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kpostedsum · 3 years

Text

high | d.m

summary: you find an unhealthy way of coping after draco cheats on you

warnings: drug use (marijuana) angsty¿, cheating, illusions to sex

song: habits - tove lo

a/n: this fic isn’t meant to romanticize drug use in any way. i also know nothing abt weed so LOL and very rushed & not edited

masterlist | taglist

I eat my dinner in my bathtub

Then I go to sexclubs

Watching freaky people gettin' it on

It doesn't make me nervous

If anything I'm restless

Yeah, I've been around and I've seen it all

you had a few minutes left of your charms class which was your last class before the weekend. you wanted nothing more than to get out of here and cuddle up with your boyfriend— who was enjoying his free period right now.

draco was one of the best boyfriends you could ask for, the frequent dates, gifts, and attention— it was more than you could wish for.

“you’re excused. you essays are due at the beginning of next week” snapes monotone voice dragged on as you quickly packed up your things and made your way to the slytherin common room.

I get home, I got the munchies

Binge on all my Twinkies

Throw up in the tub

Then I go to sleep

And I drank up all my money

Days get kinda lonely

entering the slytherin common room your eyes immediately searched for a certain blond boy, yet he was nowhere to be found. you made your way to the boys dorms in hopes of finding him there but you’re quickly interrupted by two familiar voices.

“why hello y/n, marvellous weather we’re having today aren’t we?” theo asked looking towards the ceiling and smiling as if he were outside, blaise blocking your path as he did so.

“i’m not sure what weather you’re talking about since we’re inside but i am okay thank you” you responded with a chuckle, trying to make your way past blaise.

“wait y/n” he stopped you. “can i borrow the astronomy notes? i would ask luna but i can’t find her anywhere” blaise continued.

they both seemed awfully on edge and anxious, you figured it was just quidditch nerves getting to them since there was an upcoming game this week.

“i have yet to finish my astronomy notes, but i did see luna in the great hall if you want her notes. now if you’d excuse me i’d like to see draco” you said trying to push past the two boys who still wouldn’t let you through.

“forget malfoy! let’s do something instead, we’re so much more fun than him, right blaise?” theo said giving blaise a pointed look as he threw his arm around your shoulder.

“right you are nott, let’s go!” blaise continued also throwing his arm around your shoulder and leading you away from the boys dorm.

“what? no, i have plans with draco. now excuse me” you said pushing them both off and heading towards dracos door.

as you get closer to his door you can hear heavy breathing, pants and skin slapping on skin. you’re confused, you figured draco would be taking a nap or running over drills for quidditch practice. the closer you get, the louder the noises become.

“pans, you feel so good”

you recognize that voice anywhere.

You're gone and I gotta stay

High all the time

To keep you off my mind

Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh

High all the time

To keep you off my mind

Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh

quickly you turned your head towards blaise and theo who had their heads lowered in shame, refusing to meet your gaze. “is this some kind of sick joke, are you guys pulling a prank or something because this isn’t funny” you said seriously not wanting to believe what you’re hearing from inside of your boyfriends dorm.

“we’re sorry, we tried to convince him not too but he wouldn’t listen” theo muttered silently.

it felt like your world was breaking apart slowly. just not too long ago you were excited to spend a weekend with your boyfriend who you loved so dearly, the same boyfriend who you’ve been dating for years, the same boyfriend who gets jealous about how much time you spend with his mum rather than him.

with shaky fingers you put your hand on the door knob and quickly pushed the door open, already preparing for the worst.

there he was, wrapped up with parkinson in the same bed you two shared not even twenty-four hours ago. her body straddling his naked, just like yours was doing the night before. you stood there frozen, mouth agape— not even knowing what to do with yourself.

“baby, i can explain, just please— y/n please don’t leave” draco said pushing pansy off of him, shuffling on his pants and reaching out towards you.

“dont touch me, malfoy!” you yelled and everyone froze. “you lost the right to touch me the minute you even thought of touching her” you continued sending both him and pansy a glare with tears threatening to slip from your eyes.

“darling please, i can explain—”

“no draco, we’re done just leave me alone, please” your voice cracking at the end as you pushed past blaise and theo rushing towards the girls dormitory.

Spend my days locked in a haze

Trying to forget you babe

I fall back down

Gotta stay high all my life

To forget I'm missing you

Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh

it’s been days since you last left your room, days since you last saw draco. daphne would come by and check on you but you’d always dismiss her, wanting to be alone. regret is one word to describe how you’ve been feeling— you gave him everything and he threw it away so carelessly for a quick hook up.

you missed waking up against his smooth skin in his embrace, tracing the lines and scars across his porcelain skin as you waited for him to wake up, the way he’d try to kiss you in the morning without brushing his teeth and you wouldn’t let him because of morning breath— but he’d still do it anyways.

you missed him, but he didn’t want you anymore.

maybe it was something you’ve done, you’ve been quite busy with work recently so you haven’t been spending as much time with him as normal. he was probably lonely and trying to seek the attention you lacked to give him.

getting up, you stared at yourself in the mirror picking yourself apart. you were pretty, it was a well known fact around hogwarts, maybe he thought she was prettier. she was the life of the party and always up for some mischief whereas you preferred to do stuff in silence and would rather be with a small group of people. maybe he liked how exciting she was in comparison to you, she probably brought a spark of excitement to his life that you couldn’t.

dreading to feel something you quickly showered and got ready to leave your room hoping to run into a specific set of twins.

Pick up daddies at the playground

How I spend my daytime

Loosen up the frown,

Make them feel alive

I'll make it fast and greasy

I'm on my way to easy

“well what can we do for you today” fred said to you with a cheeky smile plastered across his face.

“do you have any muggle herb left?” you asked in a low voice making sure no one heard you.

“maybe we do, maybe we don’t” george said. “how much are you offering in exchange though” he continued.

“ten galleons for three ounces, is that enough” you said pulling the galleons out of your pockets and placing them in george’s palm.

“it was a pleasure doing business with you” they said in unison as fred placed the tiny baggie in your pocket so no one would see.

once you returned to your dormitory you quickly pulled out the pre-rolled muggle herb, lit it and let yourself forget.

You're gone and I gotta stay

High all the time

To keep you off my mind

Spend my days locked in a haze

Trying to forget you babe

I fall back down

Gotta stay high all my life

To forget I'm missing you

you started showing up to class late with red tired eyes, not caring about the looks you got. at this point every one knew what had happened but you couldn’t bring yourself to care.

the muggle herb brought you a sense of bliss and freedom, a new feeling you haven’t felt before but something that you now craved.

“are you high right now?” draco said as he sat himself in the seat beside you.

“since when do you care about what i’m doing” you said sharply, not wanting to talk with him.

“love, you don’t smoke. who gave that stuff to you, i’ll kill them—”

“no you won’t.” you said turning towards him. “you won’t do any of that because you don’t own me and i’m not your girlfriend anymore. so mind your business malfoy, i’m sure parkinson’s waiting for you”

the rest of the class you both sat in silence working on potions that draco did most of since you weren’t in the correct mind state and he wasn’t willing to let his mark falter over your slip up.

you find it amazing how even when you’re on drugs he still looks amazing. the way his nose curves perfectly with a slight bump, and the way his hands move with caution as he pours the potion into the waste bucket.

“look, i’m sorry for what happened with pansy. it didn’t mean anything i swear, i don’t know why i did it but i regret it with my life” draco said breaking your thoughts, he looked older than normal and had dark circles underneath his under eyes. you wondered why he looked so distraught when he wasn’t the one who got cheated on.

“a sorry isn’t going to fix this draco” you told him. he knew you were right but he didn’t want to admit it. he hadn’t talked to pansy since the day you walked in on them, the guilt has been eating him up inside. he stayed silent and didn’t bother respond to you, he knew anything he said would have made the situation worst than it already is— but how he wished you were still his sweet y/n.

“now if you excuse me, i have some fun to attend too” you said leaving him alone as you made your way back to your dorm.

Staying in my play pretend

Where the fun, it got no end

Can't go home alone again

Need someone to numb the pain

You're gone and I gotta stay

High all the time

To keep you off my mind

over the last few weeks, you couldn’t remember the last time you were sober. you started skipping classes to smoke and avoiding your friends so they’d stop questioning your habits.

you were forgetting and that’s all that mattered, you didn’t care how it was affecting your health— it made you feel better. sometimes you wished there was another way, another way to forget how he held you at night pressing soft kisses to your skin, another way to forget the way he took pansy the same way he took you. you wonder if he feels as sorry as he looks, he’s the one who cheated so he can’t possibly care that much.

you hear two knocks at your door which quickly break you from your state making you more attentive, cleaning yourself up and opening the door. there stood draco— his eyes red as well, like hes been crying.

“y/n listen, i know what i did was wrong and that i tried to pretend it wasn’t me but please. i didn’t mean too, you mean the world to me. i miss you so much love.” he pleaded with you.

“y’know draco, i miss you too” you admitted. “but i’ve found a way to forget about you, maybe you should do the same”.

Gotta stay high all my life

To forget I'm missing you

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#draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy #draco malfoy fluff #draco malfoy smut #draco fuckingmalfoy #draco malfoy angst #harry potter #draco lucius malfoy

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ampleappleamble · 3 years

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Heritage Hill. Dyrford. Brackenbury Sanitarium. She was starting to wonder if she'd bitten off more than she could chew. Axa had just finished off her third goblet of the Goose and Fox's most modestly priced wine and was considering a fourth, seeing as her hands were still shaking– so badly, in fact, that she'd spilled her pipe on the bar twice while trying to refill it– when she felt a presence at her side take the stool next to her. She didn't even have to look to know who it was: no one else in her party smelled as good as Aloth, moved as daintily as he did. "Forgive me; I know you're probably loathe to entertain company at the moment, else you'd not have left the table to sit up here by yourself," Aloth murmured, sliding into his seat. "But gods' mercy, I just couldn't take it anymore." He planted his elbows on the slick, well-polished wood of the bar and buried his face in his hands. "I understand that my... ailment is an unusual one, but why must they pry so?" "Welcome to my world." Her voice was thick and rough, the wine and smoke gumming up her throat as well as her mind, and hearing herself speak was enough to help her decide against that fourth drink. So instead she lowered her head to the bar and gently rested it against her outstretched arm, regarding the elf at her side with sympathy and curiosity in equal measure, hoping to forget her own burdens for a bit by focusing on someone else's.

