before and it started the exact same way.
If I had to narrow it down to a specific month in which I relapsed the first time it would be May 2016.
In April of that year I decided I would make another attempt to stop smoking cigarettes. I’ve tried every few months for the last six years. It’s like a lot like quitting meth, if you don’t really want to quit, there’s nothing that can help you. I never made it more than a week, usually just three days. I wanted this time to actually work, so I ignored my better judgement and got a prescription from my doctor for Bupropion.
Apparently it was my second attempt to quit using pharmaceuticals. I have no memory of the first. Alcohol is the perfect drug for me, if I’m trying to forget.
There was a time I had sworn I wouldn’t take smoking cessation drugs. Friends and coworkers told me about the success they had using Chantix and the like, but I was still concerned of the potential side effects.
Underneath it all I was terrified of being a sociopath unfit for society, just waiting for a chance to fulfill some horrendous act I’d yet decided. Every time I considered it one potential side effect stood out in my mind more than any other, “increased thoughts of homicide, suicide and rape”.
I had harbored a fear of myself for as long as I can remember. There were insomniatic nights where I would just lie in bed and think of all the horrible things I might be capable of doing. Cannibalism, mass murder, serial killer, you name it, it crossed my mind at some point. I never understood how I might be capable of actually doing it but just considering the potential was equated to inevitable guilt.
This was only amplified by the apocalyptic dreams I experienced on a regular basis. I still haven’t been able to identify their origin. Looking back it seems that they could all be metaphors for what I was doing to my life. Then again it could just be a result of misfiring neurons from years of distilling my brain. I’m not sure there is a difference.
In a strange way I have to thank the most horrific face of God for solving both of these problems. The day I became an IVDU is also the day that I ceased to be an alcoholic. Just as the sun can expunge the moon from the sky, so did the dragon eclipse a decade of alcoholism.
It wasn’t until my November death that it broke me of my greatest fear though. At this time I did everything I wanted, when I wanted. If I was hungry I ate cheesecake. If I was horny I went to a sex club. If I needed to get high I went to a dealer. If I didn’t feel like doing something I ignored it.
While there were countless crimes and acts of sexual depravity, the majority of my time was spent devoted to more admirable ventures. I would drive across town because I wanted to make sure a friend wasn’t’ left alone with his psychosis. Countless hours were spent in conversation trying to absorb all the experiences I could from other people. Often times I would just stare out across the water wondering “Why?” without ever actually understanding the question.
It was when I forfeited my life to the unknown that I first saw I was living the full extent to which my demons were capable. Where I expected to find the demented soul of Jack the ripper instead sat an autodidactic vagabond in the depths of an existentialist crisis. The person I was most capable of hurting was myself, and those close enough to suffer from the collateral damage.
What once felt like an endless abyss of self doubt vanished in a moment. No longer did I need to process every action through a series of filters. I was finally free from myself, unfortunately I was taken hostage by an equally formidable adversary in the process.
There was so much going on in my life that spring that affected the chemical balance of my brain that it’s difficult to blame any one factor. I quit, more dramatically reduced, my drinking to avoid complications with the prescription and having just bought a car further emphasised the need to be sober. Meth wasn’t seen as a problem yet, though it presented itself as the solution.
Only three days after I started taking Bupropion I started experiencing severe insomnia. I was lucky if I could get three hours of sleep a night. I would lie in bed replaying every mistake I’ve ever made in my life in fast forward. Without alcohol I didn’t know how to get my brain to stop and it ran wild all night long.
After just a month I had started to use meth frequently to combat the constant fatigue. I was smoking before I went to work and gut bombing a parachute to get me through the eight hour shift. There was nothing recreational about my use. I blinked and before I knew it the summer was almost over.
I’ve spent two months now excavating the recesses of my memory in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the events that transpired. There are flash images but nothing more. Countless hours were spent parked along Lake Washington Boulevard in the afternoon just smoking meth in my car because I didn’t wantt to go home. Every lunch break rushing to my car and driving to the arboreteum to smoke a bowl, hoping that no one would notice the billowing clouds. Driving and parking and smoking and driving. My car was my home and the windows were coated in ice.
