Flashback to Addiction

[CN- Pre­scrip­tion drug abuse.]

There has been a sig­nif­i­cant pause in my Mor­ri­g­an posts while I took some time off to help one of my part­ners grieve the loss of a friend and boss who was vio­lent­ly killed in Feb­ru­ary.

Please remem­ber my dis­claimers and rules if you’d like to engage this post here or in any of my social media spaces. I wel­come feed­back, but there are a hand­ful of boil­er­plate respons­es that I’ve heard a mil­lion times before, already spo­ken to, and am real­ly tired of. I already know I can’t “prove” any of this. I already know it sounds crazy. I already know that this could all be in my head. I find these dis­tinc­tions mean­ing­less in the face of my expe­ri­ence.

I also wel­come you to go back and see the first steps in my jour­ney. Read the most recent part, Dis­cov­er­ing Anu, if you just need the recap. Or you can go all the way back to where the Jour­ney Begins. 

To go for­ward, I first have to go back.

I have to tell you a sto­ry of my very-near­ly-fatal addic­tion and my deeply flawed cop­ing mech­a­nisms. The impor­tant part of this sto­ry doesn’t require that much back­ground or a pre­cise time­line. But here is what you need to know.

-In late 2011, I was diag­nosed with adult ADHD. My mom had dealt with the diag­no­sis when I was a child but refused to put me on med­ica­tion at the time. I was hop­ing for cop­ing mech­a­nisms and tech­niques, but it was Kaiser, so instead I got a script for gener­ic Rital­in.

-There’s a lot I could tell you about how it hap­pened and WHY it happened—I was strug­gling with a dif­fi­cult relationship—but the impor­tant part is that I got addict­ed to the ADHD meds. Noth­ing like a lit­tle bit of P.G. meth to liv­en up the life of some­one who craves stim­u­la­tion.

-With­in only a cou­ple of years, I had a prob­lem. A big prob­lem. I won’t go into every­thing I did, but it was bad. I did things I’m deeply ashamed of try­ing to chase that high includ­ing par­tak­ing of oth­er people’s meds. I learned which ones I real­ly liked and which ones were not that inter­est­ing. 

Amphet­a­mine salts were my favorite.

-Then, around 2014, I stopped tak­ing ADHD meds. I was going to ther­a­py. I was begin­ning the process of extri­cat­ing myself from the bad rela­tion­ship. I start­ed to move away from my addic­tion. It was a hard and cold-turkey process that freaked my psy­chi­a­trists out, but I wasn’t will­ing to taper. 

-There were hard and tempt­ing moments (espe­cial­ly as a pet sit­ter who some­times end­ed up in a house with a client’s ADHD meds), but I dealt with them.

And then one day, in 2019, my clients died while I was watch­ing their pets. It was a cou­ple and they both died in a boat fire off the coast of San­ta Cruz. I was in the house with their ani­mals wait­ing on fam­i­ly to arrive to start mak­ing arrange­ments. And I was alone in the house with prob­a­bly 300 amphet­a­mine salt pills. 

Addic­tion is a ter­ri­ble mon­ster. It will nev­er die. Not com­plete­ly. And it will nev­er stop. You can over­come phys­i­cal depen­dence, but still get crav­ings a month…a year…even a decade lat­er. And just because you can make the healthy choice once, twice, ten times…twenty times…doesn’t mean that the twen­ty-first time that com­pul­sion comes knock­ing that you will have the same willpow­er to resist it. It’s why addicts can’t be around peo­ple who get high on their drug of choice. It’s why they remove them­selves from sit­u­a­tions where they’re tempt­ed. It’s why they often don’t even hang out at their old haunts.

Because they know…eventually…they’ll be stressed, weak, low-resourced and they won’t face those moments of temp­ta­tion with the same willpow­er. And the addic­tion will win. Their brain has been rewired. Once they start….

I had been in that house a dozen times. Watched their cats. Noticed that one of them clear­ly wasn’t using their amphet­a­mine salt pre­scrip­tion. Bot­tles every­where in the third bedroom—dozens and dozens of them—none of them touched. Clear­ly noth­ing that would be missed if a few dis­ap­peared here or there. For months I fed the cats, scooped the box­es, slept in the house and just said “no,” when­ev­er the thought of those pills came to mind.

