DOSE:

repeated

Methamphetamine

(daily)

BODY WEIGHT:

180 lb

This is my story. It's a bit of a read but I wanted to share a bit of everything I've gone through, to really give readers an idea of what exactly meth is capable of. My heart breaks for those of you also battling an addiction to meth, and for those who haven't signed your life away yet, don't do it. I would never wish the pain and devastation of a meth addiction on my worst enemy. Nothing and no one should ever be worth giving up your life for, especially 'her'.

………………………………
Addictions of any kind are never easy. They're definitely not easy to go through.  They're not exactly something easy to explain to those who have never experienced addiction firsthand. I'm still trying to figure out the other half of an 'addiction' myself honestly. Recovery and sobriety, something I have never quite been able to grasp. After 8 years, the more I think I understand it and am no longer lost in denial, the farther away from reality I continue taking myself. I never in a million years thought I'd ever take myself directly to hell though. Willingly.

I am an alcoholic and began heavily drinking when I was 15 years old. I had just lost my grandma suddenly and unexpectedly. She was my entire world and I was completely devastated, crushed. I was already in a deep, dark depression having been going through quite a bit of other hardships at that time and her death was it for me. I didn't want to feel anymore. The first time I got drunk, 6 shots of vodka gave me a super power that would rapidly become an obsession. The ability to black out and not have to feel or think or literally even have to be present to life. I spent the next 6 years blacking my life out. I was brutally raped the first time I had ever had sex as well as taken advantage of countless times over the years by men whose names I've never even known. I was stolen from, drawn on, ridiculed. I broke my arm in 6 places and became hooked on opiates, fell in a fire, fell out of a moving vehicle, crashed a stolen car while almost killing myself and 2 other boys who had just fucked me and forced me to drive them home afterwards. I was kicked out and became homeless after leaving a rehab I entered that was more of an alternative to jail for people who had no other choice. I was hospitalized over 6 times, all alcohol-related reasons and racked up nearly $100,000 in medical debt. I can't even begin to count the times I have nearly killed myself either while intoxicated or due to complications caused due to being intoxicated. I thought that at that point, I had truly reached (more so crashed going full speed) rock bottom. I really had no idea.

I knew I never wanted to try meth for the first time. My whole life I had watched first hand just what it's capable of. It was nothing I had ever wanted for myself, for my life. It broke my heart in inexplainable ways upon finding out I had friends who were using crystal meth once I moved to the mainland. And even worse, I had fallen in love with a meth addict. Being an addict personally to different substances, I thought I could understand in some sort of way and that I could help. I had no idea what I was dealing with initially. If I could go back in time and help anyone now, I'd help myself. 

Love is a powerful thing, but if you've met Crystal Meth you know that she's a whole lot more powerful. At this point, I wish I was still capable of love… Loving something, someone? because I'm not even in love with the drug that controls me. I never was. In fact I hate it. It's honestly sickening how much I write about my hatred for it every time I get high. You'd think it would be as simple as just not getting high anymore, right? Well, it's not. It's the most manipulative, deceitful, devastation to ever enter my life by choice.

The first time I got high I was with a group of people and I didn't even really get it. I was so used to an actual feeling of intoxication after drinking or doing drugs that meth caught me a little off guard. Meth doesn't exactly work that way.

We ended up going to get another bag of drugs once the first was gone, because I didn't really know for sure whether the first bag had done what it was supposed to. I was talking, comprehending, still in a pretty sober state of mind (aside from the shots of tequila I had taken earlier)... and now I was clenching my jaws together very tightly. Three days later and I was beyond dehydrated. I physically could not eat because my mouth was so dry. I was hearing things around me that only I happened to be hearing and my body hurt. I felt as if I had run a marathon or something. Three days of no sleep was definitely not one big party like you'd think, I was delusional and it was a little scary. I was experiencing what it meant to be 'spun' for the very first time in my life. 

I wouldn't exactly say I enjoyed my first time, nor would I say I experienced extreme feelings of 'pleasure' and 'happiness' as you often will hear about. It was more of a confusing, somewhat depressing and even disappointing experience. I don't recall having an overwhelming desire to do it again. Unfortunately though, for all of the addicts I hadn't realized were surrounding me, my using for the first time was somewhat of a jackpot for their habits. I had acquired a pipe of my own from the very first time (I had been talked into paying for everything) and a couple of friends wanted to use it again and said this next time would be better. I didn't think it'd do much more harm to try it one more time. Sadly, as the meth advertisements warn, 'Meth Not Even Once'.