I was about to lose my new job. It wasn’t that I was bad at it, actually I was one of the best, I was just a bad employee. I would stay out all night spinning around in circles, then when the time came to go to work I’d fall asleep and not even an act of God could roust me out of bed.
While still in the probationary period of my employment I was late or missed work more than eight times. It was grounds for termination. The human resources department had begun to process my separation despite protests from management. My director wanted so badly to keep me there he found a loophole in the system.
While the paperwork was already moving along they couldn’t finalize my termination if I applied for medical leave of absence. I had four days to get all the forms submitted before things were finalized. Luckily I already had a perfect excuse with medical backing: bupropion.
The three biggest factors affecting my employment could all be explained as side effects from Bupropion: insomnia, rapid cycling mood shifts and increasing dissociation. They also could be attributed to an anxiety disorder. One might even propose methamphetamine use as the cause, but in the mind of an addict that was quickly dismissed.
I wasn’t able to get an appointment with the doctor who originally prescribed me Buproprion. Time was the biggest factor and it didn’t matter who I saw as long as they agreed that my situation was such that a medical leave of absence was necessary. It was surprisingly easy.
I met with the doctor and explained I was only sleeping 2 or 3 hours a night. He was reluctant to diagnose it as a medicinally induced chemical imbalance. We went over all of my symptoms, my sleep patterns, diet, etc. He then asked for more details about what had changed in my life recently and specifically for anything that caused stress. I told him the truth about everything while casually neglecting to mention my drug habit.
It was impossible to deny that stress had become a defining element of my mental state. My living situation was such that just being at home instigated a fight or flight response in my brain. I had no idea what was happening in my life and in an effort to control something, anything, I was taking on far more than I was capable of handling. I was working over sixty hours a week, often going two weeks without a day off.
It was during this visit that I took my first anxiety test. It was a single page of questions asking you to rank the frequency and intensity of different sources of anxiety in your life. I read each situation carefully and circled “5 - Extreme” on every line.
“Based on what I’m seeing here, your life exists in a perpetual state of anxiety. Would you agree with that assessment?”
Yes.
“Well, we can treat it as an imbalance from the drugs, but that’s going to mean more drugs and to be real honest it’s a guessing game to find out what might be effective.”
Antidepressant roulette essentially?
“Yeah, I don’t really want to go down that road unless we have to.”
I don’t want to do that either.
“The amount of anxiety you’re describing is very concerning though. It’s also hard to tell exactly what it is stemming from. However you had said that it all began with insomnia. Many of your other symptoms could all be attributed to sleep deprivation as well. I think we should start there.
But I can’t sleep.
“That is a problem that we can solve.”
He wrote me a prescription for Ambien and wanted to follow up in two weeks. The goal was to normalize my sleep schedule enough that he could get a better idea of what was actually causing my problem. He filled out my FMLA paperwork and told me the one thing I needed to do for the next month was relax and avoid any situations that might cause stress.
I was familiar with Ambien, but had never taken it before. There were endless stories about the “walrus” and people waking up in dangerous situations, like driving. I was certain that any potential side effect would be a part of my experience with it and decided I should only take it when there was someone else in the house to watch out for me.
I was well aware that my life was completely out of control. Getting the option to take a leave of absence and save my job was a gift from a saint who chose to remain anonymous, likely out of fear of being made a fool. Whoever it was looking out for me, was right to be skeptical. I immediately left the doctor's office and went about preparing for another sleepless weekend.
I wanted to stop but didn’t know how. I told myself that I had to keep using through the weekend because my roommate was going to be camping. I couldn’t start taking the Ambien without supervision and I couldn’t sleep without it, so I did drugs to keep me awake. In hindsight the logic is maddening.
Despite continuously smoking dope, I was still set on getting things in order so that I could quit. In the past I wasn’t able to just stop using, I had to make sure that absolutely everything was perfect, even the things I couldn’t control. The first order of business was to establish my sense of home.
After I left my job of thirteen years in March I had decided that it was finally time to update my possessions. My furniture was a hodge podge of hand me downs from various sources, mostly my parents. My clothes were all six sizes too big for me. My dog had been slowly dismantling my mattress into bite sized pieces and relocated them all over the house. It all had to go.
