Tag Archives: drugs

Seeking Transcendence

sobriety2

First off, it looks like my Subversion post got a lot of traffic through Facebook. That always weirds me out, because I can never tell if it’s good or bad traffic or who shared what with whom and what they thought of it, but this is the nature of blogging. Anyhow, I hope people liked it, because they sure came to read it!

Sometimes I write about drugs on here. I’ve been pretty open about phases of my past and the fact that I stopped drinking, etc. by personal choice in 2002, when I was 21. I’d already lived enough of the party life, and moderation wasn’t for me, though I think a lot of people do better with moderation than abstinence. I fully believe that addiction is a choice, not an uncontrollable brain disease like modern propaganda purports in order to endorse religious programs. That being said, whatever works for you, drugs, no drugs, religious programs, your own strong will–do it.

So, that aside, I live in California, home of drugs. Drugs are everywhere. They are a major part of people’s life and lifestyle. Psychedelics, pot, alcohol, they’re like a religion here. For years, I stayed away from most situations that involved any sort of drug, even on the periphery, but after so much time with my own commitment to sobriety as a form of transcendence in my own life, I am OK with being in bars or going to shows or spending time with friends who use, only because I know how committed I am to my choice. I’ve proven it to myself, and I have so many people in my corner who know my past and support my decision to seek spirituality through meditation, yoga, hiking, writing and music rather than through substances.

Mostly the battles were in my mind and body due to years spent seeking a cure to anxiety and depression (my tortured artist lot, I suppose, the genetic card I’ve been dealt) through pills that ended up causing more harm than help, left me staring down an abyss. After that debacle of years, I was the loneliest I had ever felt in my life, an experience and feeling nobody who hasn’t been there can really relate to, and I don’t expect them to. I came to some conclusions about how short life is and what really matters to me.

All these little things, the structures I’ve built: Part-time county job, rented room in a Victorian in Oakland, plenty of time to spend on music and art, being completely sober of all mind-altering substances, exercise, lots of time to reflect and process so I don’t struggle too much with anxiety or depression–these things may not seem like a lot to others. They may seem boring, even. But to me, they are all I have. They are my foundation.

***

I dated a guy once, when I was 19, who was trying not to drink so much. I was sober at the time, due to being a crusty punk street kid earlier in my teens and almost dying out there due to excessive consumption of whiskey daily, fights, elements, etc. I knew in my heart how close I’d been, and I was scared shitless, so I went straight edge. No sex, no drugs.

And I was happy. I enjoyed things more than I ever had before. I was working on music constantly, I was fit, I had awesome friends, I trusted myself. I looked and felt great.

But this dude came along, my soul mate I believed, a musician, passionate, intense, real, deep, successful, everything I thought I wanted, and basically he systematically worked at me until I decided to cave, because I thought love could conquer all. I thought if I drank with him, moved in with him, changed all my values, that our love would make it work.

I was so wrong.

And anyone who truly loved me would never have demanded that of me. But I was young. And I learned an important lesson which is this. No matter what your values are, whether it’s drugs or no drugs, sex or no sex, religion or no religion, if you change them to satisfy another person, you become hollow inside. You are not living up to your own convictions. You have to be true to yourself or shit just won’t work.

And no truth is static. We all ebb and flow in what we believe in. We change daily. Some of us are stubborn in our convictions, like, for me, I will not budge on the no drugs thing for another person EVER again. Doesn’t matter what comes. I believe in myself more than I believe in love or any other person. That doesn’t make me a narcissist, it makes me strong. Our own selves are all we ever have. If I make a choice, it has to be something I am doing for myself, because it feels right. And drugs don’t feel right to me now in my life.

***

I’ve been on some strange personal journey lately. I bring up the drugs thing because a couple things have happened to test my resolve, and I’ve found that I’m stronger than ever in it. I just don’t want those things in my life. I watch my friends use them constantly, and to be honest, I am not jealous  and it doesn’t look like fun to me. My life is subtle and simple and slow and takes time. I’ve accepted that. I love to be excited and learn new things, I love to feel good, but for me, quick fixes never last. The only thing that lasts is me, day to day, for however long I last as a conscious person. And I can transcend through many other means.

I write music in order to transcend this mortal coil. Because I can’t have some of the things I want, because I am sensitive and feel everything sometimes, I try to put it all in music so that it can be larger than me, and affect on a plane I can’t access through any other means. Same with writing. I transcend through art. That’s enough for me. It’s what I have and what I choose. Anything else distracts me.