As it had turned out, he hadn't been entirely dishonest with her before– his uncouth, vulgarity-laden outbursts of Hylspeak actually had been a problem beyond his control ever since his childhood, and one for which no healer in Aedyr would have had a cure. But the cause of his compulsion was not some medical mystery or mental affliction. After the Leaden Key acolyte had unwittingly revealed to Axa the cult's machinations in the city and beyond, after they'd escaped the catacombs and staggered to the nearest tavern to process and recuperate, Aloth had gathered every ounce of courage he could muster and, at long last, he'd told them about his Awakening. About her. Her name was Iselmyr. The soul that now dwelled within Aloth Corfiser had belonged to her some centuries hence, and if her rustic accent and colorful colloquialisms were anything to go by, her life had been a rough-and-tumble series of drinking binges and late night fistfights in the bucolic paradise of the ass-end-of-nowhere Aedyran countryside. Unlike the fleeting, nebulous recollections from her past life that Axa's Awakening afforded her, Aloth's past life had manifested in him as an entire separate personality– this bold, coarse woman born again in his body, who forced his own personal will aside at times and supplanted it with her own. Hence the Hylspeak, the surly temper, the rude language that occasionally spouted forth from such a mild-mannered academic as Aloth. She'd been shooting his mouth off at anyone who pissed her off since he was a boy, and he'd been searching for a way to permanently silence her for just as long. He heaved a heavy sigh, briefly massaging his temples before dropping his hands to the bar. "If I was ever anywhere near as annoyingly intrusive with my inquiries about your Awakening as they've been about mine, I deeply apologize. Sagani and Pallegina are courteous enough to take a hint and mind their own business, but Edér and Kana... Those two boors would have me call her out to play, like she's some damned parlor trick and not the scourge of my existence for the past five decades...!" Aloth paused suddenly as an argument with his other half erupted inside him, the effort to keep Iselmyr from usurping his body slowly driving color into his cheeks, his eyes twitching and bulging behind his tightly shut eyelids, veins throbbing in his brow. Finally, he choked out a breath, panting and sweating, and raised a trembling hand to summon the bartender. "Gods, she's persistent tonight!" He ordered a glass of wine for himself, turned to Axa, one eyebrow raised in an unspoken offer. She grimaced and shook her head, burgundy curls spilling across the bar, and he shrugged, accepting his drink and sliding the barkeep some coin. "I've gotten stronger over the years, better at maintaining control. But evidently, she's gotten stronger, too." "What happened to you, anyway? When you were a child, to Awaken you?" Axa lifted her head, planting her chin in the palm of one hand. "I somehow doubt your Awakening was also caused by a strange machine and an eerily familiar black-robed cultist." The look he gave her in response probably would have made her feel guilty were she not so deep in her cups and pipe, but as it was, she only smiled sheepishly as he glared at her, disgust and betrayal plain on his face. "You, uh... you don't have to answer that if you don't want to," she assured him. Aloth glowered at the orlan a moment longer before relenting with a sigh, the guarded hostility on his face replaced suddenly with resigned weariness. "No, it's– it's fine. I figure I probably owe you some answers after what I've put you through, anyway." He downed his glass in one smooth motion, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he did. "...And you've tolerated my nosiness more than once yourself. It's only fair you should get a straight answer out of me every now and then." "'Trust is a double-edged sword, gift and burden both to friends and allies.' My father taught me that one." Axa smiled up at him, hoping she looked more like a supportive listener and less like the sloppy drunken fool she suspected she looked. Aloth winced as he set his goblet back on the bar, applying a bit more force than was necessary. "He sounds a wise fellow, your father. My own father's lessons were... somewhat harsher." Axa straightened up in her seat, halfway to sober almost instantly. The color had all but drained from Aloth's face, leaving the elf pale and haggard, his voice soft and tremulous. "He was employed as an arcane knight, stewarding an erl in the Cythwood, and as his only son– his only child– it was my duty to follow in his footsteps." He gazed into the empty goblet, picturing it full again, hating himself for wishing it so. "He was quite demanding in his expectations of me, even when I was very young. And when I fell short of those expectations, as children are apt to do, he... was not shy about making his displeasure known. Especially after a drink or six." "He'd beat you." A cold rage bloomed in Axa's belly and chest, her little hands clenched into fists atop the bar. "He'd get drunk, and he'd beat you." Aloth struggled to look anywhere else, at anything but the woman next to him. "He... yes. Yes, he would. And although I can't recall the exact details, on one such occasion he was a bit... overzealous about it. So much so that– well, I suppose he must have beaten her out of me. Struck her Awake, so to speak." He toyed nervously with the stem of his goblet, his lips a thin, bloodless line. "To his credit, that was the last time he was physically violent with me. Although it certainly wasn't the last time he put voice to his discontent with my performance as a student of the arcane. Nor was it the last time he drank himself to debasement. As far as I know, it's still his custom to drown himself with liquor as often as his budget allows." The wine sat heavy in Axa's stomach as she considered his words, eyed his empty cup. "And where was your mother during all this?" "Away working, usually. She was in a haemneg– a sort of symbolic marriage between folk and elf, more a business partnership than anything– to a landed thayn some five days' ride from home. In truth, that's where the greater part of our family's finances were earned." He gave in at last and signaled to the bartender for a refill, grimacing as he did so. "Although to my father, the fact that his wife supported our family better than he could was just one more reason to get into his bottles." He'd fixed his gaze into the bowl of his goblet, and as the barkeep finished pouring and the wine settled, he saw his father's face sneering back at him in his own reflection. The two kith sat in silence for a while, Aloth sipping at his drink and twiddling his thumbs, Axa puffing on her pipe and scratching at a rough spot on the bar, both wondering what they should say next while hoping the other would say something first. He wondered if he'd said too much. She wondered if she ever should have said anything at all. In the end, Axa broke first. "I'm sorry," she blurted, stomach and head heavy from drink and grief alike. "No one deserves that sort of treatment from their own family, least of all in their most tender years. I mean, my own family situation wasn't exactly smiles and sunshine all the time in my youth either, but..." "It's all in the past now," he replied, finally turning to look at her. "Water under the bridge. But I do appreciate your sympathy all the same, truly. Thank you for listening." He forced a small smile, but when she lifted her gaze to meet his, he found he didn't really need to force it after all. Cor, laddie, next ye'll be invitin' 'er up to yers fer a tumble– Axa chuckled as she slid off of her stool, catching herself on Aloth's elbow and taking a moment to get her feet beneath her while he gritted his teeth against Iselmyr's perverse delusions. "Thank you for sharing yourself with me. Wael knows it's not always easy to talk about past hardships, not even when you trust the one you're telling. But I'm glad you've judged me worth the risk." Her smile broadened, hand lingering on his forearm, and he didn't quite know what to make of that. "Hopefully we can both find out a little more about our Awakenings at the sanitarium tomorrow– after we've attended to a few other matters first, of course." She patted the satchel at her side, the animancy research for the Knights safely tucked within. "Of course," he murmured, knuckles white with tension as he grasped his cup. "Tomorrow." She gave his arm a little squeeze– gods, was she blushing? No, no, she was just flushed from the wine, surely– before excusing herself and sauntering away, clambering up the stairs to sleep it off in the party's rented room. Her meeting with the Leaden Key had given the Watcher little in the way of answers, but more than enough new leads to chase down, and it seemed she intended to do so with vigor. Aloth only hoped– –only hopin' she disnae suss out yer other grand secret, aye? Iselmyr's voice held little of its usual bite, her crude little barbs replaced with what felt like at least partly genuine concern. Nae afore ye can tell 'er yerself, leastways? He lifted the goblet to his mouth, careful to avoid glimpsing his reflection in it again. "If we should be successful in our endeavors, I hope to never have to tell her at all." Oh, fine figurin' there, lad, his long-suffering other half sighed. As e'er. —

#pillars of eternity #poe anthem infinitum #fic wip #hoo boy this one's a doozy #content warning for alcoholism and child abuse #chapter 10: finish!#now to edit it... clean it up... make it suck less... etc #thanks for reading ♡

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kennedycatherine · 3 years

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04.27.21

We were thirteen and I knew enough to know that was absurd.

We still inhabited a school yard with children learning their ABC’s. Girls our own age hadn’t yet graduated out of training bras.

Aren’t our brains like, too underdeveloped for this?

A few nights I just watched.

They came in fun colours, like the vitamins my mom still set out with my breakfast.

I found the whole thing anxious and boring. Anxious because it was drugs, and we were thirteen and what if we got caught or what if something happened. Boring because they bored me.

Nothing happened.

I made sure they had water and popsicles and candies to suck on.

“You’ll bite your tongue off,” Kallie had said one night.

A small trickle of blood came from her mouth awhile later and she looked pleased. I knew she’d done it. When I looked at her, I wanted to call her a liar.

“I know,” I wanted to say, “I’m sober. You just did that to yourself.”

I felt very young and very old all at once.

They asked for lotion. Lotioned themselves from head to toe.

One night one of the girls did a runner. Just opened the front door to suburbia and took off down the street in nothing but skimpy shorts and a tank top into the chilled night air.

I worried about her, but I didn’t go after her.

There were babies to look after, real babies. 6 years old and one year.

I don’t remember their names, but I remember loving them. I remember feeling sad for them.

Every weekend their mom would leave. She was pretty and young and had a thirteen-year-old she trusted to handle things.

“Where does she go?”

“To the bars in some small town. I think a guy lives there.”

They had family photos in the house. She had a husband. I remember wondering how things had fallen apart so quickly? They’d had a baby only a year ago and now they were getting a divorce?

Except they weren't. He just worked out of the city for months at a time and neither of them cared, I suppose.

I sat on a bed with the 6-year-old once, playing a game or reading a story and I heard laughter downstairs and I was so angry.

I was angry that no one cared that there were children upstairs. I was angry that I was going to put a child to bed who had a mother but seemingly didn’t. I was angry that I had to do it at all, that I was expected to. That it had come to mean relief when I walked in the door. If I was there, it was handled. I didn’t want to handle it.

