Category Archives: addiction

That’s why.

6 Replies

This morning I had an important thought.  If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently.  The Ativan is not a choice that works as well.  I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point.  My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks.  Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid.  I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours.  I can build with Lego’s all day.  I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned.  When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away.  There is something wrong with me.  When I am sober it hurts.  She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or…  I kind of hate it.  When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”.  I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics.  She doesn’t mean anything by them.  She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately.  I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard.  Most of my body hurts most of the time.  My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids.  Most of the day is really quite pleasant.  I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately.  That’s how I manage to be a good mother.  I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time.  I don’t divide my energy well.  I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit.  Sometimes they let me read.  They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it.  That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day.  That is what having Sarah here gives me.  Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive.  When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break.  I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t.  My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries.  My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me.  Why do I need the medicine?  Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl.  They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine.  It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it.  Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is.  Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw.  I cry a lot.  I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog.  I loathe being touched.  It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body.  Every touch feels bad right now.  Everything hurts.  The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap.  I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her.  I think I should get stoned instead.  It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it.  It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card.  It allows me to be a good mother.  I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it.  I guess this makes me an addict?  Officially?  I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines.  I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot.  The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting.  I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out.  I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently.  If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest.  I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore.  There are scars all through my vagina.  I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them.  I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!”  Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal.  I’m just not desperate enough.  It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself.  It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself.  But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide.  Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong.  The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else.  It is hard to be a different person.  It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be?  I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function.  This stage of processing won’t last forever.  What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt?  Can I change enough?   Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma?  Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober.  I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life.  I hate that in myself.  And when I’m stoned I’m fine.  No really.  I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it.  There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus.  That’s not very functional, only it is.  I’m functional, I really am.  I beg the internet to believe me.  Why do I care so much?  Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value.  I am not just a worthless piece of shit.  Even if I do smoke pot.  Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

Bad decisions

Leave a reply

In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Addiction

2 Replies

As long as I feel ashamed of engaging in the behavior I am obsessed with it.  Either I can’t have any ever or I am bad, or I think about it all the time and I feel like it crosses over into other parts of my life.  I don’t know how to have balance.

That’s why this is so important to me.  I have to get over being ashamed of the things I want.  Because I want them and it is actually ok for me to want them.  Even though I am a mother.  Even though I am a mother it is ok for me to want ridiculous amounts of promiscuous sex.  I’m not hurting my family by wanting it.  If I started going out and pursuing it constantly and neglecting my family that would be a problem.  But I’m not doing anything that hurts my family when I occasionally in my time away from my kids have sex with another consenting adult.

This is why I want to let go of feeling this shame.  I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet.  It’s kind of complicated.  My father started raping me when I was a baby.  How do I ever feel ok about having these feelings?  How do they ever stop signaling that I must have wanted it and it was all an acceptable thing to do to me.

I kind of hate sex.

What does it mean to be an addict?

7 Replies

So I’ve been tossing and turning lately about the whole “addict” thing. It plays in with incest families because most of the coping mechanisms are similar. Everyone is fucked up in similar ways, just to greater and lesser extent. Pretty much everyone I know who was raised around addicts/abuse/fucked up shit all seem to have anxiety. Anxiety is horrible to live with. It can really ruin your day. All day. Every day. To greater and lesser extent influenced by a huge array of factors. But anxiety is useful. Anxiety is energy. If you get good at it, you can learn to channel that anxiety into enormous energy surges and you can accomplish great things.

I’ve done this a lot in my life. That’s why I wait until the last minute to do work. This is a common thing. Lots of people work better in sprints rather than marathons. But if you look around the world, many things have to be done by people who are running a marathon, not a sprint. I’m a mother. Raising children is one of the most grinding marathons in life. And I’m a sprinter. I love to sprint. I love to have big dramatic hard periods where I accomplish a lot of work and then I go hibernate. I really suck at work/life balance.

When I talk to people who are marathon runners they tell me to learn to meditate or “heal” so I can “find peace” not realizing that what they are telling me to do is to stop being me. They are telling me to remove the energy that has sustained my life. That is part of the problem. I’ve never thought about it quite like that before. I get very very fussy about advice. That’s a huge hot button for me. I am very particular about who I solicit advice from. And if I sit here and go down the list I can sort people into marathoners or sprinters and I can straight down the line predict how and where their advice is useful. I’m half tempted to make a list and explain the people and see if anyone can guess. But naptime isn’t that long.

