It is early Thursday morning and I am getting through this week with a lot more normal in my life. For the first time since before I was hospitalized in early March U-Me is returning to our own sense of normal.
This week has been marked with nightly dinners followed by movie nights and later bed times. Stephanie is much happier as I come into my own space of recovery. I have tried really hard to make a concerted effort.
I have been trying to get back to the me I used to know prior to all the withdrawals. The space I occupied then was marked by mood-altering chemicals. Suffice it say that Corey doesn't exist without the drugs. It is both good and bad. I am much more suspect to anxiety and all its ills. However I am not trying to mask my reality or alter my sense of being.
I miss both the Xanax and the Adderall as well. They were different drugs for me as each held its own term of endearment in my daily life. The start of the day was shrouded in Adderall and the rest of the day was cloaked in Xanax. No matter how you look at it I was dripping in the fumes of pharmaceuticals. I was calm when I wasn't on Adderall but my calm was a dazed and confused sort of twisted calm. My calm was marked by fits of rebound anxiety which required I take another Xanax to quell that storm. It was a vicious cycle and one that five 2 mg Xanax could barely keep up with. My Adderall was to quell the natural high I maintain when not crunching Xanax
Living without these two contrasting drugs is a new mental health picture for me to display. I must now live with my two-sided mirror of my personality. Acknowledging my organic manic high is hard in its own right. Sometimes I fly on top of the ceiling with my moods. I wake up every day with this predisposition. Waking up on the hyper-alert side of life is beneficial to my schoolwork and my overall efficiency as a human being. I am capable as I am now of long stretches of concentration and work output. My crash is not low or sad it is anxiety. The anxiety is partly brought on by the mania. My body can not sustain the mania and as a result my systems get taxed and rebel in the form of anxiety and panic. This is the my first attempt to explain my full circuit of mental states I visit in the course of the day. My extremely early rising is a result of the mania I organically produce. My hard afternoons are a result of insidious anxiety which riddles me at my soul and suffocates my breath.
In this early morning I recall last night and a conversation I had with Stephanie. We were having dinner and got talking about the lack of pills in my life. It wasn't the easiest part of the day for me so I was susceptible to the romantic winds of yesterday's Xanax. I spoke out loud as I recalled many a dinner accompanied by a bottle of champagne. On top of the Xanax we were likely to share a bottle of Perrier Jouet with whatever dinner consisted of that night. Food as always was a distant second as I imbibed on the alcohol and felt the fusion of Xanax and champagne. The softening of my anxious edges was ebbed into smooth curves of intoxication. Usually the night followed with a movie or watching a series of some sort. I always awakened without a clear knowledge of what had happened in the later part of the evening. Stephanie mentioned last night how much more present I am at dinner. We talked about how preoccupied I used to be with the end of my pills for the day. I usually wanted to go to sleep when my Xanax were done for the day. However until now I have never admitted it. Lots of truths spoken now for the first time. I am unedited like nothing I have ever experienced before.
I reflect of the number of pills I had in one month at my disposal: one hundred and fifty 2mg Xanax and 90 30mg tablets of Adderall. Enough ingredients for my own pharmaceutical version of a eight ball. You know, the cocaine type. Seriously some lethal combination of push-pull going on in my system at any given time. I would be remiss to say I don't miss it at this vulnerable hour. Heck, every hour is vulnerable in this brave new world I am not sure I want to explore. No other choices at the present and with my recovery. It would be too great a mind fuck to go back to the pharmaceutical path I journeyed for twelve years. Why would I ever think of giving up this constant state of high alert and anxiety that flows through my veins like blood? Yes THOSE days are history now and looking back is a bad idea sort of like getting pregnant in high school. I can't dwell in the past for it is not my current state of affairs and not one I would or could change at this time. See I am too far in recovery to entertain the use of chemicals but not far enough in to not let myself really fuck my head up.
Dark waters without a solid grounding is my current reality. It hurts. Some days the pain sends me to bed for hours. I chase sleep to make myself go away. What is different now then on Xanax? Not much seriously. I work to escape either way I live. However, now I am rewarded in an odd sort of way for doing the right thing and getting clean. Because drugs are bad right? I wonder this question every moment I am awake. I suffer and hurt these days like never before. I feel more- I am alive- but is this all worth it? The answers I seek are not in now but in years of recovery.
Corey
BORN THIS WAY-2017
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