Homeostasis.

It was the fucking pills.

This article deals with addiction, suicidal ideation and the decay of a mind in chronic pain. If these are themes you cannot cope with presently, please give this a miss, I will be back and more chipper next piece I promise <3

I’m clawing my way out of a slump I can’t even begin to try and explain. Try and imagine having the access to tools of expression and joy, these tools have never changed in the 36 years you have had them, you’ve changed in how you use them but they themselves have remained a constant. Now imagine one day you go to pick up these tools, and they seem unusually heavy. Not something unmanageable, but there’s more of a heft to them than usual. The corners are harder to round; the weight seems more difficult to bear. Don’t let it discourage you, there are always going to be days where you’re less accurate, press on.
Each day, the tools seem a little more heavy – not enough to rip your joints out of place but enough to leave a mark in your hands that is uncomfortable and not something you look forward to bearing. Each day, a little heavier, a little duller. There is a fog forming in your mind, making your reaches less accurate – it gets to the point that you only reach for them once a day, for a page. Then less than a page. The day you barely scratch out a sentence you know something is severely wrong. You look back, at the days where you were filling pages and pages with your thoughts, your inspiration overflowing and barely contained. These can’t be the same hands that spun tales of your youth into poetry, this can’t be the same mind that absorbed every word from their favourite author to transform their own understanding. Something is wrong, so very very wrong.

These headaches have been getting worse. Each day they start earlier, until you’re waking up to the sensation of something burrowing out from behind your eye. You’re not stressed though; you have something for this. You’re lucky to have found a specialist who understands the complex universe of medications you take for pre-existing conditions, you have access to relative relief with minimal questions asked. A routine eye check confirms what you had been suspecting – something is awry in your eyes, the tools you use the most, the guardians of the burrowing pain the wakes you from sedated sleep. You have an emergency referral to a specialist to figure out what’s going on with your optic nerve. It’s okay. It will be okay. It has to be okay. Luckily, you have something for this.

You can acutely remember the first time you took it. The honeyed euphoria that washed over your body was unlike anything you had experienced before. For the first time in your life, the pain stopped – you felt yourself finally relax into a body you’ve always felt at odds at. As the bliss peaked, coursing through your veins, you feel like you’re the most empathetic person on the planet and actually you have something specific to say to each person that crosses your path.

The best part? This is medically necessary! You’re still sober! You’re not breaking any rules you made for yourself because this is strictly for something you needed to get prescriptions for, there was absolutely no way this was in any way comparable to something like alcohol, or weed. This is legal in every sense of the word, and it feels INCREDIBLE.
This joy is further inflamed by the bids for connection you were otherwise too self-conscious to make, are now paying off and you have people to say things too! And the joy and energy and whimsy to do so! Nothing seems like a stupid answer, in fact, quantity over quality baby let’s go. What you’re not going to do is think remotely that this reminds you of being in the trenches of alcoholism, where you would be on your fourth glass and actually now is the time to make plans for every business hour of the foreseeable future with people you have legitimately never spent time with. Offers you will have to rescind from the darkness of a room beset with the pox of biblically proportioned Hangxiety. You don’t have time to think about the similarities when you know what’s coming.

There is a moment where you put your phone down, your energy is waning. This is the part of the night where you contemplate popping another, to potentially preserve the high. The thing is, you KNOW it doesn’t. You know that another one simply adds to the crash, there is no more euphoria to squeeze out of it, but that ravenous beast that wouldn’t ever let you stop at just one glass of wine, one line of coke, one joint “to wind down” is ever present. It doesn’t go away when you have a prescription, in fact, one could argue that it makes it worse because you know it’s finite and therefore want to get every crumb of worth out of it. The crash is coming and no extra pills will stop it, no matter how much the beast craving oblivion claws at every fragment of willpower you posses.
You feel it first in your eyes – the very things that cause you this entire misery. They suddenly feel… heavy. Leaded. The balance is off, the aim you have for objects has been messed with – you go to look at the TV but they sort of skid off target like landing on wet tarmac. The eyelids follow. They want so desperately to be allowed to shutter, but this feeling isn’t tiredness – in fact, sleep is nearly impossible. You spend many nights in a purgatory of eyes closed wakefulness, restless legs and racing mind of echolalias and anxieties played over and over again. You’re on strong sedatives but they don’t touch Sleep Purgatory, it’s a price you begin to pay for the euphoria, and the oblivion beast cares not for what happens to you once it gets its hit. You lose focus on interests, projects, people. Whatever offers the path of least resistance, the last thing you need is to be distracted from the bliss, you let things that held importance for you to fall to the wayside with the promise that you’ll sort it out the next day during lucidity. You don’t.

This leads to the inevitable. Each passing day, your date with bliss is timed specifically for enough time to unwind for bed, enough time to lie down and soak it in. You don’t notice it at first. In fact you don’t notice it until you’re actually in pain and know exactly where to find relief – something has changed. The euphoria feels… different. You don’t feel so much like talking, you don’t feel much at all. The warm relaxation into your body has curdled into a lukewarm woolly feeling. You can’t concentrate, not because there’s so much bliss to absorb, but because the oblivion beast is demanding its meal of metered consumption and your body is not holding up its end of the deal. You know you shouldn’t take more, you swear you won’t do it tomorrow, the oblivion beast isn’t satisfied in its filling of emptiness, but it seems to take the fact that it has total control over you as its consolation prize.