I wanted to call my mom.

I wanted to tell her what was happening, tell her that someone needed to hold these babies or feed them right and love them. Because surely, I didn’t know how.

But I didn’t want to ruin the fun. I didn’t want Kallie’s mom to be in trouble. I didn’t want my mom, who also had a seventeen-year-old who just couldn’t seem to keep it together, to realize that a house she’d deemed safe by proximity in our good neighbourhood probably wasn’t.

“Give me one.”

No one teased or questioned it. They just handed over the small plastic bag.

I don’t remember what it felt like, only that I didn’t care for it. I didn’t understand it. I was bored by it.

I stopped going. Those girls decided they hated me. I worried about those babies and over 10 years later, I still do.

I started to see my childhood best friend, Maddy, a lot after that. She was pretty and athletic and loud and adventurous and young, my age but, young.

She lived a few blocks away, in the opposite direction from Kallie.

Her mom was in the midst of a divorce. She was older than most of the moms because Maddy had been a “surprise.” A blessing, she’d say, but a surprise. So, the rest of her kids were grown and gone. She’d done it all, seen it all.

We were in the eighth grade, just a few months away from high school when she offered to buy us booze.

She promised it would stay within the walls of the house, my parents wouldn’t have to know. She just wanted us to get a feel for it so we could test our limits, learn our boundaries.

When she presented us with those sickly-sweet orange coolers, I winced. Alcohol had never really interested me. I didn’t feel mystified by it or interested in it.

We drank them anyway.

We had one each. Then shoved two more under our thick sweaters and walked to the nearby park.

There were always kids there, in that strange age range where you have some sense of freedom without actually having any and you crave it, always. You know how to sneak alcohol, ask people outside the convenience store to buy you cigarettes.

Uncool teens, acting very cool leaning against slides and monkey bars we earnestly used only a few years earlier.

By then I’d decided I liked Logan. He was in high school already, two years older than us, seemed nice enough and attractive enough to like, so I guessed I did. I showed him the stashed coolers under my sweater and shivered when the air hit me. He offered me his jacket.

I was only wearing it maybe a minute, not even long enough to brag, when the sirens hit and the park was lit up with red and blue. Everyone scattered in different directions. We hopped a fence and then another and another until we collapsed on her lawn, one cooler lost to our epic and brave journey.

The patrol car circled the block.

“It’s almost 2am,” they told us. We nodded.

They asked how old we were and I told them we were 16.

Maybe they believed us because it was dark but maybe they didn’t because we weren't.

“Do you live here?”

“Yes.”

“Go inside.” We did.

I didn’t drink much after that. All we could get our hands on were drinks that seemed to be a half pound of sugar and something that tasted like mouth wash. The group favourite was Troika which smelt like hand sanitizer and cost about $25 for more than a litre. Everything was vodka.

Every time I drank any of it, I was immediately and violently ill.

My entire body would flush, an ache in my collar bones that radiated and buzzed down my arms and go on and on and on until I’d have to peel my clothes off and stick myself to the coldest surface, let my body wretch and wretch until I’d vomited everything.

I’d find out a few years later that I’m alcohol intolerant with a vodka allergy.

But I’d given up trying long before then. Found my way to pot.

I loved it immediately. It calmed me down, it made me laugh. It made me hungry.

I suffered far fewer embarrassing stories and hallway whispers than most.

I had a starring role in only one story that would go down in infamy.

There’d been a birthday party, someone had made an ice cream cake that was immediately forgotten in favour of solo cups and bongs. I smoked my own joint and remembered that cake. In a haze I found myself alone in a tiny storage room, in front of a deepfreeze. Opening the lid, there it was, creamy and beautiful.

“Fuck yes.”

Then the door opened.

I turned and there he was. The hottest guy in our grade and he’d been calling me a dirty hippie for two years. I closed the lid.

“What are you doing?” He asked

“Waiting.”

“For?”

“You.”

He looked confused. He should've. I had no reason to be waiting for him, I hadn’t even spoken to him. I was 16 and stoned and I wanted to eat an ice cream cake at this dumb birthday party by my fucking self. I pushed myself on top of the freezer.

“Come here.”

He did. We made out on top of the freezer until I felt he was sufficiently distracted, and my job was done and then I pushed him out of the room.

Then I ate some of that cake alone as I’d intended.

Upstairs my best friend sobbed in a bathroom. Even now that we’ve long outgrown teenage angst and hormones she can be prickly, angry, deeply unaffectionate. Then, she was slightly volatile. She wanted to be alone, but I stayed – shoved myself into a corner of the bathtub as she refused to look at me or tell me what she was so upset about it. I waited her out. Mostly because I was stoned and relieved to be in a room away from a throng of sweaty, horny 16-year-olds.

Suddenly, she confessed something to me quietly. She’d made out with that same guy - the hot one I’d been with on top of a freezer - at a party the weekend before. I hadn’t known and she hadn’t stopped thinking about him, and he hadn’t looked at her since.

“I just want him,” she whined.

“I just made out with him on top of a freezer.”

She turned her startling green eyes on me. “You what?”

“I don’t know,” I felt deeply guilty, “there was a cake inside.”

She choked and then she laughed and then I laughed. We left and we laughed the whole walk back to wherever we slept that night.

I went to a performing arts college that had less than twenty students which became lesser and lesser as we viciously vied for the same thing. There were no parties or binge drinking or even any outings. We worked quietly and quickly, most kept to ourselves.

If school really was a competition, I won.

My instructor called me into his office, “I want you to go to this interview. You’re ready.”

I wasn’t supposed to be graduating for at least 3, maybe 4 months. I wasn’t ready. But I went. I got the job and I left, the school and the city.

I was alone and I was terrified, and I was working most hours of everyday and waking up every morning feeling like I’d made a massive mistake. I hadn’t. I was just 19 with no idea what I was doing, only that people seemed to believe I could, and I didn’t know why.

My sister and my grandfather became sicker and sicker with addiction.

I stopped smoking pot almost completely. I’d found alcohol that didn’t upset my entire system, but I never drank by myself. I was afraid that if I did, I wouldn’t stop. I’d fill the hole and then just like them, I’d never learn how to be whole on my own. I went for runs and I journaled and worked and tried to make friends.

I drove home for graduation and realized a few things. These people had three more months together. They were closer, most of them resented me for being given an opportunity that most days I wasn’t even sure I wanted.

There was a party afterward and I felt 13, lonely and bored. I wanted to leave.

My sister was really sick by then.

The best friend I’d made in school, Elliot, he cornered me in the empty kitchen. Most people had settled into the living room for conversations or the basement for beer pong and I hovered in the kitchen, feeling entirely silly in my cheap white dress. Elliot smelled like whiskey while he hugged me, and I wanted to cry. I'd missed him.

We’d had plans to get jobs together. We were going to become a morning show duo in some city we’d never been to, rent a house together. Spend our afternoons drinking beer, planning our show content and break into big markets before we were 25.

I cried when I took the job that meant those things wouldn’t happen and he’d hugged me then too. He was happy for me.

He pulled out of the hug in that kitchen and looked at me for a long time, with big open eyes. A nearly childish, wide stare. He took a deep breathe.

Then he told me he was in love with me.

I startled backward away from him and hit my hip hard against the stove. I was angry immediately. Because I was gay. Because people had been telling me he was in love with me. Because I chose not to believe them. I felt my trust had been broken. Because why? What can I do with that? I loved him. I couldn’t be in love with him. If I could, I would’ve wanted to be. He was so good.

And I was so mad because he was drunk.

I was sick of whispered late-night confessions and people telling me things that weren’t true. I was tired of people making promises to me and telling me they loved me and none of it mattering. I was just so fucking sick of everyone being wasted on something all the time.

It wasn’t his fault. I’d always felt loved by him, I appreciated him, I loved him. I wanted to be gentle with him. I should’ve been. It was just… there were so many things.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I asked him.

“I just needed you to know.”

I left. He called me so many times, he left voicemails I deleted, and I never answered. I went back to my small town and my small job the next day. I re-read his texts, “I’m sorry, I was drunk” over and over and felt no relief in his excuses.

I didn’t drink for a long time.

A man I thought I knew told me he was in love with me.

I found my sister cold and blue on a floor, medically dead, though she miraculously survived.

My grandfather vomited on himself in the back of a van as we took him to the dry out centre where he'd eventually become sober for a brief time.

I was so tired.

When I moved back to the city, I found comfort in things again. I could drink and be fine. The world didn’t end. I didn’t crave it in the morning or when things got hard. I started smoking pot again. It calmed me down, it made me laugh. It made me hungry.

I took mushrooms a handful of times with my friends. I cried the first time because I felt like me. Present and responsible and in control and so deeply, disappointingly myself. I’d wanted drugs to be a void, even if I never took them. I wanted to believe that somewhere there was a way to just not be myself for a while.

I was bored of myself.

I wanted to escape, and it wasn’t happening.

But the second or third time I learned to enjoy them for what they were and felt all too proud for simply having a nice time.

I begged my roommate to come to this EDM show with me. It was my co-worker’s birthday and she’d always been excessively, exceedingly lovely to me. When she sheepishly asked if I would be interested in going to this live show to celebrate her 37th, I swallowed down the price of tickets and said yes. Emphatically.

Matt, good natured and so easy, said yes. He liked live music and whiskey and leaving the house.

We got there and she was alone.

I asked about her husband. He stayed home with the baby. And her friends?

Coming, she said.

There were three of them. I thought back to days she’d cried to me in the bathroom and the coffees we’d shared in her office. I’d always thought of her as a sort of leaky faucet, spilling out without control. I hadn’t realized I was actually just in her circle. One of five.

She got adorably drunk. “Mom’s night out!” They all chanted and Matt and I stood off to the side a bit while I apologized to him on a loop for painting this night as an in and out affair.

“We can just leave whenever, I'm sure she won’t notice.” I’d said.

Eventually she asked me if I wanted to “score” in the alley. I laughed because it sounded so seedy and suspicious coming from the mouth of this quintessential suburban mom who I only knew as a woman sitting in a blazer, in an office, next to her family portraits.