After deciding to try it for the second time to see if I could figure out what was so desirable and enjoyable about meth, it wasn't long until I had 'tried' it more times than I could recall. At that point, I had never in my wildest dreams imagined what could possibly, or in reality, what would happen. I wasn't anywhere near being one of those tweakers that were covered in sores, looked emaciated, was constantly super twitchy and jittery, or who was stealing from my family. I had truly started to believe that meth was actually doing some positive in my life. But this phase with meth ended very quickly and it wasn't long till I stopped leaving my house aside from getting or doing drugs altogether.

I quickly learned how to light the pipe for myself  and even began picking up my own techniques with smoking and scraping pipes and doing lines. A pretty box with a pink ribbon once filled with perfumes was now filled with pink meth pipes, drugs and tools used to do drugs. My OCD became intensified and my home was even cleaner than it was normally. I could draw and write for hours on end and had become so crafty, I even impressed myself. I always wanted to go out and party and socialize and I'd kind of laugh as I sat in bathroom stalls in nightclubs making myself a line. They had signs on the back of every door saying the use of illegal drugs was strictly prohibited. I debated how cute a picture of the sign along with my line in a 20$ bill underneath it would look.

I was always a little heavier but I had started losing weight (more weight than I even realized) and began feeling a lot more confident. I was finally starting to understand what the hype was with meth. It was in a way, a heightened sense of sobriety. I had even almost completely stopped drinking alcohol. While I was on drugs I stayed home by myself a lot more and wasn't taunted with the temptation anymore. Besides, I had to force myself to even take a sip of water so I could move my tongue in my mouth, meth made alcohol impossible. Although I honestly had never felt those euphoric feelings it is said that meth gives, I was in my own state of euphoria for different reasons. I had become wonder woman.

I became 'friends' with my dealer pretty quickly as I had become a regular. The friends I had gotten his number from initially had eventually started going through me to get drugs because I was someone whose phone call would rarely go unanswered. Thank God my dealer was good about answering me because I had started calling quite a bit more. I have never been stingy with my drugs throughout any of my addictions but, I was suddenly becoming agitated by constantly sharing my drugs with everyone. Once I had figured out how to smoke on my own, it wasn't exactly necessary to do so with 5 other people every time. The more I shared, the less I had once everyone had gone. I also no longer had a vehicle and was unable to drive due to my DUI, so when the drugs were gone it was a problem. I had started to understand the saying 'bigger is better' and I started buying bigger and bigger bags of drugs. I started stashing drugs and telling friends I didn't have any left. I would have to sit in misery with them until they'd take the hint that I wasn't doing anything to get us more and that it was time to go home. I started running out of resources to get drugs pretty quickly and I began to panic. 

My home life had changed dramatically shortly after I had started doing meth. My mom was in a very well-off situation suddenly. Spoiled by lavish gifts and trips around the country, she was also given large amounts of money to top it off. Sometimes there would be over a thousand dollars cash in her wallet and when she began getting ready for work and got in the shower, I'd slip a little cash. It started out with a twenty here or forty there but when that went unnoticed, I started stealing a hundred at a time. I would tell myself that it wasn't like she worked for it so I didn't have to feel bad. Besides it wasn't like I didn't need money for things anyway. Having gotten into a new relationship, especially with someone who had money, I was hardly seeing my mom anymore. It broke my heart the more I realized I was never going to have that mother-daughter relationship I had longed for my whole life but, the more I thought about it the angrier I had become. I did more and more drugs and continued stealing money for a good amount of time, but the longer it went unnoticed, the more infuriated I became. I couldn't understand how my mom was suddenly ripped from my life and had become even more distant than she had always been or how she could have so much of everything now, that hundreds of dollars going missing meant nothing to her. All the while I was still asking for toothpaste and some deodorant and each time would have to listen to the lecture of needing to get a job, move out and support myself.

