Moving Forward

Today was about the most productive day I've had in aaaaaages. I wrote a letter to get more information on editorial internships at a local weekly, wrote a couple poems (well, late last night), and I think most satisfyingly I was able to rework my short story concept, and even though I had to start over on the first one, it practically flew out under my fingers and ended up being just about what I envisioned. A good end to the weekend, for sure. Now, another week of trying to survive the tedium of the warehouse, while using my free time to do a million and one things. At least I get a three day weekend this week, in Chicago! :D

Running with Scissors

Here's an essay of a rant I wrote just trying to keep some desperate perspective before I really tear myself apart.

Some days I swear I'm just gonna explode. I can feel stress and gravity tear me apart along the lines of addiction. It's always so insidious, when it shows up I always, always mistake it for something else. Some minor happening that it uses as a cataclysmic excuse to try to destroy me. It always feels the same, though, after I get over the initial pain, I can feel the fractures, the tears, the severing of my being. My mind tears in to the same three, throbbing pieces, as if my brain was cut in half between the hemispheres, and then in half again on the left side. A knotting rupture ripples from my temple to my heart, and then on to my stomach, and it contracts like a tendon designed to pull my body together so that whatever is cutting at me doesn't have to chase down parts of me that would otherwise fly off. I hate this, I hate how it feels, how it hurts, how it hurts people I care about as my personality falls, sundered like a condemned man before a firing squad. If this happened any other time than when my brain was waking up neuroreceptor factories, I'd seek pharmaceutical assistance. I'd think I was schizophrenic, at best. Bipolar/borderline/MPD at worst. Fighting it is pointless, but I always get drawn in to a fight before I realize what my opponent really is. I feel sick in the head, chemicals coming on-line in random order make you think weird thoughts, say weird things. Right now I just want to cry, it's the only real form of protest I have available to me. The worst part is that my body knows a way to fix my mind, tape myself back together so I can function properly. It costs about four dollars, and is available on most street corners and grocery stores in America. I knew this was coming, but I got lazy. I got careless. I thought that the ease of the first few stages of withdrawal meant this wouldn't happen. Even now, it's trying to use that feeling of self-disappointment to sink it's claws in and cut me open a new wound or two. FUCK why the hell does this hit me so hard? Why do I end up just like a goddamn heroin addict?! Why the hell are these things legal? Why won't anybody stand up for us? Why won't anybody stand up for me? My only solace is that this won't last long. It might be a couple days, but, soon I'll be able to think again. Soon I'll be able to look in a mirror without wondering who that wild-eyed stranger glaring back at me is. Soon I'll be able to talk to my friends without crushing them under the weight of my need. It's so hard to not hate myself right now. The tiny thread keeping me aloft is knowing that this isn't real. This pain will pass. The grief, the anger, the dependency, is all illusory. I know nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on earth, and nobody has an easy time of quitting once they're physically addicted, but I feel so alone, so isolated, just like always. Now it's trying to prey upon my loneliness. Fucking sick monster, just leave me alone. Just leave me alone. I feel so stupid for allowing this addiction to get me again, after I went through this before. The one person who promised to be strong for me didn't realize what I was asking, and if I was any weaker than I already am, this addiction would poison my mind against anyone who couldn't handle me right now. At least I'm not that far gone, not like last time. There will be no collapse of my world, it's just getting bashed up pretty good. I wish I could sleep.

Might have to hit myself in the head with a hammer to get any peace.

