Ok, so quitting smoking is on the list of things to do in the near future. For 3 to 5 days after Quit (Q) day, it IS the list.  Well, aside from stay alive, it is. I have to do that too. So just how am I going to manage this? What can I do for mindcandy and to distract myself, prop my already floppy mood up, and get by until the worst of the withdrawal is past? I’m a compulsive list maker, which is a good thing since the bipolar meds ate a chunk of my memory, so I’ll start a list of Q coping thingies.

• Da Patch – To turn the quitting into quit habit then quit nicotine. Reasonable.
  • Note to self – Put the damned thing on the night before so the next morning doesn’t drive ya nuts.
• Non-caloric or low calorie things to chew on
  • Toothpicks That’s how my Grandmother quit her smoking habit of 25 years cold turkey. She kept a toothpick in her mouth most of the time until she died of pancreatic cancer some 25 years later.
  • Sugar free candies
  • Carrots or carrot sticks. Gnawing on a whole carrot might be distracting. Maybe I could make carrot art with my teeth the way they do in Japanese restaurants.
• Make a list of all the bad things about smoking, all the good things about quitting
  I carried around a list of some 275 reasons to quit using cocaine for about 4 years. Whenever I had a craving, I pulled it out and read it. It worked, so I can use that idea again.
•  Medical assistance?  Might or might not be anything particularly useful. Maybe a xanax or two for the hysteria would be helpful. Or might be worse and have me lighting up because I don’t care. (I hate benzos lol) Who knows. Will talk with the shrink about that. 
• Get rid of all the ashtrays, lighters and cigs at quit time. No brainer, but I need to remember to do it.
• Air freshener or incense or both. No use being reminded about smoking by the way the studio smells.
• Water.
  • Drink lots. Clear that crap on out of the body.
  • Shower or hop in the bath when the urge really strikes. I never did smoke in the shower or bathtub and now’s not likely to be a good time.
• Get support.  *looks around cyberspace* You guys, and family, and friends. Check. I think I’ve got that down. And then there’s all those quit smoking support programs all over the place. I’ll have to find one or twelve of them.
• Stay away from people who smoke. No problem. No one else I know offline smokes.
• Write up affirmations about being smoke free and stick them around house to remember why I’m going through the pain of quitting.
• Sleep lots. The more of the withdrawal I can sleep through, the less I have to notice it.
• Breath meditations and exercises.
• Stock up on humble pie in case I’m a pain in the ass while getting past the worst of it.

I feel sort of like I have my head up my butt half the time. The other half I feel fairly invinceable. Shall we call this ultra rapid cycling or shall we just call it plain old emotional ambivalence or maybe prednisone weirdness? I choose B. I can always go for the others if B doesn’t work.

I’m in shock about the smoking and breathing thing. Yes, I’m going to quit smoking. There’s no other choice that works for me. As WC said, “Choose Life” and I am.  I’m neither ready to die nor to end up on oxygen or bending my brain completely from steroids. So quit it is. After I talk to the Shrink like the doc suggested. I have a little reprieve from going full tilt at the quitting thing. I feel like I’m looking at life from the Tower of London, though.

I bought my last carton of cigs today and that was weird. I felt like I was looking at the from far away. Maybe looking at the monolith from 2001 or something. I just couldn’t relate at all to a “last carton” of cigs at all.

I haven’t any real idea how I’ll make that happen, this quitting smoking thing. I’ll have to reach back to find every bit of anything that helped me get away from the drugs and use them again. Steps. Rationality. Distraction. Everything. Physical props. Chemical help. I’m trying to remember just how I did it with the drugs and it’s like looking down a long, dark tunnel.  The memories seem to have rolled themselves up and tucked themselves away like they say happens with childbirth. But I can find it if I reach.

The thing I remember most clearly is that anything at all was ok as long as I did not die and I did not use. Qutting drugs was the single most important thing other than staying alive that I did for an entire year. Bar none. Everything else had to get out of the way for it. I’m not feeling up to that sort of thing with this. I’m afraid the bipolar or something will eat me if I go that hard on. The bit about the dopamine mucking with the bipolar when quitting smoking scares me half to death. Or my business will completely crumble. Or something hideous. But it’s what worked for me before. All the rest was mindcandy to keep up that one thing.