There has to be some kind of balance. There has to be a way to help a race horse pull a plow. Mostly what we do (as far as I am aware, in America) is medicate them. We have so many drugs for this it isn’t funny. I cannot function right now in the day to day grind without some form of help. With help I am patient, kind and attentive. Without help I pace all day pissed off about the work I want to be doing that I can’t do because my children have needs. That really doesn’t make for a good day for anyone.

But the problem is, I really like being a sprinter. If I medicate so that I can be a marathoner when my kids are awake and I need to be more level, that doesn’t go away the rest of the time. It’s pretty difficult to find any kind of medication that you can fine tune enough by itself for that kind of anxiety suppressant. So if I want to feel like me and have that nervous energy I need to medicate again. And there’s this cycle. And I have really strong feelings about it. I feel very upset about doing this. I feel like I am a completely horrible person. I am a terrible mother.

Yeah. Guess what my fucking uppers are. Sugar and caffeine. Yeah. So I do medicate down (legally/medically and everything) because I feel that is the most important thing for me to be doing. But then I eat crap and eat a caffeinated mint and I get up and I start Working! But why am I really better than someone who uses speed responsibly? (Breastfeeding issues aside)

And then it comes back around to, but I don’t want to be an addict. I don’t want to be addicted to energy cycles in my body. But the thing is, if I don’t medicate at all… I’m a sprinter. Not a marathoner. That’s really not fair to my kids. I am not going to be putting them in daycare for a laundry list of reasons I should never have to enumerate! Why in the fuck do I feel like I have to defend the fact that I WANT to be home with my kids! Ugh. But I’m a sprinter, not a marathoner.

So is my mom. My mom pulled me hither and yon following her sprints. I actually plan to do a fair bit of that with my kids later. When they are older. When they can have a say in where we go and what we do and opt out if they really don’t want to. I want my children to have a safe community of people who see them. People who are tracking their growth and progress so that even if I do lose my shit and completely start abusing them (very unlikely) there will be people who notice. I want my next door neighbors to know that my daughter is this bright, passionate, exceptionally precocious child. If she stopped being willing to talk to them it would be really a big deal. Shanna adores them and goes over to visit whenever she can. I want there to be people in my daughter’s life who will be ask questions on her behalf. That won’t happen if I sprint.

I think it was enormously damaging to me in every single way that I have no idea what it feels like to have people in your life. In about a year I will have lived with Noah longer than I ever lived with my mother continuously. Wow. That’s really sad. I lived with my ex-boyfriend Tom longer than I had ever lived in one place before. That was just over three years. I have now lived in this house longer than I have ever lived anywhere else in my life. That’s quite daunting.

A comment said that someone doesn’t love me or hate me. She’s trying to get to know me. That actually freaked me the fuck out. I am absolutely the sort of person who bonds or doesn’t and just runs away. I keep friendships with the people I bond with. I have many many friendships that have lasted 10, 15, almost 20, and 30 years. Ok, only one (nearly) 30 year friendship. But oh man do I keep people. Thing is, I keep them in my head and my heart. Sometimes I keep in decent touch on im. But I don’t see people. I am alone and very lonely. I don’t know how to have community with people I am not living with. I’ve never ever had it. I don’t even know what it looks like.

But I’m trying to find out. Today is Sunday. At 4 Alex and Yani will come over for Family Dinner. I still don’t know what we are eating and first we have to make Shanna’s birthday cake. She wants vanilla this year. I think I scored big. There’s still so much to do and I want to do it. And that means settling in for a marathon. I want this life. I want it so much that I lose my breath with terror as I make my contingency plans for what to do in the various circumstances that could come with it ending.

I have to have those contingency plans. I’m a sprinter. If I fuck this up I have to run and I have to run hard. But I have the plans. And I know what to do. So now what I have to do is settle in and not fuck up. Because I really want my life. And so I medicate. I medicate and worry about health risks and the psychological risk to my children if I don’t. Maybe I am an addict and I just never knew it. But I don’t think that’s true. I’m not an addict. I’m a sprinter who isn’t allowed to run so I’m frustrated as all hell. I will get back to a stage in my life where that is appropriate and I will stop medicating and I will run like hell. It will be glorious and beautiful.

It’s hard living with the guilt of medicating though. I think I should be at ease with the decision but I really have the internalized message of shame. For me to need help of any kind in any way means I am a weak and worthless human being. But honestly all of the versions of “strong” I’ve ever seen don’t look very appealing. I don’t want to medicate because I do not want to feel like an addict but if I do not medicate I am making a choice that is bad for my kids because I am a nasty bitch. So don’t be a nasty bitch. But I’m a nasty bitch because I am a sprinter not a marathoner. So become a marathoner.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.