Been a bad couple of days after a hard weekend of drinking. A bit shaky and having a rough time focusing. That withdrawal is never pleasant. Plus, I'd been slipping down slowly. Then went hard in the paint for a couple of days. Well, hard in the paint for 40 and not drinking regularly.
Anyhow, the withdrawal didn't go the usual way. For those who have never been through alcohol withdrawal, it's normally shaking, sweating, vomiting, loads and loads of anxiety. It feels a little like an anxiety attack, on the lower end of the spectrum. The problem is, it lasts all day. There isn't a lot of feeling like your heart is going to burst or terror you're going to die. Frankly, you often wish you'd just go ahead and die. Get the silly bugger over with. The anxiety just drags on and on. Then there's the loneliness. Especially bad when you're a chap of middle years who couldn't hold on to a relationship if it were coated in tar.
Those are just the initial parts of withdrawal. It's often like a bad stomach flu. It even comes with a dash of fever that brings on those sweet malarial chills. Incidentally, Malarial Chills is playing the Almost Acoustic Christmas. During withdrawal, you might get some hallucinations. Mine were auditory along with things shaking and bending slightly. Frankly, I've always thought those who start claiming that they saw "pink elephants" or the like are making things up that they heard somewhere. Though, I admit I could be wrong. My issue with claims of vivid hallucinations comes from a lifetime spent around alcoholics. They're prone to embellishment in service of a tale. Especially if it's a tale about them. People in recovery are often honest in the ways that matter, but hyperbole and colorful illustration often frequent their speech in a way that can be misleading.
Whatever the hallucinatory case may be, there is certainly the possibility to see, hear, or feel things that aren't there. I tended to hear mumbling or music, as if someone was listening to the radio in the other room, but you couldn't make out any words. It was just this variable mumbling drone. The first time I heard it I didn't quite realize it wasn't my roommates until I heard the sounds coming from the dryer.
Tactile hallucinations aren't as common with alcohol as they tend to be with stimulants. Meth, cocaine, Adderall, and similar drugs in the "upper" category tend to give the sensation of bugs inside the skin. Very common, from what I've heard. With alcohol, there's not so much the sense of bugs in your skin as it being extremely sensitive. This is because your body is producing stimulants. The natural stimulants are what your body uses to help reduce the effects of alcohol. Take the alcohol away if you've been drinking for a while, and your body doesn't know that it doesn't need to produce the stimulants anymore. So, while you're curled up on the bathroom floor, you're also going to feel uncomfortably aware of your skin.
There's another facet to alcohol withdrawal that doesn't get mentioned very much: a strange libido. I don't know if this is a male peculiarity, or if it's confined to just me and perhaps a select few. However, with the body being denied dopamine, and being flooded with stimulants, I end up wanting to have sex. This is largely because at that point I want just about anything that will make me feel better. Luckily, porn is always there, or I can find a shower and work with the data stored in my fantasy fucktage. I will be barely able to walk, shivering like a newborn in a snowstorm, and unable to eat anything more solid than purified water. Yet, dehydrated as I may be, I can still conjure forth the nectar of life.
I don't mention this to be crass. It's an interesting phenomenon to literally be so sick it could kill you, since alcohol withdrawal can be fatal, yet you're still such an addict that you're looking for a dopamine hit anywhere you can get it. If we couldn't satisfy our carnal desires, I bet you'd see alcoholics going through withdrawal who were skydiving or bungee jumping just to get their body some kind of rush.
That's what addiction is. It's so entwined with your personality that it can drive you to fits and feats of madness.
Once the major physical ailments wear off, you go into a sort of twilight stage between true withdrawal, and what was called "Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome" or PAWS. The name may have changed. Anyhow, during PAWS, you're going through a lot of physical, mental, and emotional changes. However, most of these changes are subtle. Before you really get into PAWS, you're going to have completely chaotic emotions. Those can crop up during PAWS too, but frequently the latter stages of withdrawal are an internal storm. Part of you wants to use again, part of you wants to ride it out, part of you hates the whole world, part of you is so lonely you think you've been not only hollowed out like a Jack-o-Lantern, but carved up for someone's macabre amusement, as well.
