Addiction & Mental Illness: Part Three

...So I was back in my childhood home. I was nearly thirty-five years old and I had literally crawled back to my mother, tail between my legs, begging for help. I quit everything. Drugs, alcohol, and the myriad of psychiatric meds I had been abusing as well.

I had no idea how I was going to get my life back, but since I had already lost everything, I somehow managed to realise I no longer had anything to lose. It was the guilt and shame that had kept me using drugs so I had to somehow figure out how to leave it all behind me. So I put some blinders on and just kept clawing my way forward, inching my way out of the darkness, the emptiness. I found a job at a restaurant within walking distance doing whatever they asked. I still hadn't won back friends and frankly everyone acted weird around me, so I just spent time alone. I worked, I walked, and I meditated. My head was starting to clear.

As the fog slowly faded away from my existence, I realised I didn't know who I was. But for some reason this actually made me happy. I realised all the bad things I had done in the past weren't actually me. I had created many different fractured personalities to deal with what I couldn't. I wasn't a bad person. I was at the mercy of my illness back then. I was neutral. I had no idea who I was, but that was good because it meant I wasn't bad. I could choose who I wanted to be. And I chose to be happy and good.

It wasn't always easy. Some days were straight up impossible. I would have to literally will myself through every second of the day just to get through it. It was exhausting. But everyday got a little easier. And something amazing started to happen, I started to like myself. I had come to appreciate the little things in life. I appreciated my mother for helping me, my boss for giving me a job, my friends for giving me another chance yet again, and God for getting me through the darkness.

Now did the idea of using drugs again float through my head? On bad days, yes. I would think about how that first high would make the bad feelings go away. And then I would make myself think about all the bad things that followed and ask myself if that's what I really wanted. The answer was no. I had started to see a glimpse of myself and I realised I wasn't so bad after all. In fact, I was pretty freaking awesome!

I had been through hell. A hell I wouldn't wish upon anyone. Somehow I made it through. I had a chance to start over. A chance to discover who I really was deep inside. I made some decisions about what kind of person I wanted to be and have stuck to it ever since.

First, no guilt or shame. There was no room for that in my future so I left it in the past. I wasn't going to let my past define me. 

Second, be open and honest. This goes hand in hand with not being ashamed. If I'm honest with people about who I am, I don't have to keep secrets about my past.  Not everyone will accept my past, but I have and that's all that matters.

Third, be generous. If I am able to give to someone in need, I do. Simple.

Fourth, be kind. Even if someone isn't kind to me, I try to be mindful of what they might be going through that I don't know about. Maybe they need a little kindness.

Fifth, appreciate what I have. I lost all my possessions at one point. I learned what is important. When I have more than I need, I appreciate every bit of it.

Sixth, ask for help. Guess what? I can't do it all, so if I need help, I ask.

I hope my story helps others get through their nightmare. I hope that it helps knowing it is possible to not only get through hell, but to end up immensely happy on the other side. And I have no regrets. If I hadn't been through my hell, I wouldn't have found myself. It was part of my journey. It wasn't pretty, but it was part of who I am.

I am Kay and I'm pretty awesome! Just sayin...

Addiction & Mental Illness: Part Two

*Warning: contains graphic descriptions and triggers*

...After spending years trying to pin all my happiness on my husband and stepsons, I was coming to the realisation that I was a shell of a human being. To keep myself from having time to think about the void in my soul, I kept busy. Really really busy. I worked a forty hours plus a week job. I had decided to go back to college and attended classes four nights a week. I had loads of homework. And I was raising two teenage boys. All the while my husband was working eighty hours a week and was having to go on business trips more and more frequently. To top it all off, we had taken in my father-in-law who had complicated medical issues.

I begged my husband for months into years to cut back at work. I needed more of him. Our marriage was crumbling. The love and caring was there, but the marriage suffered greatly. Looking back, I realise now spending more time with me wasn't going to solve my problems. He had married a character I created and I no longer knew how to play that part. It wasn't his fault or mine. It was the illness inside me that was taking over.

As the emptiness grew, so did the depression. Sleep cycles became erratic. Mood swings ran rampant. Food lost its taste. Everything was dull and grey. I would spend hours staring out a window contemplating how to end it all. My work suffered. My marriage suffered. And I suffered. I eventually had a breakdown at work and was found near catatonic on the bathroom floor crying hysterically. Next thing I knew, I was being checked into an institution. Again. After a couple weeks, I was back home but I still couldn't function and a few months later, I was back in the hospital.

I was so afraid of everything. The questions and thoughts blazing through my head dizzied me. I was cycling through manic episodes at lightning speed. In my haze, I found myself charmed by a fellow patient. I didn't know it, but I was about to delve into a world you can only imagine in your worst nightmares.