I met a musician recently, a few months back, who was real excited about some of my songs. He was up front with me after reading my blog and told me he hadn’t realized I was “so straight edge.” I wouldn’t really call it straight edge. Some of my best friends use substances, a lot. I love them, and respect their decisions, and listen to their stories. That’s enough for me. I try to be as open as I can. It’s not black and white to me what others do. Only what I choose to do right now.

This guy decided not to work with me because I don’t drink or use drugs. He was admittedly a big burner (Burning Man), and I felt like what he wasn’t saying was what I’ve heard a few times since then. If I couldn’t be in his world, on the same page as him, then he didn’t want to work with me on music.

I was bummed and pissed, because I don’t ask that of anyone. I don’t cut people off because they use substances. I just don’t use with them. And I don’t put myself in situations that are too much for me, depending on where I am inside myself at the time. But I am finding it works the other way around. People can and will reject you as an artist and a friend because you’re sober. It cuts both ways.

I was talking with an artist friend last night, and was saying that a lot of people try to change me. They say I’m too reflective or morose or depressed or think too much. She struggles with depression and anxiety, and she was saying that when someone close to her is suffering, she wants to take their pain away. She feels like for some reason, she could handle it better, because she’s well equated with pain in general.

I feel like that with those of my friends who are using drugs to cope with this world, that they are completely justified in doing so. Some of them may be using drugs for other reasons, they believe they take them to a higher plane or whatnot, but I have many who use them to simply numb themselves out, or to fill the empty spaces. If I could use something to numb myself out, sometimes I feel like I totally would, if anyone needs to take a chill pill sometimes, shut their brain up, it’s certainly myself.

But for me, I got tired of the endless empty hunt for something outside of me to make everything better. I think I have all I need inside. I can handle the pain of life, how hard it is, how much loss we all feel. I can put it into my art. It’s not easy, but it’s what I’m here for. I truly believe that, for whatever it’s worth.

Music and Drugs

*This post actually made a musician not want to work with me. Go figure. I’m an opinionated gal. But…to be honest, I have lots of good pals who use substances and do just fine with their music, this is just a typical stifled artist blog rant, so take it with a grain of salt, will ya kids? I am not officially straight-edge, nor am I a believer in 12-step programs, though I have many friends who are. I am simply a girl who decided years ago to not drink or use drugs because they had given me harsh consequences. If that threatens you, I don’t know what to say. To each their own. I’m not judging you for snorting coke, don’t judge me for not wanting to hang out at a bar, right?

You’re looking forward to the Thursday post, I’m sure.

I thought, since I am beat and I promised a post every Monday and Thursday (and I am a woman of my word), that I would speak briefly to the subject of music and drugs.

Playing music puts me in circles that sometimes I don’t want to be in–namely those that involve a lot of pot smoking and drinking and possibly dope and ketamine and ecstasy and cocaine and acid and god knows what else. These things don’t tempt me, per say, but being around constant lushness is surely annoying to those who don’t imbibe, only because you’ve got one person over there with glossy eyes and a slight (or slightly more intense) escape from reality, and another person over here with not-glossy eyes and complete presence in reality.

I am not against people drinking or doing what they’re gonna do. Let me be the first to say that there were times in my life that I really enjoyed those things. The problems came, though, and pretty soon the substances became more important to me than the things that really were important to me, like music.

There is nothing like playing music with people who you gel with.

Today, for example, a person I met about a month ago asked me if I wanted to jam with him and his friends. It was awesome. There was a drummer, four of us are guitar players, and we all had similar musical influences.

(For one, I asked one of the guys if he’d heard of this band my friend recently turned me onto called The Mob (UK), a band no one else I know has ever heard of (and I hang around with some very eclectic people) and he was like, “Of all the bands you could mention. Look at this, this is the only vinyl I have purchased recently,” and he pulled out a vinyl of the very same band.)

That was the beginning. Hours later, we had all played a series of really fun songs we made up on the spot, and three of us switched off playing drums.

In all of that time, I was nowhere but in the music.