For me, since my withdrawal was fairly mild, I basically jumped into the latter stage. It's the agitated, depressed, irritable part where everyone is your enemy, no one understands you, and murder with a suicide chaser starts to sound like the only rational choice for a reasonable person to make.
It was a bad mood day, in the most extreme sense.
I didn't smoke any pot today, until tonight. Thank god for that drug. Look, it might drag me back to the booze, but it really eases the emotional suffering, and likely some physical symptoms. I need to at least try CBD to see how it impacts me. That might be a healthier solution.
I know going back and forth between cannabis alone and then cannabis with booze isn't the best choice, but trying to ride the cold turkey nightmare was really becoming painful.
As I was walking out to get high, perhaps to justify the behavior, I kept thinking, "The most common emotion I feel is pain. Then fear, or anxiety. Then comes rage or fury. I think there's actually another layer of pain before any other emotions come up. However, those miscellaneous emotions only show up a tiny percentage of the time. Pain, fear, fury. There's an increasing number of people for whom those are the totality of their emotional tableau. They prevent space for compassion or empathy. It's impossible to feel wounded and abandoned and wronged by the world and then want to be compassionate towards it.
Perhaps monks can do it, but I say turning the other cheek is for cowards, like me, often, who are too afraid to fight back.
The major issue is using a substance to alter one's mood. That's always why addicts use. Granted, to a degree that's why everyone drinks or uses, to feel differently, but it's often the only thing an addict uses. Tonight, I exercised, which helped a little, but only made me realize how miserable I was, and how it really didn't matter if I went ahead and got high. There was no upside to that breed of sobriety. That cur was going to be nothing but hate and insomnia. At least now I don't feel all alone and at war with the world. I can at least partially realize that other people have internal lives similar to mine and shouldn't be treated like disposable chattel, and maybe if I didn't judge them so harshly for the innumerable ways in which they let me down, I wouldn't have to harbor such an ire quagmire.
That's a cute little saying. Dumb, but cute.
Boy, howdy did I feel bloody terrible. Trying to manage all those feelings, and function in any minimal capacity is beyond anything Hercules could pull. Feats of strength are simple mechanics. Managing the monsters we have in our heads, who wear our faces, and know how to bait us to trouble is a game of endless knives.
I'm liking the writing more if I focus on actually trying to make it halfway decent, and don't worry about things like how many words are being put down. Easier to just explain it until you've explained it the way that sounds proper. It takes focus, which feels good, but which I never have. I'm always bent over some resentment, or thinking about money, or worrying about where I live, or merely watching the clock or counting the words until I can be done. It's a lot more gratifying to merely rest my attention on the words and keep them flowing together. Hold them front of mind.
I can virtually guarantee there's no way I will be able to do that tomorrow when the mental ghosts have been ressurected and my host of neurotic parasites can glut themselves tearing me apart with pain and discord, discontentment, and loathing to spare.
There's always the worry about the future to get back to. More fantasy house shopping. Counting how many hours I can work to make the absolute bare minimum, because I do have aspirations of developing some of my actual projects. I just can't motivate stone sober. Which is in part because my emotional state, financial state, socioeconomic state, and social state are in such disarray that I'm barely keeping it together. I hang by the thinnest of threads.
Which is why so many of us who are addicts struggle so hard. Trying to juggle anything resembling life, while trying to cope with a lifetime of shame -- I forgot about shame in my emotions list! -- fear, regret, failure, trauma, and turmoil while trying to actually run a life is more balls to juggle than we can handle. It's why rehabs exist. To give them a chance to get internally stabilized, because that's where stability must be found.
Therefore the question is whether or not cannabis use can be used to help stabilize patients. So far, I've had a lot of failure at making that work. That's not to say it can't. It's to say there's some method necessary for the maelstrom.
Bong therapy turns into daily need, cravings, and ultimately failure of the drug as the requirements of the addiction grow. Synergy to alcohol, cycle repeats.
Maybe medical intervention? I'm barely limping along, and doing it without much hope of righting again.