After leaving rehab and becoming homeless and spiraling down even worse with my drinking, I had been forced to move out of state and back in with my mom and I hadn't really worked other than a few part time retail jobs. I lost all of them due to drinking. I had fallen into an extremely intoxicated depressive state that I couldn't even fathom having to hold a job at that point. But I couldn't believe how selfish she was acting when it would mean nothing to her to help me with some necessities (not talking about drugs). Even more so, that she WAS helping me without even realizing it and she still had the audacity to give the speech.
She had someone taking care of her and saving her from everything she got herself into throughout her entire life. She honestly had no idea how to do exactly what she was asking me to do without being helped, yet she offered none. I am beyond baffled that she had even failed to realize her daughter had become hooked on crystal meth and was beginning to waste away right in front of her face. The physical morph happening to me had become pretty evident, pretty rapidly. Having been staying up for days at a time, sometimes nearing a full week, I'd be so malnourished and delirious that I'd see my mom in the hall in passing and she'd accuse me of being wasted from alcohol. Her ignorance and ridicule only fueled my desire to see how much further I could go without what I was really doing being realized. Having a parent that has never experienced any type of addiction whatsoever gave me the ability to venture off with meth, so far that I ended up losing my way back. 

The very reason why I had tried meth for the first time was because I was madly in love. I was in love with an addict. He was my everything. All I had wanted was to be with him on that particular night that I tried it for the first time, but he hadn't had a ride over. Later in the night I was told that I was being left at the friend's house we were all at on the opposite side of town from which I lived, but I would be picked up and taken home the next morning. I wasn't having it, I was not about to get stranded yet again. I wasn't staying there, end of story. It eventually came out that the friend I had driven with was going to go hang out with the very person I was in love with. I couldn't go with because they were going to be doing meth. I didn't do meth so they didn't want me there making negative comments and offsetting the vibe because I wasn't on the same level as them. Like I said, love is a powerful thing. I agreed to try meth for the first time solely for the ability to be with my love. I really had no intention of following through with doing meth but, after paying for 2 bags of it I figured I might as well get something for my money. I wish I had never opened that door within our relationship because in the end, I chose her too… just as he always had.

I fell out of love on meth. Two meth addicts can never truly work because meth will always be number one to an addict. Someone I had once loved so deeply that I had literally physically ached when we fought, had suddenly become someone I despised. I developed 'meth mind'. Constant thoughts racing back and forth, over analyzing things, finding eight different solutions to situations that hadn't even happened yet, resentment for things that had already been left in the past for some time… I hated him. I hated finally knowing what it was that had caused him to hurt me so badly, so many times before. I hated how much of my life, my time, my money, my love.. everything that I had given him and how there weren't even excuses anymore. Doing drugs together was to him, me accepting every time he had cheated, lied, embarrassed me or whatever else he had put me through. I was apparently supposed to understand now. I was supposed to accept it because he had been high, needing to get high, getting high, getting someone else high and at that time I wasn't important to him. Because I now knew what it was to be high on meth and to crave it and want more and more, all was to be forgiven now.

I didn't see eye to eye with him on that one. I had been so afraid to lose him for so long that I realized I had truly ended up losing myself. I wasn't about to lose some of my meth by using it on him now too. Instead I felt empowered by the meth to finally say 'fuck you, I'm done'. I cut out the biggest part of my life at that time and replaced him with meth. I now had one less person to share my drugs with, as well as my living space and now had all the privacy I ever wanted. I've always been way too compassionate and accepting of others taking advantage of me in multiple ways, I was born with the Pisces curse. I loved that meth allowed me to be a little more aggressive and to put my foot down and think about myself for a change. I wasn't really thinking about myself though, I was thinking about meth. And just as 'he' had, I chose meth over anyone and anything else.

My life had never exactly been what I'd call paradise, but things had gotten a lot more intense at that point. I didn't really care to hang out much anymore the way I used to when I was drinking. I hated not being able to continue the routine of getting high while I was out. It was annoying crushing up lines in a bill in some random bathroom in secrecy. It was just such a hassle getting high and being away from home and not being able to craft, write, clean or do more drugs in peace. I began to distance myself from the people I had once been close to and filled their places with newer people. People who also did meth and whom I could chill with, pipe and markers in hand. I also had acquired quite a few shadow people at that point and they took up enough of my time and energy following me around every day that I didn't even mind everyone else now being gone. Not everyone was gone though. I had acquired a new, rather large circle of meth users, 'best friends' who understood me and were always there for me… and my drugs.