I just wanted to try writing, this weekend was tough in a lot of ways, it was probably stupid of me to refuse to go buy a small box of nicotine patches, so I've gone without since Saturday morning. All told there's only been three or four cravings that were strong enough to even think about. All in all, this quit seems to be progressing on a schedule at least twice as fast as the last time, and I'm positive that it's because I wasn't smoking as many cigarettes a day as I was before I quit last time, and I haven't been operating in addiction mode for nearly as long. I'd say I've been physically addicted to smoking for maybe 8-10 months now, as opposed to the 10 or 11 years I had been physically addicted before I quit the first time. So the symptoms of withdrawal are coming along in much more rapid waves, but as would be expected they're not as severe as last time either. Today is day 10, and my brain is slipping and twisting itself in very uncomfortable ways, much like it was doing around day 22 of my first quit. At least this time around I'm still able to speak English, and recognize my surroundings. I feel much more like what most people have described their mental states through various addiction breaks, as opposed to the total psychosis I felt the first time around. Of course, maybe I went through this around day 10 of my first quit, and don't remember it because of the trauma of the third week, but, comparing cravings and other benchmarks, this one really does seem much more mild.

Tomorrow is the last day of the first week of quitting again. Today I lost my nicotine patch for about two hours, I put it in a bad spot and it wound up sticking to my shirt and migrating around to the middle of my back, contact side away from my body. I only realized it wasn't in place when I started getting washed over with withdraw symptoms, cravings that the patch almost completely eliminates. Nothing can put you in a bad mood faster than walking unprepared into a situation where your body screams for you to feed it what it wants. Well, nothing except having your boss tell you that you're going to work late on Friday evening in a bid to prevent the entire crew from having to come in on Saturday, and if you fail to eliminate enough of the work load it's going to be an early morning on Saturday, no matter how late you stay on Friday. I could've cried. At least I found the patch, so between the delay of when the nicotine quit entering my blood from my skin (it keeps soaking through for at least an hour after you take off or lose a patch) and when I got it secured right-side-touching again, there was only about 90 minutes when I really had to battle myself to not kill anyone and/or seek a smoke from one of the dozen or so of my crew who smoke.

When I got home, I went right to bed, and now I wish I hadn't. I slept for maybe four hours, and now I'll be lucky if I can get back to sleep before 5 or 6 AM. To help things along, someone I can usually rely on to pick me up and help hold me together when I feel like I'm about to fly apart was having a horrible day in their own right, and my general bad mood did not mix with theirs in anything remotely resembling decency. I need more friends here in town, it's just so hard for me to find people that I can even relate to, let alone like and want to spend time with. I'm gonna go crawl back in bed and hide under the covers until it's time to go to work. At least somewhere along the path of my life I've learned how to not dwell on the fear of how bad tomorrow might be, which is almost as valuable as my natural aversion to killing myself, no matter how despicable I feel I am. Tomorrow will be better, I will find a way to make tomorrow better, if not for everyone, then just for myself.

A note I keep forgetting to bring up, last Monday I asked our usual ABF driver, Joe, "What's up?" when he made his daily stop by the warehouse to drop off and/or pick up skids.

"S.O.S. Brother." He grinned at me. It's been making me wonder all week if it's coincidental that a sarcastic acronym for despising your situation bears the same elements as a desperate cry for help. I spend a lot of time lately wondering why so many people I know seem to be waiting for someone to pull their asses out of the cold, shark infested water. Not me, not anymore, at least.

Progression

I just spent some time going over the archives of my blog, hoping to glean some help for this quit attempt. I didn't find anything particularly useful, but, reading where I was made me very glad to be where I am now. I think it's highly possible that in the last year I've taken some large strides towards being the person, the man that I want to be. It soothes me a bit to see the evidence, to know how much I've grown. It's still a work in progress, but, you don't notice how strong you've gotten until you get to a place where you can look back and remember the way things used to be. I'm sure I'm still breakable, I wouldn't want to be so rigid I couldn't feel. I know I'm still fallible, humans always will be. But, finding out that our emotional and psychological selves can be reinforced and honed as well as our physical selves is very reassuring. We'll see if I can keep that in mind as the nicotine works its way out of my system and my brain runs on fumes for a couple weeks. That whole thing is still really scaring me.