I didn’t think about my current situation and recent drama, I didn’t think about loneliness and the point of human existence. I simply played music. It was transcendental. It’s what music is about for me. When the time in the practice space was up, none of us wanted to stop, and two of us continued to play guitar and two of us banged on the drum kit, me going completely ape shit nuts, all of us totally bouncing around and into what we were doing, no self-conscious brainiac bullshit. Pure high.

Now, this isn’t an argument complete with statistics and examples, but did I need any sort of substance during that time? No. Some of the other musicians had smoked pot, but it didn’t bother me. We all had a good time.

Why we need to get loaded to play music is beyond me. I don’t know why the worlds of music and drugs are so tightly intertwined, and frankly, it’s frustrating and hard to escape. On craigslist or when meeting new musicians you have to ask questions like, “Can you show up on time? Do you have instruments and equipment? A car? Do you have a substance problem?”

Granted, many musicians handle a copious amount of substances while still playing amazing music, but the annals of rock history are strewn with the memory of amazing musicians who died before they even hit 30, due to their habit gone out of control.

You could argue that musicians are sensitive folk and can’t “handle” the world, especially success and the machine of the grind that making music can become if you get some success, but hell, I’m a sensitive folk and I’ve managed to not drink or smoke pot or consume nefarious other illegal substances for ten years now. Ten years. Since I was 21 years old.

I spent almost my entire twenties NOT partying with substances. I didn’t miss anything. I got my BA degree, I worked a bunch of day jobs, and now I’ve entered my thirties totally focused on art, because I got all of that other stuff out of the way and figured out who I am in that regard. (Though subtle and not-so-subtle tweaks are often necessary).

I have plenty of friends who did spend their twenties (and even thirties) indulging and are now sober in their thirties and forties. They have some stupendous war stories of the things they did that I can listen to and be glad I did not have to do myself. The fact of the matter is, your body gets wiped after a while. It doesn’t recuperate like it used to. People start complaining about their livers and kidneys and stomach aches and switching one drug for another in an attempt to moderate. I decided to skip all that (to be honest, I was complaining about some of those things when I was only 15 years old, due to my love of substances).

There will always be drugs in the music world. And I can’t convince anyone of what to do with their own life. But I’ve found that as my own personal choice, all of the energy spent consuming, popping, seeking, purchasing is just wasted energy that could be better used actually playing music. And because of this, I am present when I play music and I enjoy playing music.

I’ve reframed my thinking over the years to be along the lines of drugs interfere with my music. They don’t help it. They actually distract me from it, by taking away portions of my basic motor skills.

Don’t give me that mumbo-jumbo about psychedelics opening up your mind to new things. For that, you have the Grateful Dead, and that’s fine, but it’s not my bag. Ok, and Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and all those trippy, jammy bands who I do appreciate, but sober. I appreciate them sober. Some people love psychedelics and that’s fine. Even the founder of AA was on a psychedelic combo called the “Belladonna Cure” when he had his epiphany about starting AA (Overcoming Your Drug and Alcohol Habits, Desena). Yea. For real. So…to each their own. These are only my personal opinions on my own experience.

I know my way of life isn’t for everyone, and those that can drink or pop pills or smoke pot without letting it become an obsession, go for it. Whatever. I don’t really care. But for me, the obsession I used to cheaply focus on substances is now channeled into music. I’ve replaced drugs with music. Art is perfect for crazy neurotic people like me–we can channel our insanity into something beautiful.

Music IS my drug. I don’t need drugs to do my drug.

Validation

Most of my successes are silent, seen only by me. Nobody sees me tweak a song all day, edit a story until it’s done, listen to my music until 2am in the morning trying to figure out if it’s cohesive, go through my old notebooks finding lyrics, poetry, material to work with…

Seeking outside validation is a crap shoot and bound for failure if that’s the only driving mechanism. It’s faulty and based on unpredictable and uncontrollable outside things, namely people. And each person in this world has their own goal, a priority of themselves first above all else.

Because I grew up with a father who was a local musician, admired in many circles, I always felt like I was living in shadows of someone more talented and bigger than myself. I started playing music when I was very young, and picked up the guitar at 13, knowing full well music was something I wanted to pursue, but somehow, I didn’t learn how to validate myself, because I always felt like someone was better. After my dad, there was a guy friend who was amazingly hot and talented at the guitar who I felt always criticized me. I wanted him to appreciate and respect my songs so badly, just like I maybe wanted my dad to look at me and say, “Damn, my daughter is super talented.”