My mom's new partner, 'P', owned a business in a different state where P had been living up until they got together. P offered me a job since it had been so long since I had been employed and I needed to make money somehow. I ended up moving to a new state for a few months. I brought all the drugs I could afford with me and prayed that my plan for more once I got there would work out. A few of P's family members I was now surrounded by and living around were meth users as well. They were the sort of tweakers who had sores on their faces and were missing teeth and really possessed the epitome of 'meth mouth'. I thought they would eagerly hook me up with some meth if I offered to smoke them out or something. They were reluctant at first, but eventually they sold me a 20$ sack, charging me 70$ for it. I was pissed but there was no way I could turn it down, I needed to get high. I smoked all of it with a number of people that night and thought about planning a quick trip back home to get more drugs. A few days later I was introduced to 'J', we were going to be working together and she was going to pick me up the next morning for the hour and a half drive up to our location. P told me a little about her and said that she was an old family friend and she also mentioned that she had a drug problem in the past but was sober now. P had no idea that I was doing drugs at this point, she was just giving me an idea of who I was going to be working with. I'm glad she did.

I ended up loving J. She was much younger than I expected, pretty attractive though it was evident she had put some years into her drug use. She had been sober for 8 months at that point and was slowly working on getting her life back together. We hung out and drank at the bar after work and we just really clicked. It took me about a week for me to come to a conclusion to the debate that had been going on in my head. 'Should I ask her for drugs? I really need them. Is that fucked up?… I mean she's sober now. Should I just do it? Yeah. I need to get high.'

I asked J one night if she could get me some meth because I was literally about to leave the state to go and get high. I told her I felt really bad asking but I was desperate. She told me she'd have to see if she could even get in touch with someone anymore but she'd try. The next day she brought me a tee. A very large tee. I was ecstatic. I had my own room at P's house she used to live in. No one was allowed to even consume alcohol in the house because of her grandmother's rules whom the house had belonged to before she passed away but I spent all my time in my walk-in closet smoking meth anyway. I even brought my pipe to work and would smoke meth in the containers while no customers were around.

One day while me and J were working, she asked me if I brought my pipe with me. I told her I did and she asked if she could hit it. I am disgusted with myself for even creating a situation in which she could potentially relapse, but I did. I told her I didn't want her to fuck up her sobriety because of me and she told me it wasn't a big deal, she just wanted to use this weekend and she'd be over it. So we smoked meth together that day. We smoked meth together every day actually, even when P 'fired' me and we were no longer working together. She even came down to visit me after I left the state and went home and we smoked so much meth I had to literally tell her I couldn't handle any more I was sick. After P fired me because someone had told on me for taking a shot or whatever it was, I instantly got a job in a hotel working front desk. I personally loved the job and picked up on everything within a matter of days and was instantly comfortable. A few of the girls liked me because I was so independent and required little assistance. Apparently the girl's position I had filled was in her fourth month there before she left for college and she had just barely started to get the hang of everything.

I finally had a decent job and one that I enjoyed. There were signs everywhere saying security had the right to search your belongings at any time, for any reason and I worried about bringing drugs with me to work, but I did it anyway. I couldn't go 8 hours without drugs, I did lines in the bathroom while I was working. When I got home, I'd lock myself in my closet and smoke and smoke and smoke, until it was time to go to work in the morning. One day I got a voicemail from the manager, I didn't listen to it because I didn't want to have to deal with making a phone call back. I ignored it and went back to work after my day off and was met with confusion. Apparently the message I had received was telling me that my services were no longer needed, I was fired. I didn't find out till months later why I was let go. It turns out someone had said I was bragging about not having to be drug tested, unlike the rest of the employees because I had been hired directly by the main boss. I had worked with her at my previous job and we had become friends. The day I was fired by P, she actually came to my house and offered me the job saying she knew I'd be perfect for it. She knew I smoked weed and drank so she said I wouldn't be drug tested (thank fucking god). However, I had never said anything about that to anyone… that would be absolutely ridiculous.