I asked Matt if he wanted any. No, he’d brought his vape pen.

We went outside, me, her and her curvy friend with the insane curly hair. Some guy was already there, and the exchange was quick. She turned back and announced, “to the bathroom.”

The bathroom? Fuck.

It’d seemed seedy and suspicious because it kind of was. “Dumb stoner,” I thought to myself as we marched back inside with the bag of cocaine I’d thought would be a Ziplock of weak weed.

I don’t like coke. It makes me angry.

She lined it up, wide eyed, on the hard back of her red wallet. She yammered and mumbled and stumbled over her words quickly and excitedly. It’d been years, I couldn’t tell anyone at work, her husband could never find out, was I sure?

Once again, I felt bored. “I’m sure.”

The friend took her bump and turned back to me, “what’s your sign?”

“Cancer.”

Her eyes were frenzied, like I’d said something important.

“I knew it, I’m a Scorpio.” She wound her fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and whispered to me, “we’re like sisters.” Then she kissed me, hard and square. Her breath was sour, her lips were chapped and she pulled away with a toothy grin before offering the wallet up to my nose.

I looked at them, their excitement, I felt the overwhelming emptiness in my chest. I felt sad for someone, them or me, and how dull I found the whole thing to be.

I sniffed it through a receipt from a kids play centre and wondered, idly, if there are people who think mothers don’t behave this way.

I wiped and sniffled and felt the light burn in my twice broken nose, now irritated by thin white powder.

“Well, that took for-fucking-ever,” Matt yelled over his whiskey.

“It wasn’t pot.”

“Did you do it?”

“Yeah.”

He laughed, slung his arm around my shoulders and we moved into the crowd of dancing bodies. Mostly I felt sober and a little annoyed about the money I’d spent.

I found the group, buttoned one of their torn open shirts and hugged them goodbye.

Matt checked his watch in the cab, “we have to be up in like, less than 5 hours” he groaned and then called the wing place to make sure we could have some delivered.

He’s a sneaky drunk. You never know until it’s too late. As he poured himself a whiskey at our bar cart, I knew it was too late.

We settled into the couch, waiting for our food. He kept dozing off and I kept saving the glass tumbler he refused to relinquish, from falling to the floor and sloshing all over our new carpet.

When the food arrived, I ran to get it. I had the energy.

I decided to take the stairs and took a turn too sharply, smashed myself against a railing and yelped in pain. A bruise blossomed on my arm before I got back to our apartment.

I tried to sleep and kept waking with my knees knocking and my thighs wobbling. Matt came to my door, bleary eyed and dull. It was 6:30am. I hadn’t slept for more than seven minutes at a time.

“We gotta go, G.”

I looked at my packed bags on the floor. We were driving to his moms, 2.5 hours away.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

He turned away and called over his shoulder, “Happy Easter.”

Jesus, I laughed, it is fucking Easter.

And while I sipped my third mid-afternoon coffee over a card game with his mom and sister, I thought - I guess if there’s a day to decide I probably never have to sniff anything through my nose ever again, Easters as good as any.

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empaths-hsp · 4 years

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I’m Sensitive, and I Drank to Turn It Off

Many people can drink for fun, have a glass or two, and then walk away. My drinking was always bigger. If I went out to a concert, a pub, or a party — any place or event where I’d be around loud noises, bright lights, or an uncertain social landscape (or, my total nightmare: all three!) — I was quick to order a drink (or three, or five) to settle my extreme overwhelm.

It didn’t help that my mother was a social butterfly. She liked her home time, yes, but when she went out, she went all out, and she made it look so natural. In contrast, I was quieter, the type to observe and read a room before making my move (preferably to a corner, with a book or a sketch pad). But it was hard to get her voice out of my head repeating the advice she gave me time and time again as I grew up: Be more outgoing. Flirt. Get out more. The world is your stage.

Looking back now, I can see how alcohol helped me handle social situations as a highly sensitive person (HSP) — someone who processes information more deeply, making them more physically and emotionally sensitive than most people. Decades ago, when I first read about the signs that you’re a highly sensitive person, it was a lightbulb moment. It explained why the world felt so overwhelming.

I startled easily. I was sensitive to loud noises. A wool sweater felt like agony (so much poking, so much itching). Strong smells gave me headaches and a sore throat. Bright lights felt too intense. I had a rich inner world. And I was very unsettled by change — good or bad, it didn’t matter. The list went on.

But there was something else. As I learned about my high sensitivity, I realized I had picked up a habit of numbing myself from overwhelm by turning to alcohol.

Discovering Alcohol Felt Like an Answer

Alcohol was a big part of life growing up. My mother developed quick camaraderies against a backdrop of empty beer pitchers, cigarette smoke, loud music, and laughter. Seeing it in action as a child, it never seemed right. Playing bartender in the house as a teen, watching the grownups she’d invited over laugh and stagger around — and sometimes fight and bicker — it didn’t feel right either.

Then I discovered something that helped my anxiety: Vodka. And sweet red wine. Those were my early poisons of choice. They were plentiful in the house, and I was permitted a glass or two when mom was around, mainly because I think it cheered me up and made me jolly, something of which she approved. (Plus she was European, so a teen consuming a glass of wine was no big deal.)

When my mom went out, I’d experiment with the contents of the liquor cabinet. Me plus vodka and juice meant I didn’t feel so alone. Me plus rum and cola meant I didn’t feel so anxious. I felt like I’d found the answer.

Bottom’s Up, Worries Out

College amplified my dependency. In class I felt fine, but going out was painful. Park me next to a neon beer sign with the music turned up high, and I felt clumsy and shy, like I had nothing in common with anyone.

I wasn’t into flirting with — or even just casually chatting with — any random guy. I wasn’t the girl who made fast friends or who always had dates. That kind of thing felt like a violation. I didn’t want that much intimacy with someone I barely knew. I wanted a connection, but I didn’t find that in the nightlife. It hurt. Alcohol helped. It blurred and muted any anxieties when I felt out of place.

Because sober in a packed club, I felt like the third wrong answer on an episode of “Family Feud”: Three vivid red X’s and a loud, grating sound to announce my disqualification. When I drank, it felt better. Or rather, I felt less wrong. Sometimes I was even fun! And funny! Having a drink before heading out calmed jittery nerves. In retrospect, I was only getting ridiculously blitzed, but I felt better simply because it made me unable to feel.

When Alcohol Became a Bad Habit

Fast-forward a few years: Now I had a full-time job but the same old anxieties. Drinks to the rescue! I was scared walking into any place, even if it was to meet coworkers after our shifts were done, but what kept me moving forward was I knew I could rely on liquid courage. One drink put me at ease. Three made me funnier. Five made me not care. I may as well have been in a room of blurs and blobs and noise.

The self-medication exacted a toll. I never totally blacked out, got arrested, or woke up with a stranger in my bed, but I usually paid the next day. After being sick to my stomach, sleeping horribly, and waking with a killer headache, I would experience horrible lows. I came to call them my Dementors, after the prison guards in the Harry Potter series that sucked all the joy out of a soul. I couldn’t see those filmy glee-suckers hovering over my chest, but I could feel them.

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Signs You’re Drinking to Numb Your Sensitivity

I tried to tell myself to try to stop earlier in the night, so I wouldn’t get so sick or feel so low. Just have two and quit, I’d say. I failed the first time I tried that. I also failed the fifth time, and probably the twentieth. I knew I was hurting myself, putting myself and others at risk for accidents, and making myself more vulnerable to assault. Never mind the wear and tear my liver was getting.

Then by chance I started to read up on problem drinking and alcoholism:

Did I need a drink to get through the day? No.

Was it getting me into trouble with the law? No. Well, not yet. (If I was being perfectly honest with myself, I was playing a game of chicken with getting a DWI. At that rate it wasn’t a matter of if but when.)

Was I binging (four drinks on an occasion, for a woman)? Yes, pretty much every single time.

Could I stop at one or two? Honestly, I hadn’t been able to thus far. My resolve always vanished quickly.

I only started to connect the dots between being highly sensitive and trying to numb that part of me at that point. I began to see how I was drinking to self-medicate, to protect myself from feeling so overwhelmed. Everything was too bright. Too loud. Too hectic. Too crowded. Alcohol helped shield me from the reality of a night out. But that meant lying to myself about who I was. When I finally realized that I pulled back and refocused.

‘Me Time,’ Not ‘Long Island Iced Tea Time’

In the months and years that followed, I quietly began focusing on myself, and finding ways to connect with others that didn’t involve alcohol. It wasn’t easy, but one day I started chatting with someone at my job, another quiet soul. The conversation flowed — we had enough in common to connect, but enough differences to keep it interesting. The best part: I didn’t feel like I had to be anything other than myself around him.

I’d finally found something I’d wanted all along: Someone who I wanted to be around, and somebody who wanted to be around me. Nearly 17 years later, we’re still married. We like the quiet. And bookstores. And staying out of crowded, noisy spaces. And we’ll have a drink now and then, but it’s to enjoy the flavor. Not to numb. Not anymore.

#Empaths #Introverts #Highly Sensitive People #Tips #Habits #INFJ #INFP #INTJ #INTP

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wildandrunning · 7 years

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06: Intoxicated

The hotel room was packed with people. One of the support bands was a guy named William Control, and he’d booked one of the party rooms at the Hard Rock hotel. Currently, everyone from the tour and several people from the venue were packed into it. The cigarette smoke was so thick it was hard to see across the room, and the music was so loud Andy could hardly hear himself think.

They were all pre-gaming here before heading out on the Vegas strip. Andy felt out of place, he was the youngest on tour and the only one who wasn’t 21. That meant that he would more than likely not be allowed into any of the casinos and bars. He didn’t understand why he even let Ashley talk him into coming. He would have been more than happy to get a full night’s rest in their hotel room.

Ashley, however, was clearly enjoying himself. He was sandwiched between his less than amused singer and some stripper that Will knew. Andy kept checking his phone even though he knew there wasn’t anything new. He’d managed to keep himself entertained for the past hour by replying to kids on Twitter about the show.

“Yo, Andy is it? Why don’t you have a drink in your hand man?” Will stood in front of him, his dark black hair slicked back. He looked like a fucking vampire in his black dress pants, button up white shirt and pale makeup.