After that boy, there was a string of other men I let become my harsh internal critic, and I constantly sought out their approval, in an endless empty desire to fill myself with someone else’s validation. I spent years searching for that better-than-me musician or writer who would make me real, like the velveteen rabbit, just begging for someone to consider me as an item worth handling.

I don’t know, maybe the Velveteen Rabbit story is another in a string of societal myths of outside validation making you real that set me up to be endlessly disappointed and searching for something more. I’ll have to take a look at that.

At 31 years old, I think I’m finally aware of the pattern enough to realize that I can only seek validation from my self, anything else is icing on the cake. I can connect with people, I can share what I’m doing with them, but I can’t expect them to make me feel better about my work or what I do. They can’t make me real. I am real, but I need to see it before I can even accept that anyone else can see it.

I’m not sure what it is that separates those who are majorly successful in the worlds eyes from those who are mildly successful, seems to me the talent is often there in both cases, but sometimes, those that are more successful simply believe in their work to a level that allows them to never back down. They don’t hide their art under a rock as soon as they perceive the slightest rejection.

One of my biggest lessons in life has been learning to accept myself and my own art, and not look to people who I admire or look up to to tell me I “have it” or don’t. It’s hard, it’s like drugs. I crave attention and connection and understanding, and I get so tired of trying to give it to myself all the time. It’s like living in the middle of a desert, patting yourself on the back for managing to bleed cactuses for water so you don’t die of thirst. It gets old, congratulating yourself for simply being able to survive.

“Knowledge, ultimately, means perspective. There’s knowing something and then knowing it. Another Taoist saying is that “you have to not know you know anymore.” That’s the hardest part. Because you can get real real smart. If you get stoned or high on a spring morning, or you’re fucking or in love–whatever it is that does it for you–it’s, ‘Ah, I know! There it is!.’ But it’s a bubble. It bursts. And when the bubble bursts, you’re right back where you were with your habit and your weaknesses and your fears and your loneliness and your lies and your stupidities and all the rest of it, stumbling through life and not really knowing what the fuck is going on…“

–Marco Vassi

“I thought I would stand myself a little dinner. I hadn’t quite enough sense to know what I really wanted was human companions. There aren’t such things. Every man is eternally alone. But when you get mixed up with a fairly decent crowd, you forget that appalling fact for long enough to give your brain time to recover from the acute symptoms of its disease–that of thinking.“

–Diary of a Drug Fiend/Aleister Crowley

Seems that’s the eternal equation. We need to validate ourselves, but we want outside validation. So we have to go ahead and validate ourselves in spite of our wants. Because being human means wanting, and wanting is a disease in and of itself. I know I have an endless want monster inside. I get a little bit of validation and attention and suddenly I want more. I stop taking care of myself as soon as I realize I can get a balm from someone else, but then I always come back to me again and find that I need to get my own damn balm, even though it’s harder and it’s seemingly thankless and it takes longer and it gets so tiring taking care of myself all of the time because frankly, I’m a lot to handle, and I spread myself thin just trying to manage my own moods and desires and abilities all of the time.

But hey, that’s life.

So the moral of this story is: Validate your own damn self, because you know how to do that better than anyone else, and if you don’t validate yourself, you won’t even be able to accept anyone else’s validation to begin with.

Nowhere To Go But Up

“I have a built in sense of not being good enough that I’ve carried with me from whatever it’s come from and an easy way to fit in was to self-medicate.  After a while, self-medication started to stifle anything good that I could create including the ability to even like myself. That led itself to a place where I was either going to (weighty pause)…. I just had to get better, I hated who I‘d become.”

–Trent Reznor

Hey, he said it.  I just wrote about it a couple of days ago, when I was talking about why I choose to live a sober life.  I think you sometimes reach a point where you can’t go anywhere but up. And for each of us, it’s a different place.

Anyhow, I’ve been pretty engaged lately in life, I’ve found it’s the only way to be OK, really, like Bertrand Russell (an early 1900′s philosopher) in The Conquest of Happiness writes:

“Perhaps the best introduction to the philosophy which I wish to advocate will be a few words of autobiography. I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn was: ‘Weary of earth and laden with my sin’. At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long spread out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics.

Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire – such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other – as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.

Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself – no doubt justly – a miserable specimen.

Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die.

But pains of these kinds do not destroy the essential quality of life, as do those that spring from disgust with self.