I don’t say this to make excus­es. I can’t jus­ti­fy what hap­pened. They died, I was an emo­tion­al wreck (try sleep­ing dead people’s house!), and alone with those pills day after day. I did not make a good choice the twen­ty-first time. I knew the pills wouldn’t be missed and I took a pre­scrip­tion bot­tle absolute­ly filled to the brim. It’s one of the most shame­ful things I’ve ever done.

I got high as fuck­ing balls the day I came home. I sobered up and did it again a cou­ple of days lat­er. Then again a cou­ple of days lat­er. Pret­ty soon I was high more than I was sober. When one didn’t make me high enough, I start­ed tak­ing two. Some­times I would take a sec­ond or third pill to stay high instead of com­ing down. I would sit for hours, locked in place, star­ing at porn, my heart slam­ming 160 beats a minute in my chest and every light on the dash­board of my brain lit up like a thou­sand watt flood. 

I couldn’t tell you how long this went on. Each time I sobered up, I would promise myself I was going to wait to do that again—that it need­ed to be a rare treat. Each time I stayed sober for less and less time between pills. Soon, I start­ed to go about my dai­ly busi­ness with one pill in me all the time, and take a sec­ond and third to get high. 

I remem­ber few sur­round­ing details about what hap­pened next. I remem­ber being high and want­i­ng to stay high. I remem­ber tap­ping out three pills into my hand. I remem­ber being up for two days straight. I remem­ber think­ing I would nev­er get enough sleep to be func­tion­al the next day, so I might as well stay up…with a lit­tle help from a three pill bump.

“You’re going to kill your­self.”

It’s a curi­ous sen­sa­tion when a voice in your head isn’t yours. You might think any thought in your head would be yours, but your inter­nal mono­logue has a dis­tinc­tive voice. If you’re like me, you have an ensem­ble cast, depend­ing on what’s being said. My mom is my voice of pru­dence (and maybe some­times crit­i­cism). My ther­a­pist is the voice that asks me what it would feel like if I were kinder to myself about some­thing.

But a voice you’ve nev­er heard before—even if it is clear­ly in your head—sounds strange. Inva­sive. Alien. It doesn’t sound like the voice (or voic­es) you’re used to, and has a dis­so­nant qual­i­ty quite like you’ve heard anoth­er per­son casu­al­ly using your head to think. It was firm, not com­pas­sion­less, but also mat­ter-of-fact. A woman’s voice. Like a moth­er telling their child they’re about to hurt them­selves, but being will­ing to let them fuck around and find out.

I put the pills back in the lit­tle brown bot­tle. I slid the child safe­ty lid closed, threw them out, and took out the garbage. Then just to be sure, I fished them back OUT of the dump­ster, and poured them down into the rain gut­ter, watch­ing as the water dis­solved dozens of pills into a shape­less white sludge. That was the last time I ever took an ADHD med. It’s been four years. 

I know how human mem­o­ry works. I under­stand the fal­li­bil­i­ty of years old mem­o­ries and how we go back and rewrite things to con­form to our nar­ra­tives of who we are and how we got here. I know that I prob­a­bly had a salient moment of clar­i­ty and lis­tened to myself, then years lat­er decid­ed to ascribe some­thing more to it. 

I also know that I real­ly DID almost kill myself. My heart had arrhyth­mias so bad I had chest pains for weeks. I spasmed uncon­trol­lably for a month. My liv­er still shows signs of cir­rho­sis years lat­er. But it’s heal­ing. (Because liv­ers regen­er­ate if you stop kick­ing the crap out of them.) And my doc­tor point­ed out that if it looked that bad three years after I’d tak­en my last pill, I prob­a­bly came SO close to acute liv­er fail­ure that there would have been noth­ing any­one could do.

But I also know that I rec­og­nized that voice. From the moment it answered my ques­tion of who it was and I woke with the word “Anu” in my head, I rec­og­nized the voice.

Because that was the voice I heard that night tell me I was about to kill myself. And when she start­ed talk­ing to me in my dreams, I knew that she had at least stopped by that night to give me one last chance to stay alive.

More com­ing soon…

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