One night while me and J were at the bar drinking and partying (both on drugs), we ran into 'T'. She talked to us for quite a while and I could tell was eyeing me suspiciously and judging me. Not only were some people a bit envious that I was the outsider to this small town and happened to become a part of the most well known, successful family that basically ran everything, but I was also attractive and the girls didn't like it. I'm almost positive 'T' could tell I was on drugs and complained about it because she had been suspended for failing a drug test with marijuana and required to attend mandatory drug counseling. That put an end to me remaining in that state any longer. I returned home and I got high.

Even though I had made a lot of money while I had been away working, I spent it all on drugs and gambling. I started pawning my jewelry and whatever else I could afford to get rid of so that I could get high. I hung out with people I really didn't care to be around so that I could get high when I didn't have any money and I began really isolating myself. The process of hanging out with friends who were either unaware of my drug use or who were not users themselves became not only draining but very unappealing to me. I didn't want to go out drinking. It took me sometimes over an hour to convince myself to pry my jaws apart for a few seconds to even merely drink some water. I quickly excused myself from my once beloved social circle and hid away in my room, with my pink meth pipe and my markers.

One of my best friends at that time had started telling me that I had a problem and that she couldn't have meth in her life any more because of what it was doing to her and that if I continued using, that meant me too. Of course I dismissed her feelings. I explained that I was glad she had come to that point and that she was deciding to no longer use meth but that I personally did not care to stop. I pointed out that we were in different places in life and our priorities were not the same. I did not feel my drug use had reached the point of negatively affecting me thus far but that I would support her decision to quit. Obviously I was very high.

At first I didn't even realize I was doing it. But when I'd look away from the mirror after tweezing my eyebrows the room would be spinning. There were times I'd sit by my window in my room at around 9 AM with my magnifying mirror, tweezers and some cigarettes and I'd suddenly find myself sitting in darkness, my phone dying because I had been running the flashlight app for hours as I picked at various portions of my body.

It started with tweezing. I'd pluck out every single hair that needed to be plucked and then would notice hairs that hadn't even broke through skin yet. Because the skin was so thin above my eyes I'd see the hairs about to surface and I'd try to dig them out. I'd squeeze at them and even rip a hole with the tip of my tweezers to get it out. It left scabs all over my eyebrow area and I blamed it on ingrown hairs. For a while I wasn't able to leave my room to see anyone without first applying makeup over the wounds. It then moved on to the back of my thighs. I had noticed my leg hair grew in weird directions and was the reason I could never get a smooth shave. I began to pluck the thicker leg hairs growing in odd directions that the razor had missed. With the drug use came the body acne from the drugs draining through the pores. As a result I actually did start to get ingrown hairs, hairs that were stuck inside the skin accompanied by pus. I had to pop the ingrown hairs and get the pus out... and then I had to dig. As with my eyebrows, I began making little holes in which to dig the ingrown hairs out. The hairs were sometimes so short still that I literally couldn't get them out, but I'd try for hours anyway. I'd find myself dripping blood on to the floor from multiple places and covered in lesions in more than one spot. It stung to even take a shower because I had picked so many holes in my body that the soap and water stung like crazy. I had even started picking at the little bumps on my forearms that had been diagnosed as 'heat rash' by a dermatologist and for a long time wasn't able to wear anything short sleeved around anyone. I tried desperately to divert my attention elsewhere while I was high. I was slowly destroying my body internally and externally.

Word of my drug use began to spread throughout my former social circle and suddenly my once 'best friends' were speaking of me as if I were some disgusting, evil person. I was even threatened through text messages and told to just kill myself already because I was just a nasty druggie and nobody liked me. It was all anyone could talk about, I was a tweaker. It baffled me how some people even had the audacity to go there when they had been the very ones lighting the pipe for me in the beginning. Besides I hadn't left my room in nearly a year now and even showed face to all of these people. Why did it matter what I was doing? Which (in my mind) they really had no clue as to what exactly that was. I didn't notice that I had lost 40 pounds and my cheeks and eyes were sunken in. I actually felt I had room to deny that I was on drugs because most of these people hadn't even spent time with me any time recently so they wouldn't know. Unfortunately that was just another blatant giveaway that I was on drugs. I honestly don't even believe I cared about any of the bullshit I was getting, I only cared about getting high. Besides, I had a few people left and some new ones…. all 'friends' who are on drugs as well. But even quite a few of those on drugs are no longer in my life. Some have passed away, some gotten sober and some just decided not to associate with me any longer because of the extent of my drug use. It's honestly sad. Sad that friends could be battling the same exact addiction and simply point the fingers while denying, to avoid the association. Crystal never betrayed me though, she's always been there no matter what I manage to do.