“I don’t drink.” “Nonsense you’re in Vegas. A few drinks ain’t gonna hurt you.” the man shoved a plastic solo cup into the singer’s hand.

Andy looked down at it. “What is it?”

“Sea Dew. It’s Seagram’s whiskey and Mountain Dew. It’s delicious. Try it.” Andy bit his lip, he wanted to fit in.

He knew that he’d promised himself no drinking, that he’d stay sober, but one drink wasn’t the same as binge drinking. He took a small sip, almost gagging. The drink was more whiskey than soda that’s for sure.

“Oh yeah, I should have warned you it’s pretty strong.” Will laughed before patting Andy on the back and disappearing back into the crowd of people.

Andy took another drink, coughing as the bitter liquid went down his throat. How on earth did people enjoy drinking this? Absentmindedly he kept sipping on it, slowly getting used to the burn.

“Are you drinking?” Ashley asked, pulling Andy out of his head.

“Oh.. um yeah. I guess so.” The drink was almost completely gone, and Andy was starting to feel weird...

His body felt warm and for once he felt.. calm. The discomfort and anxiety that normally plagued him whenever he was in a room full of strangers were almost gone. He actually felt kind of good, happy even. The constant thoughts that haunted him had gone quiet. He felt numb to everything in the best way.

He smiled, ‘I don’t have to feel like this anymore’ he thought to himself. Oh god, for once in his life there was a way to shut all of it out. All the fear, the self-doubt, the hatred. This is why people drink...

He thought he would care more about breaking the promise to himself, but he didn’t. If he had known that escaping the mental hell that was his head, he wouldn’t have ever made that promise. It was drugs, it was just one (rather strong) drink. There was much worse he could be doing, and being able to enjoy himself for one night wasn’t a crime.

“Be careful.. don’t drink too much,” Ashley said, a concerned look on his face.

He knew it was only a matter of time before Andy gave into the temptation and drank. The older man was more concerned with keeping him away from drugs. He couldn’t say that he wasn’t disappointed in the singer though. He thought he had more willpower than to just make it one tour without breaking.

With Andy’s personality, he knew that drinking wasn’t good for him. If Ashley had learned anything from his period of trial and errors, it was that if you’ve got demons you shouldn’t be drinking. Andy sure as hell had demons...

“I won’t.” Andy laughed.

Andy leaned back against the couch and looked up at the lights dancing across the ceiling. He tuned out the sounds around him and focused on the feeling of being at peace in his mind.

---

“Fuck Andy, walk straight,” Ashley growled, holding up his very drunk, very wasted singer.

Andy giggled, leaning all of his weight on Ashley. It was around three in the morning, and he’d had several more drinks. So much for just having one drink and enjoying himself. It was hard to turn down drinks though, and random people kept offering to buy him more. They had run into a couple older fans from the venue who were eager to buy the band shots. Turns out there were a couple of bars that were a little loose on carding too.

The Vegas strip was packed with people, most of whom were intoxicated. They’d been out all night, gambling, drinking and partying. They’d all lost quite a bit of money, but they’d regret that in the morning.

Ashley had insisted that it was time to go back to the hotel and sleep it off. He hadn’t intended to let the singer get as drunk as he did but people kept buying the kid drinks, and he seemed to have thrown his self-control to the wind. Andy would sure as hell regret this in the morning. That would probably be for the best too, a good hangover would deter him from drinking again.

“Ash, I feel so good.” Andy slurred.

“Yeah, for now, let’s see if that’s still the case in a few hours.” “For the first time I feel free, god it’s such a good feeling.” “Andy, getting wasted isn’t how you deal with your problems.” the older man groaned, struggling to get Andy through the front doors of the hotel.

“Oh hush, it’s not like you don’t do it.” “I don’t do it to escape my problems.”

Andy for whatever reason decided his legs no longer worked, almost collapsing onto the floor. Ashley cursed under his breath before being forced to pick the singer up and carry him onto the elevator. Luckily the kid hardly weighed anything, but he still got some weird looks from other people. Andy mumbled all the way to their room incoherently.

This is what he got for not keeping a closer eye on the boy. He should have let him stay at the hotel for the night, but he wanted the kid to actually have a good time. He should have known better.

The older man set Andy down on one of the bed, the muscles in his shoulders aching from carrying him. Andy reached up for him, “Lay down with me.”

“No, I’m going to take a shower you need to go to bed.” “Mmm, please?” Andy could hardly focus anymore, his vision was blurred, and the room felt like it was spinning, but he didn’t care.

Ashley bit his lip. Andy looked more than gorgeous right now. His pale stomach was exposed thanks to his too small leather vest, and his long black hair framed his porcelain face. There he was, drunk and laid out on a hotel bed, asking for him.

Andy grabbed Ashley’s hand, pulling him down onto the bed with him. Ashley cupped the singer’s face in his hands. “I know you want me.” Andy purred.

“Do I now?” Ashley chuckled.

“Mhm, why wouldn’t you want me?” Andy smirked, his words slurring together.

“But I thought you don’t go for guys?” Ashley teased. “Mmm and I thought you didn’t believe me?” “I don’t.”

Andy tilted his head, pressing his lips against Ashley’s. The bassist hesitated before giving in and kissing the younger boy back. Ashley had also drunk quite a bit, and his better judgment was all but gone. Andy’s lips were as soft as they looked and they tasted like whiskey.

Ashley wrapped a hand around the singer’s throat, gently squeezing it. Andy moaned into the kiss, running his fingertips up the older man’s back. Ashley knew he needed to stop the kid before it went any further. Andy was drunk, and this wasn’t right. If he were sober, he wouldn’t be doing this, and if he remembered this in the morning, he would regret it. God, he didn’t want to stop..

Andy was almost as intoxicating as anything he’d had to drink that night. The older man just wanted to rip his clothes off and explore every inch of his perfect body. Just like he’d planned to from day one.

“Mm, Andy stop.” he finally managed the strength to say, pulling the singer’s hands off him.

“Why?” Andy pouted, barely able to keep his eyes open anymore.

“Because you’re too drunk and you need to sleep this off,” Ashley replied, sitting up and readjusting his pants.

Andy tried to focus on what his bandmate was saying but he couldn’t. He saw Ashley get up and walk into the bathroom before blacking out.

#andley #bvb #black veil brides #ashley purdy #andy biersack #andy six #andy black #fan fiction #slash fiction #wild and running #06

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wellmeaningshutin · 7 years

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Short Story #79: Altered.

Written: 3/28/2017

After several years of binge drinking, glass punching, drunk driving, unmemorable one night stands, mysteriously appearing tattoos, burned bridges, broken bones, and many other troubling behaviors, Linda had finally decided to put her addiction behind her, and decided to swear off alcohol for the rest of her life. It was difficult not to drink, and withdrawals were, in her words, “A bitch”, but she had a trick up her sleeve to keep her from drinking, it was the same trick that her sister had used when attempting to get herself off of xanax: smoke pot all day, every day, make sure you only use indicas, just to make sure that you will never leave the house, maybe even your room, and before you know it you’ll have the addiction behind you, and instead you could try to stop smoking pot. It wasn’t exactly fool proof, especially since her sister ended up relapsing and over dosing, but Linda had to try something.

The worst part, for her, about trying to kick her addiction wasn’t the withdrawals, she had spent four years in the hospital when she was a child, and was used to feeling sick in the same way that teachers are used to being screamed at by shitty parents, or comedians are used to feeling dead inside. What really got to her was the fact that she had to be sober, that she had to deal with everything while in a lucid state, and she just couldn’t stand that at all. It drove her crazy, and she would often become agitated at every little thought that popped into head, as if she were being intruded upon while in the midst of a very private act. Liquor used to quiet these thoughts, used to make her a woman that only had to think through actions, or primal urges, and life was easier. Those were the days.

With cannabis, it was like she was thinking more and less, simultaneously, but a lot of the times she would have to put in strenuous effort to remember what she had previously thinking about, and occasionally, when she did remember, she would remember that she was trying to remember something earlier, but got distracted, and then she would get sidetracked while trying to figure out what had sidetracked her, until one word triggered a completely different thought process, and she would forget about that everything that happened prior. However, half of the time her thoughts were mainly hypnagogic, as she would lull on her couch, not quite able to sleep, not able to get up, eyes closed, letting whatever strange thoughts, sounds, false realities, dream like situations, enter her head and whenever she would open her eyes, it would be sort of confusing to remember what the world was actually like.

At a point she forgot that she was weaning herself off of liquor, and confused her nausea, the constant discharge of bodily fluids, but just assumed that she had smoked way too much, and was just paying the price for it. Sometimes she did smoke too much, and it was too terrible for her to handle, so she would just lie on the couch, paralyzed, feeling like she had died but her soul was still trapped in her body, so she had to stay there and feel her body break down in the process, the relaxation of the bladder and intestines (which later required her to throw away her pants and underwear, and flip over her couch cushion after spraying it down with half a can of air freshener), the rigor mortis, the bugs that would soon come and tear her to pieces, slowly burrowing inside of her and using her as both a food source and a place to raise their young, her brain slowly decaying, which caused awful head aches and didn’t let her have any abstract thought (or at least that’s what she assumed, but this whole experience had, obviously, been related to abstract thought, her brain was just too fried to realize that), only let her focus on the pain of her body, and the whole process felt like it had lasted for a lifetime. After she was finally able to snap out of it, to walk around without everything spinning, for everything to just cool down, she figured that it was probably her bong that had caused the awful experience, and she vowed to never smoke out of it again.

After a couple of days, she had gotten tired of having to roll joints all the time, and decided to hit the bong again, forgetting why she stopped using it in the first place. Again, she felt dead, and then swore to never use the thing again, but the cycle continued for a whole month before she threw it at a tree in her backyard, and that was that.

When the spell was finally broken, and she decided to stop smoking swamp, she had completely forgotten why she decided to start in the first place, and was surprised to see that three months had gone by. Three months spent surviving on junk food, microwavable pizzas, cereal, all sorts of easy to make foods that she would have delivered to her house, taking advantage of her trust fund to pay for it all. It was like, for a small stretch of time, she simply hadn’t existed. The world kept moving and she didn’t move with it. Having no idea of what the next step was supposed to be, how she was supposed to continue on with her life, she decided to call one of her friends, and then she suddenly remembered the reasons of her shut in lifestyle. However, she didn’t know anyone other than her drinking buddies, so she figured that they may as well be good enough for her.