This patient, lets call him Daniel, related to me, wooed me, brainwashed me. Next thing I knew, my husband and I were separated and I was following Daniel halfway across the country. I convinced myself he loved me and on some level I think he did. But Daniel was an addict. Not an occasional drug user, but a full fledged addict. He would disappear in the middle of the night with my car and money and wouldn't come back for hours and sometimes days. In my warped state of mind, I decided that if I did the drugs with him, I could control when and how much we did. We were smoking crack, lots of it. It didn't take long before the drug took over my life, along with my cocktail of prescription psychiatric meds. My reality was askew. I couldn't quit and didn't want to quit. When I wasn't high, the pain, guilt, and shame was overwhelming, so I stayed high at all costs. I would beg on street corners for money to feed my habit, and in some cases, even worse. We bounced from place to place, taking what we could from whoever would help us, running from dealers we ripped off, sleeping in back alleys and abandoned buildings, hitch hiking all over the southeast US.

All the while my family and friends were slowly giving up on me. The help I was given I didn't appreciate. The only thing that mattered was killing the enormous pain inside me. I couldn't stand what I had become, I had to stay high or thoughts of suicide took over. I engaged in self harm to punish myself, to bleed the pain out, to see if I was still alive. I was in and out of hospitals with several suicide attempts. No one answered the phone when I called. I had nothing. I was nothing. Even Daniel had abandoned me. Over the course of three years, I went from being a wife, stepmom, daughter, sister, etcetera to a homeless drug addict.

Daniel was attempting to get his life together and I was dragging him down. I begged him to help me, but he was angry with me. Somehow he blamed me for everything bad in his life. He finally agreed to help me, but there was a price to pay. I somehow convinced my estranged husband to buy me a bus ticket to where Daniel was living in New Orleans. Daniel said he was going to help me get a job and place to live. What he actually had in mind was unthinkable. He spent three days beating me, raping me, torturing me. Breaking me. And he did. I was broken. I was at rock bottom.

I decided my only option was to beg my mother for help one last time. She begrudgingly agreed and so I was on a bus back home to Ohio. This was it. This was my last chance at help. My last chance to live...

Addiction & Mental Illness: Part One

As if being crazy isn't enough, people who have mental illness often find themselves abusing drugs. In fact, mental illness and drug abuse tend to go hand in hand. The crazies use drugs to escape their heads and drug addicts will alter their reality so much they start to go crazy. It's a vicious cycle that once embarked upon in either direction, becomes exponentially harder to control than either problem is individually. I'm stating this as fact based on my personal experience. When I had a complete mental breakdown in my early thirties, I delved into an unseemly world I didn't know existed.

Let me back up a bit first. The cracks in my psyche started at a very young age. I had bouts with anxiety and depression as far back as childhood, though I didn't know what was going on, I just knew something wasn't right. In my mid teens, the stress of peer pressure and wanting to fit in caused me to spiral into a couple years of quickly cycling hyper manic episodes and severe depression. At the age of sixteen, I snapped one night and next thing I knew I was waking up in an institution under heavy sedation. I had no memory of how I got there or how much time had passed. It was horrifying. I ended up spending six months at an inpatient psychiatric facility. But it wasn't enough.

The next school year, I was greeted with whispers and rumours and gossip about what had happened to me. The shame was too much and knowing I didn't want to go back to the psych hospital, I started self medicating to kill the increasing pain inside me. I would sneak liquor from my parents stash and cigarettes. I would stay up all night drinking and smoking. Eventually I started getting to know the potheads at school. Marijuana was a great escape. It numbed me, but it made me feel stupid which I didn't like. I started dating a guy in his twenties and he introduced me to cocaine. Now that was exactly what I was looking for. It numbed the pain and at the same time made me feel energetic and confident. I suddenly felt powerful. It was an incredible aphrodisiac for my warped brain. I could be everything I wanted to be when high on coke.

The problem with drugs, especially if you are already mentally ill, is that it makes your "highs" even higher than normal and your "lows" unbearable. To fight the lows, you do everything you can to stay high. So you do more drugs, harder drugs. You'll do anything to keep from feeling low. And many of these drugs not only leave you mentally drained when you come down, but you develop physical withdrawals that can leave you violently ill if the growing addiction isn't fed. Like I said, vicious cycle.

Surprisingly, after only a year, I actually managed to break away from the guy who got me into the drugs and bounced back a little mentally. However, to do it I basically just stopped having feelings at all. If I didn't have ups I couldn't have downs. So I just stayed in the middle, numb. I created a facade so I could function in society. Meanwhile, my emptiness grew and grew.

In my early twenties, I started to do the bar scene. I eventually started doing coke again on occasion with the crowd I hung out with. Now none of these people would I ever consider friends. We did drugs together and partied. That's it. I could let my flamboyant wild facade run wild with these people, because I didn't care what they really thought. I let this fragmented part of my personality take over. And I took great care to keep it hidden away from my real friends and family. I never was high around them, but as I more and more needed to be high, the less and less time I spent with people who actually cared about me. I didn't want them to see this character I created that I secretly hated.

At some point I completely lost all that was me. I had been faking who I was, creating different personalities to show different segments of my world, for so long I no longer knew what was real. I didn't know who I was and I had no idea how to find me. I was tired. Very very tired. Then I met a man. A good man. A man worth attempting to find myself again for. We fell in love and got married. I had quit all my bad habits and replaced them with him and his boys. They were my world. But that was a problem. I basically traded one addiction for another. They were my new drug, my high. And as with all drugs, the high is only great for a while, but then you need more. I needed me. But I didn't know who I was and I had no idea where to find me. The void that was in me once again took over and depression set in...