I'm surprised it wasn't the most obvious thing in the world really. After 2 years of meth use though, my mom still had no idea. I lost all this weight, I never had money. I was constantly finding myself in stupid situations and I never ate or slept. I had also become increasingly irritable and vicious but it never clicked. My mom was going out of the country with P for some business and she was having P's mom come from out of state to stay at our house while they were gone. She didn't trust that I wouldn't throw some huge parties and destroy the house while she was gone. Even though my older brother was still living at home at the time, she still was hiring a babysitter. I was livid, I was 22 years old. Was she fucking kidding? Ever since my mom had started dating P, my house had become less homey. There was always some of P's relatives around and even simply having P around was awkward. We didn't really know each other yet and it was like suddenly living with a stranger. I was so stoked they were leaving the country and I could have some peace in which to do drugs and laundry until 5:30 AM while blaring music. They weren't having it and I was getting a babysitter. That's when I flat out asked my mom if she was stupid. 'Have you not realized that I haven't left my room in a year and a half, more or less even gone to a party and you think I'm going to throw one? And invite fucking who? I want to sit in my fucking room and smoke meth in peace and not deal with strangers in my house.' Her response, 'I can't believe you could put meth in your body when you've always been so conscious about the food you eat and the products you use on your body'.

After that I no longer was just the drunk of the family who needed to get a job, I was a druggie. A meth addict. I no longer was given money, anytime something was misplaced I was questioned, and everyone for the most part stopped acknowledging me. I was never invited to do anything anymore, even though the days after crashing I wanted nothing more than to eat my heart out with them at a fancy restaurant with fluffy pancakes. My mom even stopped buying things like toothpaste and shampoo for me which she always used to. It was as if I became worthless and unworthy of anything at all. Just mere seconds before I exploded and threw the fact of my using out there, I wasn't just a druggie, I was still a human being. All of a sudden it's about them though, I'm a threat to their world. 'Maybe I should just go and kill myself.'

My super powers to clean, socialize, do crafts and even pick at myself eventually burned out. I can't even get up to go pee without hitting my pipe 5 or 6 more times reminding myself I need to use the restroom each time. It's gotten to the point where I can't even leave my room anymore while I'm getting high because I can't even look people in the face. I shake and my breathing is shallow making my voice shake when I talk. My skin looks almost dirty, it becomes a bluish, blackish tint as the meth cuts off the circulation of blood to my skin. No matter how much makeup remover I use, the black bags don't come off anymore and I can't even really think straight enough to have a normal conversation with anyone other than myself anyway. I'm sad and I'm scared. Sad that I let meth take over me and afraid now that I'm no longer as strong as I once was. I've isolated myself and it's lonely but social interaction has become unbearably overwhelming for me. My metabolism is beyond ruined and my body is stuck in starvation mode from going for 6 or 7 days with no food and then all of a sudden binge eating, followed by another week of starvation. My back hurts from sitting for hours and hours and hours without moving, hunched over a notebook or a magnified mirror.

Sometimes the pain is so excruciating it feels like I'm being stabbed in my kidneys. I have even developed a kidney infection due to the excess amount of meth I use. I no longer have a period. I'm constantly covered in bruises and I literally see my sickly body breaking down a little more each time I get high. I am 23 years old and I feel about 60. My body aches, my head aches, my jaws ache, my back feels like it's about to give out and I'm going to collapse. My heart hurts. The depression hurts. Even though I've lost 12 pounds this week starving myself, the depression feels as if it weighs an additional ton.