And every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui. Interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper, provided he were compelled to remain one. External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.”

These are truths I’ve stumbled upon through my own means, but this whole book is a must-read, and really has changed the way I’ve approached people and situations lately. I know going into something expecting something is a surefire way to reach let down, whereas, if I enjoy people and things with no expectations of ownership, possession, expectation, realizing we all exist in our own independent spaces, the outcome is so much better.

Keep interested in a variety of thing, enjoy others. And also, enjoy simplicity. Sleep well and eat enough food. Trust people.

More on Sobriety and Art

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Once again, I am in a place where I am looking for something I cannot seem to find. It seems that Buddhist philosophies speak a lot to the human condition. Find a middle ground between the highs and lows, detach from expectations, accept what is. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. Acceptance is key.

I found a temporary solace in going to support groups, but now I am back to my reality, mainly, what steps do I need to take to get to where I want to go with my art, and where exactly do I want to go with my art. This is something I need to take action on myself, no one else can do it for me.

I ranted a little bit about AA in a previous post on Sobriety and Art. I haven’t really changed my mind about much of that, but I have found that I missed something key in that post. AA is really about alcoholics and addicts sharing their experience with others. The cornerstone of the whole program is one addict helping another. Where the hell else can people down and out go and find a group of people willing to just listen? Not many places. In this, the group is a great resource for people seeking recovery, support and friendship.

But, like with any group of people who are not well, you can get lost in those rooms. You can find yourself avoiding action in your real life, sequestering yourself away from making new friendships.

AA is good because it is inclusive, but bad because it can be very insular. As a whole, the friendships you make in AA tend to be incumbent on your participation in the program, just like any church. And a lot of times, people get rid of the drink or drug and continue to just act like assholes. But as long as they keep sober, they encourage staying in the same old behavior.

Humans, in groups, tend to act the same, no matter what the group.

No religion or support group, unfortunately, can assuage the reality that I am here, responsible for my own actions. I decided a long time ago not to pick up a drink. I am not powerless over whether or not I choose to take a drink. If, however, I choose to take a drink, I do not know what will happen from then on out, and I decided a long time ago that I am a purist and not willing to take that chance. I am questioned a lot by normal people and recreational users who ask why I had to quit completely. That’s why. I don’t know what will happen, and the last few times, it wasn’t fun, exciting, life-enhancing or pretty when I did decide to use substances as a coping mechanism. For some people it works. Not for me so far.

That being said, it is hard to find sober artists, writers and musicians to hang with, and I am truly struggling with that again. It’s important I don’t spend a lot of time around substances, because then I feel left out and bored by the people I’m with. It’s not fun for me to watch someone leave the vacancy behind their eyes while I am sitting right there, due to a chemical rush. It’s not jealousy, more like, “Dude, you just left the building while I’m sitting right here. Could you be present for a little while at least?”

I wanted to speak again to art and sobriety, because that seems to be an important topic for me on this blog. I attract a lot of people here who are sober or in recovery, etc. I do recommend AA or rehab to anyone trying to get out of their dysfunctional behavior with drugs and alcohol, but I can’t fully endorse BIll W’s program of action. I’ve done it myself, and I’ve had sponsers and sponsees, in fact, I’m currently doing that whole thing just because I don’t know how the hell else to fill up my time, but there’s something in my heart that says, “Don’t linger long.”

I need to get out and see the world. I believe, for me, quitting substances was a personal decision. AA gave me a support group and built-in instant friends, and exposure to people who were willing to let me hash out my problems, but there is such a thing as AA overkill, and getting annoyed by the shaky logic of AA dogma.

There is a lot of good in those rooms, and a lot of good in those books, if you take them all with a grain of salt and never stop trusting your own gut and intuition. It seems a lot of people in AA believe that relationships are a bad and addictive thing too. Relationships are a human desire, and they are fun. There’s a program for everything these days. Relationships, sex, marijuana, gambling…the problem we all have is life.

I was moaning and kvetching about AA once and a friend talked to her sober writer friend about my laments. This writer friend told her that AA is awesome, and it’s one of the last fully functional anarchist groups in the US.

I’m not sure I would classify AA as anarchist. There are definitely rules to follow, and you really aren’t accepted into the group until you follow these rules. I haven’t seen the rules really hurt anyone…looking inward and reflecting seems to be a good thing. The problem I have is when people stop trusting their own selves and decide that the group should decide for them what to do.