I stood at the mirror today and looked myself in the eye. “Well girl, you have a choice. You can choose to live and breathe. You can choose to die a slow painful death by smoking. Your choice. Which do you want.” Oh some choices I just hate.

But for a few days, I can ignore choosing more or less. Let it rumble in the background since I know I’m not doing anything until next week.  In the meanwhile I’ll try to catch up on visiting over the next few days.  Sorry I’ve had my head up my butt and haven’t been as sociable as I’d like.

I started writing this post on the 7th, then dropped it for some reason. Border Life’s post Accidental Medication Vacation got me to thinking maybe I should go ahead and post this, and hopefully in finishing writing it, come to some peace with the question

I sometimes wonder whether being addicted to psych meds is much better than being addicted to illicit drugs.  The whole concept is especially poignant for me, as I’m a addict and alcoholic clean and sober for over 13 years now. Sometimes I feel like I’ve traded in one batch of drug addictions for another. No, I’m not going to quit my meds. Addictive or not,  the combination of them and life management and therapy is the best combination for handling my bipolar disorder that I’ve ever found.  But man, it is ironic to go through the hell of kicking addictions and years later end up on a prescribed batch of drugs that will kick my ass if I quit them cold turkey, and quite probably however I were to them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always had a hell of a time with that.  Secrecy is what kept me abused for so long when I was a tot. Privacy had no meaning, really. My bedroom as a kid was private, except that my father ambled in to abuse me whenever he took the mind, and my mother ambled in to clean and who knows what else.  I can hear my father’s words echoing in my ears today, “Keep this private between us or I’ll have to kill your mother and your brother so they can’t tell anyone else.”

When I finally kicked the cocaine and booze thirteen plus years ago, I went on a complete diet of no privacy/no secrecy.  It helped me stay on the wagon, yes. If everyone around you knows you’re in recovery, they’re watching for you to screw up, and at the time that was exactly what I wanted. After 2 years of no cocaine but not talking about it, and still drinking,  I crashed into my worst experience with cocaine from being tipsy and saying yes to a line just for kicks. It damned near killed me. Actually, I think it did, but that’s another tale. Near or actually, though, I finally realized I just couldn’t do anything mind altering and be ok and I just couldn’t do it alone, so no privacy any more.  I had to have help.  I got it, through 12 stepping and RR and all sorts of things and groups and people. Along the way many things that should have stayed private got shared.   That habit stayed with me for a dozen years into my recovery from addiction.

Nothing in my experience taught me there was any value in privacy.  Secrets, yes. They kept me and my family alive through the worst hells, I thought. It was ground into me from childhood. Privacy? What’s that?  People talked about it and the idea sounded good. I came to think maybe I should have it.  Just maybe I deserved it.  But I wasn’t exactly sure what it was.

I hit the dictionaries many times. I do that when the world of English makes no sense to me, which is fairly often.  Unfortunately, the word privacy is actually one of the definitions of secrecy and vice versa. Oops. Well at least I discovered I wasn’t insane to not be able to distinguish between the two words. Back to square one.

I finally asked my current therapist what the heck was the difference between secrecy and privacy in the “real” world.  
The first thing she said was, “That’s a tough one.”  
Well hell’s bells, I KNOW that!  
But she thought a minute and came up with something that made sense to me finally and has been slowly sinking in since. It’s sort of a kindergarten version of the concepts, but sometimes those are the best.

Secrecy is hiding something even when it’s harmful to you or others.
Privacy is hiding something when it’s just your choice to, and doesn’t hurt anyone to do so.

Oooooh! A workable definition difference.  Nevermind the semantics. I can do semantics up one wall and down the other any time I want, but it’s seldom useful, and often more confusing.  This I can work with!

I can keep things private without remorse when it doesn’t hurt me, and at least as far as I can figure doesn’t hurt anyone else. Secrets, nyet. Unless I want to end up feeling crappy, that is.  It’s always my choice, and I can always feel crappy if I choose to. But privacy, when chosen, isn’t likely to make me feel bad.  Ooooh ooooh! Yes!

I love it when a plan comes together.

…that I’m much more comfortable “talking” on my blog about bipolar stuff than the rest. The rest mostly being the various abuses I survived. Or the addictions I survived. Or the rape. Or the mugging at gunpoint.  Or. Or. Or.  Yes, the bipolar disorder is a total pain in the ass.  It’s hard to live when you know your brain can suddenly fling you into seeming ecstasy or hell at any point no matter what’s going on.  It’s hard to trust.  But compound that with the other crap, which beats at me when good or bad things do happen around me.  How will I ever learn to trust when for so so many years I could trust neither myself nor the world around me?

