The Enemy Without

I NEED to keep a drink diary and a mood diary, I have decided. This should show how wonderful life gradually becomes once the evil substances are flushed down the metaphorical loo.

The best advice I got came today from Jess the Mistress of Mischief and chimes in exactly with my doctor: CUT OUT ALL DRINK AND DRUGS FOR THREE MONTHS. Only after three months clean can they possibly tell what is you and what was and was not drink or drug-induced. Focus on the practicalities of life and the fact you're a problem drinker with a drug problem. In other words go to NA, go to AA. Frequently.

Hey it's past 3pm and I'm wide awake. No sleep last night. My sleep pattern is in tatters and I used the wonders of caffeine to get me through the morning. It did make me very fidgety in the chemists and I'm convinced they thought I was on drugs. Well I was. Black coffee!!! I don't normally drink coffee and barely drink tea. I buy milk that goes off before it ever gets finished, unless I glug it down. I need to switch to tea anyway ~ as a substitute for alcohol. Soft drinks remind me of strong drink too much as I used the fruit flavoured ones as mixers (yes on white cyder ~ makes a budget alcopop, highly addictive!)

I spoke to my Mum today and she said something I thought very perceptive as it highlights the biggest problem I have. Forget any drug or medical terminology it's THIS more than anything that has turned my life into the ruin it is today. And the drugs made it far, far worse. It impossible to explain why I do this and I know junkies get this a lot. My Mum remembers it going back to when I was about four and calls it "autistic". I'm not sure that's the word but what do I care. To be frank I'm amazed she was perceptive enough to notice it's going on, considering she doesn't live with me and it's this:~

I live my life on a constant loop. I have things I do every day and these things I do without too much trouble. The loop is like a railway line with only a few stations. The train goes round and round and only stops at those stations, so I only do the stuff that's in this loop. Anything out of the ordinary involving planning or going anywhere unfamiliar or meeting someone new brings on the worst stress, in fact for a long time I basically avoided ANYTHING out of my limited routine. This includes good stuff as well as bad. When I got sent a parcel I only just made it to the post office in time to pick it up before it got returned to sender. I wouldn't blame my family for being offended at this seeming Don't Care attitude. But it wasn't not caring, it was... something I cannot explain. You can call it laziness if you like. Bear in mind though that nobody who knows me in real life has ever called me lazy. I've been called a lot of things, lazy ain't among them.

So this nameless thing, my dear readers, "autism" or whatever it is, is what I have to work on. The whys and wherefores are immaterial: I need to make it to go away. I didn't used to be that bad. But my Mum thinks it's a lifelong characteristic. This does not however mean that there's no hope.

I spent my entire adult life consciously working on changing myself ~ until drug addiction changed me beyond the point of self-help. I don't despair that this is insurmountable.

With the right degree of motivation and patience, anything is possible. Remember, I specialize in things that require unusual amounts of these qualities. You need them to write a book. And I have written books, even though they were crap. You need them to learn a foreign language. And I've learned a few (badly). All you need do is keep on and on and on in the correct direction no matter how discouraged you may feel, no matter how irrelevant to that particular day the activity may be, you still do it and you go on doing it every single day without fail. And then, in maybe not too long, you'll look back and realized you've done something you never dreamed possible.

*******OK really these links are for other people. Once you've read around this topic, as I say it gets stultifyingly boring. I skimmed through every one and got no real answers. Yeah I got symptoms that match bipolar ones. Bipolar isn't about "mood swings" between "happy and sad"; it's about extreme swings in energy that affect the mood. I'm tired of this subject now. I'm writing for myself as an aide-memoire. My private notes are open for anyone and everyone to see, which makes me slightly circumspect in what I say. I'm fed up of thinking about something that happened that was so immensely powerful it was worse than being hit by a truck. I literally did get hit on the head by a truck some years ago and was so concussed I didn't know what I was doing all week. And yet I was able to count fingers, so I got instant discharge from hospital. What I couldn't do was tell the time, the day or sometimes even where I was. I knew I was forgetting things but obviously couldn't remember what it was I'd forgotten! So at the doctor's office I was at something of a loss to explain myself. My point being whatever happened to me whacked me even worse than that. I felt more badly jolted and jarred than I've ever been in my life from anything. Considering the length of time it lasted, it was the most intense mental state I've ever been in, on or off drugs, including acid, ketamine and crack. Everyone who met me that week thought I'd been piping because that was how I was acting. All hyper and paranoid, unable to calm down. Now I've had enough of talking about this I really am bored with the entire issue. As I say I'm only posting these links in case they help some other person, I glanced through and once you know the basics of coke, and what can go wrong, you'll know this stuff. The video is posted because it's funny.