I don’t know, argue against me on this, tell me why you’re sold on the program as more than a short-term solution where people rush to your aid when you’re down in it and need quick help. I’ve always had conflicts with the actual steps and the book, a lot of it I read and I’m just like, “WTF. This is dated.”

I also know that I become like who I spend time with, so it’s important for me to not spend much time around people using drugs or alcohol, unless it’s a structured event where I’m playing a show or know sober people in attendance at a party. I don’t keep alcohol or pills in my home, I don’t keep many friends who would encourage me to use a pill to escape my problems. AA is a good place to meet other sober and crazy people.

Like anything, there’s good and bad, and no one can tell us the answers. Mainly, I stay sober because, as I’ve talked to other sober and not sober creative people about, when I use, I get off my path and lose my art. So it’s a personal choice. Knowing my art is a big part of why I exist, the meaning I have ascribed to my existence so to speak, I can’t in good faith allow myself to experiment with things I’ve already proven don’t help my life in any way.

This Pill Makes You Smaller

I’ve been living with a sense of impending doom for as long as I can remember. When did it start? Was it when I went for a check-up at age 13 and my skinny female doctor poked me in the stomach and said, “Getting a little chubby, aren’t we? Have you tried dieting?” Is this what led to coming home after middle school and scowling into a bowl of carefully counted goldfish crackers until I lost ten pounds in less than a month?

Was it growing up wearing Kmart clothes when my neighbors casually splurged on trips to the mall multiple times a year? Was it my parent’s own anxiety and depression issues they tried treating with medication, therapy, being workaholics?

I don’t think it was simply an external event, more a combo of environment, learned behavior and genetics, but I do recall that there was often a sense of dread in the air—always money or thinness. How to get it, where is it, why don’t I have it.

But deeper than that, anxiety recently has been a background hum as a result of choosing not to ever take medication again. Something called “rebound anxiety” lingers as a result of benzos, the medication I took FOR my preexisting anxiety for years. Those pills do a number on the nervous system. In Europe, they prescribe them for one week, max. The guidelines in the medical journals recommend not prescribing them longer than two weeks or so. Yet my doctors prescribed them for me for about eight years on and off.

For many people, benzo withdrawal lingers for years and years. I had what they call an extremely long protracted withdrawal–I couldn’t even feel joy for nine months after getting off those little yellow pills I relied on so much, only pain. I learned all about the little-known word gratitude as I struggled through, insomnia, nerve pain and a thrumming sensation in my body, heightened awareness of almost everything, memory loss, the ubiquitous brain fog. Like being shot with adrenalin day after day after day, but feeling exhausted at the same time.

***

“It is more difficult to withdraw people from benzodiazepines than it is from heroin. It just seems that the dependency is so ingrained and the withdrawal symptoms you get are so intolerable that people have a great deal of problem coming off. The other aspect is that with heroin, usually the withdrawal is over within a week or so. With benzodiazepines, a proportion of patients go on to long term withdrawal and they have very unpleasant symptoms for month after month, and I get letters from people saying you can go on for two years or more. Some of the tranquilliser groups can document people who still have symptoms ten years after stopping.” – Professor Malcolm H Lader, Royal Maudesley Hospital, BBC Radio 4, Face The Facts, March 16, 1999.

***

In spite of this, I stayed off the pills, got freelance work, started writing and doing music again. I wasn’t able to sleep much for almost a year. I had to do something with that time. I remember one day, waking up at 6 or 7am after four or five hours of sleep, thinking, “WTF do I do with the next eighteen hours until I can sleep again?”

These days, it’s the opposite. It’s more like, “How the hell do I work at the library, work on my music, writing, kettlebell/fitness, learning to cook with gluten issues, relationship with my husband, taking care of my allergic paw-eating dog, socializing with all of my new and long-lost friends and find time to read a book with only sixteen hours of the non-sleeping day?”

My how things change. How we adjust.

***

Anxiety isn’t a bad thing, necessarily. When I used to take anti-D’s, I didn’t care about art so much. I was numb—couldn’t cry, didn’t get too down. It was nice, for a while. Until years went by and I hadn’t progressed in the way I wanted to. As my old rehab counselor said last night when we went out to dinner to catch up, “Art and music are a coping mechanism.”