Suburban Survival

Truthfully I'm a lot more comfortable with wilderness survival. It's easy to identify your basic needs and address them. In the less defined suburban world, sometimes just trying to figure out what's wrong is enough to make your head explode. Maybe it's just the nicotine cravings speaking. I feel like I should be upset, but instead I just have this obscure anxiousness that's making me want to run around screaming. Day one on the patch wasn't to bad, until I accidentally ripped the damn thing off, and carelessly touched the contact side with my thumb. I'm sure Murphy has a law describing how your eye always itches when you have some dangerous substance on your fingers. It turns out the warning on the box to wash your hands before touching your eyes is not just hypothetical advisory, that shit burns. Didn't hurt as much as having a lit cigarette land cherry first in your open eye (yes, I'm familiar with that sensation, too) but it did hurt more than getting a couple good-sized drops of Dr Pepper in your eye.

My pet project has sat all day without being opened even once, I'm not sure if I'll work on it at all tonight. I thought it would be a good diversion during the first couple days of this quit, but today at least, anything with structure was kinda scary. I took two or three naps, one of 'em was deep enough that I had one of the crazy ultra-lucid dreams people tend to get while taking transdermal nicotine. I remember it more than I'd care to, but thinking about it still weirds me out a little so I'm not gonna retell it.

Blogging

Wow, it's been 370 days since I touched this. Let me try to recap the year... Same old shit, same old shit, same old shit, started smoking again, same old shit, same old shit, same old shit, and now here I am.

Any potentially interesting details are waaaaay to personal for me to feel comfortable sharing.

Right now I'm as close to panic as I think I've ever been, I'm quitting smoking for good this time on Friday, my labor day weekend is going to suck, and it's scaring me. If you don't understand addiction, let me try to explain it.

When you get chemically addicted to a substance, your brain quits producing the natural compounds that it's getting artificially. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances humans fuck around with, and it's so addictive because it matches up to not just one neuroreceptor, but a whole mess of 'em. The biggest problem ones are the feel good and feel bad juices, and the muscle control juices. Ever heard someone complain about being shaky or trembling? Were they a smoker? I know that right after I smoke, I get twitchy and if I hold up a piece of paper it's impossible to read because my hand shakes so much. Thanks nicotine.

When you quit introducing a chemical that your body has grown dependent on, it takes about three weeks for your body to start producing the natural variants in significant enough quantities that you can actually tell something is going on upstairs. And I've left out explaining the associative and habitual aspects of the smoking addiction. Those are obnoxious, but it can be easy to replace the motion of smoking with candy suckers, or training yourself to watch people or listen to music instead of smoking while you're writing. I'm so afraid of this quit, because the first time I did, for whatever reason my brain didn't start spitting out the hormones it needed all at once, it turned on one or two at a time, and the first ones to come back online were not euphoric, happy juices. It was scary, there were times where I was content, watching TV with my roommate's dog, and inexplicably this huge wave of sorrow would just crash and break all over me. One time I had to go to my room and cry for about half an hour, I was just so broken up, and over nothing at all. I've always attacked problems, confronted issues, sought resolution. Knowing I'm probably going to go up against feelings that have no basis, no connection to anything scares me horribly.

That's my thoughts on addiction. In other news, this week I've started taking steps (albeit small, tiny, probably backwards steps) to get my life on track. A friend casually said something in the middle of a conversation that has just been tearing me up, pushing me to get off my ass. I know doing the things I want to do is going to be difficult without at least a framed BA sitting in my pile of worldly belongings, but I'm not afraid to try. Who knows, maybe once I start getting my feet moving in the right direction, I'll find a way to finish up college. Right now my biggest goal is to get active in my community again, I'm researching local non-profits and trying to decide who and how I want to give my time to.

Since it could be another year before I write here, I hope you all are well and will be well until we talk again!

Transportation

Ok, so, today was finally d-day on getting my ass a new ride. I went to the local Toyota dealership to check out a yaris in person. Long story short, the idiot dealer who spoke to us convinced me to never buy a car from them in about 3 minutes. So, off to Markley Motors, who my parents, Paul, and Dave all highly recommended. The result was this 2006 Cobalt. It's fast. I love it. Yes I'll let you ride in it.