As she returned to her old group, she realized that all they did was drink. Hanging out sober was a foreign concept to them, and they didn’t see that mindset as bad, or didn’t see themselves as alcoholics, because they claimed there were people who drank way more than them, so it was okay if they were always getting drunk. At first they agreed to be sober around her, but after a day or two of this, they had enough and started drinking beers, just to “take it slow at first, you can’t expect us to be full sober can you? Its just a couple beers, we’re just getting buzzed, not drunk.” That would lead to chugging contests, shotgunning, drinking games, which would eventually lead to harder alcohol to be brought out, then proposed trips to their favorite bar, and the whole time they would keep offering Linda drinks, not understanding how she could be alright with only drinking ginger ale.

Linda had become their designated driver for the night, but none of them were thankful, because they would claim that, “Chet can drive drunk better than anyone could drive sober. He could take ten shots and take the drivers test to get his license, but he can’t take the test because he can only drive well if he’s drunk.”

“Well, is he actually a good driver when he’s drunk,” Linda would ask, having to repeat this several times throughout the night, “or is he just so drunk that he thinks he’s just a good driver. From what I remember, Chet had wrecked not one, not two, but three cars total from drunk driving.”

The responses given were:

“He really is a good driver, I’ve been in the car with him and I never, never noticed any problems. None whatsoever. And, actually, my dear, dear, compatriot, it was sober people that had run into him. So really, if you think about it, the system is just rigged against him, because even though he is an amazing drunk driver, people will, they’ll just always trust the sober person over the drunk, and, its like unfair-” this shifted into some confused rant about how PC culture is to blame for the idea of alcoholism, and how people just call others to lazily discredit their viewpoints, and shut down any form of serious conversation, but every time Linda would try to argue back the guy would just interrupt her with more of his rant. Eventually, he ended up standing on a pool table and tried to get everyone to do the macarena, and when everyone told him to get down from the table, he claimed that they were infringing on his free speech, and that they were displaying a clear lack of American values.

“If he believes he’s a good drunk driver because he’s drunk, then that makes him a good driver, good at driving, because if you have confidence, you can do anything. Like, think about it, all you need to do, to do anything good, to be good at anything, is to believe in yourself, and then when you believe it you see it, cause seeing is believing” Nodding to themselves, seven shots and six beers deep, “Like, I believe that I am going to be the next big, you know, great American author, and in a way that is proof that, can’t you see? I’m going to be the next best thing, I’m going to be good with words, and put all of that shit on paper, and as you can tell I am, I’m way better than a lot of people, because people don’t believe in themselves. But I believe in myself.” When Linda asked her what her book was going to be about, the girl just shrugged and said, “I don’t know, trains or something.”

“Drunk drivers, they are the ones that survive the crashes anyways, so what’s the problem? If you don’t want to be hit by drunk driver, then don’t be outside. Its not his fault. They’re the ones messing up, its not going to kill him, and then we thin out, you know, the whole population and everything so that the dumb people can’t reproduce, and next thing you know the gene pool is all good again. Like, the problem with society is its too, like, too easy to survive nowadays, and evolution doesn’t know what the fuck its doing, and the gene pool, oh man, its all fucked up. Its all filled with idiots, who are the reason, have you paid attention to politics lately? Have you heard all of this stuff about China, apparently they’re growing too, and, well, everyones growing. If you ask me China fucked up big time, they should have, like, gone back to throwing excess babies into rivers and shit,” pointing aggressively with her rum and coke, spilling it on the table, “Now that’s a good, that’s where politics are doing real good.”

“Yeah, he may have wrecked three cars, but he’ll never wreck pussy as good as I do.” Then he raised his hand for a high five, a waitress thought he was flagging her down, and, to hide his embarrassment from this miscommunication, he ordered a glass of wine. After the waitress walked away, “I hate wine, but, that’s what classy people drink, so she probably wont notice my mistake anyways.”

“I agree with what you have to say, and you know that, you know, Linda you’re the best. I’m always going to agree with you, but right now, at this very moment, I need you to help me get to the bathroom quick. Like, asap. I haven’t gone to the bathroom in the longest time, and, my bladder, it feels like it made of concrete, you know? I don’t think I can walk on my own, I need you to, you gotta help me.” After she walked the girl to the bathroom, she could hear the girl say, in her stall, “Oh man, its not coming out. I think I have to, I gotta push on my bladder and try to squeeze it out. Stay with me, wont you? I need, I don’t want to be alone.” Linda waited for three minutes straight as the girl relieved herself.

The bar was a terrible place to be, but the group had loved it because they never cut you off from drinking, making it just shady enough for them. At first the owner couldn’t stand this rowdy group of trust fund assholes, but eventually she realized that her business was going under, and she could hike the prices up on them, without them batting an eye, so she began to grow fond of them, and made a rule to never kick them out. Although, running the business this way made her feel like she was running a tourist attraction, where affluent people could visit when they wanted to spend a little bit of time in poor areas.

After Linda got her third refill on ginger ale, the group all began to whisper amongst one another, and she was trying to figure out what she did wrong. Did she ask too many questions, show too much judgment after having disappeared for so long? Did they think that she felt as if she was somehow better than them, and was only hanging out with them in a false sense of pity?

“Linda,” Chet finally spoke up, stroking his stubbly beard, looking concerned, “We’re worried about you.”

“What?”, Linda said, taken aback, “What are you talking about?”

“Well, you’re, we feel that you’re not as fun as you used to be, you know? We’re your friends, we care about you, and we feel like you’re on a dark and dangerous path. Sobriety doesn’t seem like it would be good for you, its like you’re dead inside without it.”

“Where,” asked the great writer, “Where is the, where’s the Linda that believed in herself, who believed that she could be fun and was fun. Ya know? The girl who would, always having a good time, would drink a fifth of whiskey and, just like,” making an explosion sound with her mouth, “jump through, right through, a window or something. That was great.”

“You think,” Said Linda, “that its a bad sign that I’m not getting so drunk that I’m jumping through windows?”

“Life is short,” said the political activist, “you don’t know when you’re going to die, and it could be all, any of the time. The infrastructure, man don’t get me started on that, its all regulated and messed up, its so-”

“Kafkaesque”, the endurance pisser pitched in.

“Is that even a word?” Asked the great writer.

“Uh huh,” said the activist, nodding, “Its all kamanesque, and you’re lucky if you’ll even like to be like forty, or whatever, whatever the age is. Big Pharma has everything messed up, they keep having everyone live longer, but, that’s just not right, because like they’re making the bad people live longer, and that means.. It means that you’re life span, its all shortened now, because your chance of being murdered, or being tied up, and left on a train track, its gone waaay up, like right through the glass ceiling.”

“That’s terrible,” said the endurance girl, who was blowing out a flaming shot of Sambuca.

“Yeah, they’re, the government doesn’t understand that by giving other people rights, they’re taking it away from us.”

“And,” the wine drinker pitched in, on his third glass since the waitress keeps asking if he wants a refill, but he’s to embarrassed to correct her, “you’re taking our right to have fun, real good times, by being a wet blanket. You’re a real life, walking party foul.”

“Do you guys just want me to leave?” Asked Linda.

“No!” Yelled Chet, veteran drunk driver, “You’re missing the whole point! If you leave, then you still wont be here, having fun with us! Off you disappear again, and we have nobody to, remember when you got that, the tattoo you have of the bear, and it takes its head off, and there’s the garden gnome inside-”

“No, wait,” Said the great writer, “That’s my tattoo, I got that. It was, I think it was from a book or something, see?” Awkwardly turning around in the booth, presenting her backside to the rest of the group, and pulling up her shirt to reveal the strange tattoo.

“What book is that from?” Asked the endurance pisser.

“I think, maybe it was Paradise Lost?”

Linda was starting to see that everyone was alive and excited by this very confusing conversation, and she was beginning to wonder if she should get drunk, again, just to make all of this more bearable, just to make it fun again. “So,” She asked, “All you guys want me to do is to drink with you?”

“Yeah!” Shouted the activist, “You have to, its like your manifest destiny, and you have to not tread on us. That’s what we’re, what our country is all for, you know? Lincoln didn’t die at Gettysburg, so that his country could be filled, with, with people who tread all over each other. Like, people who don’t like freedom, and you’re hurting our freedom, you know, by not doing what we want you to do. Like, its your body, you have the freedom to own it, but you don’t, you don’t get to choose what you do with it because that might, like it treads all over our beliefs, so as Americans-”

“Hell yeah!” Shouted the wine drinker, who pounded on the table and spilled the Sambuca shot, which just became cool enough to drink.

“-Americans in America, we have to make sure that people won’t tread on our beliefs, so we have to make sure everyone has to follow our beliefs, and won’t do the things, they want to, because we want to, and in the end that’s just what liberty is all about.”

The table cheered, inspired by the speech, and they lifted up their drinks in celebration, and proceeded to make their liver’s jobs just a little more stressful. “I think,” said the author, “I think I know what my next book is going to be about.”

“What is it going to be about?” Linda asked.

“Freedom.” Everyone at the table applauded, except for Linda, who was trying to think of what she wanted her next drink to be. In a way, she felt that it was alright that she drank, because if she didn’t really want to, then she wouldn’t have gone to a bar in the first place, she wouldn’t have hung out with a group of alcoholics. And how could a drink or two do much damage? Plus, she was going to have to drink to ignore her impulses to smoke, and if you think about it, if you squint your brain, alcohol is much less dangerous than the devil’s cabbage. Her friends had a point, too, that everything was pretty boring when she was sober, and she did owe them, like, she was their friend.

When the waitress came back to their table, Linda made sure to add in her order, stressing to her friends that she was just going to get something small, to get her buzzed to appease them, then proceeded to order two tequila sunrises. After those were brought to the table, she ended up knocking them down without waiting to savor the taste, and started to order shots, then her friends ordered more shots, with several cries of “Get on my level”, and everyone proceeded to have a genuinely fun time, even if there was a point where Linda was crying because she hadn’t had so much fun in a long time. After the crying session she bet that she could jump over one of the tables, made a running start, and then crashed into it, face first, and caused the two legs, that were facing her, to snap and the table folded over.