The days pass, the weeks pass. It’s a familiar routine, only broken up with experimentation in potency. Does taking it on an empty stomach hit better? Does it mellow better with food? Watching the clock anxiously for the TimeTM that you’re AllowedTM to dispense, watching the clock some more for the feeble little golden ray of sunshine to radiate through your body. Sometimes it doesn’t even happen. The frustration was growing with the paranoia of a script running low. Do others know? Is it obvious? How did we get here?
You’re too distracted by the grief and the guilt of secret keeping to realise what has been happening around you. Every day seems colder, harder. The weather feels worse on your skin. You don’t remember it being this cold. You don’t recall the last time you felt genuinely happy, or worse, you do and you wonder why the fuck that hasn’t happened again. You religiously track your non-existent cycle, are you Luteal or just insane? You diligently note what could be a depressive episode which is all part of the rich tapestry of mental illness, dysthymia and cluster B Personality disorder traits. You don’t remember the last time you felt proud. You don’t remember the last time you genuinely laughed wholeheartedly with no fear that your body would ache afterwards. Remember how much you used to write? How you would find inspiration in the two colours of a leaf? Remember how everything was poetry and nothing was immune of being romanticized into a paragraph analogy that made you chuckle, never made it to people’s eyes, but existed purely for you to say yeah I did that that day and it made me happy. Days blur – you’re non-verbal on the couch for most of them. You go to work and spend the entire week you have off before your next shift, unmoving from your place in rot. Is this your body shutting down? Is this what you have to look forward to? You join support groups for CFSME to try and gain some traction in hope, only to be drowned out by everyone’s suffering. Is this as good as it gets?

You’re drowning in medical fear, trauma, the death of a friend and your nanny, and a body failing you. There is nothing you look forward to. Everything is a chore.

It’s a Sunday, the sky is grey and falling. You have errands to run, normally something that would excite you. Your makeup looks wrong, your hair is shit and your outfit doesn’t work. Do you remember the last time you felt confident? When was the last time you truly felt beautiful? Your camera roll is a shrine to the decline of your mental state. The shop is an overstimulating nightmare, and you’re there as a body with no organs. You’re simply existing as an object, you have no wants, no needs, no joy. Tears are choking the back of your throat; food tastes like ash. This isn’t living. For the first time in a very long time, you ideate. You have worked so long, so hard, and you feel like you have nothing to show for it. You cannot cope any further with the prospect of life being this hard. You do your best not to alert anyone around you to the thoughts you’re having, you’re not important enough to have a fuss kicked up like that. Take it home with you, and think.

You sit hunched, with your journal you’ve nearly finished. You’ve never done that before. Why is it so hard now? You think about when words were flowing freely from your mind to your hands, a physical block has appeared somewhere between now and the date you decided you were going to make a change in your life and commit to using your tools. You’re not sure why this didn’t occur to you sooner, but you pick up your phone and open a search engine. Pure curiosity, in the gloom of the room that smelled of sweat from nights of restless sleep after days of barely moving from your couch.

And there it was. Medical article after medical article, confirming what you’d only had as a vague hunch – one last Hail Mary before committing to something serious. “Long-term use or misuse can increase the risk of developing depressive symptoms or exacerbating pre-existing mental health conditions due to its effects on brain chemistry and the potential for dependence.”

You will never be able to describe that moment. There are no words humanly available for the feeling of every single thought colliding into a point of clarity. 9

The day after you stopped, you laughed genuinely for the first time in a long time. A few days later, you spoke to someone you cared about on the phone. You made plans. You even had some small wins, things you wouldn’t have even considered as a point of joy a few weeks ago. You’re unable to go to your friend’s funeral, or your nanny’s but you know they’d be proud of you for just sticking it out and getting out of bed.
There’s still a rough road ahead, because no matter what happens, those pills are as intrinsically as part of you as your illness, you can quit them recreationally but that doesn’t remove their purpose as medical help, and that is something that radical honesty and accountability will have to be dusted off for. You cannot be normal about anything it would seem, the chronic emptiness finds a way to be filled one way or another, so its best if you just ride the high of finally having the strength to pick up those tools that seemed so heavy a few days ago. You now have the very real threat and reminder that this isn’t a game or something to take the edge off – if you want to kill that headache, you have to contend with voicelessness for the days after. Is it worth entirely nullifying your being? It suddenly, for the first time, has very real consequences.

It’s okay to fuck up. I refuse to see this as some kind of moral failing, because self flagellation only leads to the kind of shame that relies on substances to cover it. I’m doing my best, in a flesh mech operated by something that cannot be normal about changes to its homeostasis. All I can ask for is this experience to be added to the arsenal of strategies I have to cope with future tests. I’d say “hey being fucking suicidal because of a headache isn’t worth it” is a pretty compelling point.

I write often about the other of being chronically ill, my ten years in the adult industry, the eldest daughter thought experiment and attempts at scraps of poetry and fiction. It would be lovely to have you here <3

~ Z