So how is it that all of that could still not be enough to make me quit doing meth? Meth takes control in ways most people could never imagine. Because of the feeling of an enhanced sobriety, it's hard to go back to doing things sober without the catalyst of meth. Cleaning something becomes dreaded and put off for months and my environment becomes filthy. It's hard to be able to concentrate on tasks or to get them completed in the way I usually do on drugs, while I'm sober. Merely getting out of bed is hard. It's physically and psychologically painful. My body is so worn out after waking up from a crash that most times I use the restroom and am back out for another 2 days. If I don't stay up after sleeping for 2 days and start doing drugs again, I can easily sleep for a week and a half only getting up to pee. Once I can't sleep any more I start eating. My body is usually deprived of everything so my brain wants fatty, greasy, sugary foods and beverages to attempt to fulfill me and to give me some sort of boost of energy as I feel like living dead while I no longer have a meth boost. As I begin sobriety, I gain weight at rapid speeds and suddenly none of my clothes fit anymore and I'm too embarrassed as well as depressed to even think about trying to dress up and go out and do anything. Simple trips to places like Wal-mart or the dollar store become overwhelming and I get anxiety and have panic attacks. I have drug flash backs when going to places I generally spent time at while I was high causing me to panic. Attempting to do anything even something as simple as checking out using a self checkout at the grocery store becomes intimidating and unthinkable while sober.

It's literally like having to retrain myself to do anything I've ever had to do for myself in life. I have to relearn even basic social skills. I have to teach myself how to once again act as a functioning member of society. I have to nurse my body back to health to even have the energy to walk up and down the stairs to do a load of laundry. I have to remind myself how to eat normally again. I'm constantly reminding myself that the shadow people aren't real even though they were following me for the last few years. They're not really there. I have to deal with the realization that no one honestly knows what I'm dealing with or going through so it's not reasonable to get angry or out of line with them. I have to remind myself that I did this all by my own free will. The hardest out of everything is having to realize all of this and then some and commit to fighting for my life back. Starting over for that very last time and it truly being the last time... and not running away from it all and relapsing and ending up even further from square one than I had been each time before the last time. 

That's the hardest part about sobriety, the acknowledgment and acceptance that sobriety means living free of substances. Living  my life and coping with feeling things again, without a crutch to hide behind. Facing myself and everything I use substances to run away from. Not having the comfort and reassurance of being able to make myself feel something expected and go somewhere that's familiar. Every time I get high I know what's coming, what's going to happen. Having to actually get to know myself and love and accept myself as I am seems unfathomable. It's the hardest challenge I've ever had to face. After countless near-death experiences, destroying my body and my dignity, hurting my family and friends, wasting so many years of my my that I can never get back... I can't figure out how to stop for good. I always run back to drugs and alcohol. I hate losing control of myself and being vulnerable and unprotected, blacking out portions of life and feeling embarrassed to even simply look at my phone the next day... it sickens me. But I don't know how to cope other than more. My true drug of choice, more. I try to black out my existence from myself but there's always those time periods that reality hit me in the face.

I don't feel 'cool' because I am an addict, I don't even like people watching me do drugs or being around me while I'm on drugs... but I still use. It's embarrassing to even put into words that I feel even more of a high when I watch myself becoming strung out. It makes me feel powerful in a sense. As I begin to look sickly and empty and my eyes become sad and confused, I feel in control. I am the one doing this to me, this time no one is hurting me but me. Watching my body shrink before my eyes only to fill out again and knowing I can control that too, makes me feel a sense of power. I know I'm fucking my organs up, my brain, my stomach, my skin, my lungs, it's all part of the thrill. It's like dying but not really having to die forever. More than a handful of times I have literally felt my body shutting down because I overdosed on heroin or painkillers or I took a bad mixture of substances and I begin to feel my heart slowing down, stopping. I know that if I don't connect mentally with my physical being that I will die laying there in that position, just like that. Knowing that if I don't make myself breathe that I'm about to die makes me feel a sense of power so unhealthy it scares me even as I'm loaded. Feeling my heart stop and my chest get heavy and watching my hands and arms turn blue... it fascinates me that I can see this. It's almost an out of body experience... and then right before the black curtains begin to shut, I force myself to take a shallow breath to stop it. How is it possible that I am in control of whether I live or die in those moments?