Now those links. I don't really want to post these I'm so sick of words like "cocaine". But maybe someone somewhere will get some enlightenment from 'em:~

This explains what a mixed state is and isn't. If it can be established that a drug (or drug withdrawal) caused my cuckoo episode then it's called a "substance-induced mood disorder with mixed features"
Substance disorders.
Substance-induced mood disorders.
How much cocaine required to cause psychosis?
Cocaine hallucinosis/psychosis.
Mixed bipolar state: http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=11195&cn=4
Hypomania: a natural state to be in. Euphoric hypomania, which just means mild mania, is NOT an illness, it's merely a medical condition, like having three nipples. On its own it means nothing except that you're blessed with energy, charisma and creativity. But it does unfortunately tend to develop into full mania which is very different. Or to snap into depression, as this link explains: http://www.gulfbend.org/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=11194&cn=4
Mixed episode, Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_episodes

Illustrated: beer; trainset, just like my life, running in circles; Chinese character for money; cocaine as I barely ever took it ~ in "rails" (I love that Americanism)

PS HERE for comparison is the same woman, Trisch, totally sane. See the marked difference in her composure and behaviour. I love her look and the film exposure, doesn't she look amazing:

The light at the end of the tunnel...

IT'S A VERY COMMON EXPRESSION: "the light at the end of the tunnel". You might not have experienced the reality behind the metaphor. I have only experienced this twice in my life, both times in childhood.

The first time I saw light at the end of a tunnel, I was very little. It was the last holiday we went on before my parents divorced. Their hobby was hiking, so I did lots of hillwalking in Yorkshire and Derbyshire when I was very small. On this last excursion we followed the route of a disused railway. The terrain was luxuriously flat and reliable... until we came to a fenced off tunnel. The fence was torn open, so we ventured inside.

Unlike the road tunnels or Docklands Light Railway (where you can ride a driverless train right at the front where the driver would be), there were of course no lights here. Moving into the eventual light took a long, long time. The torch my Mum was shining around was almost ineffectual. Its weak beam danced around stones and rocks and just about lit the way. Within about a hundred yards we were in utter darkness. A strong dank smell was everywhere. When she turned off this torch, there was not the faintest glimmer of anything to be seen in front or behind. Just infinite blackness in all directions. I wasn't scared, but I remember vividly the intensity of this dark, knowing that if that torch failed we would see nothing at all for a long, long time.

The tunnel was "only" about half a mile to a mile long, meaning the walk through took ten to twenty minutes.

And this is what I remember best. Eventually, we trekked to the point where the tiniest pinpoint of light appeared straight ahead, like a needle-point. Walking onwards, this light grew gradually in size until it looked like an ever-brightening star. Eventually it grew to the size of the moon. It took what seemed like an eternity to expand into anything resembling the tunnel exit it actually was.

And then we were outside in blinding sunlight, and it was all over.

The second time we were on a canal boat. My parents were divorced and remarried, but the same phenomenon. Utter darkness, then the tiny point of light very gradually getting bigger. It was nothing like driving through a road tunnel, because it took such a long time to actually reach this light, which started so incredibly tiny, you might not be sure you were just imagining things in the endless night.

So there we have it. The great metaphor for life. Somewhere, there's light at that tunnel's end! Keep walking, keep chugging. Keep going. Eventually that light becomes almost blinding, because it's real.

(Just don't go in that tunnel after midnight!)




F R DAVID: WORDS (DON'T COME EASY)
Anyone remember this song? It got to number 2 in 1983, and it's barely ever played now. But I like it.