I said that they are basically the foundation of my sobriety. I know if I seek out pills, I will not do my art. As soon as I numb out the anxiety and lingering malaise, I have no desire to make music. I still write, but not as viscerally. And it turns into more journaling than productive non-fiction essay and poetry writing.

To compound matters, my food allergies (wheat, and/or gluten) trigger similar symptoms, such as fatigue, anxiety and nerve pain.

I am constantly grateful that in spite of being damaged by years of taking prescribed benzos and other health issues, I’m functional. I go work every day. I write. I read my writing in public. I work with other musicians on my songs. I do kettlebell.

The only time I have a problem with anxiety being a fact of life for me, mentally and physically, is when I decide I deserve better and that I want something other than what is.

I can’t have something other than what is. I try very hard to control things—to the point that my friends are like, “Dude, chill. Stop obsessing.” Then I back off, and everything kind of falls away. Then I go back to obsessing.

And sometimes, late at night, when I’ve got nerve pain so bad I have to sleep in a sweater to keep the air and sheets from feeling like they’re bruising my skin, I wish there was a pill to fix me. But there is no pill that will fix me long-term. They all have rebound effects after a time. I don’t want to take that risk. And the pills is likely what caused most of this damage in the first place.

***

I don’t know many people who struggle with anxiety at this level, aside from my husband, who channels it into work, and my dad. It’s something I’ve learned to live with. It’s better than it used to be after first stopping the benzos, but it’s still there and I don’t know if it will ever go away. Sometimes, after getting off of pills or drugs, people’s nervous systems don’t heal for five years or more. Sometimes, they don’t heal at all.

I could be mad that the substance abuse specialists and psychiatrists who were supposed to be helping me after I stopped drinking alcohol at age 21 prescribed me things that made me worse, but it was my choice to put the pills in my body, to trust that a pill could fix me.

It used to be that I would preach the ills of benzos and opiate replacement therapy like suboxone (which I was on for about a year and a half and had a horrible time with as well) to anyone who would listen. These days, I realize they are all tools, and as much as I think those two particular medications are poison and am scared shitless of them based on what happened to me, I don’t care if you take them. All I have is my own reality. All you have is yours. This isn’t about your pills or my pills or anyone’s pills. Take your pills, if they help you.

Mine helped for a while and then they didn’t, so I got off them. But not without taking extreme actions. My psychiatrist wanted me on them, even though they were hurting me. The suboxone made me sleep 16 hours a night, so he put me on Ritalin. The benzos stopped working so he upped the dose. I tried to taper them myself, but finally, I just went to a rehab and asked them to help me. And suffered protracted withdrawal. And now the lingering anxiety worse than the anxiety I started with, compounded by food and environmental allergies (yay).

I get sucked into these spirals of everyone else is better than me and more successful and has more money and doesn’t struggle with anxiety and body dysmorphia and money issues, and I don’t think it’s true. I think a lot of people are struggling with these things or something similar. And it’s made me who I am today, I can’t change that. I’m more sober than I’ve ever been.

Boy, do I wish I had the money to afford a fancy nutritionist and supplements and a spa therapy every weekend, but doesn’t everyone?

Like most people, I trudge along, have good days and bad.

Like fewer and fewer people these days, I don’t use pills to make modern life more bearable, but I know why people do. I’ve been there. I wanted that to be my answer. It wasn’t. Life to me is, believe it or not, more manageable without them.

“…Writers do not thrive on drugs like Klonopin and Prozac. It takes your soul; it takes your creativity; it takes your love of running home at night and getting out a typewriter or getting out your paper and pencil and writing something that you love. It takes that away. You don’t care anymore. So Street Angel was all about just not caring. And that’s horrible to me. One of the few things that I’ve never not done in my life is not care. And I didn’t care for a long time. The lows for me were probably the last years of cocaine in the 1980s, and the last four years of the Klonopin. - Stevie Nicks

Why Do We Go There Part II (Why I Go There)

I am notably a little slow on the uptake. I read Joe Clifford’s response to my post Why Do We Go There, titled, Why Do We Go There (And Away We Go) when he posted it about a week ago, but it’s taken me this long to elaborate on my first post, to which I’ve been planning to add a part two.