Midnight hit and everyone started to get tired of the bar, and figured that they could head somewhere more interesting, which would mostly likely be the playground they used to drink at when they were in high school, that they would often visit for the “nostalgia”, even though they went at least two times every week. However, there was plenty of arguing about who would drive, but it wasn’t a long argument because Chet took the keys, and told Linda that he was going to prove that he was an expert driver, when intoxicated, and she dared him to put his money where his mouth was. After connecting his phone to an AUX chord in his car, and spending ten minutes trying to find a good driving song to put on, a task made difficult with everyone shouting their own preferences, and after a long deliberation he finally said “Fuck it”, and decided to press the shuffle button, which caused Madonna’s Like a Prayer to fill the car.

After his seat belt was placed on, the car stared, and the chorus hit, he turned to Linda, who was in the passenger’s seat, and gave her a cocky smile. He proceeded to drive amazingly, and it seemed like he wasn’t drunk at all, until he had to throw up and the car swerved past a red light, and slammed into a sedan containing a family of five, who was coming home from a long vacation. Everyone in the driver’s car was fine.

#Free Write #Short Story #Writers on Tumblr #Alcohol #Addiction

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theherblifeblog · 5 years

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Can I Be A Drug Advocate As the Sister of A Drug Addict?

by Kait Heacock

The night I learned of my brother’s overdose, I cooked a large pot of food. Every time I’ve eaten this meal after, I’ve thought of it as the death meal. I was in survival mode: make enough food to feed myself for the next couple of nights because eating was one of the fews things I could guarantee. Eat, breathe, sleep, maybe. That week I drank too much and smoked weed every night. The weekend in Atlantic City, a new couple’s getaway, was damaged beyond repair, but we went, and I consumed everything I could to feed the vacuum inside me.

The Epidemic

Much like survivors of gun violence focus on gun reform or breast cancer survivors raise money for research, those of us touched by the opioid crisis feel a personal responsibility. I did not save my brother; that fact will remain with me for the rest of my life. But I refuse to sit quietly and watch other families fall apart, not when there are potential real solutions. Opioids are a big pharma backed scourge made possible by doctors rushing to dull the symptoms of chronic pain rather than treat the cause. We should stop scapegoating cannabis and put actual funding into more in-depth research.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest report found the number of opioid-related overdoses rose by nearly 28% between 2015 and 2016. These overdoses break down into prescription opioids, synthetic opioids, and heroin. It was heroin that took my brother, though his entry point was the painkillers given to him after foot surgery. After some fifteen years struggling with alcoholism and drug addiction, a doctor handed him a death sentence when they filled out that prescription.

In a report released in April 2018, JAMA found a correlation between legalizing marijuana and a reduction in opiates, and this follows a report from 2017 by the National Academies finding evidence “to support that patients who were treated with cannabis or cannabinoids were more likely to experience a significant reduction in pain symptoms.”

According to a .gov drug abuse website, “Marijuana use disorder becomes addiction when the person cannot stop using the drug even though it interferes with many aspects of his or her life.” The website carries a whiff of reefer madness, so quick to offer marijuana as a gateway drug because it still holds the counterculture stigma of “turn on, tune in, drop out.” I was raised in the DARE, “just say no” generation, where we were taught that all drugs are the same. Unfortunately there are people, including those high up in our government, who can’t separate cannabis from other drugs.

For the record, former Attorney General Sessions, cannabis is not the same as heroin.

There were moments following my brother’s death when I wondered if I could do it too, need something so much I’d risk my life for it. I hovered on the brink but never dove off it. Is want and need the difference between dependence and addiction?

In an alternate universe, my brother was told cannabis was not just another “illicit drug” made to fuck him up, but that it was a medicinal alternative to address the pain caused by his surgery.

The Survivors

In an alternate universe, my brother survives. Not lives, survives. Because this is an epidemic.

I look for answers because I don’t have a brother anymore. A cursory glance at headlines suggest we exercise to combat the epidemic. The Trump administration wants to explore policy allowing the death penalty to be sought for drug dealers, and yet there is no mention of punishing pharmaceutical companies. We are fumbling in the dark for an answer to this plague. Is it really so absurd to suggest cannabis?

Entrepreneur and Ellementa co-founder Ashley Kingsley is a survivor. She is two years sober from pills and alcohol, and attributes her recovery to cannabis. Ashley suffered from undiagnosed Endometriosis for years, and from the age of 15, doctors prescribed her everything from sleeping pills to Percocet. When she was finally diagnosed, she underwent multiple surgeries and began to rely on opiates to dull the pain.

“It was like I had to feed something inside of me, like this beast,” Ashley described of her pill addiction. She tried AA, yoga, therapy—everything to get sober. “I was functional. I wasn’t jobless or homeless. I wasn’t what people pictured.”

Melissa Heldreth, co-founder of Panacea Plant Sciences, considers her family survivors too: “My brother was one of the lucky ones. He is one year and eight months off heroin, and it’s been a struggle for years.”

Melissa is also sober, and she uses cannabis for anxiety and pain relief. She, like so many others who become advocates, knows firsthand the risk of using cannabis when drug addiction is in your family, your life, yourself. When I shared with her my fear of a potential cannabis addiction, she told me, “I 100% understand this battle of thought process, but I look myself in the mirror every day and know this is the right thing for me. I’ve never been healthier or happier in my life.”

She supports her and her brother’s recovery stories with evidence, pointing me to studies on how CBD stops addiction. “THC is what stops heroin and alcohol withdrawals that could potentially kill a person. While there are people with addictive personalities who should watch their intake, studies show that weed, itself, is not addictive,” she explains.

“This is my main mission in life, to help end the stigma in using cannabis for sober people. To show people this is a less risky, healthier way to elevate so many things that doctors push prescriptions for. Prescriptions that are extremely addictive,” Melissa adds.

Ashley echoes the sentiment, saying, “Cannabis has changed my life—in so many ways. I want these kinds of stories out there.”

My Survival

I admit that I relied heavily on alcohol, weed, and sex to numb, self-medicate, and distract myself after my brother’s death. I was in survival mode. We don’t always make the best choices in desperate situations. In the nearly six years since, I’ve stopped sleeping around for the sake of departing my body, and I’ve stopped the reckless nights of binge drinking just to force myself to sob on the walk home, a needed pain extraction that was as messy as my wet face.

In the years since my brother’s death, my relationship with cannabis has only deepened. I’ve utilized it in both my running and writing routines, began learning its medicinal benefits through work with a women’s wellness network, and now proclaim myself a cannabis advocate.

I want to normalize cannabis and proclaim its benefits, but it’s hard to do that when first you have to fight stigma and stereotypes. I worry people can’t—or refuse—to see the plant in a new light. But I also worry that their shortsightedness prevents them from utilizing something that can help with pain, sleeping problems, and in my case, wading through the emotional chaos left inside of me in the wake of my brother’s death.

What I’ve found the most interesting in my experiences using cannabis to affect my mood is that it seems to help me better hone in on what I’m feeling and process it. When I drank, it was a distraction from what I was really feeling, or like I was only able to experience the raw, visceral tears. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for an ugly cry, but sometimes I wanted to dig deeper than that, and that’s where cannabis shaped a lot of my grief journey. It slowed me down and helped me shed the inhibitions that kept me from truly exploring my grief.

I haven’t always felt comfortable admitting that cannabis helped me fight my way out of the dark places I had fallen into in the wake of loss. I worried people would think I was no different than him, using drugs to escape my problems. To preempt that, as anyone with addiction in their family should consider doing, I’ll take breaks from using cannabis and alcohol to check the want versus need ratio, sometimes for a week, maybe a month. I don’t ever want to need it, don’t want to abandon everything and wind up like my brother, frozen in his Alaskan backyard, hundreds of miles away from his children.

In an alternate universe, my brother and I sneak away from Thanksgiving dinner at our parents’ house, pass a joint by the lake, and talk about how big his kids are getting. But I don’t get to live in that universe. I live in this one; I survive in this one.

If you or someone you know is suffering and needs help there are resources available:

U.S.A.

The National Drug Helpline offers 24/7 drug and alcohol help to those struggling with addiction. Call the national hotline for drug abuse today to receive information regarding treatment and recovery.

Tel:1- 888-633-3239

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Tel:1-800-273-8255

Canada

For questions or concerns about substance use during pregnancy, please contact Motherisk’s Alcohol and Substance Use Helpline at 1-877-327-4636 (toll-free in Canada).

For access to a listing of programs offered to First Nations and Inuit, visit: Addictions Treatment for First Nations and Inuit.

The new Canada Suicide Prevention Service (CSPS), by Crisis Services Canada, enables callers anywhere in Canada to access crisis support by phone, in French or English: toll-free 1-833-456-4566 Available 24/7

Crisis Text Line (Powered by Kids Help Phone) Canada Wide free, 24/7 texting service is accessible immediately to youth anywhere in Canada by texting TALK to 686868 to reach an English speaking Crisis Responder and TEXTO to 686868 to reach a French-speaking Crisis Responder on any text/SMS enabled cell phone.

KidsHelpPhone Ages 20 Years and Under in Canada 1-800-668-6868 (Online or on the Phone) First Nations and Inuit Hope for Wellness 24/7 Help Line 1-855-242-3310 Canadian Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line 1-866-925-4419 Trans LifeLine – All Ages 1-877-330-6366

Visit thelifelinecanada.ca for more services.