I’d taken a sizeable withdrawal from my retirement fund. It was more than enough to replace all the things that brought me unhappiness and then some. When I got home that evening I realized that part of why I didn’t feel at home was because nothing in my room had value to me. It was all new and soulless, a fitting expression of how I felt about myself.
I started by finding anything I had left from before I had moved in two years before. It began with an old ikea TV stand that I bought when I still lived at my parent’s house. I remember seeing dirt caked into the cracking wood and wondering how long it had been there. In what many would see as trash I found a symbol of every place I’d ever lived.
There was no question about what came next. Since I’d moved in the portal bell had been downstairs in the living room. It was always the first thing people mention when coming to my house and I had wanted it displayed in a prominent location. I positioned it atop the TV stand in my bedroom and turned it til it was at just the right angle. I then fell to my knees, spoke unknown words to faceless ideals and rang the bell. That was the last time I rang the bell in Seattle.
Everything else fell into place naturally. The once dead aralia plant I took when moving out of my house in Columbia City. The monkey lamp left to me by my oldest friend. Various religious symbols from across the globe.
It took me about four hours before I stepped back and said aloud, “Perfect.”
Very pleased with myself I just laid in my bed for two hours lost in thoughts and clouds of T. I don’t know how much I smoked. A lot. This was before I took my first plunge and actually getting high took a considerable amount of time due to the tolerance I’d built up.
Once I felt like I’d had enough I loaded another sizeable amount into my glass bubble and melted it into place. I made a habit of loading a good size bowl before leaving the house so I didn’t have to expose how much dope I had on hand.
Once everything was in order I hopped in the car and headed out. I was spending most of my free time at a park down on the Duwamish river. It had the reputation as being the most active cruising park in all of Seattle and was just down the hill from my house. At any hour of the day you could show up and it was pretty much guaranteed that someone was down there looking to get off.
Overtime it became less about sex and more about the social elements offered. If I didn’t know anyone there already I’d walk a couple laps and then sit in my car to wait. I’d been doing this for a few months at this point so I knew all of the other regulars. It wasn’t that much different from a neighborhood bar, only instead of drinking beer we did meth.
It was set to be one of the hottest days of the year. I took my usual spot in the crowded parking lot and put the sunshade on my windshield before taking a couple more tokes. I was already ridiculously high, but the thick clouds of smoke billowing from my sunroof would make it clear to everyone else there my intentions.
I recognized a few other cars and a group of people loitering near the picnic table. We chatted while a couple of the guys played with remote control cars. The next few hours are foggy at best. There was sex and dope and miscommunications. Nothing tragic or memorable seemed forth coming so around 4am I parted ways with the two guys still hanging around and drove around to the other side of west seattle.
When I found myself in a more introspective mindset I would usually retreat to Mee-Kwa-Mooks. In the early hours of the morning it was the perfect hideaway from existence. I spoke to the sound in the darkness and reflected on my life as the sun's first light casted back from the Olympic Mountains.
How had this all happened again? Why did I not see it coming sooner? Was I really so good at hiding it that no one seemed to even notice? Will I really be able to make it out again? Or had I unknowingly made the choice to live out the rest of my life in clouds of devastation?
Everything was a mess. I couldn’t place the pieces in an order that made reasonable sense of how it all had gotten so far. I stared into the rearview mirror at a face I didn’t know and wanted to cry. As soon as a tear formed enough to begin cascading down my cheek, Wes dog woke up from the back seat and stopped it’s decent with one motion of his tongue covering the whole right side of my face.
There are many times that dog saved my life, this was one of them.
Despite knowing I needed to find a way out, the next nine months would be devoted to my addiction. I wanted nothing more than to be free of it, but it didn’t matter what I wanted. I would try to fight and as soon as the face stared down upon me I would prostrate in surrender. Mine was a life of servitude
I wish the past offered itself more freely. I have felt that in order to prevent it all from happening again I need to understand how and why it happened again. I’m starting to think that the how may be irrelevant though.
I could spend the next decade reverse engineering the constructs of my dissociation. While certain aspects certainly require further investigation, I think I’ll leave the majority of the experience in the past where it can exist without my continuous interaction. I don’t need a detailed outline on how to relapse when what I should be focusing on is drafting a roadmap to reintegration.