In his reply, he disagreed with my reasoning in Why Do We Go There, stating that for him, and perhaps for many other writers who write about dark pasts (specifically, in his case junkie lit writers), it’s a feeling of being the scum of the earth and a need for attention, no matter if it’s negative attention, any attention will do.

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Why Do We Go There?

I forgot to mention, when I was naming some of my favorite books yesterday, that one of my very favorite books is Permanent Midnight, by Jerry Stahl.

That’s not to say I can read it every day. It still makes me feel a bit sick when I do. And, you may ask, why do I like so many screwed up memoirs? The reason I like Stahl’s book so much is because it completely illustrates a man’s descent into utter and complete hell, laying out all of the humiliation along the way, with no holds barred.

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Writing is Stupid

*Because of some strange reactions to this post, I have had to insert this disclaimer, as you can see by the commenter down below who proclaimed that a large body of literature disagrees with “my little rant.” The beauty of the internet is that you can write something in hyperbole, trying to play with the concept of something going on in your brain at a given moment, and people can take offense, think you mean it literally to offend. I shouldn’t have to say that I am a writer, and so if I really believed this “little rant” (satirical extremes I’m sure many people have thought at times when they were being very dramatic and prospects seemed difficult in the writing world) that would be plain silly. But I’ll let you, intrawebs, decide whether or not you will crucify me or catch my drift for this “little rant.” The more negative reaction I get from it, the less I want to take it down, because this seems like bludgeoned ignorant censorship.

The more I read this and think people took it literally, the more I shake my head and think, “Wow.” I love my writing group, and I love writing. But sometimes, writing feels silly, and I like to play around with opposites. I think the issue here is that people are putting themselves into this rant, for whatever ungodly reason, thinking I am actually ranting against them, when I’m actually making fun of myself. It seems to hit a personal nerve for some, so much so that they don’t even get through to the last part where it argues against itself FOR writing. 

***

I am not going to write anymore. I give up. Writing is stupid.

Writing is a solo act. A single spectator sport for wanderers, gypsies, people who won’t make it in the real world. Vagrants and vagabonds and drifters. Fringe people. Unless you’re not fringe and you write. Then it’s for clusters of perfect people who sit in towers with calligraphy pens, holding their martini glasses with their fingers just so, pinky jutting out, laughing with each other, ha ha ha, look at my work, I’m a star, I’m a stud, I’m the best. Darling, darling, you’re a natural, you really are. Have some drugs, oh yes, I don’t mind if I do. I’m a star, I really am.

Writing is ornery. It’s like pulling an elephant up a mountain by the tail: impossible.

Writing is a stilted endeavor, skewed by the inferior perspective of a person on their own looking out at the world through a filter they don’t even necessarily know exists. Writing doesn’t usually pay the bills, except for a select few lucky people, those who get all the accolades and the curses from the audience at once.

I’m not going to go to a writing group anymore. It’s just a bunch of us vainly fantasizing and spewing debris through pens on the page. It’s like our pens are shitting ink, useless ink farts. Who wants to read ink farts, anyhow? And nobody ever comes, anyway, because writing is silly. Why bother. Why take the time. Writing is selfish and hopeless and vain. We’re not going anywhere, and we’re doing it together.

Nope, I’m never going to write again because there is nothing to write about. And if there was something to write about, I wouldn’t want to write about it because it wouldn’t mean much, just a whimsy, just a flight of fancy, just a selfish soliloquy performed in a desert full of skittering lizards who never cross paths. Besides, it never comes out just perfect on the page at first attempt. It should just flow from my fingertips, like I’m a scribe to the gods, like I’m tapped into something marvelous and fascinating, not this revision, revision, revision BS.

Writing is a hollow, pretentious duty, performed by too many people competing for too little outlets. If you write, you’re doomed to fail. There are too many unreachable galaxies, too few people able to fly.

Every day, someone picks up a pen. Why? Writing is a process, writing is a hope. Wait, I thought writing sucked, that I wasn’t going to do it anymore. But writing makes people feel better.

Writing helps people connect, relate, regurgitate. It helps people process excessive amounts of stimuli from their lives in whichever way they feel they need to. 

Writing may be good for something. Ok. Fine. I’ll write. But just for me. Just for today. And don’t think I’m going to like it. I’m going to hate every minute of it and I’m going to write crap on the page, just to make you happy. Oh, hey! I wrote an entire blog post about not wanting to write. How quaint.

Photo credit: Tommy the Pariah