I don't want to die, that was never my goal after I found refuge in substances.... but at the same time it's a little thrilling to think that maybe this next time it won't be like the last time. What if the next time I do just a little too much and I nod out and am unconscious and unable to tell myself that I need to take a breath... it's like Russian Roulette and I now live for the rush of the game. I intrigue myself on drugs and feel like I'm an entirely different person when I'm loaded and it's almost like I'm getting the ability to meet me as a different person and learn everything about the person I become when I'm high, as I'm high. My thought process is different, my appearance becomes different, my mentality, way of thinking, tolerance, creativity, all of it.. it's new. It's like Christmas but I can celebrate it all year long and the anticipation is never more than a few hours. But after the third day with my altered self, the people start to come for me. No matter what I try to do.. they won't give up. It's like they come to pick the altered, spun out me up and they make me go home to the other me. Unless I want to spend time with them for a while..... I have to force myself to sleep because they will not leave until I do so. They follow me and slide by in my peripheral vision and I turn to check behind myself and suddenly they're dead center in front of me staring at me dead in the eyes. They make me feel terrified, paranoid, miserable, trapped, anxious and depressed. They take my control away. They change the high me and turn me into a delusional, scared and alone me. I hate that one. I hate feeling the control leave my grasp and once again being left to exist at the mercy of others. 

But that's the worst part.... an addict is never really in control of anything. The drug controls the addict from the very first time.  Who am I fucking trying to kid here? I'm not connecting with myself intellectually while I'm high, I'm causing irreversible brain damage. I'd like to believe I am one of the lucky ones who had the advantage of being a bit more intelligent than the average person, allowing me to keep a true sense of reality even despite the drugs I'm on. Even though I'm spun out of my mind and ready to go into cardiac arrest because I'm hallucinating so badly and I'm literally scared shitless, I know what I'm doing. I'm not oblivious to the fact that I look like an idiot peeking out of my curtains every 4 seconds, thinking I hear someone showing up at my house. Finding myself sitting there cleaning up my own urine on my floor with my dirty laundry because the tupperware I was peeing in had filled and I tried to empty it in a ziploc so I could use it again and instead it went everywhere else. My bathroom is literally 10 feet away from me, right outside my door, but there's people at my house and I'm hallucinating and hearing things and I'm greasy and bright red and have picked my face, chest and arms apart for hours and look like I've broken out in hives. I don't want to open my bedroom door and risk being heard and letting anyone know I'm awake. I don't want to talk to anyone, in fact I can't even talk. I can't even open my mouth, my jaws are locked and my tongue is dried out. My head is fucking killing me because I'm so dehydrated and I can't get my jaws to lighten up on the pressure.

I just want to die. I want to kill myself. I don't really want to kill myself. But what am I doing? I'm smoking battery acid and nail polish remover? Rat poison and brake fluid? I am killing myself. It's embarrassing to admit, I'm stupefying myself. As I'm writing I find myself pausing because I forget the words that I'm looking for to finish the sentences I'm writing…. God what was that word that means like…. like what I'm doing to myself and my life… I almost want to text someone because for some reason, I can't for the life of me think of the word. After smoking more meth and zoning off for a second… literally hurting my brain thinking, I remember, it's 'pathetic'. The scariest thing about meth is the psychological control it has. I hate meth. I've never liked the way it makes me feel. I don't like being tensed up, greasy, nauseous, paranoid, dehydrated. I don't like headaches and dry heaves or shitting straight clear mucus because I don't eat any fucking food. I don't like being trapped in my room, alone, 24/7, unable to be loved or appreciated for the good that I do possess…. because I'm fucking high on meth. I don't like blowing people off and making anyone feel that I don't care for them or that they're unimportant. I would never want to be the cause of someone feeling not good enough, like I feel every day.

I hate this depression. I don't want to be sad. I don't want to just throw the towel in and accept that I'm a drug addict that is not in recovery. I don't want to use. Yet... I'd give up anything for meth. I did give up everything. I gave up me. I always say it's the last time but it never is. Throughout all the people who have walked out on me and who I've distanced myself from, meth is here. I crash and sleep for days and wake up and smoke some weed and watch the Kardashians and tell myself it's going to be okay. Hours later I'm sitting there with a sack of drugs. I'm terrified of unpredictable feelings. The meth will always be consistent and familiar. I'm sad, miserable and lonely, every single time. Lonely until day 3 when the shadow people come, and I don't even need to hide my tears. It's not an irrational fear, they are going to hurt me. I am going to hurt me. There's no escaping this one until the very end. I guess I sort of did listen when they said 'Meth, not even once'… I did it twice and it is now my fatal vice.

Exp Year: 2013	ExpID: 101056
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 23
Published: May 16, 2016	Views: 27,055
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Methamphetamine (37) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Health Problems (27), Entities / Beings (37), Depression (15), Addiction & Habituation (10), Various (28)