#personal stories #essays #experiences #opioids #overdose #cannabis #cannabisadvocacy #advocacy #heartbreak

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pitz182 · 5 years

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Microdosing Marijuana at 9 Years Sober

Microdosing. All the cool kids in Silicon Valley are doing it, and anyone who got sober before 2015 has been left out of the fun. At least, anyone with an all-or-nothing recovery plan, which is most people, but definitely not yours truly. Anecdotally, it looks like it’s better to have Silicon Valley hooked on low doses of LSD and psilocybin than abusing Adderall, but more empirical data on the therapeutic benefits of this trend is needed. Though I’m not going near psychedelics without a doctor’s note, I have dabbled in some microdosing on weed, and I still consider myself 100% sober.Alcohol was my problem. It was a gnarly problem. I put the kibosh on that problem in 2009 and haven’t looked back.Google piqued my interest in microdosing on weed by feeding me a headline that claimed one puff of it could blast away depression. I double-clicked. Since I deal with bipolar disorder and have benefited from using CBD (the non-psychoactive component in marijuana), the article seemed relevant.According to the study, one drag of low-THC and high-CBD dose of weed can knock out depression immediately, unlike traditional antidepressants that often take a few weeks to kick in. But, there’s a catch: Continual use of THC could worsen depression, so this had to be an every-now-and-again smoke. I stored that information in my brain for future reference, noting that if I ever experienced an intense depression that didn’t abate I could give it a try since I’m fortunate enough to live in Los Angeles (pot shops on nearly every major street).About two months after I read about the study, I got stuck in a morass of negativity and self-deprecation and self-doubt for about a week. Everything was out of alignment, and no matter how much meditation I did, I just couldn’t snap out of it. Sure, I have bipolar II, but because I take meds, 90% of the time the symptoms are manageable. Still, there are those days when stress or neurochemistry or hormones or a bad fight with a boyfriend can throw me off.Sometimes I find relief in jogging or dancing, calling my therapist or going to a meeting, but there are times where I don’t have the energy or ability to do the very things I know will help (Depression 101). Since I’ve dealt with the condition for so long, I know when I’m dealing with a chemical imbalance and when I’m dealing with a psychological imbalance.This time it felt like both.I was curious to see how the weed would work, especially since I’d heard so much about the benefits of microdosing on psychedelics from friends. Because the CBD succeeded in quieting my anxiety and smoothing out my thoughts, I figured why not try something with a bit of THC.Anyone who smokes pot can tell you that it triggers euphoria, thereby alleviating depression; you don’t need a study to tell you that. But I’ve never been a huge fan of weed, for several reasons.For starters, my sister smoked way too much of it when she was 18, and she wound up with a permanent case of acute paranoid schizophrenia right after a three-month-long binge. Her doctor said the weed probably triggered a dormant case of the illness inherited from my schizophrenic grandfather, one that would have emerged with or without the pot, it was just a matter of time. So, that instilled in me a well-warranted dose of fear.After staying far away from weed until my early 20s, I started smoking it every now and then, but not very often, and I certainly never purchased any or had it around. You’re probably wondering why I’d even risk smoking pot at all given my sister’s condition. Well, the doc also pointed out that she displayed many early signs of the disorder from childhood, and that my emotional and expressive--albeit mood-disordered--personality was opposite of what you’d typically see in a child predisposed for schizophrenia.I also had passed adolescence by the time I started smoking, and the science says adolescents are the ones most at risk. Strength and frequency also play a huge role, and my sister admitted that she holed herself up in her dorm room smoking bowl after bowl after bowl all day long for months until she literally couldn’t think anymore. I had no intention of smoking more than a hit or two off a blunt.My highs were a total mixed bag: Sometimes they relaxed me, sometimes they brought on unstoppable fits of giggles; one time I had waking dreams about dancing tortilla chips, and a few times I found myself in the midst of very uncomfortable paranoia. The one and only time I smoked way more than two hits, I wound up with full-blown psychosis that ruined an entire Halloween for multiple people. Even when smoking did bring on an enjoyable high, I still had to endure those moments of not remembering the last word I spoke, which I found, and still find, utterly horrifying. Plus my head felt like it weighed 100 pounds and my face felt like it was going to burn off.Pot just didn’t provide an alluring buzz. I never developed a craving for or addiction to it.If the weed I smoked had had even a small percentage of CBD, those episodes of paranoia would likely have not occurred since CBD actually curbs the anxiety-inducing effects of THC. In fact, in a bizarre twist of irony, studies have shown CBD effectively treats schizophrenia.Sadly, whoever bred weed in the 90s and early 2000s grew strains that had little or no CBD because it decreases the psychoactive effect. (Remember chronic?) Now, CBD is making a comeback among health-conscious, microdosing millennials who are sensible enough to want a more balanced high. This is good news for a paranoid Gen Xer.Now, you can walk into the local dispensary and see a smorgasbord of pot goodies that include CBD, from all-CBD vanilla bean cookies to 1:1 taffies to 100% CBD oil cartridges. There are salves and gums and pre-rolls and mints and a white CBD dust that looks just like cocaine, and all of them are labeled with the milligrams and the percentages of THC and CBD. This is heaven for someone like me who might want to try some pot without getting paranoid or stoned.I have to say, I love budtenders. Mitch, who manned the shop by my house, was extremely sympathetic to my terror of coming down with pot-induced paranoia. He emphasized that dosing, strain, and CBD content made a world of difference when trying to avoid it and pointed me in the direction of 1:1 taffies. Each taffy had 5 mg of CBD and THC, which sounds low, but it’s no microdose for someone like me. According to Mitch, 5 mg of CBD and THC can lead to a strong high for someone with zero pot tolerance, and I wasn’t looking to get stoned — I just wanted that mild euphoria, for the bell jar to lift.I ended up buying the taffies and slicing them into thirds, which Mitch suggested. In the end, I was ingesting about 1.5 mg of THC and 1.5 mg of CBD, which a lot of doctors would consider an ineffective dose, but not for me! My brain is super sensitive. After two hours, I ended up feeling a very small effect, but of course it grew.Ultimately, the high — if you’d call it that — was a powerful feeling of ease and positivity. My thoughts quieted, and yes, a mild euphoria fell over me. It was, without a doubt, a nice buzz, but a buzz no more intense than a glass of wine sipped slowly and on a reasonably full stomach. Despite this buzz, I had no craving for more pot. I was so pleased to not be paranoid or forgetting my thoughts as they spilled out of my head, the last thing I wanted was more. More might have induced those adverse effects. (Oh, the benefits of legalization!)I am not ashamed of that pot buzz nor do I think it nulls my sobriety in any way. My sobriety is just that — my sobriety, and it’s not some stringent moral code that demands I never feel any psychoactive pleasure whatsoever just because I used to drink myself into rages, sobs, and blackouts. If the pot buzz was harmless and actually beneficial for my mental health, why not embrace it? One of the main reasons I got off the booze is because how seriously destabilizing it is for my mood given my bipolar diagnosis. When I drank too much, it sent me crashing down into suicidal depressions.Normal drinkers get a slight buzz — if not a big buzz — from their drinks, and they’ll admit it. It’s a social lubricant and a relaxant that well-adjusted and healthy folks leverage all the time to take the edge off and have fun. When they manage to leverage these positive aspects of alcohol without destroying their lives, we tip our hats to them.Being out of AA for nearly three years no doubt helped me take the microdosing plunge with zero guilt.Now, if I wanted to gorge myself on those taffies after this experience, that would be problematic, at least for me. Someone else might not care if they engage that behavior, but I’m not in the mood to pick up any new addictions.I’m still very wary of using weed on the regular given my familial history of schizophrenia, though at this age my chances of developing the illness are low. Some studies have shown that heavy and regular use can fry your short-term memory, and I’m not down for that either: I need all the synapses I can get as I push 40. So, I don’t plan on using it very often.After having the weed, the positive mood lasted for a few days without ingesting any more taffies. I basically just returned to baseline. I didn’t eat any for weeks after that episode. Since then, I’ve probably had two or three, each time cutting them in thirds or halves. After a while, the package just sat there in the fridge, and eventually I ended up tossing them when I moved out of the apartment.So, now I have no taffies, and I could frankly care less. If I feel like one might help me in the future, I’ll take it. If I go out to the desert, maybe I’ll take some for recreational use. Either way, I know my limitations, and I know I don’t want to do it often. Because I don’t experience a craving, I doubt this will be a problem. I experienced a craving for alcohol from Day One. From the very beginning, I needed more.“Marijuana maintenance,” or smoking pot in recovery, is generally frowned upon by your standard AA member. Historically referred to (incorrectly) as “the gateway drug,” 12-step philosophy looks at it in the same way, cautioning that if you start smoking it in recovery it will open up the floodgates toward drinking again.The problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t take into account the vast differences that exist between all of us, be they physiological or psychological, or, hell, even spiritual. After reading much about recovery, from Lance Dodes to Marc Lewis to Gabrielle Glaser to Bill Wilson and all the stories in the rest of the Big Book, I feel that it's unconscionable to argue that we are not unique, as so many people do in 12-step programs. We are highly unique, and observing this and tailoring treatment plans for each individual will increase success at recovery. One-size-fits-all recovery modalities are, according to my research, quite dangerous.Imagine if a woman with breast cancer walked into a doctor’s office and the doctor said, “Well, there’s no reason to take any additional imaging because all breast cancer patients are the same. You’re not unique. Mastectomy it is!”Even in the dark ages medicine was probably more sophisticated than this. So why are we in the dark ages when it comes to addiction treatment? If our bodies are this unique, then so are our minds. The field of psychiatry also takes our differences into account, with medication and other treatment prescribed according to individual circumstances.I am not encouraging anyone to microdose, but I am trying to encourage the sober community to keep an open mind about new psychotherapeutic treatments and to accept the fact that some people can stay away from their drug of choice while indulging in a substance that wasn’t and isn’t problematic. Studies have shown that marijuana can benefit our mental health; let’s continue to study this promising medicine instead of closing ourselves off to it out of fear.Microdosing on anything while in recovery is a very nuanced topic, and drawing blanket conclusions won’t do anyone a bit of good. But in order to make room for these conversations, we have to be open and accepting. We have to be willing to say, “Okay, she can take a little THC every now and then and enjoy it. I know it’s not a good idea for me since I smoked too much pot in the past, so I won’t do it.” We all need to be in touch with our own limits and accept them while not imposing them on others; otherwise, we resort to reductive fear-mongering that has no basis in reality.

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alexdmorgan30 · 5 years

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Microdosing Marijuana at 9 Years Sober

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 http://bit.ly/2AF1Qjc

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emlydunstan · 5 years

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Microdosing Marijuana at 9 Years Sober

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/microdosing-marijuana-9-years-sober

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