What I've been up to since I've been gone... my longest post ever.

I’m having a much better day today than yesterday, though I haven’t gone to sleep yet. I’ll be doing that as soon as I’ve finished writing this. I’ve completely flipped my sleeping schedule so I’m generally asleep during the day and well into the afternoon, and then I’m up all night which suits me just fine. To let everyone know, this entry is going to be VERY lengthy and full of information, because I really just need to put it all down and clear my head. It’s a tangled up mess at the moment that needs to be sorted. That being said, I have a few interesting tales to tell from my absence on here.

I went to a Halloween party this past Saturday night that one of my good friends from high school hosted, and her fiancé invited me to join him in the AA group he’s been going to (court ordered for his third DUI). I’ve decided I’m going to take him up on the offer, possibly starting as soon as next Sunday. It’s once a week for an hour, completely free and anonymous, and I won’t be turned in or sent anywhere. It’ll be nice to have a group of people I can talk to who understand the things I’m going through. I thought it was only for alcoholics but Byron said that people go there to deal with drug addiction and family problems as well. I’m really nervous to go and blurt out my problems to strangers, but I need to make a change fast while I have the will to do it.

I know that if I keep at it much longer I’ll spiral completely down to Never-Never-Return-to-Sanity Land, and I really don’t want that to happen. I hit a point where I was begging every drug dealer I knew to find me meth and heroin because the cocaine wasn’t getting me high enough for my liking anymore, and I seriously considered injecting with a needle. I have since decided that would be a huge, potentially fatal mistake, and I won’t be doing it ever. I just refuse to take the risk. On one occasion I took a heroin-based ecstasy pill alone at night and had a really terrible trip. It made me tap into my innermost thoughts and feelings, a lot of which are filled with pain, so I spent hours crying nonstop. I even cried in front of my father and talked about my issues with my mother dying, which is something we rarely do. We don’t like to dwell on the pain, but I couldn’t block any of it out when I was on that stuff. It hit me like a concrete block in the face. I won’t be doing it again either. I had absolutely no control over my emotions and at one point in the early morning I nearly had a severe panic attack. It was no fun at all.

The weekend before last I drove up to Atlanta to go to Six Flags (an amusement park if you’re not familiar with it) with a group of my friends. We bought season passes as a group so we got an awesome discount and free parking for all of next year. I thought it was going to be a really great day, but my ride buddy flaked out and didn’t come, so I was the fifth wheel all day long. I had to stand alone and watch my friends be all cuddly with each other and it sucked. I hate that lonely feeling when you’re in a group of people with an odd number. Anyway, in the afternoon we decided to go out to my friend’s car to smoke some weed and have a few lines of coke, and as soon as we got to it we saw that he had a flat tire; completely flat, like skin on pavement. Even worse, he had absolutely no idea how to change the tire, nor did his girlfriend or my other two friends. Luckily, my father taught me how years ago.

We had to walk all the way back from the hotel where he’d parked to the parking inside Six Flags where I’d parked, because he didn’t have the right equipment to change it in his trunk. It felt so weird teaching a guy how to change a tire, and I did most of the work myself. Of course my uber high-maintenance girly friends didn’t offer to lift a finger, because they wouldn’t want to break a nail. They sat in my air conditioned car while DC and I sweated our asses off. I ended up with black palms and a huge scrape on my wrist (he broke my car jack and the car fell down and I barely got my hand out in time), but in the end we got his spare on proper and went back to the park. By then all of us were a bit irritated and tired from walking all day, so the last few hours were spent bickering about whether we wanted to stay or leave and which ride to wait in line for. We ended up wasting so much time walking around arguing that we didn’t ride anything else before we left. What a great day at the amusement park… not.

I broke my two-and-a-half-year voluntary celibacy earlier this month. I’m not too pleased with myself on that now, but it’s done and I can’t change it. It all started with an online dating profile I’d set up after my last serious girlfriend and I split up. I went on a bunch of dates with a bunch of really lame people who only wanted to get in my pants, and then one day I got a message from a girl who looked nice and seemed to be a decent, intelligent person, so I agreed to meet with her. It was only after that I found out she was married and she and her husband were looking for a threesome. At first I was very hesitant and said no, because men do nothing for me, but then my curiosity got the best of me since I’d never had a threesome before. Anyway, I ended up doing it and causing a huge fight between them. They have more fights than any couple I know and they’re both really jealous by nature, so my being there only created a problem.

Then in the following weeks I had sex with two more men. Both times I was completely wasted on drugs and alcohol, so the memories are more of a watercolor than a perfect portrait. After that I started hanging out with the married couple again and we decided to give dating a shot as a group, which I’ve actually done in the past (don’t know why I was stupid enough to make that mistake again). It was pleasant for about two days, and then all the fighting started up again between them and when they fight they get really cold and silent.

