Anxiety and "Issues"

I HAVE banged up one bag of Lovely Heroin today and feel no better for it; I have one bag left. And don't even know if I want to take it.

Yesterday I felt horrible in the morning. Depressed and anxious. Then I took heroin and felt fine. All afternoon. Pinky asked if I was hypomanic. Come nighttime I felt OK and phoned my family.

All night long I slept deeply, only awakening once to pee out some of the three litres of lemonade I guzzle each day. I no longer drink alcohol at all.

So I got up at twenty to one feeling sour and blank and confused. Sometimes it pains me just to think.

Pinky has been transferred from mental hospital to burns unit where's she's awaiting surgery. When she set fire to her pyjamas last week, she burnt her leg so badly she needs SKIN GRAFTS. She's right across town so I don't get to see her for a couple of days.

People keep confusing me. The things they say; the things they feel. I don't want to take any of it on board. Eg Pinks talks about me as if I'm seriously ill. I don't like that, and I do not believe it.  If I mentioned it at all in real life, I would say I'm "a bit bipolar" but she says I'm "really bipolar" which is no longer true. There is nothing wrong with me any more. Apart from that I'm my old miserable self.

Dr Lovelace, the GP, says I should not take on the identity of "schizophrenic". I would not want to associate with a condition I do not have anyway. I said my moods are who I am. But mental illnesses are not and never will be "me". Yes in the past I have parrotted ideas that I've read. But psychiatry to me is like a religion: an object of fascination, not belief.

I'm totally off tea. I started feeling panicky earlier today and that makes me feel I should be shot dead. Anxious people are useless people ~ incapacitated by misplaced energy that crushes the heart. I loathe anxiety above every other mental state. If I get anxiety back, I will kill myself. Caffeine makes all this worse. It's just like the after-effects of crack cocaine ~ another drug I loathe.

There is nothing much more to say. If I analysed it, I'd ask myself why I should blog about feeling crap. The only reason is that I would keep a journal anyway. Saying these things in public is confusing enough. I know some people think I should just kill myself.

My blogfriend Bugerlugs, who has a cyclothymic nature anyhow, went on a beautiful two-week break to North Wales but came back not just depressed but panicky on top. I held back my opinion that anxiety is the absolute pits of psychiatry, sheer living hell.

And when her GP prescribed Prozac, I kept quiet on what fluoxetine would do to me: make me agitated, angry and dysphoric and a whole lot worse. My last experience with an antidepressant (mirtazapine/Remeron) was catastrophic. I never want to go near anything like that again. The stuff I'm now on (quetiapine/Seroquel) is for bipolar depression. But it's also antimanic and antipsychotic. So it shouldn't set me off on a psycho episode.

I hope Bugerlugs is OK. She sounds better. Her biggest problem now is a furry pingpongball-with-eyes robo-hamster who's been on the lose for nearly a week. They're tiny, flighty and much faster than normal hamsters. So it's like trying to catch a wild house-mouse. Except roborovskis are even smaller and pingier. And when on the lose, they switch to wild mode and don't want to be picked up.

Ukh. See that theory that distractions improve the mood doesn't work.

I keep thinking about Bugerlugs and what I said about anxiety. When I make these sweeping statements I'm talking about me. If Bugerlugs put a gun to her head I would be gutted. I don't want Bugerlugs to die.

As for this heroin (the other thing Bugerlugs and I have in common, apart from uneven moods) ~ I don't know what to do.

Earlier today, I ended up turning the issue over in my head. Telling myself it is destroying me: I have to make a break from it sometime.

Then I tell myself I will stop tomorrow. But I'm not naïve. When I think I've spent too much money, I'm able to put my fixation on ice for some days. So I've done a few days heroin-clean. But that day, the day that I still have a yen for gear and the money to get it ~ that "tomorrow" never comes.

Last year there were many days when I had the money but not the desire to use. My worker was asking me last week what has changed between now and then but I don't want to talk to some drug-obsessed drug-clinic worker about my mental equilibrium. Last year I had an "elevated" mood for weeks on end. This year I haven't been so high. I tested myself, by using again, and the habit came back. It's nowhere near as intense as it once was, years ago. I can do a day or several days on just methadone without climbing the walls.

And I want, I really do want to be drug-free and that means methadone-free as well.

I'm also aware that heroin is doing my mental wellbeing no good at all. For years it salved my misery. But now, it either switches my mood so I feel higher hours later than when I first took it. Or it does nothing much at all. Whatever it's doing to my brain cannot be good.

For a long time I was averse to methadone because I thought it would damage my brain.

I know what I have to do. That is: to give up all drugs, prescribed and otherwise. Then maybe my brain could be OK.

My family have said that if I leave the drugs ~ all drugs behind, I should be OK. I never used to believe that. Mainly because I wasn't OK before I went on heroin, so I didn't assume I'd be OK afterwards. But I never even had the chance to try Sobriety out ~ never gave myself the chance.

This is my single goal. To live drug-free.

Maybe next year I'll have some news to tell you...

Until then I can't promise not to put up a whole load more miserable posts. Sorry.



Illustrated: I couldn't think up an illustration, so I went abstract; I found this graph by accident but it shows something I've long suspected ~ that heroin is far more popular here in Europe than across the Pond...

MUSIC
I wanted to put up SOMETHING... but what?
This is an old trance classic,
AGE OF LOVE: AGE OF LOVE (JAM & SPOON MIX)
It has a PROPER VIDEO...



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