Bit by bit I struggle with trust, and all the shards of myself.  So many pieces to deal with.  Even when I feel pretty well like I do now, this stuff has the power to bring me to my knees.  But when I feel pretty well is the best, safest time to deal with it.  Dealing with the abuse and such has the power to lay me flat and nearly kill me when I’m already in a bad place.  I’m coming to trust I can survive dealing with it. Slowly coming to that.  I have to remind myself things like that about dealing with it when I’m pretty well. That I’ve survived the actuality and the bits I’ve faced so far. Bloody hell it hurts, though.  I’d often rather go hide in a closet than struggle with all this trust and shit anymore.

Closets not withstanding, I’m doing better with dealing with the abuse and whatnot too.  I need to recognize that.  

Until I was in my early 30’s I only knew I hated my abusers, but didn’t know why.   After the most powerful of them died, the memories came flooding back in living color, dolby surround sound, the whole wad.  I’d never heard of the idea of “planted” repressed memories at the time.  There was no one to plant the idea in my head at the time anyway.  I just suddenly knew viscerally why I hated those family members who abused me worst, my father and his mother.  And I hated them and myself and my life for it.

As I’ve scraped away the barnacles of hate and fear attached to what those two did to me, I’ve discovered more and more layers of pain and betrayal. Why DIDN’T my mother see that her baby with the eterally painful crotch was being abused?  Why didn’t she ever do anything?  Why did those horrid great-aunts have to torture me, though not so horridly, along with their sister?  Why did they put up with it?  Why couldn’t I save my brother from the same fate as me?  When I offered up my life for him, why wasn’t it enough?

No wonder I became a drug addict. No wonder when I was raped I didn’t tell anyone for 20 years. No wonder I tried to kill myself several times, or ended up in the mental wards several times. No wonder the landscape between my ears is a wreck.  I had no chance for a normal life. It’s kind of amazing I’ve lived long enough to tell anything about it.

At least now I do trust I’m going to live soberly to tell, to try to heal, to go on.  That’s something. That’s definitely something.

the big 13

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13 years clean and sober today.
Woo hoo!

Addiction has been on my mind lately, because on August 13, around 4pm, I’ll have 13 years clean and sober. Kind of impressive, is what people say. I suppose so since it seems most people can’t (or won’t) do it. To me, though, getting clean and sober just seemed to be what I had to do since I preferred to stay alive.

I have to say, though, that I quit going to NA or AA meetings regularly years ago. I got tired of going to meetings and hearing folks talk about drugs and alcohol. Yes, it was in the how to quit them and how to stay quit. But at that point I had some 6 or 7 years clean and I actually knew how to do both, and talking about drink and drugs just made me think of them when I didn’t think of them otherwise. When I feel I need a reminder, I go back. The first years, though, I needed reminders constantly because the conflict in my head sounded something like this.

Yo, chickie, just WHY is it we’re living such a damned dull life sitting here knitting between meetings?

Um, I dunno really, but damn you’re right, this is boring.

Yeah, screw this knitting and meetings shit, let’s go out and party.

Uh, wait, that crap killed us once.

True. Well. So what now?

Let’s go to a meeting.

Life got unboring though. Probably the petro… wait… neuro-chemicals in my brain got settled down from being a cokehead. And I got in the habit of having a different sort of life than I did before I quit the drink and the drugs. It’s ok, you know.

I got in the habit of just saying no. Over and over and over. Screaming it if I had to, to be heard. Barring that, I started the habit of just literally walking out if the “no” wasn’t getting through. But I realized I really, really had it engraved in my brain when someone in an online chat room offered me a cyberdrink and without thinking, I replied, “No thanks. I don’t drink.”

So I don’t drink. Alcohol, that is. Nor do I do any recreational drugs. Nor do I abuse prescription drugs. Barring any completely unforeseen weirdness and mental collapse that I can’t fathom, I’ll make it to 13 years. Yippee. Double yippee because I always get taken out for Yummy Food to celebrate.

(Ok, I’m batty lately. Posted this as a page when I posted it, then had to drag it off here and make a post of it. Ugh. I think the bipolar meds really are eating my brain.)