They literally wouldn’t speak at all and they’d ignore each other and me. I really hate being ignored. I’d rather have someone tell me what the problem is so I can fix it, but they both refused to communicate so that was the end of that. I won’t waste my time on anyone who won’t talk to me openly and honestly, because I’ve learned from personal experience that keeping secrets and bottling things up only leads to destruction in relationships. To be honest, though, I don’t think it would have worked anyway, because they’re legally married and my heart is still pinned to someone else. I’m going to try really hard to work things out with her because she means a hell of a lot to me. Since we split I’ve had her on my mind a lot. I still wear the ring from our matching set and keep pictures of her on my phone, because that’s the only way I can see her face right now.

We’ve actually started talking again and I’m really pleased because I think we’re on the right track now. We were both dealing with a ton of personal shit when we were together and I think the time apart gave us both space we needed. Unfortunately, I turned into a complete disaster in the meantime, and then my grandmother died and it kept going downhill from there. I’m slowly trying to climb back up and I’ve promised myself that I’m done with casual sex for good. It’s meaningless and does nothing for me, and I would much rather be with one person I’m in love with, even if that means waiting for a long time. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.

I’m determined that I will find my way back to the person I was before I fell in with the wrong crowd of people. Almost every single person I work with is on at least one illegal substance regularly and that’s where I picked it up, because I never touched hard drugs in high school. If my job piss tested at all then nearly everyone would be fired, including one of our shift managers. I actually used to buy my weed from her. Our general manager even used to be a huge stoner back in the day, which I found out last year when I decided to try and make pot brownies. I asked the regular weed smokers there about it and none of them knew so I took a shot in the dark and asked my GM. I was totally shocked when she actually gave me an answer and admitted to having made them a lot in the past.

Most of my coworkers are not bad people, just people who’ve had little education and rough lives. You don’t really need any qualifications to make a pizza, and I have friends who work in other restaurants around here and they’ve told me they’re all the same. Apparently the restaurant biz is the place to go if you’re a junkie. A lot of us used to socialize regularly outside of work simply for the fact that we all wanted to get high, but I won’t be going over to smoke with them anymore. I plan to quit working there in the very beginning of February, before my birthday, and get my job back in the elections department of our city government center. It’s a temporary position that will last through the election cycle next year, but it pays way more than I make right now. If I want to get that job, though, I’ll have to be completely clean because they do a drug test before they hire you and then randomly after that.

I’ve decided to try and not regret my varied/wild/insane experiences of this past month and just take them as life lessons learned. Even as depressed as I’ve been lately, I still have enough fire left in me to fight this because I’ve realized I don’t want to end up a thirty-year-old junkie living in a ghetto trailer park and living off welfare with six starving kids. I want a better life than that. I want to clean up my act, settle into a serious relationship, and get a career started. I’m not sure what it will be yet, but I have time to figure it out still. If I can get my passion for writing back I may try and make it as a novelist. If I get some proper vocal training I might even try for singing. I have a nice voice for mellow indie music like Ingrid Michaelson and Dido. It was suggested to me that I should try learning piano and singing in piano bars where that kind of music is popular. I honestly just can’t make up my mind at the moment. Two months ago I was convinced I wanted to be a marine biologist and study sharks up close and personal. I love all things dangerous and adrenaline-causing, and that certainly would be.

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I dropped all of my college classes recently for this semester. I wasn’t going to any of them because I couldn’t find the will to get out of bed at all for days at a time, weeks in a row. My mood swings have been getting gradually worse. I don’t know exactly what mental disorder classification I’m in at the moment, because I haven’t yet spoken to a proper psychiatrist. I’ve only spoken to my general physician about getting a referral to a therapist, and she put me on antidepressants and some anti-anxiety pills to calm me down. I tend to get wound up sometimes and have mini panic attacks. Thus far I’ve only had two really huge ones where I’ve started hyperventilating and had to breathe into a bag, so I’m counting my lucky stars on that and hope to keep it that way. I also fidget constantly and have an annoying habit of talking too much when my nerves go haywire.

The problem is that what she prescribed doesn’t seem to work for me. It made me really sleepy to the point where I couldn’t drive safely, so I had to call the whole weekend out of work, and it made me sick to my stomach, but it didn’t make me feel less anxious. I looked it up online and found out it’s a kind of tranquilizer used to treat mild cases of anxiety and insomnia, but that’s not what I want. I don’t need something to just knock me out, because I need to be awake and aware if I’m going to keep working, and besides I’ll still feel shitty when I wake up. I need something that will kick in fast enough to calm me down when I freak out, because my mood shifts aren’t subtle at all. They come out of nowhere with the smallest of triggers, and a lot of times I can’t pinpoint a specific cause or reason. I told my doctor I thought I might be bipolar and she doesn’t think I am, but that’s what it feels like. I feel like my entire day is a game of chance and I’m gambling with my sanity. Unfortunately doctors are really hesitant to prescribe the pills I need because of all the addiction potential. The thing I’ve found that works best to calm me quickly is Xanax, but it’s really, really hard to get a prescription for now.

I’m going back in a month to check in with my doctor and if the anti-anxiety meds she gave me still aren’t working then she’ll just have to switch me. I can’t afford to have random freak-outs at any given moment because of the chemical imbalance in my brain, so I need a near-instant off switch. On a lighter note, my dad and I are getting on much better. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that we used to fight a lot when I was growing up, and then we learned to be civil after I turned 18 but we rarely spoke. Now we actually sit in the same room and have conversations. I’ve made him watch a show I love called Bad Girls (British show about a women’s prison) and I know he only watches it to humor me but it gets us in the same room and talking.

I’ve also just potentially made a new friend. I actually met her in high school but we never became friends. I remember at one point in time she was good friends with my best friend at the time and I disliked her, though I can’t recall why for the life of me. It must have been some petty high school drama not worth remembering. Anyway, I had a bit of a fit last night and started cutting really badly. There was a lot of blood and I knew I needed to stop and not be alone, so I called the person I usually call in these instances. She took the approach that I need to learn to cope on my own and stop relying on her to calm me down, which I understand, but I really needed support and I’m a little hurt she didn’t give it to me.

She gave me Becca’s number instead and told me I should talk to her because we have very similar issues, which turned out to be a good thing. Becca came right over to my apartment in the middle of the morning to make sure I was okay and just listen. I spilled my problems and listened to hers, and I found out that we are, in fact, very alike. I described my mood swings and anxiety issues to her and she goes through the same thing. She takes mood stabilizers because antidepressants make her feel suicidal, which I’ve personally experienced. I’ve never been a suicidal person at all, even when I’m depressed, but as soon as I started taking this shit I got even more moody and unstable than before, and I felt like slitting my wrists. I just don’t think they agree with my body.

It wouldn’t be the first time my doctor prescribed the wrong thing to me. She’s done it before so now I’m wondering if I should switch physicians. The only issue is that I’m on my dad’s insurance so I have to pick from the list of available doctors covered by our plan, and she’s the only female physician on the list who’s taking new patients. I’ve only ever had a female doctor ever since I hit puberty and the thought of having a male one makes me very uncomfortable. If she can’t help me, though, I may just have to suck it up. I don’t want to come out worse than I went in.

I’m actually looking forward to this afternoon because Becca is supposed to come back over so we can talk more and watch movies and stuff. From the little time I spent with her I found out she’s actually a really nice person and I just never gave her a chance in high school. I think we’re definitely going to be good friends. As soon as she saw my massive movie collection she started going on about it. We like basically all of the same shows and she’s the only friend I have here who will actually sit down and watch The O.C. with me. If you’re not familiar, it’s an American high school/teen drama show. I don’t usually watch those types of shows because they annoy the shit out of me, but it’s definitely an exception. I’m super excited because I’ve been wanting to re-watch it for a while and I have the collector’s edition set.

Neither of us have anything to do most of the week since I dropped my classes and she’s on mental disorder/disability pay from the government, which means she’s not allowed to have a job. After I quit Pizza Hut, if I don’t decide to go back to the CCG, I might apply for it because she explained the process and told me that I would definitely qualify. I’m sure most of the people reading this have experienced some form of depression or a mental disorder of some sort (otherwise we all probably wouldn’t be on here) so I’m sure you can understand that holding down a job while taking serious prescription medicine is not an easy thing.

I am dreading the thought of going to work next weekend. I don’t know how I’m going to last until February. I suppose I’ll just have to force myself to go if I still feel this way next weekend, but I’m honestly hoping that these meds start improving my mood soon because otherwise I take it out on everyone around me unintentionally, and that’s a really bad thing if I want to keep my job. I already pissed a few people off by blowing up on them last week. I don’t mean to do it but sometimes I can’t control it. It’s a scary and overwhelming feeling to have so much anger and pain inside, and to try and hold it in when someone pisses me off and I just want to scream bloody murder, which happens frequently at my job. I’m not much of a people person to begin with and all I do there is deal with rude people. I feel like a ticking time bomb and as time passes I come closer to detonating, and I know that the drugs I’ve been doing only make it worse (especially the withdrawals), which is just another reason for me to give them up.

Even now I can feel the headache coming on as I’m writing this, so I’m going to wrap up this mini-novel, take some aspirin, and go to sleep. I’ll try and update more frequently and not be gone as long as I was before. If you’re still reading this I am absolutely astounded and have to give you kudos, and if you are I hope you’re in a much better place than I am emotionally, and if not then I hope that some of the things I said might bring you hope. Until next time… love you all and good morning/night (to my sweet girl on the other side of the world. I hope we have time to talk again later).